His Butler’s Story (1980-1981)

by Edward Limonov

  Writers always abuse their publishers. True, but I despise Malcolm not because he wouldn’t publish my book, but because he was small about it.

  “A holy place is never empty,” as the Russian proverb has it. Malcolm was gone, and Richard Atlas at once stepped in to fill the void. That’s right, the personage himself, Mr. Richard Atlas, publisher, of the house of Gerard and Atlas. I met him at a party given by Mrs. Janet Garrisson, the wife of the chairman of one of America’s oldest panty hose manufacturers, who had started receiving me again. Despite all my dislike of rich old ladies, this was one I was even fond of. I had particularly good feelings about her after learning that she had once energetically and cheerfully supported herself and her daughter by making women’s dresses. Labor is something I respect. I don’t know whether Madame Garrisson supported herself on dresses alone, or whether she also supplemented her income with a little trading in her cunt, as women are wont to do, but I respect her. At the age of seventy or whatever, she’s unbelievably cynical and for that reason a rare pleasure to talk to. The other reason I became enamored of her was that she liked my book — my whole life revolved around it, gentlemen, as you see. I had given Mrs. Garrisson a copy to read. The homosexual Volodya had long before wormed his way in with the Garrissons, and her enthusiasm for the book had been his work. I thought she would be embarrassed by it and dismiss all my strong feelings as “pornography.” But she didn’t; she was up to it. “I’m in raptures!” said Janet, looking like an old circus clown as she descended from her upstairs chambers to the living room where I was waiting for her. “Let me kiss you, my dear!” She kissed me, and afterward looked slyly at me and said, “In your next book you can write that I’m an old hag, a repulsive old hag.” And so I have, as you see, but she’s not an old hag; that’s the wrong image for her. If I were a little older, and she about thirty years younger, I’m sure we’d have hit it off beautifully. As I was leaving her that day, she came out to the doorway of her house, between Park Avenue and Lexington, and said to me very seriously, “Watch out for Elena!” Elena was in New York then, and Madame Garrisson was, as you see, concerned about me and shielding me from that monster.

  And so it was at a party at the Garrissons that I met Richard Atlas. A cocktail party, that is, with people coming and going. Andy Warhol was there with his retinue. I could have asked Madame Garrisson to introduce me to him, but what the hell for? To show him my two books in Russian? What else could I have done? I already believed firmly in the system and felt that until I had a book in English, I didn’t exist. I could, say, have stood with Warhol and said some intelligent things to him, since I did know something about his work and his book The Philosophy of Andy Warhol, but I didn’t want to bullshit anonymously; I wanted to speak as Edward Limonov and not as a nonentity, and so I didn’t ask Madame to introduce us. There’ll be time for that. I hope that Andy and I will both be around for a while.

  Atlas started talking to me by accident. We happened to be together in one of those fluctuating groups that take form, break up, and merge with other groups countless times at any more or less large-scale party. I said something, he said something, and then he asked me what I did, and I brashly told him I was a writer. His interest piqued, he asked, “And what have you written, if you’ll permit me to ask?”

  There wasn’t any mockery in his voice, and I permitted myself to answer: “Right now I’m trying to sell my first novel.” I said it as modestly as I could.

  “Interesting. If it’s not a secret, what is it about?” he asked, taking his pipe out of his mouth. He was smoking a pipe.

  “No, it’s not a secret. Basically, it’s an account, novelized obviously, of my own social and sexual experience in the United States,” I said, trying to sound serious and literary and yet still be brief. I didn’t have any idea who he was. Just a man between fifty and sixty, apparently. In a tweed jacket with a pipe. He could have been anybody; I didn’t even care who he was. His face was simple enough. A businessman, perhaps.

  “And have you sent your book to my publishing house?” he asked.

  “Which one is that?” I asked in my turn. “Forgive me, but we haven’t been introduced.”

  “Gerard and Atlas,” he said. “Heard of it?”

  “Yes, certainly,” I said. “My agent sent the manuscript to Gerard and Atlas. That is, she sent an outline and three chapters in English. At the time only three chapters had been translated. The whole manuscript is in English now,” I said.

