“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.'”
More Intelligent Life comments on T.S. Eliot’s second volume of published letters, fascinated by the letter correspondences between T.S. Eliot and Groucho Marx.
