His Butler’s Story (1980-1981)

by Edward Limonov

  “Too peaceful,” I said.

  “I haven’t stayed over in New York for any length of time in twenty years,” Angeletti went on thoughtfully. “I’ve stopped for a day or two on my way back from Europe on occasion, but always when I was very busy with meetings planned beforehand without a minute to spare, so I haven’t really seen the city. Probably it’s changed a lot?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Even in the five years I’ve been here, it’s changed a great deal. Certain neighborhoods have come back, and others have gone under.”

  “Efimenkov spoke very highly of your book,” Angeletti said, abruptly changing the subject. “He regards it as one of the best things written in Russian since the end of the Second World War.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Probably it’s easier for him to tell. But the fact is it’s been very hard for me to find that masterpiece a publisher.”

  “I’ll take your manuscript, and if I like it, I’ll publish it. We only bring out a few books a year, but what we do bring out we try to make as choice as possible.” Angeletti said all this in a way that made it sound very solid.

  “I would be very pleased if you considered it possible to publish my book,” I said. I meant it. Then noticing that the wine was gone, I asked, “Would you like some more?” and went to the kitchen to get it.

  I had prepared lunch beforehand — sliced steak, something I learned to do from Jenny, although it doesn’t in fact require much skill. You sauté long strips of meat cut a little thicker than for beef Stroganoff in a skillet and serve them hot. That’s it. I also had a salad. And wine and some Heineken’s, and cheeses for dessert. There was plenty of meat and plenty of salad — what else does a person need? We ate in the kitchen just as we were, and I asked Linda to join us too, just as she was.

  We ate and talked. Nothing special — just mealtime conversation. Angeletti didn’t drop any pearls of wisdom, nor did I. Linda didn’t drop any either, and Louise helped herself to the food. I had the odd sensation that it was all very commonplace and ordinary. I had known Angeletti from photographs and books when I was in Russia. My poet friend Dmitri had translated his verse into Russian for me. And now he was sitting in my kitchen, and calmly eating. A mythological figure of world-class proportions. And now he’d just downed a large gulp of beer.

  But why should he have been a superman? His friend Gluzberg, who had shaved off his beard for the first time only last year, was a quiet and gentle bookkeeper from New Jersey, an old, not overly tidy homosexual in spectacles who barely looked like the author of the snarling, howling verse he had been famous for in the fifties. (I generally don’t like the way writers age; they do it in an ugly way.) Was Angeletti supposed to cast fiery glances perhaps? What did I want from him, anyway? That he be unique? Such were my thoughts as I gazed at Angeletti sitting in my kitchen.

  Was it that I still hadn’t completely rid myself of romanticism, of my provincial, Russian romanticism, or that I had anticipated a heated discussion in which certain mysteries would suddenly be revealed to me? But he was certainly no seer.

  The whole “Angeletti operation” lasted three hours. Then taking my manuscript, they left. Angeletti promised to write as soon as he had finished reading it. I walked them to the door, closed it behind them, and then went upstairs to Linda and asked her, “What did you think of that person, Linda — your own opinion?”

  Linda, tearing herself away from her papers, lifted her head and said without hesitating and with complete indifference, “I thought he wasn’t too bright, Edward,” and then stuck her head back in her papers. She was working on her closet plan, of course — Gatsby wasn’t home.

  It seemed to me that perhaps she hadn’t formulated her opinion very precisely; I thought it was rather that Angeletti hadn’t been very interesting. But maybe uninteresting and “not too bright” were one and the same? The hell with it! I thought. After all, he has somehow published good books in the past. Maybe he’ll publish mine too. Anyway he came here himself. It’s a great honor when a famous publisher comes to see a writer himself.

  I went into the TV room, sat down on the couch, and fell into thought, trying to understand the nature of Angeletti’s visit. I recalled what Angeletti had said, and what Louise had said. Was I a homosexual? No. What difference did it make anyway? I wondered. Although for her it probably did make a difference, since she was a feminist writer, as Angeletti had told me when introducing her.

  “Linda, how do you feel about feminism?” I yelled into the next room.

  “Shit! Don’t bother me, Edward!” she answered. I couldn’t tell whether «shit» was an expression of Linda’s attitude toward feminism, or simply an emotional response to the fact that I had distracted her.

