Men and Clothes: the Good, the Bad, and the Bow-Tie

David Secombe:  What follows is a transcript of a conversation that took place in spring this year. The participants were myself, the novelist Andrew Martin and the poet Tim Turnbull , and Horizon Review editor Katy Evans-Bush was also present. (Andrew and Tim had never met before). It had been my idea to get Andrew and Tim together; as you'd expect, they are both urbane literary fellows, but they are also unusually well-dressed gentlemen. They share a certain formality — rigour, even — with regards to their appearance, and we thought it would be fascinating to hear what they had to say on the subject of male dress in literature. (They are also both Yorkshiremen, which lent an interesting slant to the discussion.) As it turned out, the conversation widened to include dress in film and popular culture as well as reminiscences of the son's relationships to the clothes of his father. We convened at a West London pub, prior to a poetry event at which Tim and Katy were reading. 

17 March 2011. A pub off Ladbroke Grove.

TIM TURNBULL: I’m a bit nervous on my ground –

ANDREW MARTIN: Same here.

TT: My dressing up nice, actually, is a fairly recent development.

ANDREW MARTIN: My very best clothes are in the wash, in fact. What is the definition of Dandyism? Is it an attitude? And I was thinking that it is actually a charitable act to dress nicely — it’s sort of playful, isn’t it? It assumes that the world is a stylish place and you are going to play ball. You are going to join in. But I don’t feel that I could maintain that for very long because I would just collapse in sheer disappointment — like when you keep a diary and when you start you think it’s going to be ‘seeing a very interesting person today’ but in fact it’s full of depressing matter like ‘my dog died’.

The thing is, I am impressed by the generosity of people who dress well, their bravery in presenting that front.

TT: That’s the point. I'd contend that Dandyism proper and literature are a bit separate, aren’t they?

AM: Well, are they? There have been plenty of literary dandies.

TT: Well, have there?

AM: Some of the poets were very well dressed: Ezra Pound, Eliot, Yeats –

TT: Basil Bunting.

AM: I don’t know anything about Basil Bunting.

TT: When he as a young man he was very nicely turned out. There are photos of him in the thirties looking very dapper:

There's Baudelaire, of course, I had a chat with Hugo Williams once and he rather likes the irony that Baudelaire was driven from dandyism to bohemianism as his money ran out, wandering around in beautiful clothes that were falling to bits.

Anyway in the essay The Painter of Modern Life he is describing two things, the flâneur, who walks the streets, and the dandy, who is purely ornamental.

AM: What’s the difference between a flâneur and a dandy?

TT: A flâneur is somebody who walks through the city and observes. In the essay he's talking about the artist Guy who's the exemplar, whereas the dandy is one of the archetypes that Guy observes in his perambulations; indeed, is there to be observed. That’s how I understood it — although over the years things seem to have got confused. I would contend that, for a real dandy, penmanship is too much like toil. A proper dandy should fill the entire day dressing and being seen.

AM: Oscar Wilde said that you should either be a work of art or wear a work of art.

TT: Hmmm …

DAVID SECOMBE: Ellmann says that he had a coat — quite early on, when he was trying to make his mark — that was cut to resemble a cello. He attended a gallery opening in it and was talked about, as intended.

TT: He was playing the arse as well, wasn’t he — playing up to the stereotype, part of his self-promotion. It's the same period as he was parodied in that Gilbert and Sullivan opera, what’s it called?

DS: Patience.

TT: That’s it.

AM: The best-dressed poet I can think of is Yeats, the only man I have ever seen — in photographs, let alone in person — who could wear a bow-tie properly.

TT: Yes, and Jack Yeats was a man who could wear a hat:

AM: David Mamet said that why would you trust a man who wore a bow tie? On the basis that an ordinary tie draws attention to a man’s penis — by mimicking the angle of it — at least, the usual angle…

TT: (laughs) Yes.

