How green was my Eliot?

"The strangeness of these instructions was compounded by the fact that the Sitwells noticed, while dining with him, that he was wearing face powder, “pale but distinctly green, the colour of forced lily-of-the-valley.” Their observation confirmed what Virginia Woolf thought she had seen— green powder on his face. The year before, she had suspected that he painted his lips, and in March 1922 Clive Bell told Vanessa Bell that Eliot “has taken to powdering his face green—he looks interesting and cadaverous.” Osbert Sitwell’s explanation for this use of makeup was that he wore it in order to accentuate his look of suffering, so that he might more easily provoke sympathy. This would undoubtedly conform with Eliot’s strongly realized sense of drama, contemplating himself as a romantic or dramatic figure, as he once said of Cyrano de Bergerac, and thus enjoying his situation all the more keenly—as if only by displaying his suffering could he actually experience or deal with it. It is significant that the only people who noticed his makeup, and probably the only ones in whose company he wore it, were writers and artists; it is unlikely he powdered his face before going to the bank, for example. His sensitivity to atmosphere was such that he may have wanted to live up to it; wearing face powder made him look more modem, more interesting, a poet rather than a bank official. He was too intelligent not to realize the effect he had on others—that slightly chilling and aloof quality on which his friends often commented—and this was one way of mitigating it."

From:https://vanityfair-staging.azurewebsites.net/article/1984/8/viv-and-tom