  Leonard Angeletti’s letter arrived a month after his visit. Whether by ironical decree of the post office or of fate, his letter arrived after my long-suffering manuscript, as had been the case with Mr. Atlas. I was so dismayed when I saw the package extended to me by the mailman, that I just stood there without moving. “Take it!” he said irritably, shoving it into my hands. I slammed the kitchen door and tore open the package. The manuscript. Just the manuscript. Well-trained office personnel don’t include letters with their packages; they send them in separate envelopes. But the return address testified irrefutably that the manuscript had been sent from Mr. Angeletti’s publishing house.

  A letter will undoubtedly follow, I thought, possibly even tomorrow, but it won’t change anything. Essentially it’s all clear: That sixties liberal isn’t going to publish my book. If he had decided to publish it, he wouldn’t have sent the manuscript back.

  I didn’t say anything to Linda; I was ashamed and afraid she might decide I was a failure. I recalled the words of Sarah’s parting letter: “The reason nobody will touch your book here is that the United States has much higher standards for literature, and your book just isn’t good enough… You’re a huge, gaping, empty zero.”

  The next day the empty zero received the letter. Another secretarial blunder obviously. The zero opened the letter and started reading. No, he hadn’t restricted himself merely to apologies; he had written a long letter, sparing no pains. He wasn’t even, as it turned out, refusing to publish my book. Rather Mr. Angeletti was suggesting that I cut it. Why not, why not cut it? I thought. A little bit here, a little there. After all it’s my first novel. I had never rejected the idea of cutting it, although in the Russian version it was two hundred and eighty pages long, not what you would call a large book. I was just about to start celebrating when I got to the main part of the letter. Angeletti was suggesting that I change the novel’s ending, introducing a “political murder.” He couldn’t publish the book with the ending I had now.

  He doesn’t understand shit about my book, I thought. My hero is trying with all his might to keep from killing himself. He wants to go on living, to continue his struggle, and accept his share of the blood and tears of this fucked-up world. A political murder in the form of a suicide. The hero struggles against his own suicidal tendencies and desires throughout the course of the book, and frees himself from them at the cost of considerable suffering, thereby shaping a new personality for himself. The hero decides to live, but Angeletti was suggesting a political murder. He didn’t understand anything.

  At the end of the letter was a P.S. “Now, living as he does in such a rich and beautiful home and possessed as he is of such a soft job, and no longer on the bottom of bourgeois society but already to a certain extent accustomed to its blessings, hasn’t the protagonist of your book become more loyal to that society and civilization, calmer and more contented?” Angeletti wrote, adding a question mark.

  I was enraged. You goddamn whore! I thought. Why drink our wine and beer and eat our meat and salad! Why take part in our “upper bourgeois” blessings, if you’re going to start in with this demagoguery, you bastard? You shouldn’t have eaten or drunk if you want to be consistent. Soft job! Why, you bearded cunt! I thought bitterly. I’d like to make you stand
around on your feet all day from seven until midnight, and then see how you’d look and see what your tune would be then. Soft job! I’d like to see you run around the way I do: “Edward, coffee!” a dozen times a day. “Edward, an ashtray!” “Edward, go get some orange juice at the Greek restaurant right now!” But Steven doesn’t remember where the restaurant is, just that it’s somewhere around Third Avenue and Fifty-seventh Street, and Edward runs over there like an idiot. “Edward, take Stanley to the bus station!” “Edward, go meet Mr. and Mrs. Buckley; their bags are very heavy.” “Edward, where are Steven’s yellow pajamas?” And at twelve I tumble off to bed and have just fallen asleep, when suddenly there’s a telephone call from Japan or from an island, fuck knows which one. And once somebody called at five o’clock in the morning, identifying himself as «Rockefeller»! Soft job!

  He reminds me about bourgeois society! The protagonist whom nobody has yet bought off. Mr. Publisher Angeletti obviously regards himself as a virtual revolutionary. But what about his money and all the books he sells? Are we to suppose that he spends his nights under a bridge with nothing but a quarter in his pocket? Obviously, if his publishing house has been in existence for over twenty-five years, he’s no asshole when it comes to business; at least he hasn’t lost any money, given the name authors he’s surrounded himself with. But does he really have no sense of humor? Apparently not, if he could send a letter with a P.S. like that to somebody who works as a servant, to someone like me who polishes the floor and shines the boss’s shoes.

