[Vwoolf] A Bloomsbury sighting in the 30 April 2023 NY Times Magazine

Sat Apr 29 14:47:42 EDT 2023

<https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/21/magazine/polyamory-breakup-ethics.html__;!!KGKeukY!xAv-PD52xe59F7pcsW_2gG4tquktB0bTYT--MmtUwK-FO-eIygc0Esk8FglEzSt272rHkPGj_gDmMuSn3uYj8dJguCi0$ >As noted in the subject line above, there's a Bloomsbury reference in the New York Times Magazine that evokes an earlier series of discussions about Bloomsbury, squares, circles, and triangles, as well as queerness.

Kwame Anthony Appiah, the columnist of "The Ethicist," offers guidance in response to the query (and the title of the column) "Our Throuple Fell Apart. What Are the Rules of the Breakup?" He observes that:
"Among tight-knit friends, things can get messy even when only two are involved at a time. When friends and lovers are the same, things get more complicated still. The English artists and intellectuals of the Bloomsbury group — who, in the old line, 'lived in squares, painted in circles and loved in triangles'— included some math whizzes, and they, too, struggled with the geometry of their loves and loyalties."
https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/21/magazine/polyamory-breakup-ethics.html__;!!KGKeukY!xAv-PD52xe59F7pcsW_2gG4tquktB0bTYT--MmtUwK-FO-eIygc0Esk8FglEzSt272rHkPGj_gDmMuSn3uYj8dJguCi0$ 

Pursuing the thread of that phrase (and being very relieved that the author avoided any attribution), I thought it would be interesting to check on whether the phrase has continued to evolve while the attribution continues to be cited incorrectly despite an attempt to clarify its history, which Stuart N. Clarke has done diligently. In his article in Issue 57 of the Virginia Woolf Bulletin published in 2018 (later also re-published in the Virginia Woolf Miscellany), Stuart traced the first version of the phrase to Margaret Irwin's The Fire Down Below (1928).

Stuart provides the exact phrase directly from Irwin's novel situated in its context:

Mr. Wem knew everyone who was a philosopher or politician or artist or writer or thinker, or rather, everyone whom he counted as such, which did not mean that his acquaintance was at all wide. It was in fact limited to a part of London that Peregrine had referred to in his absence from lunch as Gloomsbury.

“Where’s that, Father?”

“It is a circle, my fair child, composed of a few squares where all the couples are triangles.”

“Perry dear what are you saying?”

The children could not understand, but there was Miss O’Farrell; and you never knew with girls. (Irwin 109)

(This quotation is pasted in from page 39 in Stuart's article in the Miscellany: https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://virginiawoolfmiscellany.files.wordpress.com/2018/04/vwm92fall2017winter20181.pdf__;!!KGKeukY!xAv-PD52xe59F7pcsW_2gG4tquktB0bTYT--MmtUwK-FO-eIygc0Esk8FglEzSt272rHkPGj_gDmMuSn3uYj8SGtfq0m$ .)

On the Quote Investigator website, variations of the phrase are traced through to Kingsley Martin (1941), John Walker (1975), Dianne C. Betts (1979), Gertrude Himmelfarb (1986), the Victorian Review (2013), and Amy Licence (2015) in her book Living in Squares, Loving in Triangles: The Lives and Loves of Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group. Licence attributes the phrase to Dorothy Parker (which could explain where the Tate garnered its version). The Quote Investigator--Gregory F. Sullivan, who uses the pseudonym Garson O'Toole (https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quote_Investigator)--also__;!!KGKeukY!xAv-PD52xe59F7pcsW_2gG4tquktB0bTYT--MmtUwK-FO-eIygc0Esk8FglEzSt272rHkPGj_gDmMuSn3uYj8T_Aefrq$  notes that, in a 2015 review of Life in Squares (a British television mini-series)  published in the Daily Express, the phrase pops up again (the review was written by James Rampton). O'Toole says that the actor James Norton (who played Duncan Grant in the 1910-1920s segment) was interviewed by Rampton and that it was Norton who mentioned "living in squares, painting in circles and loving in triangles" (https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.express.co.uk/life-style/life/593251/Life-In-Squares-BBC-Bloomsbury-Group__;!!KGKeukY!xAv-PD52xe59F7pcsW_2gG4tquktB0bTYT--MmtUwK-FO-eIygc0Esk8FglEzSt272rHkPGj_gDmMuSn3uYj8f4Sv6_1$ ), but actually it is Rampton who cites the phrase and, of course, attributes it to Dorothy Parker (wrongly).

