Guy Cuthbertson

Today, I bought a green tie on ebay. Not green in the trendy ‘Green’ sense, but it might be that too. It might be an ecologically-responsible, fair-trade, biodegradable, organic, non-conflict, planet-friendly, environmentally-aware tie, and I rather hope it is; but that might well be too much to expect (given the unfair-trade peanuts I paid for it), and, for now, the important thing is that the tie was a rather nice shade of green. I don’t want to get too excited, but I do have a sense that the green-coloured tie offers something new. Get a green tie, be a new man. A green tie says spring is coming. Spring! Green shoots. Today I will be different. Or, at least, when the green tie arrives from ebay. So tomorrow I will be a new man. Or maybe the next day. It could be the start of something beautiful. And about time too.

Things begin with a green tie. Aestheticism began with one. In one green flash, Walter Pater went from dull Oxford don to the ‘alma pater’ of Art for Art’s Sake when, as Edmund Gosse tells us, he chose one day to wear a green tie:

The costume of Walter Pater had been the ordinary academic dress of the don of the period, but in May 1869 he flashed forth at the Private View of the Royal Academy in a new top hat and a silk tie of brilliant apple-green. This little transformation marked a crisis; he was henceforth no longer a provincial philosopher, but a critic linked to London and the modern arts.

Lord David Cecil, not a man to dress like the average scholar, looked later at that green tie, seeing it as the mark of the artist as well as evidence of Pater’s precocity. Green was certainly Pater’s colour. In Compton Mackenzie’s Sinister Street, on his first day at university, the first day of a brilliant new life, Michael Fane buys a nine-volume set of Pater ‘in thick sea-green cloth and richly stamped with a golden monogram’: ‘It was the greatest contentment he had ever known to see the glowing of his fire, and slowly to untie under the red-shaded light the fat parcels of his newly bought books.’ That first day he also buys ‘seven ties of knitted silk’ – surely one of them was green, to match his new Pater, and maybe they were seven shades of green, ‘apple-green’ and ‘sea-green’ included.

The White Dress – John Duncan Fergusson

When Oscar Wilde wanted to come out as an aesthete he started wearing a pale green tie. Green ties get noticed it seems. And for both Wilde and Pater going green also meant not quite ‘coming out’ in our modern sense but something pretty damn close to it. Their love might not have dared to speak its name but it did quite happily wear the club tie. ‘The ties are coming into leaf like something almost being said’, as Philip Larkin almost said. I’m fairly sure that that’s not why I bought a green tie but, well, maybe my subconscious is trying to tell me something. Hey ho. If it supports my thesis, I’ll go with it. There’s an old phrase, ‘to give a lass a green gown’, meaning, first, ‘to roll her, in sport, on the grass so that her dress is stained with green’ and, then, euphemistically, something more than that, where the green gown was a declaration of heterosexual experience. I can imagine that ‘to give a lad a green tie’ could be a homosexual equivalent.

But the green tie makes me think of another coming out, at the start of The Wind in the Willows:

So he scraped and scratched and scrabbled and scrooged, and then he scrooged again and scrabbled and scratched and scraped, working busily with his little paws and muttering to himself, ‘Up we go! Up we go!’ till at last, pop! his snout came out into the sunlight and he found himself rolling in the warm grass of a great meadow. ‘This is fine!’ he said to himself. ‘This is better than whitewashing!’ The sunshine struck hot on his fur, soft breezes caressed his heated brow, and after the seclusion of the cellarage he had lived in so long the carol of happy birds fell on his dulled hearing almost like a shout. Jumping off all his four legs at once, in the joy of living and the delight of spring without its cleaning, he pursued his way across the meadow.

Green is spring, rebirth, rejuvenation, a new leaf. Mole may well be gay in an Alan Bennetty way (indeed, I suspect that Ratty, Toad and Badger are gay too) but it is the discovery of spring and sunlight and the green fields that is rather more important – at this moment, Moly’s more likely to be, if anything, hedgerowsexual. I’m not sure that Mole wore a green tie, but he should have done. And who does he meet when he comes out? Ratty, the representative of spring and of Mole’s new life. In the cosy 1983 film version by Cosgrove Hall (the only decent film version), Ratty appears in a green cravat. It’s the new tie of friendship. Get a green tie, be a new man. Or be a new mole.

The Grey Hat – John Duncan Fergusson (Self-Portrait)

Or a new woman. The New Woman of the 1890s, she who escaped from the stuffiness of the Victorian wardrobe and then cycled off somewhere, Cambridge probably, in search of personal liberty, could be seen in a white blouse, practical skirt and green tie. The green tie was a fine accessory for fin-de-siècle feminism and the Edwardian lady. When John Duncan Fergusson painted White Ruff, the striking portrait of Anne Estelle Rice, in 1907 (the year before The Wind in the Willows scrabbled and scratched and scraped into the world), she wore a green tie. Rice was herself an avant-garde artist, a modernist who painted a famous portrait of Katherine Mansfield in 1918 – Mansfield is not wearing a green tie, but she has a big green shadow on her neck and she did write a poem, ‘Jangling Memory’, about a tie with ‘Sea-green dragons stamped on a golden ground’, a tie that represents youth and ‘Those were the days when a new tie spelt a fortune: / We wore it in turn’. So of course Rice wore a green tie in 1907. And when the wonderful Fergusson painted self-portraits in 1907 and 1909 he too wore a green tie, a colourful focus for the eyes against the general greyness (one of the them is called The Grey Hat but it’s the tie that dominates). In these self-portraits, the tie tells us, as Pater’s tie had done, that the wearer is an artist, if we hadn’t already guessed, and it represents the wild, earthy spirit of this Fauvist who had discovered both the avant-garde and his own style. I’m expecting a great deal from my green tie aren’t I? Green is the colour of hope.

Click here to read ‘A Pocket Guide to Red Trousers’ by the same author