When the American critic Edmund Wilson had Eliot to stay in New York, he was struck by his performance. ‘He is an actor,’ Wilson realised. ‘He gives you the creeps a little at first because he is such a completely artificial, or rather, self-invented character … but he has done such a perfect job with himself that you often end up admiring him.’
Henry Eliot did not admire the actor. He excused his brother on the grounds of an outsider’s ‘stage-fright’ under English eyes, forced to conform to a caricature thrust upon him by the alien affectations of the Bloomsbury Group. Henry blamed the English for what he could not approve. He deplored his brother’s switch to Anglicanism, backed by an ‘irresistible, instinctive, more or less unconscious talent for publicity’. Dismissing the public performer, Henry stressed the gift for capturing ‘the macabre and gloomy grandeur of the early Fathers’. Yet in mixing Puritan conscience with Catholic doctrine, Eliot took to acting, Henry said, more ‘literally than do sophisticated Catholics’.
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