  “And what answer did your agent receive?” he asked, smiling.

  “I don’t remember exactly,” said the writer Limonov, “but whatever it was, they didn’t take the book.” «They» had a very diplomatic sound to it.

  “You say you have the whole manuscript in English?” he asked, filling his pipe.

  “Oh yes,” I assured him. “I got it back from the typist a week ago.”

  “I’ll tell you what,” he said, “send the manuscript to me personally. I’ll take a look at your book myself.”

  “Who are you?” I asked in bewilderment and added, “Excuse me.”

  “I’m Atlas. Richard Atlas — file publisher,” he said. “Send it to me, by all means send it — we publish Russian writers sometimes. Just today, by the way, I had a meeting with Joseph Khomsky. We’re bringing out a volume of his poetry next fall. A magnificent poet, Khomsky, and an extraordinarily interesting man. Do you know him?”

  “Oh yes,” I answered hastily, “I know him.”

  “You can send your manuscript to my home address,” Atlas added, and then he disappeared. Either somebody else came up to him, or somebody came up to me, but we parted.

  It would have been odd if Volodya hadn’t been there, and of course he was, and even introduced me to the wife of a Greek billionaire, a still very beautiful woman of about fifty, although she looked much younger. I drank for a while longer, stimulated by the billionaire’s wife and my talk with the publisher Atlas, but still left around nine. The Garrissons weren’t nineteen, after all, and couldn’t put away cocktails until morning. Andy Warhol was still gleaming white in a corner of the living room. Next to him, the pretender to the Russian throne was trying to prove something to a Soviet poet. I went over and listened. The pretender was talking enthusiastically about his trip to Russia and defending the Soviet regime, while the overfed Soviet poet was running it down. What won’t you find? I thought, shrugging my shoulders. And then I left.

  I sent the manuscript to Atlas at once; I am in such matters exceptionally quick and exacting. I sent it and waited. I’m always waiting for other people. Everything that is required of me personally in this world, I do quickly and conscientiously. I’ll sit up nights, but I’ll finish the manuscript when I planned and promised to. I’ve been waiting for other people my whole life. Even as a snot-nosed fifteen-year-old kid I would be the first to show up at the agreed place at the cemetery where our gang used to meet before going off on a robbery, and I would have to sit and wait a long time for the others. As I see it, other people are fuck-offs and bunglers, careless, unreliable people who obstruct my life and my tempo, who get in the way of my energy, and who ultimately use me up. As you see, this view is similar to Gatsby’s own view of “other people,” and thus it turns out that master and servant have the same screwed-up temperament, and the world tries to slow them down. Gatsby is undoubtedly much luckier than I am: he can take the Concorde or a car or use his private plane. He has the illusion of speed, of movement and energy, whereas I’m left only with mindless waiting. To remain stuck in the syrup of a fucking daily routine devoid of odor or flavor, to remain locked in humdrum reality, while the months and years pass by, is truly heroic. To rush with a shout and the bullets flying and mount an attack (excuse me) in the teeth of popular opinion is a lot easier. It’s a deed requiring only a momentary effort of will. I’m certain I could stand smiling with a cigar between my teeth and my hands in my pockets up against a brick wall before a firing squad. I’m not kidding, I could do it. I’ve got
what it takes for the smile and the hands in the pockets and the cigar and the eyes wide open. But sometimes I think I haven’t got quite what it takes for the ordinary, everyday crap; I become unhinged and do stupid things.

  Occasionally it seems to me that nature has stuck me with die wrong destiny by mistake. I have myself interfered in my own fate more than once, and obviously not altogether intelligently, and because I have indulged certain features of my nature, I have completely neglected others, to such an extent in fact, that I have sometimes been quite different from what I actually am. At times it seems to me that my true calling — what I really am — is a colonel in command of an airborne division. Having seen the military bearing that suddenly came to life in me from God knows where when I recently put on a close-fitting dress uniform at a friend’s house, I suddenly thought, my God! this is what I really am, a decisive military man in full-dress uniform, and not the feeble, poetical soul I’ve always aspired to be. And in fact I did want to go to military school once, so why didn’t I? With my head and ambition, I could have been an airborne colonel by now. Then they would have seen something…

  Maybe there was in fact a little mistake? It doesn’t matter, since the best reader I could wish for my books, both those that have been written and those I still have to write, is a young colonel, although majors and lieutenants won’t be turned away. The national origin of my military reader is of no importance either, nor is the color of his skin.

