But Groucho waited almost two years before sending it. Eliot wanted one with Groucho sporting his famous mustache and holding his signature cigar. But here was Eliot, writing to Groucho to ask him to send along a different photograph than the official studio shot that Groucho had first mailed. Eliot would have been the stuff of a never-to-be-written proto-postmodernist novel. In 1961, when the literati were still marvelling over Arthur Miller’s marriage to Marilyn Monroe, and before high and low culture had so thoroughly merged, the idea of a relationship between Groucho Marx and T. (“I envy you going to Israel, and I wish I could go there too if the winter climate is good as I have a keen admiration for that country,” he wrote to Groucho, in 1963.) At the same time, it’s possible that he never lost his unease with the fact that Groucho was so unabashedly Jewish. So even as he was pleased by Groucho’s grateful acknowledgment of his attention, Eliot was anxious to convince Groucho of his good faith toward Jews. Eliot, Anti-Semitism and Literary Form,” Anthony Julius writes that after the Second World War Eliot, “while unable to break free of an anti-Semitism that had become part of the processes of his thinking, had ceased to be comfortable with his contempt for Jews.” And Eliot was hardly unaware, in the wake of the Holocaust, of the distress his 1934 remarks had caused. So even as he was basking in Eliot’s admiration, he seemed to feel compelled to cause Eliot some discomfort. They were loudly denounced in the Times, among other places. Groucho, a highly cultivated man whose greatest regret in life was that he had become an entertainer rather than a literary man-he published some of his first humor pieces in the inaugural issues of this magazine-could not have been unaware of Eliot’s notorious remarks about Jews. What is still more important is unity of religious background, and reasons of race and religion combine to make any large number of free-thinking Jews undesirable. The population should be homogeneous where two or more cultures exist in the same place they are likely either to be fiercely self-conscious or both to become adulterate. I trust this was an oversight on the part of Stephen Spender.” Eliot wrote back two weeks later, saying, “I think that Stephen Spender was only attempting to enumerate oil and water colour pictures and not photographs-I trust so.” In it, Spender described the portraits on the wall in Eliot’s office but, Groucho said, “one name was conspicuous by its absence. Yeats and Paul Valery.” About three and a half months later, Groucho wrote to Eliot to say that he had just read an essay about Eliot, by Stephen Spender, that had appeared in the Times Book Review. Eliot assured Groucho that one of them now hung on a wall in his office, “with other famous friends such as W. The tension between Groucho and Eliot became suddenly palpable when I reread an exchange they had about the two photographs that Groucho had sent. Reading his correspondence with his demons in mind, I gradually understood that what appeared to be harmless sarcasm was really a mordant sincerity. He had also been traumatized by catching gonorrhea from a prostitute while on the road at the age of fifteen. Groucho was driven by shame about his lack of formal education, having dropped out of school in the seventh grade. It took me a while to connect Groucho’s words to his actual life.īut this became easier once I realized that the work was much darker than is commonly perceived, and that there was an almost seamless continuity between the life and the work. When we hear or read the utterances of a celebrity, the words bounce off the public persona and create something like the loud interfering feedback from a microphone. And often, with actors, there is barely a real person to be found. The screen persona is so strong that, no matter how scrupulous you try to be, you end up collapsing the real person into the persona that sent you looking for the real person in the first place. One obstacle to writing a book about a comic actor like Groucho is that you unwittingly absorb the enthusiastic, celebratory tone in which many entertainment figures are biographized. When I reread the letters for around the fifth time, I became aware of a simmering tension between the two men.
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