The most famous Marx Brother, Groucho, and the poet T.S. Eliot, now older men, have been fans of each other’s work for some time. In 1963 Eliot proposes that ‘you and Mrs Groucho’ come to dine with him and his wife in London.
Groucho, uneducated and ‘uncouth’, envies Eliot’s erudition and has himself always harboured an ambition to be a ‘man of letters’. Eliot, refined and highly educated but also stiff and repressed, envies Groucho’s irreverence and anarchic humour.
Groucho’s brothers have both died, and he is left alone, unsure of his own identity, with unresolved tensions playing on his mind between him and his recently deceased brother Chico, and immediate tensions with his wife and son. Eliot is dealing with a letter he received from the disgraced Ezra Pound asking for friendship, and dealing with accusations of antisemitism.