Yet this obvious contrast between contemporary debasement and the
Christian Word is hardly the whole story. Indeed, when we read Adams’s own
account, it seems to point elsewhere. “No European spring,” writes Adams,
“had shown him the same intermixture of delicate grace and passionate de-
pravity that marked the Maryland May. He loved it too much as if it were
Greek and half human” (see Southam 44). It is the Greek connection and
the “lov[ing] it too much” that makes the reader of “Gerontion” pause; for
like Adams, Eliot longed for the “delicate grace and passionate depravity” as-
sociated with things “Greek and half human.” Gerontion, after all, is himself
Greek, and the denizens of the poem are certainly presented as only “half
human.” In this context, the memory of “depraved May, dogwood and chest-
nut, ®owering judas” may not be primarily negative after all. On the contrary,
the suggestion is that “depraved May” was the “month” in which Gerontion
®ourished—as lush and wet as that other month has been “dry.” One thinks
of the Hyacinth Girl in The Waste Land, “Your arms full, and your hair wet”
(Collected Poems 54). When Adams says he associates “passionate depravity”
with the Greeks, he is thinking not of the actual Greek landscape, which is
dry and rocky (“Rocks, moss, stonecrop, iron, merds”), but of the Greek dei-
ties, half-human, half-animal, sporting in the shade. “Judas,” however much
an emblem of betrayal, is, after all, depicted as “®owering.” So, the poem
implies, the pagan sacrament (“To be eaten, to be divided, to be drunk”) was
seductive enough to attract Gerontion and his friends until it was received
“Among whispers” by a particular arty coterie. The nymphs and satyrs have
departed, and instead we get sophisticated city dwellers like Mr. Silvero,
Hakagawa, Madame de Tornquist, Fräulein von Kulp.
Like “the Jew [who] squats on the window sill,” these participants in what
seems to be a sinister rite are less characters than caricatures, their mongrel-
ized names testifying to their dubious pedigrees. Silvero (a silver alloy of
some sort, a silver cover for vero, true), Hakagawa (whose af¤x, as Pound
remarked when Eliot sent him the poem, means “river” in Japanese), the
Blavatsky-clone Madame de Tornquist (“turncoat”?), who is soon to meta-
morphose into the Madame Sosostris of The Waste Land, and Madame de
Tornquist’s German accomplice Fräulein von Kulp (culpa). In the cartoon
metropolis where these ¤gures operate, there are no actions, merely gestures.
What objects (or is it people?) have come under the touch of Mr. Silvero’s
“caressing hands”? And if he “walked all night in the next room,” next to
what was it? Or is the room in question next in line? Silvero is “caressing,”
Hakagawa—an inveterate art groupie, no doubt, or a gallery owner or art
collector—is “bowing among the Titians,” and Madame de Tornquist “shift-
34 Chapter 2