AM: Whereas a bow-tie draws attention to your ears, and Mamet said that why would you trust a man who wanted to draw attention to his ears?

Somebody wrote recently in the New Statesman that a man who wears a bow-tie is a man who can’t get an erection, which I thought was absolutely, immediately damning — since reading that, I haven’t been able to make eye contact with anyone who wears a bow tie. But Yeats wore a beautiful bow tie, in the sense that it always looked like it was going to fall apart — except it was obviously never was going to.

TT: I’ve had a go with one but that was for the stage.

AM: Can you tie a bow tie?

TT: I could a year ago.

AM: It’s something you can forget. It’s not like riding a bike.

TT: No.

AM: I’ve forgotten. And it’s a sign of my social decline that I have. I bought my first bow-tie when I was about 22, from a shop in Jermyn Street — it came with a card that said, ‘How to tie the bow tie’. I like the definite article in that.

TT: I think I’ve probably found the same card. My bow-tie came from a second-hand shop in Edinburgh —

AM: Still with the instructions –

TT: Still with the instructions –

AM: Someone had given up — because you can’t understand the instructions –

(Laughter)

AM: You have to reverse everything.

TT: And thank God for YouTube, you can go and look it up! You have to be a natural I think, and clearly if you have to follow instructions it shows you really aren’t…

AM: I always look out for people who have tied their own bow-tie, you can tell because it looks slightly imperfect.

TT: The missus used to work in the fashion business and when I was trying out my first bow-tie and when I thought I'd finally got it right I showed her, all pleased with myself like, and she messed it up.

AM: I made a few notes about Sherlock Holmes, who I suppose was created at the time of the aesthetic movement — I consulted this very good book called Sherlock Holmes, by Mark Campbell, a guide to the Sherlock Holmes stories — and there are revelations about Holmes’ character that come out: ‘always puts women at their ease, even though he doesn‘t like women’ — ‘has a working knowledge of the Bible’ — ‘is a late riser’ — ‘can bend a steel poker’ — ‘always carries a tape measure’ — but it tells you about the clothes as well… and Holmes says — as revealed in the Adventures of the Creeping Man — that the first thing that he looks at in a man, he looks first at the cuffs, then at the knees of the trousers, then at the boots.

Conan Doyle was notoriously inconsistent, so the name of the housekeeper changes from story to story, but Doyle sticks with this thing that he always looks at the cuffs first — and Holmes writes on his own shirt-cuffs more than once.

TT: Right. Can’t be a dandy then.

AM: No, but he wears a lot of hats. He’s interested in hats — and he’s never described as wearing deerstalker, but whenever he goes to the country he wears a cap, and it’s always a different sort of cap: country tweed cloth cap in Hound of the Baskervilles, ear-flap travelling cap for another — what’s good is that the clothes are supposed to be completely by the way, but in fact that’s the whole point of the stories, these revealing little details about Sherlock Holmes. In The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans he gets given a green diamond tie-pin by Queen Victoria. So maybe she knew he was a dandy.

TT: But it sort of spoils it if you start writing on your cuffs –

AM: Yes, and it would stop you from being able to deduce anything from anyone else’s cuffs if they’d written on theirs.

DS: Socks…

AM: Alan Bennett once said that, ‘I’ve learnt very little in life if there’s one but one thing I have learnt is that there is something odd about women who wear ankle-length socks’.

TT: Does that still hold true?

[Here our editor, for she was present, interjects:]

KEB: That’s two male writers that don’t like women.

AM: That’s Sherlock Holmes, not me. There’s a good quote from Saki about socks… there’s a lot about clothes in Saki generally.

DS: I have a book here (Among the Bohemians: Experiments in Living 1900-39 by Virginia Nicholson)… there’s a chapter on bohemian dress, and a quote from Ford Madox Ford, talking about three young writers at a tea party, who were sitting on a couch, with ‘Fauvist ankles’: ‘One in emerald-green socks, as to the next in vermilion, and as to the next with electric blue. Merely to look in the direction of that divan was to have a pain in the eyes’.

