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In several surprising and enigmatic statements, T. S. Eliot's friends commented on his addiction to cosmetics. On September 27, 1 922, Virginia Woolf, always a caustic observer and keen gossip, recorded, "I am not sure that he does not paint his lips."1 That same year Clive Bell told WoolPs sister, Vanessa, that Eliot had gone further in exterior decoration and "taken to powdering his face green - he looks interesting and cadaverous." 2 Five years later Osbert Sitwell could scarcely believe that the self-effacing Eliot had actually tinted himself: "I was amazed to notice on his cheeks a dusting of green powder - pale but distinctly green, the colour of a forced lily-of-the-valley. 1 was all the more amazed at this discovery, because any deliberate dramatization of his appearance was so plainly out of keeping with his character, and with his desire never to call attention to himself."
A few days afterward Osbert said that Virginia Woolf, still puzzled, "was anxious for someone to confirm or rebut what she thought she had seen - whether I had observed the green powder on his face. . . . She had been equally astounded and . . . neither of us could find any way of explaining this extraordinary and fantastical pretence; except on the one basis that the great poet wished to stress his look of strain and that this must express a craving for sympathy in his [marital and financial]...