  Soft job! Fuck you! I was starting to feel bad about the boss’s wine I had given him and his feminist to drink. Why should the boss have to pay for all that shit? I suddenly thought, reasoning like a faithful and devoted servant to spite Angeletti. Angeletti reminded me of Jerry Rubin, another half-assed American pseudo-revolutionary, who in his book Growing Up at Thirty-seven admitted that at the same time he was a leftist student leader and rebelling against all the values of bourgeois society, he also owned stocks and even consulted the Wall Street journal to see how his money was doing. He had inherited the stocks from his mommy and daddy. Great revolutionaries! They have neither shame nor conscience. The publisher tells die servant that he’s too bourgeois. Well, well!

  I was so disgusted and angry that day that I got drunk and even started fighting with somebody in the street, something I hadn’t done for a long, long time. The next day I had a headache and had the Saturday New York Times stolen from my front door, since I didn’t get up until around twelve. My well-regulated way of life had been upset. Instead of The New York Times, there was a bundle of letters lying on the floor, which the mailman, instead of waiting for me to answer the door, had shoved through the mail slot. Among the dozens of letters for Gatsby was one for me. An official letter, with the name PEN embossed on the envelope. I picked up the letter and unsealed it, my hands trembling from my hangover: “We have no doubt, Mr. Limonov, of the literary merits of your books, but unfortunately we cannot accept you as a member of the PEN Club given the fact that both your books have been published only in Russian…” followed by warm wishes and kind regards.

  What? I thought. I went to them beforehand and called them several times and told them several times that my books had been published only in Russian. They had told me themselves that PEN is an international organization and that I should go ahead and send my books, but include annotations so they could understand what the books were about, and if I had articles about myself and my books in English, that I should send those too. I sent them a huge package. And I had been recommended to them by Joseph Khomsky, one of their own. And now they tell me I don’t have any books in English. But they’ve given PEN membership to a whole crowd of half-wit Russian dissidents who call themselves writers. They can join, but I’m not allowed to.

  You beat your head against the wall for four years trying to become a man of letters. You receive rejections on all sides — ‘We can’t! We don’t need you! You don’t suit us!” — even though you know that you are needed and that you do suit them, that you’re more talented than many others, and so if you aren’t a fish with cold blood in your veins, you get mad. “The goddamn faggots! The fucking bastards!” I started yelling and kicked several chairs. Round and made of iron, they flipped over and rolled across the kitchen floor. “Bastards!” I shouted with angry tears in my eyes. The one time in his life a person tries to become a member of an Organization. And even the feeblest of them won’t take him. “Sanctimonious liberal assholes! Murderers!” I shouted. “What the fucking hell was I thinking of in applying to that society of worn-out old women and insipid liberals! What the hell do I need them for? Why, they’re even worse than the goddamn Soviet Union of Writers, the old farts… Mothball minds!”

  Weeping with rage, I poured myself some whiskey, Steven’s favorite, twelve-year-old Glenlivet, and drank off the whole glass, which sent me hurtling into the wide-open spaces of my own mind. I took the bottle, got on the elevator, and went up to my room, where I quickly got dressed, not forgetting to drink, since that yellow liquid made everything easier. Much easier.

  “Freaks!” I said out loud. It’s you who are the freaks, not me. I’m a normal, healthy person who has the courage to see the world as it is, face to face. You hump-backed whores! You craven victims! Anybody with a passionate heart and an independent mind is doomed among you. You all conspire to put him down on every level, from bedroom to PEN Club. I’m not interested in playing your primitive little games, you bastards! I’m not going to change anything in my book for you, Angeletti, you jerk! And you senile old twats from the PEN Club will come to me someday, but I won’t join your decrepit organization. Never!

  After I got dressed, I suddenly couldn’t understand where it was I intended to go. Thinking over my plans and continuing to drink, I sat down by the window and looked out.

