Jason Okundaye’s fantasy dinner: camp Susan Sontag meets catty James Baldwin — and Carrie Bradshaw gatecrashes

When I sent out invitations for this evening by post, I included strict instructions that smoking may only take place outside of my Battersea flat. I couldn’t countenance smoke damage to my collection of vintage designer clothes and was sure my guests would feel similarly. What unites them, alongside their status as literary legends, is their sense of style. But my first RSVP, from Susan Sontag, came in the form of my invitation with a cigarette burn through it. That’s good, I thought. It’s protest, but it’s camp. 

Despite her bravado, Sontag is the first to arrive. She comes wearing a striped collared shirt given structure by a waistcoat as tight as a leather harness. She’s carrying a large chocolate éclair, to be cut up and shared. “Cream fills an éclair like infected pus in a wound,” she tells me, and my appetite for it reduces. I feel that her statement contradicts her diatribe against illness as metaphor. She tells me there is no such contradiction; she said nothing about similes.

James Baldwin arrives shortly after Sontag. He’s wearing cat-eye sunglasses which crowd his face, a fur-trimmed black coat and split-toe Margiela Tabi shoes. (Maison Margiela was founded the year after Baldwin died, but all time machines allow stops for good shopping.) He has brought Swordfish Provençal from his favourite café just a stone’s throw away from his villa in Saint-Paul-de-Vence. When he enters, he does not greet me. Instead he lowers his glasses and struts towards Sontag to confront her on her 1963 essay “The Ideal Husband” in which she pans his “inexhaustible self-perpetuating oratory”. He goes to speak to her but first he unwraps a silk handkerchief, pulls out a cigarette and lights it, clearly intending it as a prop to punctuate his speech. I go to say something but he holds up a finger for me to shush. He begins a great speech about being a black artist in western white civilisation, and about white writers being in cahoots with institutions from Hollywood to academia to gag the imaginations of black writers and dictate their limits.

Sontag stands to defend herself, but we’re spared by the arrival of Joan Didion. Fresh from shooting for Céline, she makes a rock star entrance, wearing that same large gold pendant and sunglasses as in her iconic 2015 ad for the brand, but swapping the black shirt for a ruffled burgundy blouse. She brings with her aubergine gratin, cold, and a note with the recipe written down. She tells us that she used to make it for her daughter Quintana.

Rivals moments ago, Sontag and Baldwin team up. Sontag wants to interrogate Didion about her famous claims in The New York Times that feminism trivialised itself through “public colloquies about the inequities of dishwashing”. She asks if Didion has brought rubber gloves to handle the washing-up later. Baldwin wants to know if she has these same views of the civil rights movement. She simply stands up and walks back outside to smoke, which is thoughtful. This is all noise, she thinks. She has not removed her sunglasses.

James Baldwin struts towards Susan Sontag to confront her on a 1963 essay in which she pans him

The ash from Didion’s cigarette falls on a pair of Chelsea boots. It’s Samuel Beckett, and he’s carrying the slouchy Gucci hobo bag. He asks Didion how things are inside my party. She describes the gathering inside as the “sociopathic centre” of the literary world. “Aye,” Beckett says. In his Gucci bag are cans of tomato soup and tins of fish. When he walks into the flat, he sees Sontag and Baldwin arguing again. He picks out one of the soup cans and throws it. It misses the two of them, but hits me square on the head. “Pain is the mundane, there is nothing to be done,” he says, simply shrugging and lining up the rest of the cans on a shelf.

My guests finally sit around the table for dinner. Didion’s aubergines and Beckett’s soup and tinned sardines and mackerel form the starter. Baldwin’s swordfish the main. But before the dessert course is served, there’s a knock at the door, of the only guest who had declined the invite because it fell on her 35th birthday. It’s Carrie Bradshaw — and she’s wearing a two-piece red Prada crop top and skirt, with a headband. She is in floods of tears as she’s been stood up by all her friends. She carries with her birthday cake that dropped on the floor in front of some builders who were taunting her, bits of dirt and tarmac still stuck to the frosting. She looks around and asks who everyone is and who everyone is wearing. To the party’s delight I announce an end to the smoking ban — it’s the only thing that will now cut the tension. By the end of the evening, my apartment is on fire.

Jason Okundaye is a writer. His first book, “Revolutionary Acts: Black Gay Men in Britain”, will be published next year

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