  But let us return to the rigors of my struggle. A few days later I received a saccharine letter from Atlas noting that my manuscript had been received and that I would be contacted without delay as soon as he read it. “I hope you were able to enjoy, and enjoy to the fullest, Mr. Limonov, the delightful atmosphere of the Garrissons’ cocktail party after my departure.” Signed, “Richard Atlas.”

  I did enjoy it, I thought, and since I didn’t know whether I should answer that I had his letter confirming the receipt of my manuscript, I asked Linda about it. She said no, I didn’t have to; all I had to do was wait.

  I sat down and waited. Or rather, I lay down — on an ever renewed succession of bodies. Although my lechery had begun as a simple inferiority complex in consequence of my being left by a woman I loved, it had long since exceeded the limits of that complex to become a way of life. I took pains to drag rarities of every sort into my housekeeper’s bed: a Brazilian singer, a Polish actress, a punk star (although admittedly not of the very first magnitude), an Amsterdam designer, a German model appropriated from the photographer Eric, and a young French writer sent to me from Paris by a friend… More a cabinet of curiosities than a bed. That bed was sometimes even adorned by the mothers of children. I let one bring them with her to the millionaire’s house, and while they frolicked about the bed, I reclined beside their mama and pleasurably fucked her, in full awareness, it’s true, that I was inflicting irreparable psychic trauma on the kids, but I still couldn’t help it. The devil triumphed, and installing himself in Edward, he forced gentle Eddie out.

  I fucked away the interval before Atlas’s reply in the same way, probably, that other people spend such times in drink — to pass the time more quickly.

  About three weeks later I received a large package. I often receive large packages, and so I didn’t think anything about it at first, but when I read the address of the sender, “Richard Atlas, Sr.” I understood it all. An office worker had sent the manuscript separately. The letter came the following day. “How could that have happened, Linda?” I asked the expert.

  “Very simple,” she said. “A secretary mailed the package and then remembered the letter the next day.”

  Linda knows all about secretarial work, I thought sadly. Ask whatever you like; she has the answer. And I unsealed the letter:

  “I very much regret, Mr. Limonov, that I cannot be of assistance… Your manuscript, unfortunately, is not for our list… I wish you every success… I am confident that you…”

  Ah, you asshole! I thought dully. You publish Khomsky; he’s fine for your list, since he’s a nice bourgeois poet. Meek. And more and more ponders the problems of life and death. And conducts himself with exceptional propriety, never saying more than he has to, and whenever he’s called upon to judge Russia publicly, he doesn’t criticize his new Motherland, he doesn’t touch it — God forbid. His favorite poet is the Greek Cavafy, who quietly sat out his life, a man with a temperament like Joseph Khomsky’s — both deep, private thinkers. For his obedient behavior, the poet Joseph Khomsky is certain in time to receive the inventor-of-dynamite prize.

  And me? Next to the respectable Khomsky, the housekeeper Edward is a literary lowlife. On the housekeeper’s desk is a portrait of Colonel Khadafy that even Efimenkov found shocking. It’s not so much that I sympathize with the brand of Islamic socialism invented by the Colonel or with the rest of his views, but that I like his personality. He’s a human being and not an asshole like the majority of rulers. He took power by himself, overthrowing his king and carrying out a revolution. I like his thirty-eight-year-old face. It’s the face of a man. There was a time when I played at being homosexual out of despair and a love for the outrageous, and since there wasn’t any place for my masculine face in Eddie, it surfaced in that picture…

