Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 1993. [Vol. 1.] Eger Journal of American Studies. (Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 21)

STUDIES - Péter Egri: From the British Grotesque To the American Absurd: the Dramatist's Dilemma

housewife into a part-time prostitute. Being short of money and a keen gardener, and wishing to help her husband, who is also a passionate gardener, she puts an advertisement in the local paper indicating that she is ready to take a part-time job. She gives her phone number, and Leonie Pimosz, the Polish pander, loses no time to call her and to call at her flat. After all, as her name may suggest, she has the relentless force of a lion, she is shrewd enough to know how to lionize a place and a person secretly, and she is sufficiently impudent to claim that "Nothing is disgusting, unless you are disgusted".

1

2 Since it is Bernard who answers the phone when Leonie is telephoning, and Jenny knows that her husband is opposed to her taking any job, she lies to Bernard that a dressmaker is giving her a ring, and so she becomes Leonie's accomplice before she has ever met her. When she does meet her, Leonie offers Jenny fifty pounds. Jenny refuses to take the money, and Leonie, with the gesture of Nastasya Filippovna in Dostoevsky's The Idiot, throws the bills into the fire. While, however, Nastasya thus rejects to be bought, Leonie tries to buy Jenny. At first Jenny suggests that Leonie had better leave her home, but when Leonie starts flinging another bundle of notes into the fire, Jenny is tempted to take the money as an advance of salary. The job is not difficult at all, Jenny is only supposed to work in the afternoons, the place (in Wimpole Street) seems to be respectable, the fee (twenty-five guineas each time) generous, and the clients are all gentlemen. For some time the nature of the job is unclear, but then the penny drops and Jenny orders Leonie out of her home. Leonie, however, is not offended, tells her that one of Jenny's friends has already undertaken the job, offers Jenny a cigarette which she badly needs and automatically accepts, though immediately throws away. Jenny's resistance is gradually weakening. She may tell the police, but then Leonie would admit how Jenny has approached her through advertisement. So Jenny does not summon the police, Leonie gives her time to think the matter over, asks her to telephone to her, establishes her superiority by 1

2 G. Cooper, Everything in the Garden, p. 156. It may be merely coincidental, yet worth noting, that "pimasz" in Hungarian, if not in Polish, means impudent, cheeky.

—If, for an English-speaking audience, Mrs Toothe is a more natural name than Leonie Pimosz, similarly, Richard is also a more common name than Bernard.