the last book I ever read (The Hyacinth Girl: T.S. Eliot's Hidden Muse, excerpt seventeen)

from The Hyacinth Girl: T.S. Eliot's Hidden Muse by Lyndall Gordon:

The American poet Donald Hall often recalled Eliot as he had been in the autumn of 1951. Hall, a New Englander, had arrived in London as a diffident young Harvard poet, as Eliot himself had been. Hall too was about to go up to Oxford as a graduate student. He cherished his meeting with Eliot, its sense of kinship, all the keener for the fact that Hall asked nothing for himself. ‘Eliot was only sixty-three … but he looked at least seventy-five,’ he recalled. ‘His face was pale as baker’s bread. He stooped as he sat at his desk … He smoked, and between inhalations he hacked a dry, deathly smoker’s hack. His speech–while precise, exact, perfect–was slow to move, as if he stood behind the boulder of each word, pushing it into view.’