Loose Connections: from Narva Maantee to Great Russell Street is Esther Menell’s entertainingly idiosyncratic memoir of family and professional life.
Better-known to the publishing world as Esther Whitby, she catalogues her many roles, including three decades at André Deutsch working alongside Diana Athill and editing writers such as National Book Award winner, William T. Vollmann.
Born in London, into a family of Estonian-Jewish origin, Esther returned to England in the first year of the war, revelled in the Angela Brazil world of an English boarding school, was deeply dissatisfied with Oxford, but landed on her feet in her first job as ‘Girl Friday’ to the publisher Anthony Blond.
Her next stop – lasting thirty years – was André Deutsch Ltd in Great Russell Street. Vivid descriptions of personalities include André Deutsch himself, a man of great charm and legendary meanness; his partner, Diana Athill, now herself a celebrated memoirist, and Tom Rosenthal, a flamboyant and controversial character who took over the firm when André retired and then presided over its rapid decline.
Well-known names abound as one connection follows another: Jean Rhys and Vidia Naipaul, glimpsed in their own homes; R. D. Laing encountered at Kingsley Hall; Norman Mailer (a distant cousin), whose obscenities nearly cost Esther her job; Edmund White, the manuscript of whose Boy’s Own Story fell off her bicycle in Camden High Street; Art Spiegelman, creator of Maus, whose ‘draughtsmanship’ Tom Rosenthal had doubts about, and Mollie Keane, whose cause the author championed when Mollie’s own agent despaired of finding her a publisher.
Last but not least, for all the best stories must have a happy ending, a long and lasting relationship with the architectural historian Robert Harbison, whose book on parish churches she conceived and edited, driving him to distraction with editorial second thoughts delivered urgently in the middle of the night.
Loose Connections (ISBN 978-0-9930087-0-2) can be ordered direct by emailing: esther@esthermenell.com.