  Down below a garden party was in progress. Only because of my hangover, I couldn’t understand whose it was. Very formally dressed men and women were trampling the young grass around our huge tree in the center. A few small groups were standing by the river. I watched them for a long time, trying to make sense out of it, and then I remembered that in a paper bag in my desk drawer I had a couple of pale violet tablets of mescaline left to me by Michael Jackson on his last visit — he had needed ten dollars. I was in such a screwed-up state that I got out the tablets and swallowed both of them, both the little crystalline triangles, knowing from experience that I would soon start vibrating like an overheated pressure cooker. But I was in such despair that I was willing to pay any price for a way out. Move into another dimension maybe, but escape. I had never taken two tabs of mescaline at once; I had been afraid to. I had been unable to calm down for a good twelve hours from just one, and had fucked like a beast without ever reaching orgasm. It seemed my prick would burst and my nerves would snap, that my whole body was crackling under the strain and would suddenly split open, coming apart like an old brick building. But I swallowed the two tablets anyway, having decided beforehand, it’s true, that whatever I did, I shouldn’t go out. That I must not go outside in that condition, or I’d perish for sure. Moreover, I was still drinking. And drinking on top of a hangover.

  Downstairs in the garden pleasant conversations were taking place, and you could hear polite laughter and the murmuring of the crowd. I envied them: Unlike me, they weren’t alone. I raised the window and tried to get a better look at them. But with shitty success; from the fourth floor, their faces were barely visible. I was most interested in the women, of course. I usually got the binoculars from Steven’s room on such occasions, but they weren’t there anymore; he’d taken them back to Connecticut a long time ago. He and Mr. Richardson were planning to go deer hunting. Mr. Richardson was a hunter; Gatsby wanted to be a hunter too.

  But I found a solution. I stood up, opened the door to my closet, and took out my rifle. It had a telescopic sight. So as not to scare them in case they happened to notice me, I put a couple of green pillows from my bed on the
windowsill, arranging the rifle on them, and then I lay down on the bed and started watching.

  How could I not have guessed at once! I thought. There’s no question it’s a party given by the Secretary General of the UN. Who else would have such formally dressed guests and so many men in tuxedos? Before such affairs people with the characteristic faces of special agents always sweep our bushes with bomb-detectors. But they never check the houses, thank God.

  The cross hairs of the sight moved from head to head as I sought the host. Aha. There’s his old face. At that instant he was being asked to pose; a young girl-photographer was taking his picture. Even though he frowned irritably, he didn’t turn away; the girl was pretty, and he let her take a picture. Though maybe she isn’t a photographer, I thought. They would be unlikely to let reporters in; they have press conferences for that. The mescaline apparently hasn’t started to affect me yet, I thought, except that maybe I’m being a little too persistent and taking too much time looking them over. Really, what the hell do I need them for anyway? At that instant the servile face of a flunky appeared in the rifle sight, a man carrying a tray of drinks. Champagne. They were champagne glasses. I hated to bring drinks to Steven in the garden, although there were times when I had to… The poor flunky. How much effort that face must have cost him.

  As I was gripping and turning the rifle and catching their faces in its sight, it suddenly occurred to me that if somebody in one of the neighboring buildings should see me lying in that prone position and call the police, I could get about ten years in prison for it. Try to prove afterward that you were just using the optical sight for binoculars and didn’t have anything bad in mind. They’d make a new Lee Harvey Oswald out of me, I thought.

  And I suddenly felt a chill that made my hair stand on end. I remembered that I had the same kind of slash marks on my arms that Oswald had, and I remembered my morbid interest in political murderers and terrorists. And then a crazy thought flashed vividly through my mind: If you pop off the Secretary General of the United Nations right now, that would be no worse, in fact, it might even be better than taking out the President of the United States! The worst part was that it would have been childishly easy to do so. After all, I was already lying in a window open onto the garden where their party was taking place. And while at the moment I had the telescopic sight fixed on one of the branches of our large tree with its spreading greenery, it would have taken no effort at all, a mere thirty seconds, to find the requisite old head of the Secretary General in the garden. At a distance of no more than fifty yards, it would have been virtually impossible to miss, even if I hadn’t practiced every day at a shooting range the way Oswald had.