Introduction
Burlesque is back! If not W. C. Fields, at least Hognose Hughes; if not the Keystone Cops, at least Fat Harry Mannlicher and the vigilantes of Muldoon's Saloon. Priscilla, My Pet, which should have been called "The Pig-baller's Ball," is something like an X-rated Three Stooges movie, or the Boar's-Head Tavern scenes of Henry IV played in the nude. It is Rabelaisian slapstick cranked down to the nth notch; Chaucer's Miller's Tale updated and transplanted to the pig sty; The Perils of Pauline gone bestial.
Oh yes, there's a lot of this latter in it, except that Miss Freed's Pauline, Priscilla Mannlicher (Hoglicher would perhaps have been better) is closer to the burlesque stage than to the movie screen. She is one of those cute little innocent ignorant naive blonde ing‚nues who comes on stage in a Little Bo Peep costume and says things like, "You filthy bugger, let go of me this instant before you do irreparable damage to my vagina!" In short, it is-as Miss Freed would say in her outrageously alliterative way-a salacious spectacle of sadosexual spoliation . . . a scandal, but simply super.
But perhaps it will not be out of place to begin by pondering briefly the apparently peculiar characteristics of the author of Priscilla, My Pet as a person-or as a pig, which is, if not probable, possible. I don't mean that figuratively, as an insult, but literally, as a suspicion; for if, as Miss Freed demonstrates, a girl can become a dog, and a man a hog, why not a pig an authoress? But this is idle speculation and no doubt beyond the realm of inquiry of one who has been asked merely to introduce the book, and not to classify its author as to species. Besides, it is probably groundless, for while it is true that her typing is sloppy to be sure (I have the manuscript before me), still it is difficult to see how it could have been done with hooves, cloven or not. Nevertheless, it can hardly be disputed that the book, while it addresses itself to swine-lovers everywhere, is narrated strictly from the pigs point of view. However, I leave the matter to biologists.
Let us look at the facts. First, Miss Freed is obviously quite familiar with the pigpen and the hog wallow, not to mention the peculiar psychosexual tendencies of pubescent farm girls, which she lays bare from early masturbation to almost equally early defloration. She is, then-or was-a farm girl. And yet she seems strangely unfamiliar with the speech of stockmen-men who must have tended the very slop troughs she knows so well, the very boars and sows with whose propensities she is so conversant. What, for instance, are the first words she draws from the mouth of Hognose Hughes, the pig-sticking hayseed who abducted Priscilla and dragged her by the hair to his sty-a man who flunked out of school in the second grade and whose most memorable sexual experiences have, been with sows? Something gross?-some disgusting bit of filth straight from the slaughterhouse? No. "At your service, miss," says he-and with a bow, no less! (True, he has his lapses, such as: "Honey chile, I been working with hawgs for nigh on twenty years, and believe me, Ah stink!" But still and all . . . )
But perhaps these incongruities are not wholly irreconcilable. We might, for instance, envision Miss Freed remaining aloof from the lower strata of the pork world, rarely venturing from her large white red-roofed farmhouse, receiving her schooling through tutors (for she is obviously well educated, suilinely and otherwise), and on Sundays, when the hands were off, or in the dead of night when they were asleep, slipping silently to the sties (now she's got me doing it-alliterating, that is) to consort surreptitiously in the swill with the swine, to romp with the razorbacks, to do her thing with the porkers.
But there is a hitch to his theory. For how is it that such a woman, however versatile, could have become, or come under the influence of, a Marine Corps drill instructor? Consider this bit of dialogue between Priscilla and her hog-nosed abductor. Hognose has just asked her if she doesn't think it's about time she cleaned up the mess she made of his genitals by permitting him to back-scuttle her. "Right," says Priscilla. "What?" growls Hognose. "Right, sir," the poor girl corrects herself. "Say it with a little more feeling!" snorts the pig man. Anyone who has endured the humiliating ordeal of a Marine boot camp can say unequivocally that this comes straight from the muddy parade fields of Parris Island, and from nowhere else.
But lest I overload my remarks with idle speculation, let us conclude only that the identity, the social status, the genus, the species and even the sex of the writer who calls herself (or himself or itself) Lorna Freed is and must remain-on the basis of the evidence at hand-a conundrum.
The style of Priscilla, My Pet, as I have inferred above, is utterly outrageous. Such brazen buffoonery and alliterative licentiousness is seldom seen outside the works of the Elizabethan slapstickers and the novels of R.John Smythe. A few examples taken at random will suffice to make the point.
"Nothing mattered but the marvelous thing that was happening to her nether lands as she wallowed naughtily in a delirium of delight."-"He endured her onslaught with a satisfied smile on his salacious lips." And if there's one thing Hognose Hughes knows how to do, "it's cold cock a fella with a cudgel." And later he "mused as his mind wallowed in miasma." Indeed! And if that's not enough, consider this, from the hog-human daisy chain scene: "One gay bastard hopped aboard his brother and began buggering away with pig-like aplomb." But enough, enough!
