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.