Macmillan

Macmillan enters Eduard Limonov’s story as the publisher considering an English translation of It’s Me, Eddie, and as the institution whose rejection sharpens his fear of remaining unknown. The submission offers a possible route from a manuscript to recognition; its refusal leaves that possibility unresolved and makes the costs of obscurity feel immediate.

Submission and the imagined gatekeeper

At Steven Gray’s suggestion, Limonov follows his agent’s advice and uses his meager allowance to have the first four chapters translated, ending with the scene in which he and Chris have sex in a sandbox. The agent submits those chapters to Macmillan. The response does not arrive at once, and Limonov understands that a delay is normal, but waiting turns the publisher’s decision into an object of anxious attention.

One morning, he goes to look at the building where his fate will be decided. At the entrance, two postal workers push a cart piled with large envelopes. Limonov estimates that the manuscripts inside amount to seventy to a hundred cubic feet. The scale of the pile makes his own submission seem almost vanishingly small: somewhere inside the building, an unknown reader may open an envelope bearing the title It’s Me, Eddie and either recognize a remarkable book or drop it onto a reject pile.

The evaluator remains faceless. Limonov imagines that the tastes and whims of someone he has never met will determine whether he rises above what he calls the mass of losers. A young man in a suit and tie, wearing thin frameless glasses, enters the building; Limonov wonders whether he might be the person whose judgment matters. The scene offers no confirmation. Its force comes from the gap between the manuscript’s significance to its author and its uncertain place among the many submissions awaiting attention.

Rejection and consequence

The decision eventually comes while Limonov is working on Long Island. After Jenny has left him, Steven Gray connects him with a friend who needs work done at a country house. Limonov spends two months there, earning four dollars an hour with a shovel and trowel. The house is empty during the week, and his calls to the few people he still considers close go unanswered. Against this isolation, the agent’s call is the only contact that brings news of the manuscript.

Macmillan rejects the submission as too antagonistic. The agent says he will not give up and is considering other publishers, but he is eager to end the unpleasant call. The manuscript itself helps explain the objection: it ends with the words, “Fuck you, cocksucking bastards! You can all go straight to hell!” The refusal is therefore tied not just to an abstract assessment of the book’s tone but to the forceful language with which the submitted work closes.

After the call, Limonov sits on a bag of cement in the empty living room. He tells himself that he has failed, imagines a future of manual jobs and porn magazines, and fears that he will die without anyone knowing he was alive. Macmillan’s decision does not establish what another publisher might do—the agent has mentioned looking elsewhere—but at this moment it becomes the immediate measure of whether the book can carry its author beyond anonymity.