[Vwoolf] four-piece suit

[ruthwebb]

When I was writing my little biography for the British Library in the late 1990s, I couldn't find what I was (wrongly) convinced was the quotation: "had there been such a thing as a four-piece-suit, T S Eliot would have worn it" for the caption next to the snap of him that I used (on page 59).  Instead, I eschewed quotation marks and wrote, "T S Eliot, of whom a friend once remarked that his clothes were English but his underclothes were American'.  How very SMART he looks in that particular three-piece suit, and HOW TIDY his hair.  There is, however, a hint - in that slightly raised right eyebrow of his - of his thinking "I know what you're thinking and I don't altogether approve."  Sorry, Tom.

Ruth Webb
VWSGB Vice-Chair
  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Stuart N. Clarke 
  To: woolf list 
  Sent: Monday, February 24, 2014 11:41 AM
  Subject: Re: [Vwoolf] four-piece suit


  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



------------------------------------------------------------------------------
  _______________________________________________
  Vwoolf mailing list
  Vwoolf at lists.service.ohio-state.edu
  https://lists.service.ohio-state.edu/mailman/listinfo/vwoolf



------------------------------------------------------------------------------


  _______________________________________________
  Vwoolf mailing list
  Vwoolf at lists.service.ohio-state.edu
  https://lists.service.ohio-state.edu/mailman/listinfo/vwoolf
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.osu.edu/pipermail/vwoolf/attachments/20140224/74fbed66/attachment.html>