AM: If you look up Ford Madox Ford he’s always photographed next to much, much better dressed people, like Ezra Pound. He was completely shambolic, wasn’t he, Ford? Chain-smoked. Not a dandy. But very attractive to women.

DS: A woman who danced with Ford Madox Ford said it was like dancing with a huge poached egg.

AM: About socks, there’s one of the PG Wodehouse stories with Jeeves, where he finds Bertie Wooster’s purple socks and takes them out of the sock drawer ‘like a man fishing a slug out of a salad’.

In the first Jeeves story, Jeeves in the Offing, Jeeves is introduced to Bertie Wooster and Jeeves take care of him very quickly, but Wooster is wearing a loud suit, and there’s a very good word that he uses, admitting his suit is loud — can’t recall it — but Jeeves is looking askance at the suit, and Wooster asks him what he thinks of the suit and Jeeves replies ‘It’s a very nice suit, sir’; and Wooster replies: ‘Well, what’s wrong with it?’ And Jeeves comes back with, ‘I think just a plain grey or blue, sir’.

DS: [Rifling through pages of Among the Bohemians] The painter Paul Nash is quoted here; he wrote in a letter to Dora Carrington: ‘I have just got a check suit that will stagger humanity. My word, it is a check suit’. Goes on… ‘Walter Sickert got himself up to look like a bookie in checks and a bowler. Evelyn Waugh overdrew at the bank to purchase a pair of checked trousers in 1925, and Dylan Thomas dressed in loud check suits because he thought they made him look like a successful scriptwriter’.

The successful scriptwriter outfit sounds appealing to me, but to do that now you’d have to dress like Nick Hornby, which is not a look I am keen to adopt.

AM: There’s a good story about Evelyn Waugh coming out of his club, where he was always very impressed by the way that the porter handed him his derby hat, and Waugh used to think that this was a sign that the porter respected him, but one day he noticed that the porter was in the habit of leaving a ticket in the hat, so as to recognize the owner — and Waugh looked at it and it said: ‘florid’.

TT: All these examples are pre-war, aren’t they?

AM: They had waistcoats and hats then, so there was more opportunity to be well or badly dressed. I was browsing through Ulysses the other day and Bloom wants to ingratiate himself with someone, and he walks up to him and says: ‘there is a dinge in your hat’. It’s a good word.

DS: Is that a technical term? Or did Joyce invent it?

AM: I think it was the technical term for the wrong dent in your hat. But waistcoats have gone. There’s a quote from Alan Clarke’s diaries that sums up Dandyism: he says, ‘Up early and waistcoat for an interesting day’.

And in Diary of a Nobody, Mr. Pooter is always having terrible trouble with his formal wear because he’s completely socially insecure, never gets it right, and he goes around parading, practising wearing this dinner suit with a white waistcoat, and he’s getting into it, and he walks down the street with his thumbs tucked into the pocket of the white waistcoat and a labourer chucks something at him. (Laughter)

He bollocks his son — Lupin — for wearing a check jacket on a Sunday, but Lupin will not walk around Broadstairs with his father because his father insists on wearing a straw sun helmet. I think that’s one thing we all have in common — one’s father goes from being someone who dresses well, and then they lose it at a certain point.

DS: I have with me an overcoat that belonged to my father — camel hair, velvet collar, moleskin pockets, it’s obviously designed for a cold day at the racecourse — a typically classy sample of my father’s wardrobe circa 1960. My father was very well-dressed, but it all went to hell around 1970. By 1975 he had an extensive collection of platform boots, including a black patent evening set and a pair in orange velour.

AM: The reason we’re talking pre-war so much is because it was practically obligatory to dress — there were so many more clothes, you had the waistcoats, you had the hats — but then you continued to have bespoke clothes until very late in the century —

TT: Even working folk wore suits –

AM: Bespoke suits –

TT: There was a tailor’s on our corner, everywhere had a tailor.

