R2E Excerpt #52: "They Lived in Squares, Painted in Circles, and Loved in Triangles"
Yes Virginia (Woolf)! Young Peter visits the Bloomsbury Group. WRITTEN and ILLUSTRATED by PETER MOORE
When the mood strikes, I run excerpts from A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG NINCOMPOOP, my coming-of-age-travel-memoir-with-funny-drawings. (The first entry is here. Most recent one is here. Or check out my complete archive here.) It details the story of my road through Paris, London, and god help me, Zagreb, in search of the ultimate destination: a life worth living. The story so far: Young Peter arrived in Paris, occupied a dorm room at the Alliance Française language school, tiptoed out onto the Boulevard Raspail and the Paris Metro, and made the first steps on the road to elsewhere. Then I went to England. Big mistake. But aren’t mistakes the first step toward anyplace worth going?
MY ADDRESS IN LONDON was 17/19 Egerton Terrace.
The information-booth lady in Euston Station handed over the hostel’s card and assured me that it was in “very posh” Knightsbridge. Egerton House was just down the Brompton Road from Harrods, a vendor of all things for all (rich) people, everywhere. (Their slogan is “omnia omnibus ubique,” which makes it sound like God’s Greyhound Bus Service).
After seeing a production of Inadmissible Evidence and taking libation therapy for a soft landing afterward, I beerily banged into my room, where my roommate Charles had, until my arrival, been sleeping. Charles was a far-ranging resident of the Congo, on scholarship to study at the London School of Economics. He’s probably a finance minister for a shockingly corrupt government there, now, if he didn’t die in the embrace of the African AIDS epidemic.
Back then he was a penniless student, resigned to absorbing my accounts of experiences my grandpa had paid for, and listening to my complaints about London. He spoke with a mournful African baritone, and his skin tone was the very heart of darkness. He looked at me with weary eyes, having seen so much more in his life than I had in mine. I tried to lure him into fish ‘n chips dinners and pub crawls, but he always turned me down. It didn’t occur to me until I’d left Edgerton House that his textbooks were his primary splurge, and his only dinner companions John Maynard Keynes and Adam Smith. Charles’ brain was full. Pockets: empty.
But he was tolerant of my late-night journal writing, which I accomplished with a light carefully angled away from his jaundiced eyes. I must have reminded him of a lion cub batting a ball of fluff; no real concerns, aside from which play to attend and when it might be the right time to toss back another pint.
My daily £3 at the Egerton House included continental breakfast, consisting of puffy rolls and boiling milk tea from an enormous aluminum urn. The rolls were served with superior jam and fattier butter than I’d ever experienced in the land of Blue Bonnet margarine. Why is it that the Europeans are so much better at these spreadable pleasures than Americans? Sea to shining sea of cows and grass, and we can’t get butter right?
No, we can’t.
European butter is churned longer for a higher butterfat count, and wouldn’t you know it, they include cultures that add sour and savory notes. Isn’t that the way it always is with Europe? An extra dollop of delicious culture. I spread with a heavy hand.
After tea and a bun, I would not rest until discount theater tickets were in my buttery fingers. Then I’d kill time until the curtain by sampling the culture of London. That’s why I turned up way too early at the British Museum one day; even stolen antiquities need their rest, evidently.
I was already in Bloomsbury, so I sought Virginia Woolf shrines. It was a Sunday, and the Dorothy Parker (maybe) quote about the group—”they lived in squares, painted in circles, and loved in triangles”—gave ample reason for my idolatry.
I had recently finished reading Woolf’s The Waves, so the progression from cradle to grave for the protagonists—all of them my Woolfian doppelgangers—was still ringing in my ears. Virginia may as well have been observing me walking through her old neighborhood.
“There are moments when the walls of the mind grow thin,” she wrote about Peter, fifty years before the walls of my mind, too, began thinning, “when nothing is unabsorbed, and I could fancy that we might blow so vast a bubble that the sun might set and rise in it and we might take the blue of midday and the black of midnight and be cast off and escape from here and now.”
I blew that bubble!
I’ve been trying to escape my whole life.
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Many thanks for joining me on this trip.
Lovely excursion into many good things British, Peter. Such fun!
From another Virginia : I enjoyed your memories and the illustrations. The one on the Woolf quote was fantastic! As a dairy farmer, I agree 100% about the butter. I have churned my own, so I know the difference. Cheers!