Gerald Finzi: His Life and Music
2006; Oxford University Press; Volume: 88; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1093/ml/gcl050
ISSN1477-4631
Autores Tópico(s)Modernist Literature and Criticism
ResumoOne of Somerset Maugham’s most disquieting short stories is ‘The Alien Corn’, a study of the ‘Jewish question’ as refracted through the prism of British high society in the years immediately after the First World War. Maugham drew his title from Keats’s ‘Ode to a Nightingale’, which sings ‘the self-same song that found a path / Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home, / She stood in tears amid the alien corn’ (Keats refers to Ruth 2: 2–3). This story, narrated by a suave English observer, concerns a tragedy in a wealthy, fiercely assimilated Jewish family who have changed their name from ‘Bleikogel’ to ‘Bland’. A crisis occurs when George Bland, the eldest son, who has been groomed to be a perfect ‘English gentleman’, declares to his horrified parents that he wants to be a concert pianist. After a period of music study in Germany, George plays for a noted concert pianist, named Lea Makart (make-art?) whose character is an amalgam of Myra Hess and Harriet Cohen. Hearing the young man play, the concert pianist gently informs him that he has no chance of success in the career of his dreams ‘in a thousand years’ (‘The Alien Corn’, in W. Somerset Maugham, The Collected Short Stories (London, 1951), ii. 562). George, who has begun to explore the Jewish quarters of Munich and identify as a Jew, cannot face returning to a life of assimilation and shoots himself through the heart.
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