AM: All my dad’s clothes were hand-made, and when that stopped it was very depressing, because he gave up doing that in the 70s I suppose, and started going to C&A.

TT: That Alan Bennett thing about his dad having his work suit, a suit that smelt of meat.

AM: Everyone did everything in suits. In Edwardian times, a man digging a hole in the road was working in a suit, was doing it in a suit — nothing else to wear — and a tie, or at least something round his neck, and of course they were thin because they didn’t have as much food as we do and they looked great — until you got up close and you could see that they had no teeth.

TT: And the suit would be worn every day.

AM: So it was shiny.

DS: In Alan Bennett’s memoirs, there’s a photo of his father — impossible to put an age to his father, he could be anything between 50 and 70 — ‘relaxing’ in his garden, wearing a three piece suit and a bowler.

AM: There’s a very famous picture by John Gay, social-realist photographer of the mid-century, a famous picture of a man on holiday in the sea at Blackpool, he’s wearing a three-piece suit and a trilby and the only concession to the sea is that he’s rolled his trousers up. I could tell my father was on holiday because he’d wear a shirt with a wide collar that would spread right across the jacket, that a sign you were off duty, like a declaration that there was no tie, his collar was completely splayed across his lapels. You’d start to get excited because he’d be whitening his plimsolls the week before we went to Scarborough.

TT: My dad wore jackets, slacks, tie to work — but then he also worked for my grandparents’ farm.

AM: What did he do?

TT: He was a draughtsman, wore office clothes and as soon as he got home he was into overalls.

AM: And he wouldn’t wear a suit for that?

TT: No. At school me and a couple of friends tried to see if we could get away with getting non-standard school uniform. The teachers, in the morning, would have patrols pulling up anyone who was wearing a coloured sweater but somehow in the mid-70s couldn’t bring themselves to tell you to take a waistcoat off. And there were a lot of waistcoats about, because grandfathers were dying.

AM: I wore my grandfather’s waistcoat.

TT: I started with ordinary dark waistcoats, instead of the dark grey jumper, then moved to a pinstripe, and finally I was parading about in a red velvet one, complete with a fob watch.

AM: What if a working class man begins to dress in a capricious sort of way — is he admitting defeat? Admitting that he is subscribing to a higher culture than he was born into, and trying to emulate it? There’s the example of Arthur Seaton in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, and he is a dandy in that. Before he goes out on a Saturday night he opens his wardrobe and he’s got a row of suits, kept in brown paper — this is a man who works as a machinist in a factory — and he’s contemplating what he’s going to wear and he says ‘I had over a hundred pounds’ worth of suits’ — he’s on £14 a week in a factory, so that’s a big investment for him, but it’s a sensible way of spending money because it not only made him look good, it made him feel good.

TT: Coming from a tiny little village, when our friends went to Manchester when we were in our 20s, we didn’t dress very well at all, me particularly, I was a complete scruff. This friend went away to a course in Manchester and said, ‘Everybody there is much better dressed than us’; that’s because they had buses, and so all their disposal income was spent on clothes. In Manchester you could get anywhere you wanted to go cheaply. Where we lived we had to have cars.

AM: Seaton was at a time, the late 50s, where there was a lot of disposable income. It was the Macmillan era, ‘you’ve never had it so good’, then they had the money to spend on clothes, and my dad was like that: a single man, spending his money on clothes. All through my childhood he had a wardrobe filled with hand-made suits. A working class man. But you did wonder whether he was trying to go above his station — literally, in his case because he worked on the railway — (laughter) — that occurred to me again in the 70s, because you saw the Northern soul people who went to Wigan Casino — did you know them?

TT: I know people who went there now, retrospectively, but not at the time –

AM: They would wear tweed jackets, but with a very specific, prescriptive approach: a certain number of buttons, a certain number of pockets, it was a Bertie Wooster approach really.

