True in His Fashion

...He became universally known simply as "the Beau," famous for being famous, the model for Lord Byron's Don Juan, Jane Austen's Mr...

...Not so long Paul Beston is a writer in New York...

...It was a dangerously insubstantial structure, held together by their mutual obsession with clothes...

...I disagree...

...I f clothes were clean, he reasoned, the body under them must also be...

...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...

...Unlike earlier peacock males who drenched themselves in perfume to hide body odors, he was almost neurotically fastidious...

...He probably resented sex because, like the perfectly groomed female fashion plate, he hated to get messed up...

...He became incontinent and fouled his room so often that the staff, unable to bear touching him, hosed him down from a distance...

...Rather, he saw through his host of acolytes and sycophants and dismissed them with genial contempt...

...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...

...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...

...Large tumors formed on his scrotum...

...The Prince was its Colonel-in-Chief, Beau BrummeH: but since there could be no The Ultimate Man of Style question of sending the heir by lan Kelly to the throne into battle, it followed that his personal (FREE PRESS, 393 PAGES, $26) regiment would never see Reviewed by Florence King combat either...

...The syphilis attacked his muscles, causing stroke-like spasms that pulled his mouth permanently open...

...A1vaney," asked the Beau in a loud voice, "who's your fat friend...

...All his mucous membranes became ulcerated and his tongue swelled up and turned black...

...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 leopardskin helmet with a fur crest, and skintight leather breeches worn without underwear to eliminate panty lines...

...As they watched raptly, "the Beau" revolutionized male fashion...

...As with everything else he did, this too became a fad...

...They might also say that failing to do so would be dishonorable...

...His spinal nerves gave way, causing a stumbling, zigzag walk that people assumed was drunkenness...

...The British Consul in Calais arranged for him to be placed in an insane asylum in Caen...

...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...

...He had met the Prince and built a friendship with him on the marshy foundations of wish-fulfillment...

...Yet on that same day we were astonished by the deeds of other men who also set self-preservation aside, though they did so in the service of goals very different from the homicidal and suicidal ideology of the terrorists...

...One day some visitors saw his valet carrying a huge basket piled with white linen and asked what it was...

...Where does an "emotionally unavailable heterosexual," as Kelly calls him, turn when he wants sex...

...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...

...H E UNIVERSALLY KNOWN simply as "the BEC,,AME Beau, famous for being famous, the model for Lord Byron's Don Juan, Jane Austen's Mr...

...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...

...Before embarking on their brave and sacred mission, some even asked for absolution from the department chaplain, who would himself be killed that day...

...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...

...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...

...The hussar look had convinced him that his less-is-more instincts were correct...

...His bitchy lese majesty mined 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...

...BOOKS IN REVIEW True in His Fashion ~ HE FEMINIST GEI~MAINE GREER once declaimed that it was folly to allow men to rule the world ~wa when they begin the day by tying a noose around their necks...

...The neckcloth had to be tied in a certain way and it often took him an hour or more to get it exactly right...

...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...

...To the astonishment of his fashionable audience, he washed his entire body with hot water every day, and even brushed his teeth...

...Replied the valet, "These are our failures...

...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...

...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...

...The culture soon reasserted itself, more comfortable celebrating victims than heroes, let alone targeting enemies...

...These were the firemen of New York, who went into the smoldering World Trade Center towers with a good idea that they would not be coming back out...

...mell'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...

...it was said that he had the same proportions as the statue of the Apollo Belvedere then on exhibition in London...

...He was so elusive that posterity has never even been sure of his sexual orientation...

...He escaped England one step ahead of his creditors and spent the last 25 years of his life in France...

...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...

...The firemen, like members of the military, exist within the remnants of what James Bowman calls Western honor culture, a code of conduct that evolved over many centuries before ebbing in the century just past to the point that we can barely recognize it anymore-except when someone does something so stunningly, obviously honorable that we are reawakened to the majesty of old-fashioned virtues like courage and sacrifice...

...Only crazy people, we reason, think that anything could be more important than self-preservation...

...k X-Ray Vision N EARLY FIVE YEARS AGO, o n a clear Tuesday morning, the United States was attacked by men who claimed to "love death more than you love life," a sentiment so alien to our ears that even now, no matter how many times we have heard it or variants of it repeated, we seem unable to grasp its implications...

...Stationed in the Florence King's collections include The Florence King Reader, STET, Damnit!: The Misanthrope's Corner, 1991 to 2002, and, coming soon, Deja Reviews: Florence King All Over Again...

...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...

...Three hundred and forty-three of them perished...

...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...

...For pants he favored the skintight cavalry look, probably because he had perfect legs...

...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...

...Kelly disagrees with historians who claim he was gay or bisexual...

...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...

...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...

...If the world is so silly as to admire my absurdities, you and I may know better, but what does that signify...

...A commission in the 10th Light was a purely social cachet, an entree to aristocratic circles for ambitious commoners like Brummell...

...That the perfection of manly grace could come to this makes a superbly entertaining book one with a moral as well...

...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...

...And at the end, "the brain itself shrank away from the insides of the skull and granulated...

...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 tch him dress...

...BOOKS IN REVIEW B RUMMELL TOOK A HOUSE in London and settled down to the serious business of getting dressed ibefore an audience...

...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...

...Brummell spent five comicopera 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...

...It is folly that is the making of me," he told the Duchess of York, one of the few people he really liked...

...An orphan but a rich one, he persuaded his trustee to buy him a commission in the lOth 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...

...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...

...Such a mentality leaves us ill equipped to understand the motives of those enemies, who conduct themselves according to a primitive code of honor that is nearly synonymous with murder...

...Darcy, and, even in faraway Russia, the inspiration for Pushkin's Eugene Onegin...

...Darcy, and, even in faraway Russia, the inspiration for Pushkin's Eugene Onegin...

...He would bet on anything, even SEPTEMBER 2006 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 69 BOOKS IN REVIEW the progress of George III's insanity...

...68 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 2006 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...

...I AN 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 BmmDespite 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...

...Something like this recognition occurred in the early days after the September l l t h attacks, but the glow inevitably faded...

...70 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 2006...

...If these men could speak to us, they would likely not say that they loved death more than they loved Honor: A History by James Bowman (ENCOUNTER BOOKS, 381 PAGES, $25.95) Reviewed by Paul Beston life, but rather that some things were worth risking and even losing one's life for-rescuing people in danger, for example...

...He changed his clothes so often, especially his "linen," t h a t his laundry bills were enormous...