Ask for “The Captain”

Agreed, this is a faintly disturbing sign of T.S. Eliot’s collapsing mental state in 1922/23. But I also think there’s something a bit charming about it, don’t you?

“[Conrad Aiken] no doubt… was one of the many friends who did not know that Eliot had taken rooms in Burleigh Mansions, on the Charing Cross Road, in this year. There was nothing particularly unusual about this: he needed somewhere quiet and secluded where he could work undisturbed, and he slept here sometimes. But what is odd is the manner in which he guarded himself. When Mary Hutchinson was preparing to visit him, he told her to ask the porter for a ‘Captain Eliot’ and to knock at the door three times. When Osbert and Sacherverell Sitwell were invited to Burleigh Mansions for dinner, they were told simply to ask for ‘the Captain.’ This nautical persona which Eliot adopted has its jaunty aspects, but it is more bizarre than comic.”

–Peter Ackroyd, T.S. Eliot: A Life, p. 136. (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984.)