[Vwoolf] four-piece suit

[Jean]

Bowtie? Spats? A four-piece suit? Queer? Or, just, perhaps, my own personal queer theory??!

Jean

Sent from my iPhone


> On Feb 24, 2014, at 10:18 AM, Elisa Sparks <SPARKS at clemson.edu> wrote:
> 
> 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>
> Date: Monday, February 24, 2014 at 5:32 AM
> To: Woolf List <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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