Groucho Marx and T.S. Eliot

There's an excellent article in the current New Yorker by Lee Siegel about the strange friendship of Groucho Marx and T. S. Eloit - or perhaps the "strained" friendship.

And from Siegel's article we can conclude one thing: Eliot may have been a better poet than Groucho, but Groucho was a lot funnier than Eliot.

Of course, this will come as no surprise to anybody.  But what may surprise most of you (who aren't huge Marx Brothers fans as I am) is that Groucho was a very gifted writer, especially when it came to his correspondence.  Siegel quotes from Groucho's letters and highlights the antagonism buried beneath the superficial cordiality of the Marx-Eliot friendship ...

In response to Eliot’s polite letter, Groucho, who was born Julius Henry Marx, reminded Eliot that his name was Tom, not T.S., and 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 ends the letter still refusing to acknowledge Eliot’s wife Valerie, and reminding both of Eliot’s less-than-Bloomsbury origins: “My best to you and Mrs. Tom.”

Groucho and Eliot had been promising to visit each other for three years before Groucho finally came for dinner at the Eliots, in June of 1964. According to Groucho’s letter to Gummo—the only existing account of the dinner—Eliot was gracious and accommodating. Groucho, on the other hand, became fixated on “King Lear,” in which the hero, Edgar, just so happens to disguise himself as a madman named Tom. Despite Tom Eliot’s polite indifference to his fevered ideas about “Lear” (“that, too, failed to bowl over the poet,” Groucho wrote to Gummo), Groucho pushed on. Eliot, he wrote, “quoted a joke—one of mine—that I had long since forgotten. Now it was my turn to smile politely. I was not going to let anyone—not even the British poet from St. Louis—spoil my Literary Evening.” 

"The British poet from St. Louis" is marvelous phrase, especially coming from the pen of a veteran of vaudeville, who had performed in every town in America, and who was certainly not impressed by the hot and humid river towns of the mid-west.  Or even by T. S. Eliot.

Siegel at first seems to be straining a bit in making his case that the relationship was strained, and that there was quite a bit of antagonism in the subtext of the letters Marx and Eliot wrote to each other.  But I suspect he's right - for elsewhere he quotes Groucho ...

“I get away with saying some pretty insulting things,” he told one of his biographers. "People think I’m joking. I’m not.”

Groucho, in a sense, took on the identity of his on-screen persona and functioned as a kind of "licensed fool" in society at large.  

Siegel is coming out with a "short critical biography" of Groucho that promises to be quite interesting.

Still Waiting

A Public Letter to Archbishop Carlson

Bill McClellan writes an open letter to Archbishop Carlson in today's St. Louis Post-Dispatch.  Some excerpts ...

Good morning, Your Eminence. How you doing? Don’t answer. I know how you’re doing. You’re still reeling from the release of that transcript of a deposition from Minnesota in which you claimed you couldn’t remember whether you used to know it was a crime for an adult to have sex with a child.

That didn’t play too well, did it? Especially because at the very time you supposedly weren’t sure about the legality of molesting kids, you were writing memos to your boss about the statute of limitations for such a crime. If you knew about a statute of limitations, you had to know it was a crime. Or am I missing something?

Again, don’t answer. I am not here to harangue you. I’m on your side. As far as I’m concerned, “Thou shalt not lie” is strictly Old Testament stuff.

You need some public relations help, Your Em. Nothing against the people you have on staff, but I read the statement from Gabe Jones, spokesman for the archdiocese: “While not being able to recall his knowledge of the law exactly as it was many decades ago, the archbishop did make clear that he knows child sex abuse is a crime today.”

You think the flock is going to rally around something like that?

***

We’re going to put you on a charm offensive. We’ll book you on all the morning shows — radio and television, both. The hosts are relentlessly cheerful. You’ll tell them you’d love to discuss the deposition, but the darned lawyers won’t let you. So you’ll talk about soccer and bingo. Stuff like that. 

Read the whole thing here, and laugh so you don't cry.

What is Theology of the Body according to St. John Paul II? (Hint: It's Not What Christopher West Keeps Yammering About)

After 129 lectures spanning nearly a five year period, Pope John Paul II gave a summation of his "Theology of the Body" in his final lecture.

I'm going to emphasize here some of the main points JP2 makes in summing up these sometimes abstruse and difficult talks.

• He notes at one point that the term "Theology of the Body" is a "working term", and he says that while these lectures focused on "the redemption of the body and the sacramentality of marriage," he was presenting only a portion of the full Theology of the Body.  What he was leaving out in focusing on the significance of the body from the point of view of sex and marriage was "the problem of suffering and death, so important in the biblical message".  

(Perhaps young eager theologians can get to work on that side of the Theology of the Body).

But while he was not touching upon the body's experience of suffering and death, he was placing "the redemption of the body and the sacramentality of marriage" in the context of the cross - of discipline and self-denial.  Indeed, though it may surprise fans of the hyper-sexual misreading of the Theology of the Body as peddled by Christopher West and the Westians, all of JP2's lectures are, in some sense, a commentary on Paul VI's encyclical Humanae Vitae.

In a certain sense we can even say that all the reflections that deal with the redemption of the body and the sacramentality of marriage seem to constitute an ample commentary on the doctrine contained in the Encyclical Humanae Vitae.

The Wednesday Audiences, then, are ultimately about the virtue of chastity and mutual self-sacrifice within marriage.  Who would have thunk it?

