“Sing, Muse, of the homosexual who threw a dinner party.” I’m beginning to regret inviting Homer, if I’m honest. My motive wasn’t solely hospitable: I wondered if he might be inspired by the evening to spin out 16,000 hexameters about my life, times, struggles and so on. I wasn’t even sure who would turn up since there was no historical Homer, it’s just the name we apply to the tradition of itinerant poets who composed epics over generations. Anyway, someone came and now he’s barding.
Homer’s odyssey was to make it to the flat in Bow, east London, where my boyfriend Wojtek lives and hosts supper clubs with his exceptional British-Polish-French-Japanese cooking. Tonight is a very special Wojtek’s Bistro: I’m assembling a crack cast of creatives to talk about how you make art. I once tried to write a comic novella and couldn’t get past the second sentence because there were simply too many words to choose from. When you can make up an infinity of things, how do you choose what to do? Where do you start?
Breaking me out of my panicky reverie is a sharp rap on the door. Yukio Mishima, was also a prolific Japanese novelist of delicacy, sympathy and violence. Cruelty loves company and here comes the drunk, plastic-surgeried matriarch Lucille Bluth from the TV comedy Arrested Development, sloshing up behind him. She points at me. “You in the glasses, you look like a waiter. I’ll have a vodka martini, hold the olives, hold the vermouth. Actually” — she pulls a large glass and a bottle of Grey Goose from her bag — “just fill this up.” If insults are an art, we have the Rembrandt of rudeness right here.
By the time Wojtek serves our first course, a springlike chanterelle soup, the mushrooms plump in the consommé, we are six. Because he came early, I had Homer prepare some of his special epithets for the guests and put them on the placecards. Instead of “swift-footed Achilles” we have “feather-fingered” for painter Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, and “dwarf-obsessed” for Richard Wagner. (My invitation for him was mischievous; I wanted to compel a notorious anti-Semite to sit at a Jewish person’s table.) “Why does mine say ‘forehead-immobilised’?” demands Lucille as she fails to frown.
As dishes are cleared and our glasses refilled with Martini Vibrante, a non-alcoholic aperitivo which tastes like a cross between a negroni and Fruit Pastilles, topped with tonic, I raise the topic du jour and ask Yiadom-Boakye how she paints such convincing portraits of people who don’t exist. “I start with the nose.” But really, how? “I find that a fragment of their existence sparks inside me — something real — an attitude I want to portray, a look in their eye, a piece of clothing they should be wearing.”
“Speaking of clothing,” interrupts Bluth, “are you a composer, Wagner, or the victim of an explosion at the crushed-velvet factory?”
She’s got him and his Swiss Guard get-up there; Mishima snorts and scribbles something into his notebook. Let’s see what Wagner has to say about my question. Over our main course of tender, melting rabbit legs baked with white miso and pear, he expounds his theory of creativity, about starting with a note, a single note, and seeing where it leads you. And expounds. And expounds some more. And before we know it, it’s been five hours. It’s funny how Wagner can do that to you, compel life to stop and time to fade away. Even Bluth looks rapt, though that might be the Botox.
Wojtek’s miniature Schnauzer, Zaro, runs into the room, which can only mean dessert is soon to follow. In comes a large, moist chocolate cake, decorated with delicate dried flower petals, and Zaro barks greedily, apparently not having learnt his lesson about the ill effects of theobromine on dogs since he last raided one.
Mishima, silent so far, stands up, draws his sword and I panic: looks like we’re about to get a repeat of his final moments, where he tried to stage a nationalist coup, failed and performed seppuku. He raises his sword and with a swift clean slice cuts the cake. “Violence, you see,” he says, “is a form of creativity. Sex, death, blood, beauty, cake — they’re all the same, all life-giving passions. Create from your passions.”
Cake consumed, crumbs littering the cloth, my guests head out into the cool London night and I, as after every meal Wojtek makes for me, put on canary-yellow rubber gloves for the washing-up and give him a kiss. However great the fantasy is, the only thing better is reality.
Josh Spero is the FT’s associate arts editor
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