Talking of Duck Soup

A Poetry Tale about T. S. Eliot, told by Hello Doggo.

In nineteen sixty-one, the most solemn poet in the English language wrote a fan letter. To Groucho Marx.

T. S. Eliot wanted a signed photograph. Groucho obliged, with a perfectly respectable studio portrait. Eliot wrote back, wanting the real thing. Visitors, he said, didn’t recognise Groucho without the cigar and the rolling eyes. The proper Groucho went up on his wall, beside Yeats and the French poet Paul Valéry.

They wrote for three years, plotting to meet. Finally, in June nineteen sixty-four, Groucho and his wife Eden came to dinner in London.

And Groucho had done his homework. As he told his brother Gummo the next day, he’d read Murder in the Cathedral twice, The Waste Land three times, and, just in case of a conversational bottleneck, brushed up on King Lear.

So when the cocktails came and the talk faltered, Groucho tossed in a line from The Waste Land. Eliot just smiled. Groucho tried King Lear. Eliot wasn’t biting.

What Eliot wanted to talk about was Animal Crackers, and A Night at the Opera. He quoted one of Groucho’s own jokes back at him, one Groucho had long forgotten. Then he asked whether Groucho remembered the courtroom scene in Duck Soup.

Groucho had forgotten every word. It was, he wrote, obviously the end of the Literary Evening. But very pleasant. They found they shared cigars, cats, and a weakness for puns.

So, with apologies to Prufrock. In the room the women come and go, talking of Michelangelo. And at the dinner table, the poet himself, talking of Duck Soup.