DS: But all those youth cultures at that time had a similar manic attention to detail, an obsessive male-driven weirdness –

TT: We’re seeing Tim Wells later, we should ask him about this: he can tell you exactly how many inches you were supposed to have your trousers above your shoes.

DS: Doesn’t Jeeves say somewhere that a gentleman’s trousers shouldn’t ‘break’ on his shoes, they should ‘shimmer’ above them?

KEB: Why is it male driven? Girls are just as obsessive about what they wear.

AM: More obsessive.

DS: Maybe when men go to such lengths it seems anomalous — and it’s usually part of some sort of tribal identity ritual.

KEB: Everything’s more tribal when you’re a teenager. With the urban dandy nowadays, the underwear is practically the whole point, isn’t it? Showing your underwear, displaying the tops of your Calvin Klein boxers riding above the sagging waistband of your jeans —

AM: They’ve got this walk, which is necessary to accommodate unbelted trousers. I heard a song by Elbow — I don’t really like them but they have a song where the singer sings, ‘I haven’t perfected the simian stroll’ — it’s that very artificially bow-legged walk, where you swing your whole body from side to side to keep your jeans up.

DS: I saw someone trying to do that the other day, they were almost around his knees.

AM: They do fall down. Then they pull them up, just by half an inch. Very self-consciously.

TT: Those rolling gaits have been part of youth culture for a long time. Richard Hoggart talks about it in The Uses of Literacy — about some youth with a swagger —

AM: In any case, it’s more marked when a man is interested in clothes, even at our age.

TT: You go to enough literary festivals, things like that, and see authors, they all shamble about in that uniform: the linen or cotton jacket, a fashion of studiously careless dressing –

AM: Yes, and it’s a sort of false self-deprecation, but to come back the social point — Katy mentioned the Beats; now, I don’t know much about the Beats, but they dressed in a flamboyantly relaxed style, they wore bright colours –

TT: Kerouac is always wearing checked shirts and so on –

AM: And that has been the orthodoxy for men for so long that I was found that I was starting to rebel against it, I did not want to dress down… I took my cue from P.J. O’Rourke who said that when he got to 40, he was walking down the street and saw himself in a shop window; he was wearing trainers and casual clothes, and he thought to himself, ‘This is wrong: I am dressed for a 20-year-old and I am 40’.

TT: My mother last year said to me, ‘Why have you started dressing like that? You look old’. And I said ‘No I don’t. I look like a 50 year-old-man. Which is what I am’.

AM: It’s just that almost all the others are not dressing like that.

DS: There is something pitiful about the denial of age in dress. Someone I know who works in the music industry, and even he had a kind of crisis when he hit his mid-40s, realised he had to stop wearing bright baggy jumpers and jeans, he said, ‘Even in the industry I’m in, I can’t do it any more’.

AM: The idea taken from the Beats that you are liberating yourself from social tyranny by not wearing a tie has been the orthodoxy for so long now that it’s completely exhausted — therefore I can’t look at that attitude with any sympathy.

TT: It’s 60 years old now.

DS: One of the quotes in this book [Among the Bohemians] is, ‘If you want to look like a poet, dress like a banker’ — which reflects a confusion about how artists are supposed to dress — a reaction against stereotyping, against the Punch cartoon image of the bohemian. On the other hand, if you are a writer or artist and you dress as formally as T.S. Eliot, are you really just aspiring to conform to conventional attitudes?

TT: It’s just arsing about, really, isn’t it? That’s my motive.

AM: Eliot predated the populist trend, didn’t he, so he wasn’t making precisely the same point, he wasn’t reacting against people walking around in T shirts and jeans –

DS: No, he’s reacting against a certain caricature of what an artist should look like… (rifles through book) if you look at someone like… there you go!

