This review by Florence King appears in the
September issue of The American Spectator. To subscribe,
click here.
Beau Brummell:
The Ultimate Man of Style
by Ian Kelly
(Free Press, 393 pages, $26)
The feminist Germaine Greer once declaimed that it was folly to
allow men to rule the world when they begin the day by tying a
noose around their necks. Ironically, George “Beau” Brummell, who
invented what was to become the modern necktie, figuratively ruled
the early 19th-century world when the men who actually ruled it
gathered in his London townhouse to watch him dress.
Brummell was the first “dandy” — today he would be called a
“metrosexual” — a type memorably defined by the historian Thomas
Carlyle: “Others dress to live, he lives to dress.” An orphan but a
rich one, he persuaded his trustee to buy him a commission in the
10th Light Dragoons, a cavalry regiment known as “the Prince of
Wales’s Own” because it had been created to satisfy the military
daydreams of the obese “Prinny” (later George IV). The Prince was
its Colonel-in-Chief, but since there could be no question of
sending the heir to the throne into battle, it followed that his
personal regiment would never see combat either. A commission in
the 10th Light was a purely social cachet, an entree to
aristocratic circles for ambitious commoners like Brummell.
Stationed in the royal resort town of Brighton, their sole duty
consisted of prancing around on state occasions wearing luscious
uniforms inspired by Prinny’s fantasies of himself as a
warrior-king.
He wanted to look like a “hussar,” a Hungarian word for the
medieval tribesmen who hunted wolves on horseback and slung the
pelts over their shoulders. The 10th Light swanked about in a
half-on, half-off fur pelisse, miles of ropey braiding, real silver
tassels hanging from the sleeves, a leopard-skin helmet with a fur
crest, and skintight leather breeches worn without underwear to
eliminate panty lines. To top off this fashion overstatement, the
Dragoons still powdered their hair and wore it in a queue despite
the tax on powder levied in 1795 to pay for the war with
France.
Brummell spent five comic-opera years in the 10th Light,
resigning his commission in 1799 when he reached his majority and
came into his inheritance, but the experience served his purpose.
He had met the Prince and built a friendship with him on the marshy
foundations of wish-fulfillment; the tall, superbly built Brummell
was the man Prinny wanted to look like, and Prinny was the ultimate
aristocrat that Brummell wanted to live like. It was a dangerously
insubstantial structure, held together by their mutual obsession
with clothes.
BRUMMELL TOOK A HOUSE in London and settled down to the serious
business of getting dressed before an audience. His toilettes were
attended by members of the Prince’s raffish circle, and even, in a
psychologically significant reversal of the court levee, by the
Prince himself. As they watched raptly, “the Beau” revolutionized
male fashion.
His first innovation was the plain white linen “neckcloth” to
replace the stiff “stock” that reached to the ears and looked like
a surgical brace. The neckcloth had to be tied in a certain way and
it often took him an hour or more to get it exactly right. One day
some visitors saw his valet carrying a huge basket piled with white
linen and asked what it was. Replied the valet, “These are our
failures.”
The hussar look had convinced him that his less-is-more
instincts were correct. He banished all frills and braid in favor
of a severe cutaway coat in undecorated wool, a plain white linen
shirt, and a simple waistcoat-the beginnings of today’s suit. For
pants he favored the skintight cavalry look, probably because he
had perfect legs; it was said that he had the same proportions as
the statue of the Apollo Belvedere then on exhibition in London. He
may have wanted to flaunt certain other aspects of classical
statuary because he decreed that pants must be unlined and close on
the side with a “fall” or flap instead of a center fly. Worn with a
cutaway coat and without underwear, they left little to the
imagination, prompting one hostess to say, “One can always tell
what a young man is thinking.”
He changed his clothes so often, especially his “linen,” that
his laundry bills were enormous. Refusing to let his washing be
hung out in sooty London, he sent it to be “country washed,” i.e.,
to laundresses outside the city who could hang it in clean air. If
clothes were clean, he reasoned, the body under them must also be.
