His Butler’s Story

His Butler’s Story is Eduard Limonov’s account of working in Manhattan as a butler, a book whose intimate disclosures transform an apparently successful domestic arrangement into a study of concealed class antagonism. It recounts his mistaken belief that his girlfriend Jenny was a wealthy heiress, his year in the orbit of multimillionaire Steven Gray, and the private violations and hostility that Steven could discover only after the book appeared. Its most disturbing passage goes further still, setting Limonov’s written rage against the shared compassion of a household confronted with a child’s terminal illness.

The book and the mistaken entrance

The book recounts how Limonov misread the household in which he found himself. Jenny was not a rich heiress but a housekeeper, a fact that had not been concealed from him; the misunderstanding belonged to his own assumptions. Although he was observant, he took almost a month to understand his mistake. The account contains no dramatic scene of revelation in which the hero suddenly sees everything clearly. Instead, the error persists in the background, and its eventual correction reveals how readily he had mistaken proximity to wealth for admission into the world of the wealthy.

That distinction is sharpened by the book’s intimate domestic details. Jenny’s small room on the top floor is not what he had imagined, and after she becomes his girlfriend she prepares him an abundant breakfast: fresh orange juice, pancakes with maple syrup, bacon, and eggs. He imagines the appeal of waking beside a loving wife in a warm bed, with ironed sheets, Vivaldi, and the smell of toast. The fantasy is not simply access to riches. It is a vision of settled comfort and care, glimpsed through the routines of a woman whose actual position in the household he has failed to recognize.

Publication and the employer’s discovery

Limonov’s service lasts a year. When a French publisher accepts his book, he leaves for Paris with Steven’s sincere blessing. The book later reaches American readers: Grove Press published His Butler’s Story in 1987, after publishers who had initially refused Limonov’s work began translating it. The narrative therefore gives the employer a delayed encounter with the account of the man he had trusted and lived alongside.

The book’s revelations are specific and physical. In Steven’s absence, Limonov leaves his room beneath the roof and takes over the master bedroom. He stretches out on Steven’s silk sheets, smokes joints in the bathtub, tries on his clothes, walks barefoot on the soft carpets, rummages through drawers, and drinks Château Margaux. He also brings women home, sometimes two at a time, and has sex with them in the bedroom, where a large Venetian mirror hangs above the king-size bed. He presents himself to them as the master of the house, or at least as the master’s equal. The trespass involves the space, possessions, and status of the employer, not merely a breach of household rules.

The narrator suggests that these acts may not have been what most troubled Steven. A servant’s use of the master’s bed, the narrator speculates, might be tolerated so long as the room was put back in order and the sheets washed; Limonov could be trusted to leave everything neat. The more unsettling discovery was what Limonov thought while serving him. Steven may have understood that his Russian poet did not like him, but the book reveals something more radical than personal dislike: Limonov’s outwardly calm, smiling manner concealed an imagined future of violent reversal.

Class hostility beneath the performance

Limonov describes himself, in the narrator’s account of his book, as behaving like a peasant serving a master while awaiting the day when the old order could be overturned. The imagined revolt is deliberately brutal: the servant enters the manor, destroys its art, assaults the master’s wife, throws the master to the floor, and triumphs over him. The narrator connects this fantasy to Steven’s grandmother’s story of Russian nobles astonished when their once-loyal household servants turned against them. Steven, reading his former servant’s book, may have felt a similar shock: for almost two years he had trusted a likable, composed man who was inwardly his enemy.

This contrast gives the book its central social tension. Limonov could find Steven neither stupid nor unbearable and have nothing against him personally, yet still imagine him as the representative of a class destined for overthrow. The book’s account of service thus holds two roles in view at once: the competent employee who anticipates his employer’s habits and serves guests skilfully, and the adversary who interprets the same house as the property of a hostile order. The discrepancy between his public conduct and private vision is not resolved by the book’s successful publication; publication is what makes the discrepancy visible to Steven.

The child with leukemia and the book’s moral shock

The most painful disclosure concerns a five-year-old boy with leukemia, the son of another couple in the neighborhood. Steven knows the parents and visits them as the boy’s condition worsens through chemotherapy, hope, and relapse. When the father tells him that the child has only days, perhaps hours, to live, Steven returns downstairs and tells Jenny, who bursts into tears. Limonov, in the kitchen as usual, does not cry, but seems moved in his own stoic, military way. The three sit together in silence, and Steven remembers the moment as one in which social barriers briefly fall away: they are simply two men and a woman waiting for a child to die.

Limonov’s written response, quoted in the book, rejects the expected expression of sympathy. He wishes the rich child dead, refuses to pretend that he is moved or sorry, and argues that money cannot bargain with cancer: in the face of death, rich and poor are equal. The passage makes the class conflict cruelly concrete. The boy is not responsible for Limonov’s resentment, but in the book’s formulation he becomes the target through which that resentment speaks.

The narrator condemns this response and says that Steven, too, would be appalled. Yet he adds a significant qualification: if anything could have saved the boy, especially something difficult or dangerous, he believes Limonov would have tried it with all his strength. That judgment does not soften the words or erase their cruelty. It leaves the book with a hard contradiction between the speaker’s expressed indifference and the narrator’s belief in what he might do when another person’s life actually depended on him.