It's not about staring at naked ladies who aren't your wife because you have "mature purity".  It's not about you yourself being naked without shame.  It's not about the Paschal Candle as a phallic symbol.  It's not about staring at Our Lady's breasts.  It's not about sexual desire somehow being a desire for God.  It's not about the great deed of West's hero pornographer Hugh Hefner.  It's about the following .(take a deep breath, but this is my attempt to distill over 300 pages of material) ...

• From the moment of the creation of man, our bodies (male and female) point toward the communion of persons: which is a love that is both unitive and procreative, establishing the life of the family.  Christ emphasized this in his teachings on marriage, and the redemption of the Body made manifest by His incarnation, death and resurrection.  St. Paul expands upon the mystery as analogous to the Second Coming, and the Old Testament affirms in many ways this "theology" that the body itself, by its very design and by the longing of our hearts, conveys.  The body is both a reality and a sign that points toward a coming reality that is not yet fully present.  We are called to re-read and understand anew the language of this sign, a language built into the body at creation and made perfect in redemption.  And while in the life to come, communion of persons is achieved and expressed through a virginal purity, in this life communion of persons finds its perfect fulfillment on earth in the sacrament of Matrimony.  Within this sacrament, and by the grace of God conveyed through prayer and by means of the other sacraments (especially the Eucharist and Confession) the married coupled are called to dominate concupiscence (i.e. lust and the tendency to lust), which is the one major thing that stands in the way of the very end for which God has designed husband and wife, male and female.  In seeking to dominate and overcome concupiscence, the married couple struggle with periodic continence from the marital act, not merely for biological reasons ("responsible parenting"), but also for deeply spiritual reasons; for chasitity is a fruit of the Holy Spirit and is the sine qua non for honoring the dignity of your spouse and the mutual gift of a life of love.

That's it in a nutshell.  But that doesn't sell the way pop music and titillation in the sanctuary sells.

BREAKING NEWS! A New Document Has Surfaced Regarding Jesus before the Sanhedrin

A great archeological find.  I provide translation below.

Q. Are you the Son of God?

JESUS. I really don't remember.

Q. Did you say you would destroy the temple and build it in three days?

JESUS. I have no recollection of that.  Do you have that in a document?

Q. I have a document here that quotes a number of things you said.

JESUS. I don't remember that document.  May I see it?

Q. Before I show it to you, I'm asking if you recall the events it describes, such as chasing the money changers out of the temple.  Did you do that?

JESUS. Is that recorded in the document?

Q. I'm asking you if you have any recollection of that outside the document?

JESUS. I have done many things.  I don't remember every one of them.

Q. Did you heal a blind man on the Sabbath?

MR. THURM. Objection.  Leading the witness, and a vague time frame.  Which Sabbath?

Q. I'm asking if you healed a blind man on any Sabbath.

JESUS. I would not dispute the documentary evidence, but I'd need to see the document.  I recall healing people, but I really can't remember where or when or how.

Q. Are you saying you do not remember at all?

JESUS. I can say categorically neither that I knew nor that I did not know either then or now or at any time in between.

Q. In other words, "Maybe?"

JESUS. I don't recall.

Q. Are you telling the truth?

JESUS. What is truth?

Unreality: The Spirit of Antichrist

Unreality is the shirking of the cross.

What is Unreality?  It is the creation of a controllable substitute for reality, a house of cards, a false life that excludes from its borders anything that would challenge us or take us out of our comfort zones; it excludes therefore the Holy Ghost.  Art and fiction are not necessarily examples of Unreality, for art and fiction can convey elements of reality that non-fiction can not.  But our lives can be examples of a kind of fiction that avoids reality rather than imaginatively portraying it or celebrating it.

Tools of Unreality can include

• Drugs, which help us find a false contentment and a seemingly manageable paradise.
• Contraception and Pornography, which help us find sexual pleasure without the great and frightening reality of love and marriage.
• Hand-wringing and Crocodile Tears, which help us to convince ourselves that we are not nearly as selfish as we are.

Of the latter, psychologist Carl Jung said ...

Neurosis is always a substitute for legitimate suffering.

And all these selfish flights of fancy have something in common: avoiding love.

For love is not only willing the good of another (as St. Thomas Aquinas said) but sacrificing and suffering in order to actualize that will.

That's Reality.

When Bishop Futon Sheen says that the satanic is nothing other than the "anti-cross", the rejection of Christ's Cross and all that it represents, such as discipline, mortification and suffering, he's describing this Spirit of Unreality.

One of the literary figures that illustrates our human penchant for Unreality is Peter Pan, the Boy who Would Not Grow Up, the Eternal Child who takes any false adventure, any fiction, over Wendy and hearth and home.  G. K. Chesterton said of Peter Pan's denial of what is real, of what is scary and demanding ...

He might have chosen love, with the inevitable result of love, which is incarnation, and the inevitable result of incarnation, which is crucifixion.

In our airy never-never land of make-believe, where love does not go beyond what is convenient, where a person's sex and identity is whatever we choose to make it, where money and work have nothing to do with one another, where friends and even lovers are made and discarded in a moment, we live the Spirit of Unreality, we reject (as Peter Pan does) love and the fruits of love: incarnation and crucifixion.  We reject what is real in order to avoid the burden of the cross.

And he said to all: If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross daily, and follow me. - Luke 9:23 

Unreality is the shirking of the cross.  It is a lie.  It is untrue.  It is a fantasy.  It is neurotic suffering, hand wringing, crocodile tears.

Reality is the truth.  It is love.  It leads to incarnation (making babies), which leads to crucifixion (changing diapers and the heart aches our children put us through).

We live in an antichristian age, an age that rejects both the dirty diapers and the babies that make them, an age of sterility, an age of self-serving artifice, an age of make-believe.

And the Spirit of Antichrist is Unreality.