Conversations I'd Have Liked to Overhear

It seems that Groucho Marx and T.S. Eliot wrote one another and  once had dinner.  In a letter to Gummo (Milton) Marx Groucho wrote:

  that the week before the dinner, “I read ‘Murder in the Cathedral’ twice; ‘The Waste Land’ three times, and just in case of a conversational bottleneck, I brushed up on ‘King Lear’.” They begin with cocktails. A lull in the conversation prompts Groucho to “toss” in a quotation from ‘The Waste Land’.” Eliot “smiled faintly.” Feeling perhaps slighted by this uber-goy, Groucho writes that he “took a whack at ‘King Lear’," arguing that the king was “an incredibly foolish old man”. But Eliot, whether annoyed or nonplussed, perhaps passive-aggressively ignores Groucho’s invitation to ponder “Lear”, preferring instead to discuss “Animal Crackers” and “A Night at the Opera”. “Now,” recounts Groucho triumphantly, “it was my turn to smile faintly.” Suddenly they are like two characters in a play co-written by Samuel Beckett and Neil Simon.

It's the faint smiling that intrigues. See also.