`Dear T.S.'

T.S. Eliot wrote a fan letter to Groucho Marx in 1960, inaugurating a mutual admiration society that endured until Eliot’s death in 1965. Eliot claimed a signed photograph of Groucho hung in his office, next to pictures of Yeats and Valery. Groucho addressed Eliot variously as “Dear T.S.,” “Dear Mr. Eliot,” and “Dear Tom.” Did anyone else have the chutzpah to do so? On June 24, 1963, Eliot wrote to Groucho:

“I envy you going to Israel and wish I could go there too if the winter climate is good as I have a keen admiration for that country.”

Some 40 years earlier, in “Gerotian,” Eliot had written:

“My house is a decayed house,
And the Jew squats on the window sill, the owner,
Spawned in some estaminet of Antwerp,
Blistered in Brussels, patched and peeled in London.”

The libel was exacerbated by Eliot spelling “Jew” with a lower-case “j” – a snub that remained in place until 1963. Around the same time, in “Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar,” he wrote:

“The rats are underneath the piles
The Jew is underneath the lot.”

Unlike Karl Shapiro, who was both Jewish and a poet, I admire much of Eliot’s work. His Four Quartets is among the great poems of the last century. That he was anti-Semitic, and that this pernicious prejudice is reflected in some of his poetry, can no longer be rationalized away. The lines quoted above are deeply offensive. Yet he admired Groucho, who was Jewish, and found him amusing and worthy of a sustained correspondence. This is baffling and reflects the capacity of the human mind to erect discrete compartments. We are adept at holding mutually incompatible ideas.

Groucho and his wife eventually visited Eliot and his wife at their home in London, in June 1964. The following January, several weeks after Eliot’s death, Groucho wrote to Russell Baker:

“I was saddened by the death of T.S. Eliot. My wife and I had dinner at his home a few months ago and I realized then that he was not long for this world. He was a nice man, the best epitaph any man can have…”