[Vwoolf] four-piece suit

[Elisa Sparks]

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.
Elisa

From: Jeremy Hawthorn <jeremy.hawthorn at ntnu.no<mailto:jeremy.hawthorn at ntnu.no>>
Date: Monday, February 24, 2014 at 5:32 AM
To: Woolf List <VWOOLF at lists.acs.ohio-state.edu<mailto: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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