very Pynchonian anecdote about TS Eliot

[Mark Kohut]

Background to fit this anecdote:
Lyndall Gordon started writing her biographies of TS Eliot in 1970. She published
both volumes by @1988, I think.....Then she wrote a (revised) one volume life published
in 1999, which is what I am quoting from.   
 
She got access to tons of letters TS wrote as well as talked to everyone she could.
(I say this because I would love to know if this almost-unbelievably C of Lot 49-related
bit comes as is from Eliot's mouth. There is no footnoting but it reads as if it does [to me])
 
She says TS Eliot wanted early to be a "Saint" and read about them. She also says that
Wydham Lewis painted him with a mask---because of his hidden life....
 
Here's the anecdote from her bio, p. 3: "At the heart of the hidden life was a hunt for signs. One 
came to him in an English garden seven years after his conversion, a renewal of a sign he had
as a student moving through the streets of Boston in June 1910. It had cut through the urban
clamour, cut through sense perception, cut through time itself with an intuition of timeless reality."
[After quoting a Dickinson poem] she continues:
 
"Eliot would not call it anything, unwilling to wrench it to fit words that fall short of the Word."......