Unlike earlier peacock males who drenched themselves in perfume to
hide body odors, he was almost neurotically fastidious. To the
astonishment of his fashionable audience, he washed his entire body
with hot water every day, and even brushed his teeth! As with
everything else he did, this too became a fad.
HE BECAME UNIVERSALLY KNOWN simply as “the Beau,” famous for being
famous, the model for Lord Byron’s Don Juan, Jane Austen’s
Mr. Darcy, and, even in faraway Russia, the inspiration for
Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin. He “knew everybody,” as the
saying goes, but nobody knew him because he was that paradox: the
emotionally aloof social butterfly who likes dogs better than
people.
His present biographer, Ian Kelly, says that Brummell’s was “a
fractured personality, rebuilt in masquerade in the mirror of other
people’s expectations of him.” This could apply to any of today’s
neurotic celebrities but Brummell differed from them in a most
refreshing way: he never came to believe his own propaganda.
Rather, he saw through his host of acolytes and sycophants and
dismissed them with genial contempt. “It is folly that is the
making of me,” he told the Duchess of York, one of the few people
he really liked. “If the world is so silly as to admire my
absurdities, you and I may know better, but what does that
signify?”
He was so elusive that posterity has never even been sure of his
sexual orientation. Kelly disagrees with historians who claim he
was gay or bisexual. The sudden quarrels that flared up between him
and the Prince had a quality of bitchiness that suggests a tendril
or two of subconscious homoeroticism, but it is generally agreed
that the Prince was straight to a fault.
He was close to the bisexual Lord Byron but he was also ten
years older, and Byron liked late-adolescent page boys (he made
Lady Caroline Lamb dress as one).
He never married, and as far as is known, never fathered any
illegitimate children as men of his class routinely did, but he
died of syphilis, so if he was not gay he presumably caught it from
a woman. Who? Where does an “emotionally unavailable heterosexual,”
as Kelly calls him, turn when he wants sex? To prostitutes,
obviously, but Kelly thinks he also might have had affairs with the
upper-class courtesans of the day, as well as adventurous older
women like Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, an ancestress of the
late Princess Diana.
I disagree. He probably resented sex because, like the perfectly
groomed female fashion plate, he hated to get messed up.
He could only let loose with women who didn’t matter.
He was also a compulsive gambler, a virtual guarantee of a low
sex drive. He would bet on anything, even the progress of George
III’s insanity. Despite his heavy losses he was safe from his
creditors as long as he remained friends with the Prince, but his
self-destructive streak caused a final break between them. One
night at a ball, the Prince, who by now was Prince Regent and so
overweight that he resembled a featherbed, greeted Lord Alvaney but
ignored Brummell. “Alvaney,” asked the Beau in a loud voice, “who’s
your fat friend?” His bitchy lese majesty ruined him. He escaped
England one step ahead of his creditors and spent the last 25 years
of his life in France.
IAN KELLY HAS PRODUCED such an evocative portrait of a man and an
age that we almost sneeze whenever Brummell takes snuff from the
elegant little boxes he designed. His simple opening sentence —
“On June 7, 1778, a fair-haired boy was born in Downing Street,
London” — is as effective as Brummell’s less-is-more sartorial
taste, so that it sticks in the mind and infuses a tragic story
with qualities of purity and pathos that shine through even in the
passages describing his terrible death.
The syphilis attacked his muscles, causing stroke-like spasms
that pulled his mouth permanently open; when he spooned up his soup
it spilled back out again, until the manager of his little French
hotel told him he was disgusting the other patrons and asked him
not to use the dining room. His spinal nerves gave way, causing a
stumbling, zigzag walk that people assumed was drunkenness. All his
mucous membranes became ulcerated and his tongue swelled up and
turned black.
The British Consul in Calais arranged for him to be placed in an
insane asylum in Caen. Large tumors formed on his scrotum. He
became incontinent and fouled his room so often that the staff,
unable to bear touching him, hosed him down from a distance. And at
the end, “the brain itself shrank away from the insides of the
skull and granulated.”
That the perfection of manly grace could come to this makes a
superbly entertaining book one with a moral as well.
