In Pursuit of Wilde Possum: Reflections on Eliot, Modernism, and the Nineties

Abstract

One of the ongoing concerns of Eliot studies, at least since the 1980s, has been to explore the increasingly apparent “disparity,” to quote Colleen Lamos, between the literary progenitors that Eliot acknowledged and the figures in Decadent England and America (principally Walter Pater, Charles Swinburne, Oscar Wilde, and Walt Whitman) whose influence he passively or actively “suppressed.”1 Nearly a hundred years after Eliot’s emergence as a poet, we are only beginning to reconstitute his temperamental and intellectual connections with the generation that shaped his earliest verse. Readers have turned most recently to examining the sexual politics underlying Eliot’s reluctance to speak about his Decadent heritage, but not always in a way that does justice to the complex relations between life and art. Take the striking story of Eliot’s secondary residence starting in 1923 in Burleigh Mansions on Charing Cross Road. According to Virgina Woolf, Clive Bell, and the Sitwells, Eliot took to wearing green face powder during private parties in the rooms—according to Osbert Sitwell, face powder “the colour of forced lily-of-the-valley.”2 Since the color green was a common emblem of the aesthetic movement— as for instance in Oscar Wilde’s subtitle (“A Study in Green”) to his sketch of the Pater-like author Wainewright in the essay “Pen, Pencil and Poison”—Eliot’s makeup would seem to signify some kind of willful effort to identify himself with the culture of the nineties.3 But must we conclude with Carole Seymour-Jones in her recent biography of Vivien Eliot that the powder was in fact