‘I don’t think you can ever hope to be more than a very competent amateur’ is her verdict. The narrator espies George’s hands ‘I was astounded to see how podgy they were and how short and stumpy the fingers.’ They are not the hands of a pianist, declares the judge and maestro of the instrument, and he lacks the ear. ‘In comparison with art, wealth and rank and power are not worth a straw.’ ‘Art is the only thing that matters’ she declares. A self-absorbed professional of the piano arrives to deliver her verdict. His hair grows long, his nails are rimmed with black, and his Oxford Bags become grimy. ‘The perfect type of a English gentleman’, observes the narrator, undergoes two years of intense immersion and dedication. ‘The Alien Corn’ appears as second story in the second volume, its lead character a privileged scion of a wealthy family, George Bland, who rejects the family parliamentary seat in favour of ambitions to become a professional pianist.
The second route came via the three volumes of Maugham’s short stories, sixteen hundred pages bound in red that occupied five inches of bookshelf in our front room. The first of the films, Quartet, features a young Dirk Bogarde in a story called ‘the Alien Corn.’ On their television showing years later I wondered over the name of the character’s name ‘Kelada’ as it obviously read ‘a Dalek’ backwards. Nigel Patrick plays the eponymous ‘Mr Knowall’ in the middle film Trio. Gainsborough Studios made three films between 19, portmanteau collections of three or four stories packed with every leading name from British theatre. Their only true literary counterpart is Burgess’ own Malayan Trilogy of the later 1950s. Maugham’s characterisations are rough-cut but his tales from Malaya still feel authentic in their depictions of lives numbed by routine, social boredom, racial and sexual discrimination. The BBC made a series of adaptations of the short stories and I would join my parents to gaze at tales of steamy colonial betrayals, disgraces and deaths. Maugham is a rare example of the author who successfully straddled novel, short story and drama. As lionised in his day as Hugh Walpole, Charles Morgan or Warwick Deeping – albeit wealthier – Maugham is now as much remembered for the grandeur of his home, the Villa Mauresque in Cap Ferrat, the toxicity of his marriage to Syrie, or his other unintended part in literary history, a source ripe for pastiche for Anthony Burgess in his epic Earthly Powers of 1980.
A voice not just from another century but from a musty part of that century.
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