<html><head><meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"></head><body dir="auto"><div>Bowtie? Spats? A four-piece suit? Queer? Or, just, perhaps, my own personal queer theory??!</div><div><br></div><div>Jean<br><br>Sent from my iPhone<div><br></div></div><div><br>On Feb 24, 2014, at 10:18 AM, Elisa Sparks <<a href="mailto:SPARKS@clemson.edu">SPARKS@clemson.edu</a>> wrote:<br><br></div><blockquote type="cite"><div>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=Windows-1252">
<div>I agree with Jeremy’s last speculation— I’ve always taken the four-piece suit remark to be one of Woolf’s amusing exaggerations: Eliot is so punctilious that if there was another piece possible to his proper suitedness, he would wear it.</div>
<div>Elisa</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<span id="OLK_SRC_BODY_SECTION">
<div style="font-family:Calibri; font-size:11pt; text-align:left; color:black; BORDER-BOTTOM: medium none; BORDER-LEFT: medium none; PADDING-BOTTOM: 0in; PADDING-LEFT: 0in; PADDING-RIGHT: 0in; BORDER-TOP: #b5c4df 1pt solid; BORDER-RIGHT: medium none; PADDING-TOP: 3pt">
<span style="font-weight:bold">From: </span>Jeremy Hawthorn <<a href="mailto:jeremy.hawthorn@ntnu.no">jeremy.hawthorn@ntnu.no</a>><br>
<span style="font-weight:bold">Date: </span>Monday, February 24, 2014 at 5:32 AM<br>
<span style="font-weight:bold">To: </span>Woolf List <<a href="mailto:VWOOLF@lists.acs.ohio-state.edu">VWOOLF@lists.acs.ohio-state.edu</a>><br>
<span style="font-weight:bold">Subject: </span>[Vwoolf] four-piece suit<br>
</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>
<div text="#000000" bgcolor="#FFFFFF">In the <i>London Review of Books</i> for 20 February 2014 Colin Burrow has a (good I think) review of Geoffrey Hill's
<i>Broken Hierarchies: Poems 1952-2012</i>. Burrow notes that Hill was "a grammar-school-educated son of a policeman from Bromsgrove, and so was not ever likely to be an Eliotean Tory in a four-piece suit".<br>
<br>
I was really puzzled by the "four-piece suit": Google does suggest that the inclusion of a matching bow-tie can turn a three-piece suit into a four-piece one, but I cannot imagine Eliot wearing such a monstrosity. So I wrote to Burrow and he told me what I
probably should have known, that it was a joke, but not an original one, as he had stolen in from Virginia Woolf. Woolf wrote to Clive Bell that she was always expecting Eliot to turn up in a four-piece suit. I suppose the point of the joke is that the fourth
piece remains unspecified; Burrow admitted that he had wondered if it could have been spats, while admitting that that would have meant five pieces.<br>
<br>
This somehow reminds me of the volume control in <i>This is Spinal Tap</i> that goes up to 11.<br>
<br>
Jeremy Hawthorn<br>
</div>
</div>
</span>
</div></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><div><span>_______________________________________________</span><br><span>Vwoolf mailing list</span><br><span><a href="mailto:Vwoolf@lists.service.ohio-state.edu">Vwoolf@lists.service.ohio-state.edu</a></span><br><span><a href="https://lists.service.ohio-state.edu/mailman/listinfo/vwoolf">https://lists.service.ohio-state.edu/mailman/listinfo/vwoolf</a></span><br></div></blockquote></body></html>