  If I’d written a novel about intellectuals «suffering» in Soviet mental hospitals, or about the oppressed Soviet national minorities, I thought, I would have found a place on their publisher’s list immediately. Without a doubt. Gerard and Atlas is a publisher of liberal-intellectual tendencies. It’s exactly the same as with the Moscow publisher “Soviet Writer,” where you’re perfectly free to publish a book on the life of the American unemployed. All you have to do is avoid sex scenes…

  I didn’t even get drunk. I had just paid off Bill the money I owed him for his translation of Eddie, and gritting my teeth, I started paying him to translate yet another book, Diary of a Loser, in order to begin a relentless general assault along the entire front and against all the New York and for that matter all the American Malcolms and Atlases, from coast to coast. I even started looking for a new literary agent. For that reason I became intimate with people I never would have made friends with. I felt it was either me or them, the Malcolms and Atlases. My own capacity for patience put me on guard; otherwise I would have had a nervous breakdown. It had begun four years since I’d begun trying to sell my book and gain a foothold as a writer, and I was afraid that I’d flip out, that I’d go to pieces and be finished.

  It was at that moment that Angeletti’s letter came. There is a God, I thought in jubilation. There is a God, Edward, there is! Angeletti’s firm wasn’t a large one, but he had published a number of very good things in the sixties, including a book by Jean Genet and another by the French surrealist poet Henri Michaux. True, he had also published a little volume of verse by a Soviet poet — tightrope walker, the same one against whom the pretender to the throne had been defending the Soviet regime at the Garrissons’ party. But I immediately consoled myself by deciding that in publishing the poet, Angeletti was merely paying tribute to an international literary fad. Who is without sin? I thought.

  Angeletti turned up promptly on the appointed day, notifying me by telephone that he was in New York, and I invited him for lunch — after taking the precaution of asking Linda’s advice as to whether it would be appropriate to do so. Linda had forgotten who Angeletti was, but she said, “Why not? You could invite a prime minister to this house, Edward.”

  Angeletti arrived with a woman. He was a tall, balding old man with a beard, an old guy but still strong. The woman, whose name was Louise, was the sort men call a “nice broad.” Not first-class or anything, but very nice: well-built, arms, legs, all there, all nice to look at, all the right curves. I didn’t envy Angeletti his broad, but given the chance I wouldn’t have turned her down either. Louise, however, had nothing to do with the business at hand. My relations with her were limited to her asking, “Are you a homosexual?” She explained her curiosity by saying she’d be
en told that I was a homosexual, although she didn’t think I was. Angeletti was in the can at the time. I told Louise I was bisexual. And I said it, you know, proudly — not coyly but with pride: “I am a bisexual!” Afterwards it occurred to me to wonder just what sort of bisexual I was, given the fact that for a long time I’d been fucking only girls.

  Before Angeletti’s arrival, I had acquired several books on him and his generation and had looked through them and studied them. I had also obtained a book recounting how Angeletti had gotten started in publishing in order to show off my knowledge and demonstrate during our conversation my heightened interest in his publishing house. My boss, before any meeting with somebody he was seeing for the first time in his life, was always sent a dossier on the person in question from somewhere in the bowels of one of his companies. I imitated the boss and got together a dossier on Angeletti.

  Initially we sat in the solarium. All the stories in the millionaire’s little house begin in the solarium. I opened a bottle of Corvo for my guests, taking my cue from Angeletti’s Italian last name. They partook of the cold wine, and Angeletti complained to me about how badly they had slept the night before.

  “We’re staying at the apartment of my old friends the poets Gluzberg and Kotovsky — you’ve heard of them, no doubt,” said Angeletti, addressing me. “It’s way down on the Lower East Side,” he continued. “Gluzberg and Kotovsky have been living there for about thirty years, and have no interest in moving anywhere else, since the rent’s so low. But it’s a terrible neighborhood, and we couldn’t get to sleep all night because the Puerto Rican teenagers down in the square never turned their radios off. But you have a very quiet neighborhood here, like the older parts of London, very peaceful,” Angeletti suddenly announced, getting up from our green couch and looking out through the glass door into the garden.