Which self-obsessed, whiney, incestuous, self-destructive intellectual and artistic lightweights do you prefer?
Me, I’m an Algonquin girl. For one thing, the Algonquin is one of my own favorite hangouts. I also have a bit of a crush on Robert Benchley, and identify (not in a good way, mind you) with Dorothy Parker and Alexander Woollcott.
So, who’s for you?
Algonquin: Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley, Alexander Woollcott, George S. Kaufman, Harold Ross, Franklin Pierce Adams, Edna Ferber, Harpo Marx, et al?
Bloomsbury: Vanessa Bell, Virginia Woolf, Leonard Woolf, Lytton Strachey, Duncan Grant, Adrian Stephen, Thoby Stephen, Clive Bell, Roger Fry, E.M. Forster?
Bloomsbury. I’d like to be able to destroy my enemies with a poem, then float around on a willowy lake for the rest of the afternoon while somebody else rows. Do I have that right, or did I mix it up with some Merchant Ivory shit I saw the other night?
I’d have to pick . . . the Rive Gauche with Joyce, Stein, Hemingway, Picasso . . .
Although, limited to the available choices, I’d like to think I’d pick Bloomsbury, posterity awaits and all that, but the Algonquin would be way more fun. But the Algonquin (my impression) was a place you visited; Bloomsbury, you lived there.
[Pathetic attempt at claim to fame hijack] My second cousin (a few times removed) was Philip Morrell, MP, the rather hapless husband of the notorious Lady Ottoline Morrell, hostess and occasional guest-fucker of the Blooomsbury Group. She had a 20-year affair with Bertrand Russell and probably diddled a few others of them. Philip was the only MP to vote against Britain’s involvement in World War I, much to his conservative family’s consternation.[/Pathetic attempt at claim to fame hijack]
Having said that, Bloomsbury still wins, because I would probably have wanted to know Bertrand Russell more than any of them. Just not in the way that Ottoline did…
I’m a newspaperman and there is something about newspaper people that lets them communicate with other newspaper people better than anyone else and they were newspaper people, well the core was. Yeah, some became authors, critics and magazine writers etc. but FPA, Wolcott, Benchley, Ross all began as newspapermen.
The other reason is sort of a newspaper thing, too. The greatest excuse for sitting down and talking for newspaper people is a poker game. You can just sit and listen (as Harpo used to) and people won’t give you a bad time about not being pithy. “After all,” they will say, “he’s just concentrating on his cards.” On the flip side, if you do choose to pontificate, others can tolerate it if you are losing money while doing it. And the catty aside (ala Dotty Parker) somehow seems less mean spirited when it is accompanied with the tossing in of a chip for a bet.
Somehow, I just don’t see the Bloomsbury group playing five-card draw with one-eyed jacks wild.
