[Vwoolf] four-piece suit

[Jeremy Hawthorn]

In the /London Review of Books/ for 20 February 2014 Colin Burrow has a 
(good I think) review of Geoffrey Hill's /Broken Hierarchies: Poems 
1952-2012/. 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".

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.

This somehow reminds me of the volume control in /This is Spinal Tap/ 
that goes up to 11.

Jeremy Hawthorn
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