CHARACTER AND PERSONALITY
Powerful, complex Personality
Eliot, a great force in modern English literature, had a complex and many-sided personality. He was a classicist and a traditionalist, a great innovator, a critic, a social thinker, a philosopher and mystic, all combined in one. He was born in America, toured through Europe, and accepted British citizenship early in life. His character and personality were thus the resultant of cosmopolitan influences. As T.S. Pearce points out, “He presented himself in a British manner, with umbrella, striped trousers and bowler hat. He rejected many of the causes which make up the American tradition, the cause of the emigration to America, of the War of Independence, and of the emigration to America, of the War of Independence, and of the civil War. He never returned to America except as a visitor. He developed a perfectly standard English accent. He appeared to possess a characteristic English reticence. He liked English cheeses. Nevertheless, none of these
things really disguised the fact that he was an American and that in attitude and tradition he fits more easily into the American context than into the British, especially when you remember that to live and work out of American has been characteristic of American writers at all times. He wore his new nationality, and his English characteristics, rather as a mask, covering, though not exactly hiding, a powerful individual largely detached from such matters as nationality.”
He was also a European, and that is a title almost as unrevealing as American. The powerful individual, rejecting any label or classification, is revealed in his poetry. It has little in common with either his English or American contemporaries, though it is closer, if anything, to the American writers, especially to Ezra Pound.
Physical Appearance
The most striking impression which memorises of him as a person gives is of his appearance. Whatever else his friends recall, nearly everyone comments on his dress, his precise, proper, dark jacket and striped trousers, which might almost have been a deliberate disguise. Occasionally, there are glimpses of him in a more flamboyant costume, and a hint that there was a touch of the dandy in him, but these are rare. He is recalled as tall, pale, thoughtful, absorbed, speaking in measured and solemn tones even when humorous, and in such a way that you could not really tell whether he was being humorous or not.
His Sense of Humour
There are anecdotes which reveal a remote and melancholy humour with the potent implications of profundity which made it disarming and slightly weird. One such anecdote is recorded by Hugh Kenner:
            After The Confidential Clerk was produced, a journalist teased by implications he couldn’t pin down, or perhaps simply assigned a term of duty at poet-baiting, wanted to know what it meant. ‘It means what it says’, said Mr. Eliot Patiently. ‘ No more ?’ ‘But supposing’ the journalist pursued, ‘supposing you had meant something else, would you not have put some other meaning more plainly?’ ‘No’, Eliot replied, ‘I should have put it just as obscurely.’
            The anecdote reveals a humorous attitude towards the situation, a humorous detachment from it, and even from himself as part of it.
Character and Personal Habits

            Herbert Read writes of his character as follows : “The man, I knew, in all his reserve, was the man he wished to be : a serious but not necessarily a solemn man, a severe man never lacking in kindness and sympathy, a profound man (profoundly learned, profoundly poetic, profoundly spiritual) and yet to outward appearance a correct man, a conventional man an infinitely polite man- in brief, a gentleman. He not only was not capable of a mean deed; I would also say that he never had mean thought. He could mock folly and be severe with sin, and there were people he simply did not wish to know. But his circle of friends, though never very large, was very diverse, and he could relax with great charm in the presence of women. He had moods of gaiety and moods of great depression – I have known occasions when I left him feeling that my spirit had been utterly depleted. Often he was witty (in a somewhat solemn voice) ; his anecdotes were related with great deliberation. He did not hesitate to discuss policies or personalities, but he condemned idle gossip. In personal habits, he was scrupulously correct and clean, never a Bohemian in thought or appearance; but he had a streak of hypochondria, and was addicted to pills and drugs. He had good reason for taking care of himself, for he easily took a chill and often suffered from a distressing cough. I never saw him indulge in any sport. One week end he spent with me early in our friendship (it was 1927 or 1928) he came in a most curious pair of checkered breeches, neither riding-breeches nor ‘plus fours’, but some hybrid which was certainly not from Savile Row. He made fetish of umbrellas, as is perhaps well-known. He had them specially made with enormous handles, with the excuse that no one would take such an umbrella from a cloak-room by mistake. He relished good food and beer and wine, but his speciality was cheese of which he had tasted a great many varieties.”