Yet the humor in these pages arises not only from the bombast and audacious alliteration, but also from certain lines inserted insidiously in (there I go again!) the script, calculated to take the reader by surprise. What, for example, does Little Bo Priscilla (still a virgin who doesn't know the meaning of the word "aroused") . . . what does this innocent child say to her sex-crazed Hungarian chauffeur Zoltan as he struggles to free himself from the bramble bush into which he has fallen in his frantic effort to get into the back seat of the limousine and lay siege to her defenseless virginity? This: "Quit fucking around and get your ass in here this instant!" Imagine! And then there is the conversation between little Priscilla-still pure, mind you, except for a brief fellatial-cunnilingual exchange with Zoltan-and her prudish frigid cold-blooded mother.
It begins with Priscilla accusing her mother of denying her father certain marital pleasures having to do with the bedroom-all in the most cultured and proper language: "How can you say such a thing?" exclaims Mrs. Mannlicher. "You, my very own daughter, calling me cruel!" And Priscilla: "But you most definitely were, Mother dear. Surely you must know how strong the sex drive is in man. To deny him that much-needed release was both a mental and physical torture that as far as I'm concerned was inexcusable." And it goes on like that for a while, in more or less believable dialogue; but then when Mrs. Mannlicher accuses Priscilla of getting all this sex business from her father, who "goes in for that sort of thing,"' and also for "pictures of nudie cuties in lewd poses," Priscilla says: "He wouldn't have to if you'd let him ball you now and then." Scandalous!
And then there are the sudden shifts in the other direction-from the tense to the casual, from the vulgar to the cultured. In the midst of being painfully deflowered by the brutal Zoltan, who, pound and thrust though he will, cannot seem to rend her tenacious hymen, Priscilla remarks, "Hey, that hurts."
And to return to Hognose for a moment, after having dragged Priscilla to his pigpen, in the middle of the grossest vernacular, including such things as "Don't kid me, sister, you already been screwed once today," and "He a pretty good fucker, is he?" and "gotta get up early to feed the pigs . . . just too tuckered out to treat you to a good time" and "after that hunkie dirtied you with his greasy dick"-in the middle of this, he says: "Years of working with hogs have given me insight into what great creatures they really are." Not even an accent! And a moment later, defending his nose, he says: "if you were a sow, you'd think me handsome." And so on, to say nothing of such out-and-out comical lines as: "You got spunk, Priscilla. I like that in a sow, er, girl." And-this also from Hognose as he ponders letting Priscilla have her last wish, to be mounted by his prize boar, before shooting her: "I dunno, I don't want to damage his do-flingy."
Though my space is running short, there is one other thing I feel I should touch on, because it seems to be the basic premise underlying this story. I mean what I might call "infectious metamorphic magic," or "instant evolution." It is clear to me that while Miss Freed's tutor was delivering his lecture on biological selection, she must have been gazing absent-mindedly out the window at the hogs, for she seems to equate one's basic genetic characteristics-physical as well as mental-with communicable disease. Hognose Hughes, because he has all his life lived among swine-swilling them, castrating them, sleeping with them and slitting their throats-thinks and even looks like a hog; one feels that, should he survive this book, there will come a day when he will develop hooves and go whole hog, so to speak. Priscilla's father, Fat Harry, also has a certain pig-like appearance, due to his beginnings on a small pig farm, his lifelong suiline associations, and his habit of bedding down with a sow in preference to his wife.
Similarly, verifying the formula, when Hognose chains Priscilla up with the dogs, it is only a matter of a few weeks-during which she eats with them, sleeps with them, and is "molested" by them-until she begins to take on unmistakable canine attributes. Her body becomes covered with hair, she attracts fleas, she scratches herself, she grows mangy, she walks on all fours; whenever Hognose comes near her, she bares her teeth, snarls, growls, and at night she howls at the moon. Miss Freed seems to be saying that humans have something of the chameleon in them, and can almost immediately take on the appearance of any other creature, if exposed to the environment to which that creature is naturally adapted. Curious, what? Clearly, there was a corroded cog in the clockworks of her curriculum.
But leaving Miss Freed's shortcomings behind, the reader has surely perceived by now that this book is the literary answer to the pleas of long-deprived erotically minded pig farmers everywhere-the answer, surely, to their wildest dreams while perusing the local book racks, searching in vain for something even vaguely touching on the delights of the muck pond and the slaughter pen. There has been nothing on the open market to compare with this since Al Capp's Moonbeam McSwine.
As for the conclusion of the tab', it can hardly be read without hearing the shrill bugle call of the Cavalry charge in the distance. The pig-loving reader will be snorting and slobbering like a rutting boar as Hognose's prize porker prepares to mount the hapless heroine, while out of Muldoon's Saloon, in a cloud of dust, armed to the teeth, come Harry Mannlicher's avengers, Fat Harry in the lead, Zoltan at the wheel, hot on the trail of the hog-nosed villain. Everyone is there-the vigilantes in Chevy pickups and Ford Falcons, the F.B.I, in black Ford Fairlanes, the C.I.A. in Citroens; and Fat Harry, his shotgun at the ready, is shouting, "Faster, faster, you fool . . . a girl's life may lie at stake!"-and here I sit, alliterating like an ass! And then, with a roll of the drum and a blast of the bugles, Harry's long black two-ton Caddy, its twin American flags fluttering from its tailfins . . . but I don't want to spoil it for you.
Whatever has been said previously needs be concluded with a word of sincere praise. Burlesque is a valid art form, and here it is well used. This extreme of satire still provides a medium for thoughtful expression, and Priscilla, My Pet makes for an uproarious yet incisive commentary on life in these benighted States.
J. Vincent Rothchilde, Ph.D.