Here also is the exceptionally intricate citation from the Quote Investigator website:
Issue: Fall 2017 / Winter 2018, Periodical: Virginia Woolf Miscellany, Number 92, Article: “squares where all the couples are triangles,” Author: Stuart N. Clarke (Independent Scholar), Start Page 38, Column 2, Quote Page 39, Column 2, (Footnote states article first appeared in the Virginia Woolf Bulletin, No. 57 (January 2018), Pages 42-45). (Accessed online at virginiawoolfmiscellany.wordpress.com on November 20, 2018). (See https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://quoteinvestigator.com/2018/05/16/triangles/__;!!KGKeukY!xAv-PD52xe59F7pcsW_2gG4tquktB0bTYT--MmtUwK-FO-eIygc0Esk8FglEzSt272rHkPGj_gDmMuSn3uYj8UAJerI1$ ).

I discovered quickly in my random search that the Tate (quite embarrassingly) still claims in a page dedicated to Bloomsbury that: "Writer Dorothy Parker famously said of the Bloomsbury Group that they ‘lived in squares…and loved in triangles’. They have been criticised as an elitist hangover from the bohemianism of the nineteenth century, and their backgrounds and unconventional lifestyle have often overshadowed their artistic achievements. However, despite the criticisms levelled at them, many of the members of the Bloomsbury circle were important thinkers and innovators and they made a significant contribution to the development of modern art, design and literature." See https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/b/bloomsbury__;!!KGKeukY!xAv-PD52xe59F7pcsW_2gG4tquktB0bTYT--MmtUwK-FO-eIygc0Esk8FglEzSt272rHkPGj_gDmMuSn3uYj8Qiyk3UF$ <https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/b/bloomsburys__;!!KGKeukY!xAv-PD52xe59F7pcsW_2gG4tquktB0bTYT--MmtUwK-FO-eIygc0Esk8FglEzSt272rHkPGj_gDmMuSn3uYj8VBnLQmJ$ .>.

So, the Tate is wrong (maybe someone should contact it and request a correction?). And Dorothy Parker never said or wrote it, but the attribution still haunts her. Of course, Dorothy Parker has acquired many, many other "spurious sayings," as Troy Patterson's states in his article "Martini Madness." He refers to Ralph Keyes's term the "flypaper figure" and mentions various famous people including "Samuel Goldwyn, Yogi Berra, Thomas Jefferson, and the vermouth-shunning Winston Churchill" as examples. Patterson's article offers an amusing discussion of such attributions (see https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.slate.com/articles/life/drink/features/2013/martini_madness_tournament/sweet_16/dorothy_parker_martini_poem_why_the_attribution_is_spurious.html__;!!KGKeukY!xAv-PD52xe59F7pcsW_2gG4tquktB0bTYT--MmtUwK-FO-eIygc0Esk8FglEzSt272rHkPGj_gDmMuSn3uYj8anCuDJz$ ).

And, of course, Virginia Woolf herself is certainly one of these many "flypaper figures" whose fame somehow attracts winged fly-like phrases that adhere to these famous individuals' legacies even though the individuals never crafted them during their lives.

<https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://quoteinvestigator.com/2018/05/16/triangles/__;!!KGKeukY!xAv-PD52xe59F7pcsW_2gG4tquktB0bTYT--MmtUwK-FO-eIygc0Esk8FglEzSt272rHkPGj_gDmMuSn3uYj8UAJerI1$ >
Vara

p.s. My apologies for redundancy if anyone has already brought up these topics recently and for any misspellings or garbled sentences. And yes, this is in some ways a reprise of an earlier conversation on the listserve: https://lists.osu.edu/pipermail/vwoolf/2018-June/002982.html

Vara Neverow
(she/her/hers)
Professor, English Department
Editor, Virginia Woolf Miscellany
Southern Connecticut State University
New Haven, CT 06515
203-392-6717
neverowv1 at southernct.edu

I acknowledge that Southern Connecticut State University was built on traditional territory of the indigenous peoples and nations of the Paugussett and Quinnipiac peoples.

Recent Publications:

Lead editor, Virginia Woolf: Critical and Primary Sources (Bloomsbury, 2020; with Jeanne Dubino, Kathryn Simpson, and Gill Lowe); Editor, Volume One, 1975-1984, Virginia Woolf: Critical and Primary Sources (Bloomsbury, 2020); Co-editor, The Edinburgh Companion to Virginia Woolf and Contemporary Global Literature (Edinburgh, 2020; with Jeanne Dubino, Paulina Pająk, Catherine Hollis, and Celiese Lypka)

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