In 1931, W. Som­er­set Maugh­am, the author of The Paint­ed Veil, Of Human Bondage, and many oth­er works of fic­tion, pub­lished a novel­la called The Alien Corn, about a fam­i­ly of wealthy British Jews. I came across it while writ­ing a book of my own about a fam­i­ly of wealthy British Jews, the Wertheimers, and their por­traits by John Singer Sar­gent; the book, to be pub­lished in Novem­ber, 2024, is called Fam­i­ly Romance. A Wertheimer descen­dant thought that Maugh­am had based one of his char­ac­ters on a mem­ber of her family.

The emi­nent Lon­don art deal­er Ash­er Wertheimer and his wife had ten chil­dren, and Sar­gent paint­ed them all, singly and in groups, between 1898 and 1908. At one point he mock-com­plained to a friend of being in a state of ​“chron­ic Wertheimerism.” This series was the artist’s largest pri­vate com­mis­sion, which made Ash­er his great­est patron. 

Prob­a­bly I was naïve to be sur­prised, in the course of learn­ing about all these peo­ple and paint­ings, at how inerad­i­ca­bly ​“oth­er” Jews looked to dom­i­nant cul­tures on both sides of the Atlantic. Crit­ics and casu­al view­ers alike described the fig­ures in the Wertheimer por­traits as alien, for­eign, exot­ic, ​“ori­en­tal”— mean­ing east­ern, not west­ern, not ​“us.”

When London’s New Gallery showed Sargent’s Essie, Ruby and Fer­di­nand, Chil­dren of Ash­er Wertheimer, in 1902, a writer for The Spec­ta­tor pro­nounced the artist ​“a great painter not mere­ly because of his enor­mous tech­ni­cal pow­er, but because he can pen­e­trate below the sur­face and reach the heart of his sub­ject.” The heart of the sub­ject, to this crit­ic, was its arti­fice and ori­en­tal tone: ​“the air we feel smells of scent and burnt pastilles…. the moral atmos­phere of an opu­lent and exot­ic soci­ety has been seized and put before us.” 

Anoth­er crit­ic went fur­ther: Sar­gent had adopt­ed ​“a more dec­o­ra­tive scheme, a more lus­cious chord of col­or than usu­al,” and the three fig­ures, ​“var­i­ous­ly and gaudi­ly dressed … lie about among cush­ions like odal­isques in a harem, and are sprin­kled over with dogs.” Ash­er hung the paint­ing over the man­tel­piece in the fam­i­ly din­ing room. 

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The title of Som­er­set Maugham’s novel­la, The Alien Corn, refers to Keats’s ​“Ode to a Nightin­gale” and the bib­li­cal sto­ry of Ruth, wid­owed in a for­eign land: 

The voice I hear this pass­ing night was heard 

In ancient days by emper­or and clown: 

Per­haps 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

Most of the peo­ple in Maugham’s fic­tion­al Jew­ish fam­i­ly have tried to erase their ori­gins, chang­ing their sur­name from Bleiko­gel to the delec­tably dena­tured Bland. One, how­ev­er, has kept his name and Jew­ish iden­ti­ty: the cul­tured, rich, social­ly bril­liant Fer­dy Raben­stein, now in his sev­en­ties. The nar­ra­tor of Alien Corn describes Ferdy: 

It was not hard to believe that in youth he was as beau­ti­ful as peo­ple said. He had still his fine Semit­ic pro­file and the lus­trous black eyes that had caused hav­oc in so many a Gen­tile breast…. He wore his clothes very well, and in evening dress, even now, he was one of the hand­somest men I had ever seen…. Per­haps he was rather flashy, but you felt it was so much in char­ac­ter that it would have ill become him to be any­thing else.

“After all, I am an Ori­en­tal,” he said. ​“I can car­ry a cer­tain bar­bar­ic magnificence.”

Ferdy’s sis­ter, née Raben­stein, had mar­ried Alphonse Bleiko­gel, ​“who end­ed life as Sir Alfred Bland, first Baronet, and Adolph, their only son, in due course became Sir Adol­phus Bland, sec­ond Baronet.” Sir Adol­phus and his wife, Muriel (for­mer­ly Miri­am), live on a vast man­i­cured estate in Sus­sex. Their eldest son, George, is slat­ed to inher­it the fam­i­ly for­tune, go into pol­i­tics, be the per­fect Eng­lish gen­tle­man. Yet George has no inter­est in mon­ey or pol­i­tics. Sent down from Oxford with huge debts in spite of a prince­ly allowance, he wants only to become a pro­fes­sion­al pianist — an aspi­ra­tion that is unac­cept­able to his parents. 

Dur­ing the fam­i­ly bat­tle over his future, George learns for the first time that he is Jew­ish. His grand­moth­er – Ferdy’s sis­ter – per­suades the young man’s par­ents to let him study piano in Ger­many for two years, then come back to per­form before a dis­in­ter­est­ed expert. If, in the expert’s opin­ion, George shows real tal­ent, they will not only not stand in his way but give him every advan­tage and encour­age­ment. If, how­ev­er, he proves to have no true gift or prospect of suc­cess, he will give up music and com­ply with his father’s wishes.

George agrees. In Munich he lives like a bohemi­an, takes piano lessons twice a week, prac­tices ten hours a day, and spends all his free time with Jews. After two years, he returns to Eng­land as promised. Fer­dy Raben­stein brings the (fic­tion­al) con­cert pianist Lea Makart, ​“acknowl­edged to be the great­est woman pianist in Europe,” to hear him. George plays Chopin. When he fin­ish­es, he turns to face Makart with­out speaking.

“What is it you want me to tell you?” she asked.

They looked into one another’s eyes.

“I want you to tell me whether I have any chance of becom­ing in time a pianist in the first rank.”

“Not in a thou­sand years.” 

In the silence that fol­lows, her eyes fill with tears. She offers to intro­duce George to (the not-fic­tion­al) Paderews­ki for anoth­er opin­ion. George smiles, says that will not be necessary.

He walks out onto the ter­race, where his father joins him. Sir Adol­phus has tri­umphed but can­not bear the anguish of the son he adores with ​“such an unEng­lish love.” In short order he relents, offer­ing to send the young man back to Munich for anoth­er year – or around the world. 

“Thanks awful­ly, Dad­dy, we’ll talk about it. I’m just going for a stroll now.” George kiss­es his father on the lips, then makes his way to the gun room, where he shoots him­self through the heart.

The Alien Corn was made into a film in 1948, star­ring Dirk Bog­a­rde as George Bland. Som­er­set Maugh­am knew one of the Wertheimer daugh­ters, and it is pos­si­ble that he drew parts of his novel­la from her family’s sto­ry. At the risk of being coy, I will leave it to read­ers of Fam­i­ly Romance to dis­cov­er which Wertheimer may have served as a mod­el for one of the fig­ures in Alien Corn.