Weird comedy of letters between T.S. Eliot and Groucho Marx
The world would not be in such a snarl, had Marx been Groucho instead of Karl :
Irving Berlin
This is as good a time as any to reflect on Eliot’s most fascinating correspondent. Ezra Pound? Well, no. James Joyce? Hmm. No. Paul Valery. Non! I am referring to Groucho Marx. And no, this isn’t a joke. The letters between T.S. Eliot and Julius Henry Marx are among the strangest and most delightful epistles ever created. ...the two men certainly are a surpassingly odd couple. As Anthony Julius puts it in his book, “T.S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism, and Literary Form”, Eliot was “able to place his anti-Semitism at the service of his art. Anti-Semitism supplied part of the material out of which he created poetry.” And not just his poetry. In polemics like “After Strange Gods” and “The Idea of a Christian Society”, Eliot elaborated his belief that Jews had no place in modern life.
Irving Berlin
This is as good a time as any to reflect on Eliot’s most fascinating correspondent. Ezra Pound? Well, no. James Joyce? Hmm. No. Paul Valery. Non! I am referring to Groucho Marx. And no, this isn’t a joke. The letters between T.S. Eliot and Julius Henry Marx are among the strangest and most delightful epistles ever created. ...the two men certainly are a surpassingly odd couple. As Anthony Julius puts it in his book, “T.S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism, and Literary Form”, Eliot was “able to place his anti-Semitism at the service of his art. Anti-Semitism supplied part of the material out of which he created poetry.” And not just his poetry. In polemics like “After Strange Gods” and “The Idea of a Christian Society”, Eliot elaborated his belief that Jews had no place in modern life.
Enter Groucho, whose wit was as uniquely Jewish as it was universally comic. Where Eliot was the famous defender of tradition, order and civilised taste, the crux of Groucho’s humour was flouting tradition, fomenting chaos and outraging taste. “I have had a perfectly wonderful evening,” he once said to a host, “but this wasn’t it.” And: “I remember the first time I had sex - I kept the receipt.” And: “The secret of life is honesty and fair dealing. If you can fake that, you’ve got it made.”
As for Groucho’s attitude toward Eliot’s exaltation of art and knowledge, he had this to say: “Well, Art is Art, isn't it? Still, on the other hand, water is water. And east is east and west is west and if you take cranberries and stew them like applesauce they taste much more like prunes than rhubarb does. Now you tell me what you know.” What Eliot considered “the waste land” of modern life - the deracination, impudence and profane materialism - was mother’s milk to Groucho...
The St Louis-born American poet, who had transplanted himself to London for an extended impersonation of an Englishman, knew all about the suppressed comedy at the heart of role-play. Appalled by humourless modern ideologies like communism, Eliot might have been drawn to Groucho’s alternative mode of revolution. It seems he agreed with Irving Berlin that “the world would not be in such a snarl, had Marx been Groucho instead of Karl.”
Eliot was also experiencing matrimonial happiness for the first time with his second wife, Esmé Valerie Fletcher, so much so that he had stopped writing poetry altogether. With sex, perhaps, came laughter. As for Groucho, his love for books and culture was unabashed and unabated. “Outside of a dog,” he once proclaimed, “a book is man’s best friend. Inside of a dog it’s too dark to read.”
The precious handful of letters that have been published reveal mutual warmth and respect—on the surface. Underneath there is a mutual fascination and wariness. They speak of getting together for three years before Groucho and “Mrs Groucho”, as Eliot gamely calls her, arrive at the Eliots’ apartment in London for dinner one evening in 1964. Throughout their correspondence, Groucho is almost alarmingly provocative with Eliot. “I get away with saying some pretty insulting things,” he told one of his biographers. "People think I’m joking. I’m not.” In his new pen pal, Eliot might have recognised Thersites in Shakespeare’s “Troilus and Cressida”, perhaps the most famous case of parrhesia—compulsive frankness—in literature. It seemed that simply being invited by Eliot into his club, as it were, incited Groucho not to want to be a full member.
Groucho cannot resist the compulsion to remind one of literature’s most famous expatriates of his origins: “Dear Tom…I think I read somewhere that your first name is the same as Tom Gibbons’, a prizefighter who once lived in St Paul.” He is quite open about his ignorance of the very public details of the poet’s life: “My best to you and your lovely wife, whoever she may be.” He pushes Eliot’s origins in his face. In another letter he calls him an “early American, (I don’t mean that you are an old piece of furniture, but you are a fugitive from St Louis)…” In the same letter he relays to Eliot that “the name Tom fits many things. There was once a famous Jewish actor named Thomashevsky. All male cats are named Tom—unless they have been fixed.” He concludes by assuring the famously buttoned-down author that “I would be interested in reading your views on sex, so don’t hesitate. Confide in me.”..