AM: He just looks like someone who’s had access to a dressing-up box.

DS: An extreme example, I grant you, but there’s Jacob Epstein, a more classic bohemian look:

Eliot was reacting against that, I suppose.

AM: Well, I think that a writer dressing formally is a kind of double bluff: it’s saying, ‘I live by my imagination, but I am going to surprise you with my appearance’.

DS: I read that Evelyn Waugh reacted with horror to Dylan Thomas’ appearance whenever they met — because Thomas had a fondness for really loud checks, very loud ties, clashing patterns and such, and Waugh said that the poet reminded him too much of what he himself had been as a young man: loudly dressed and heavily drunk.

TT: I suppose what we’re saying about the Beat thing is — do it while you're young. Like Wayne Smith — a poet of our acquaintance — his dress sense is one of the glories of the earth.

DS: The first time I saw him read he was wearing jodhpurs, a ladies’ lace shirt, a ladies’ tweed jacket, converse trainers and a beret. Quite an arresting combo.

TT: Looking like a theatrical 1930s lesbian, something out of an Otto Dix painting. Glorious!

DS: Or a character drawn by Edward Gorey.

TT: If he’s still dressing like that when he’s 60 he’s going got look a bit of a mess, but as he’s young, it’s beautiful and I applaud him.

AM: Strikes me that you do want to know what characters are wearing in a novel. In The 39 Steps when Hannay flees after being accused of murder, there’s a very good sentence, where he says he puts on a pair of stout nail boots, and a flannel shirt with a spare flannel shirt in the pocket. Very economical and well prepared for whatever might lie ahead of him — whereas there’s a novelist called Lee Child who is a very successful thriller writer, his central character is called Jack Reacher — and the thing about Jack Reacher is, he’s only got about three characteristics: he likes coffee, he’s very tall and he doesn’t live anywhere or own anything. He just appears at the beginning of the stories out of nowhere A persistent criticism of these novels on the internet is, ‘When does he change his clothes? When does he change his underwear? How come he gets all these women?’ He never gets changed.

DS: It’s a bit like Cary Grant’s suit in North by Northwest, a suit which must be made out of titanium to survive several days on the run, the crop-dusting plane attack, and so on — but we do see him get a change of clothes towards the end, and Grant wears clothes so well that when he changes into a brand new shirt, slacks and a pair of loafers — all of which have been bought for him by some unknown secret service man — it’s as if he’s putting on fresh armour, and of course the new ‘store-bought’ clothes are beautifully cut for Cary Grant and no-one else. It’s one of the best scenes in the film and perhaps the most far-fetched.

People talk about the clothes and period detail in Mad Men, but I think you learn more about the social codes of that time from two minutes of North by Northwest than from an entire DVD box set of Mad Men.

And you learn something about army life from the small scene at the start of the 1960s film The Hill, where Harry Andrews — playing the commandant of a British Army prison camp in North Africa — comes off a searingly hot parade ground at the end of his shift and is handed a freshly laundered and crisply pressed shirt by his servant which he changes into instantly, ignoring the washbasin laid out for him. It’s a tiny scene that instantly establishes the crudeness of that particular character.

TT: As an exercise, I’ve been reading novels, and I’ve been trying to imagine what the people in them looked like, but unless people are described very specifically, you retain no fixed idea in your head. The clothes have to be specifically described, but even then you're dragged back to images from TV adaptations. Something like EF Benson — or Mr Georgie in Mapp and Lucia, the descriptions of how he dressed, in the books, with his little capes, are quite particular and I'd like to imagine it — but I can never get past the screen version.

DS: Raymond Chandler’s Farewell My Lovely has that terrific opening where Moose Malloy, the gangster looking for his girl, is described by Philip Marlowe. Molloy is something like six foot seven tall and is standing outside a bar wearing two-tone shoes, a canary yellow sports coat with golf-ball buttons, and a hat with feathers in the band, of which Marlowe comments, ‘but he didn’t really need them’. The description ends: ‘He looked about as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food’.

