The Bank Clerk with the Green Face

A Poetry Tale about T. S. Eliot, told by Hello Doggo.

In nineteen seventeen, a young American poet called T. S. Eliot took a job at Lloyds Bank in the City of London. He stayed eight years, in the foreign department, among the ledgers.

Aldous Huxley went to see him there, and declared him the most bank-clerky of all bank clerks.

So here’s the gossip.

In nineteen twenty-two, Virginia Woolf confided to her diary: I am not sure that he does not paint his lips.

Around the same time, so the story goes, the critic Clive Bell told Virginia’s sister, Vanessa, that Eliot had taken to powdering his face green. Clive thought it made him look interesting and cadaverous.

And Osbert Sitwell later remembered seeing it for himself. A dusting of powder on Eliot’s cheeks. Pale, but distinctly green — the colour of a forced lily-of-the-valley. Baffling, from a man who seemed to spend his entire life trying not to be noticed.

Why green? Nobody knows. People have guessed at vanity, at illness, at a quiet bid for sympathy from an overworked, hard-up, unhappily married man. But it is guesswork. What we’ve actually got is two Bloomsbury gossips and a Sitwell, peering very hard at one man’s cheekbones.

And Eliot, of course, was ahead of them. Years before, in Prufrock, he had written about the need to prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet.

He just never said what colour.