[Vwoolf] four-piece suit

[Stuart N. Clarke]

This is (allegedly) an uncollected PC from VW to Bell: see Clive Bell, Old Friends (London: Chatto & Windus, 1956), p. 120 (“Tom is coming, and, what is more, is coming with a four-piece suit”).  

There seems to be a pun here on “three-piece suite”, which in turn is non-U: we (we?) would say “a sofa and two (three) chairs”.

Stuart

From: Jeremy Hawthorn 
Sent: Monday, February 24, 2014 10:32 AM
To: VWOOLF at lists.acs.ohio-state.edu 
Subject: [Vwoolf] four-piece suit

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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