AM: I like scenes where people are getting changed, it’s an indication of something different about to happen. I like any scene in a book or a film where someone is dressing for dinner — they are always successful people, and you know that the dinner is coming, and you’re excited on their behalf.

DS: In The Great Gatsby, before one of those grand Long Island parties, there’s a sentence simply describing how the people who had been on the beach had all come in and were upstairs dressing — and that simple sentence conjures up all the romance and glamour of the time and place. But, like you said about Pooter, wasn’t one of the great social anxieties of the Edwardian age the observance of the correct protocols of dressing for dinner?

AM: You don’t get enough about men’s underwear in books. Captain Grimes, in Decline and Fall by Evelyn Waugh, is criticised behind his back by another member of staff at the school who says, ‘I believe Captain Grimes wears combinations’. I don’t know what that means — but men have ‘combinations’ and women wear ‘separates’. I don’t know what they are either.

DS: In Graham Greene’s The Human Factor, which is one of his last novels — late 1970s — he was taken to task when it appeared because his hero, who is a man in his fifties, goes into a lavatory and is described as ‘buttoning his fly’. At least one reviewer seized upon this sentence as proof that Greene was out of touch with the modern world. Greene was slightly bewildered and all he could say in his defence was ‘But I still have buttons on my flies’.

AM: I was trying to find out what underwear an Edwardian man would wear — they basically wore long johns, and they wore much more clothes, and they wore thicker clothes. They would go a certain ounceage of worsted, and they would wear thick clothes even in summer, and maybe that’s why Cary Grant looks so good, because he’s wearing a thick suit. There’s an excellent scene in The Go-Between by LP Hartley, where the young narrator Leo, a 12 or 13-year-old boy, staying at a country house in summer, very ill at ease, and he’s wearing a Norfolk jacket which his mother forced him to wear, really thick tweed and it’s the hot summer of 1911. There’s a scene where he experiences a sort of sexual liberation, where this beautiful young woman of the house — Marion — takes him into Norwich and buys him a green flannel suit, and he comes back feeling as light as free as a bird — and she makes him stand on a table so everyone in the house can look at him, and he’s got new shoes that are like slippers, and he feels great — but the irony is that she will completely undermine his whole life by implicating him in her affair with the farmer.

DS: Talking about The Great Gatsby, there’s that famous scene where Gatsby is giving Daisy Buchanan and the narrator a tour of the house, and when they get to Gatsby’s wardrobe and its superabundance of perfect shirts, Daisy is overcome, and weeps, because she’s never seen such beautiful shirts. 

AM: Gore Vidal said ‘A narcissist is someone better dressed than you are’.

Books mentioned

Charles Baudelaire: The Painter of Modern Life and other essays
Alan Bennett: A Life Like Other People’s
E.F. Benson: Mapp and Lucia
Mark Campbell: Sherlock Holmes
Raymond Chandler: Farewell My Lovely
Lee Child: Killing Floor — first of the Jack Reacher series
Arthur Conan Doyle: Adventures of the Creeping man, The Hound of the Baskervilles, The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans
Richard Ellman: Oscar Wilde
F.Scott Fitzgerald: The Great Gatsby
Graham Greene: The Human Factor
George and Weedon Grossmith: Diary of a Nobody
Richard Hannay: The 39 Steps
L.P.Hartley: The Go-Between
Richard Hoggart: The Uses of Literacy
James Joyce: Ulysses
Virginia Nicholson: Among the Bohemians: Experiments in Living 1900-1939
Alan Sillitoe: Saturday Night and Sunday Morning
Evelyn Waugh: Decline and Fall
P.G. Wodehouse: Jeeves in the Offing

Film & television

The Hill (Dir. Sydney Lumet, 1966)
Mad Men
North by Northwest (Dir. Alfred Hitchcock, 1958)