The Art and Craft of Luncheon

Doctor Johnson used to say that he regarded a chair in a tavern as the throne of human felicity, and he certainly spent enough time there to know what he was talking about. I understand his view, but I would amend his dictum, and say “a chair in a restaurant”; taverns tend to be a little too robust, too noisy. Restaurants provide the perfect ambience for what Gibbon called “the cheerful flow of unguarded conversation”.

Guests gathered round a restaurant table can all see and hear each other, can employ the silent eloquence of body language, exchange wordless confidentialities from opposite ends of the table through the raised eyebrow, the wink, the frown and the shrug. To anyone who was not actually present at the table, even the most sensitive audiotape of the occasion can reveal less than half the communication which might have passed over the tablecloth.

By no means all frequenters of restaurants are bent on easy sociability: take famous Cyril Connolly. He was—even for a journal editor—a monster of egotism. He pronounced that a truly enjoyable dinner party was made up of two persons—himself and a good head waiter. It speaks volumes for Connolly’s more amiable side that—even after such a declaration of misanthropy—he continued to remain one of London’s most assiduously sought-after dinner guests.

Years before I began my own decades as a publisher, I learnt about the mystical link between publishing and lunching. Late in the 1950s, to my amazed delight, the publishers Angus & Robertson accepted from me the distinctly amateur manuscript of a little book of wartime reminiscences. There quickly followed an invitation to lunch at an agreeable but not flashy Sydney restaurant. My host was Beatrice Davis, that empress among editors whose wisdom, tact and learning, over many years, silently improved the prose of many much greater writers than I.

Even before the soup was cleared away, this elegant woman of equal charm and force had me hooked: I knew that my manuscript was in the hands of a person who understood, not merely its words, but its inwardness. Weeks later, when my galley proofs arrived for correction, I was surprised to discover what a competent writer I had somehow become.

Beatrice, long since, has taken her sharp blue pencils to a far region but—who knows—it might still please her that the ’prentice script she licked into shape nearly fifty years ago has since been reprinted seven times, and that it still sells steadily today.

It all goes back to that lunch: the soothing start with a martini; the good but not ostentatious bottle of wine; the attentive head waiter (“Your usual table, Miss Davis?”) Ambience is all! Some years later, rather unaccountably, I was offered the directorship of Melbourne University Press, and I was asked to set down the supposed qualifications and experience which might fit me for the post. It seemed a pretty thin list, of which the strongest item was “I can do a good lunch”. Another debt to Beatrice.

Looking back over twenty-six wonderfully rewarding years at MUP, a great number of the high points in the landscape seem to occur in restaurants—usually for luncheon, more rarely for dinner. Very soon after taking office, I had the honour of entertaining that great historian of Australian letters, H.M. Green. It was not my purpose to solicit a manuscript from him, but to seek the favour of his wisdom in general about the sort of books which a newcomer should be encouraging and publishing.

The great man lived in Ringwood, then still almost rural. He was very frail, heavily rugged up in greatcoat and scarf, though it was not an especially cold day, and we drove to a new restaurant called The Bird and Bottle. We shared a bottle of white wine which, I suspect, lay outside the scope of his approved diet. His memory was sharp and his opinions pointed. By three o’clock, when he was becoming tired, I drove him home, having learned more about Australian publishing than any three hours have ever yielded me since. Before going to bed that night I wrote out some twenty pages of notes distilled from his wisdom, and was quietly thrilled by the prospect of being able to turn to him for guidance when I got lost. Alas! He died a few months later. I would not have believed that the departure of a man I met only once could leave such a sad gap in my world.

With the poet A.D. Hope it was usually dinner rather than lunch. On his visits from Canberra there was always so much to talk about; and anyway, one should never hurry the second bottle. MUP (before my time) had made the inexplicable decision to reject the manuscript of Alec’s first volume of poems. After such an affronting misjudgment, it took many years to lure him back into our list, but the several volumes we published for him in later years were not, I feel sure, wholly unconnected with those roseate dinners.

The publication of Manning Clark’s six big volumes of history extended over nearly a quarter of a century, so it is only natural that Manning should loom large in my luncheon catalogue. He was invariably an amusing guest, with conversation just adequately spiced with gossip or mild malice. Of the innumerable lunches we shared, I can’t remember one that I didn’t enjoy. He liked best to be taken to The Florentino, then Melbourne’s poshest nosh, patronised mainly by the modish and the millionaires. Manning’s bush hat and stout boots drew a raised eyebrow, but his jacket and tie always satisfied the strict dress code.

After Manning went teetotal the size of MUP’s bills diminished sharply, but he remained a shameless freeloader, and would arrive for lunch accompanied by one or more wholly unexpected members of his family. The proposition that “there is no such thing as a free lunch” would have amused Manning Clark heartily.

Aged sixty-five, I retired from Melbourne University Press, though not before a friend (?) had drawn my attention to a passage from P.G. Wodehouse: “the lunches of fifty-seven years had caused his chest to slip down into the mezzanine floor”. The warning was wasted, and I took a lifetime love affair with lunch with me intact, out into a wider world.

Last week I lowered my frame onto the throne of human felicity in a restaurant near Melbourne University, eager to have lunch with two valued former colleagues. The omens could not have been more propitious: I had climbed the fearsome stairs (more like a fire-ladder) without stumbling or getting puffed; the very table I preferred was available; I was nearly half an hour early, which would permit the leisurely ingestion of a Scotch; I had the morning paper to read. In Frederic Manning’s famous phrase, I was “in a particularly good skin”.

A few pages into the paper (it was the Age of November 28, for anyone who wishes to check my total veracity) an advertisement proclaimed in huge type: “EVEN IF YOU FEEL FIT AND HEALTHY, YOU COULD BE DEAD WRONG”. There followed an invitation to hurry on down to friendly Epworth Hospital, there promptly to be diagnosed (I dare say at your own expense) as suffering from some ghastly and possibly disease.

It was a cloud, you might say, no bigger than a man’s hand, however unwelcome it might be at lunchtime. But the Age that day packed a double-whammy. A few pages further on, a news item was headed, “Gran saved after being fed faeces”. Mrs Ethel McEwan, aged eighty-three, was gravely ill because an invading micro-organism was destroying the normal benign bacteria which daily help us digest our food. To restore these desirable bacteria, faeces from a close genetic relative (a daughter, in this case) was introduced into the patient’s stomach by a tube. “It’s not like they put it on a plate and you have to eat it. You don’t see or smell a thing,” said the sprightly Scottish coprophagist.

When my companions arrived, and just by way of encouraging high spirits, I showed them both items. After an initial blench at the first, and an involuntary “Yuk” at the second, they displayed the indomitable fortitude of the true Australian luncher, and we got on with it. There was a suggestion that we should invite the redoubtable Mrs McEwan to become an honorary member of our group—maybe even our patron.