(8 of 10)
As precisely as an Eliot rhyme clicking into place at the end of a line, 4 o'clock each day brings tea with friends or business acquaintances in Eliot's rather shabby, faded office, where he is enthroned on a rickety wooden chair behind a massive desk. At 6:30, he leaves for home, dines with Hayward unless he has a pressing social engagement, and retires to his room for what he has called "the intolerable wrestle with words and meanings." Eliot admits that he will find numberless little things to attend to rather than buckle down to work.
Eliot types all his verse. He is a slow worker and tireless reviser. He loves words, and when he comes across a particularly fine specimen he stores it away for future use: sometimes he also makes up words, e.g., "polyphiloprogenitive.*
To his friends (who call him Tom or "Old Possum"), T. S. Eliot is a considerate, avuncular Puck who writes rhymes about cats to entertain their children and likes to address letters in verse ("Postman, propel thy feet/And take this note to greet / The Mrs. Hutchinson / Who lives in Charlotte Street . . ."). Eliot is a devoted Sherlock Holmes fan, is apt to emerge from his room clad in Holmesian dressing gown and slippers, and address his startled friend: "My dear Hayward, I am put in-mind of the incident in Bosnia, at the time of our struggle with the Professor over the Crown Prince's jewels ..."
He also loves practical jokes. For years, Eliot patronized a small store which specialized in exploding cigars, squirting buttonholes and soapy chocolates. Once, on the Fourth of July, at a solemn board meeting of Faber & Faber, he set off a bucketful of firecrackers between the chairman's legs.
In a Harvard class history, Eliot has made some frank self-revelations: "... I play a bad game of chess and like such games as poker, rummy and slippery Ann for low stakes ... I never bet because I never win ... I cannot afford yachting, but I should like to breed bull terriers. I am afraid of high places and cows . . ."
Civilization & Poetry. Today, at 61, Mr. Eliot is secure and honored in his high place as one of the foremost men of English letters. In 1948, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature and the Order of Merit (one of the highest British orders, limited to 24 members). In his critical essays, he has rendered Olympian judgments. Fellow critics swarm about Critic Eliot like an army of Lilliputians, trying to tie him down to some systematic "school"; when he stirs to reverse one of his previous unfavorable decisions (as he has been known to do, notably in the case of Milton), the swarm is agog for months.
As a playwright, Eliot is still a little dazed by the footlights. He resorts to chalk and blackboard to work out his plots. Says he: "My greatest trouble is getting the curtain up & down." (The Cocktail Party is his first play to be produced on a large commercial scale. His only other full-length play, apart from Murder in the Cathedral: The Family Reunion, the story of a modern Orestes haunted by the Furies.)