Cakes And Ale

                                                                                                                                                      Novel

Cakes and Ale

W. Somerset Maugham

Being something of a bibliophile, I obtain books much faster than I read them. As a consequence, there's a huge backlog of books I always have in mind and on my bookshelves that I have to read. This list has become intractably long now. I'm seized by a tormenting anxiety as I finish a book and am confronted with the decision to pick up my next read. I dare not waste my time on a book that I'll later regret having chosen. Time is at premium. Life has only that many moments to offer. Number of books I intend to read before I die, seems infinite. This dilemma tortured me incessantly in the past. Of late, I've reached a truce with my insatiable hunger for books. I am convinced it will matter little how many books I have read, the moment I kick the bucket. What's important is I enjoy each book I read. I love seeing beautiful books neatly stacked in my bookracks and I continue to acquire books that entice me without worrying when I'll find time to read them. I have also started reading again the books that gave me pleasure in the past. I have found this exercise most joyful. I derive as much, perhaps more, pleasure as I read a book second or third time, off course after a couple of years. I see the book in a little different light, appreciating facets that had not occurred to me earlier.

I read Somerset Maugham's Cakes and Ale for the third time a few weeks back.

Cakes and Ale, a novel by Somerset Maugham was published in 1930. Maugham was then at the peak of his career as a writer of plays, short stories and novels. Maturity of his pen and his supreme skill as a narrator of tales, after practicing the art for more than three decades, are profusely on display in Cakes and Ale. This novel showcases Maugham’s unique style of story-telling most tellingly: clarity of purpose, terse narrative, simple and lucid prose, striking verisimilitude-the places and many characters have been literally lifted from Maugham’s own life- and an endearingly suave tongue-in-cheek humour.

This is story of Edward Driffield, an octogenarian English author who has found immense popularity and reverential fan-following in the dawn of his long life, when the best years of his writing skill have all but deserted him long back. In his youth he lived a bohemian life, married to a barmaid Rosie, in the small town of Blackstable. Maugham appears in the book as the narrator, a writer himself, by the name of Ashenden. Ashenden too had spent his childhood in Blackstable, and there he had befriended Driffield and Rosie. Blackstable of fiction represents Whitstable of reality where Maugham’s uncle, his guardian after the demise of his parents, was the vicar and where Maugham spent some of the unhappiest days of his childhood. In short descriptions, Maugham juxtaposes the irreverent, free and impious life of Driffields in the background of rigid, narrow, and bigoted provincial culture of Blackstable. Elderly Driffield later marries a Nurse who competently manages his affairs- at a time when his powers of creation have dwindled considerably. His best work was written when he lived with Rosie and is in past now. His second wife secures for him the fame as the grand-old-man of English literature. She is helped in this journey by Mrs Burton Trafford, a socialite and a literary agent of sorts. Maugham spares Mrs Burton Trafford no barb of his (in)famous sardonic humour as he goes about elucidating her sincere, heartfelt love and selfless service for the upliftment of literature and its practitioners. On the death of Edward Driffield,  Mrs Driffield entrusts a successful writer and a friend, Alroy Kear, with the onerous task of writing Driffield’s biography. Alroy is Ashenden’s junior but hugely popular. He sees a great opportunity in this enterprise, a call in the service of the profession towards which he has devoted all his life and his humble offering to the memory of the greatest English writer of twentieth century. In Alroy Kear, Maugham crafts an incomparable character of a successful and popular author but one who possesses little skills. Alroy banks on his sociable nature, gift of gab and complaisant demeanour to bridge the gaping void in his writing capabilities. Nowhere does Maugham disparage Alroy’s character overtly, although each sentence about him seems to be mocking at the hollowness and superficiality in Alroy’s life, but silently. Alroy approaches Ashenden, to help him with notes about Driffield’s life at Blackstable. This has been a black chapter in Driffield’s life. More than the material for the forthcoming biography, Alroy and suave Mrs Driffield want Ashenden to promise them that he has no intentions of writing about the reverential father-figure of written English word and raking-up his disreputable past, of which Ashenden has had glimpses from close quarters. Mrs Driffield and Alroy have decided to bring forth a biography of Driffield that does justice to his gargantuan stature in literature. They do not intend to sully the pages of such a pious book by any mention of a past that does no credit to the illustrious future that followed it. The fact that he produced his most critically acclaimed books in this period is just a chance occurrence and this need not be highlighted in public memory. A major part of the novel is devoted to Driffield’s and Rosie’s life in Blackstable.

I have always found women’s characterisation in Maugham’s books stereotypical and lacking in subtle nuances of psyche that characterise his male protagonists. Even in his many stories where protagonist is a female, the personality of these are straitjacketed into a very narrow range. Rosie of Cakes and Ale is perhaps one of the most lively of Maugham’s heroines. Though she also follows Maugham’s somewhat staid female role models, Maugham has given her a vivacious personality. She is a sensuous lady. Though from humble family, she has an innate grace of soul. She is unpretentious, easy to please and at complete peace with her circumstances in life. If she is a philistine, she never pretends to enjoy or bother about Driffield’s intellectual pursuits. She is uninhibited in her sexual life. She enjoys to go to bed with any man she likes and who she feels likes her too. Maugham does not sound very convincing as he makes a virtue out of her precocious sexual proclivities. Though it’s not my case that these are essentially sinful either. One can observe them naturally, merely as a manifestation of varied human nature without being judgmental. It is through Rosie and a bit through younger Driffield too, that Maugham celebrates the ‘cakes and ale’, the material joys of life. A struggle between sybaritic pleasures and abstemious beatific joys of a life of spirit, was a recurring theme in Maugham’s stories. In this book he most effectively contrasts the captivating, unselfconscious joi-de-vivre of Rosie with the shackling hypocrisy of the early twentieth-century English society. Maugham probably based the character of Rosie on his once close friend Sue Jones. Rosie is Maugham’s most full-blooded, bubbling with life, loving and in turn lovable, female lead characters. It’s not difficult to believe he was attempting to immortalise in the role of Rosie, his one-time love, Sue Jones, whom he had even proposed. This is also one book by which he wanted to be remembered. He once said this about the book, “I am willing enough to agree with common opinion that Of Human Bondage is my best work ... But the book I like best is Cakes and Ale ... because in its pages lives for me again the woman with the lovely smile who was the model for Rosie Driffield’. In the end, there are some unexpected turns in the fate of the protagonists. Maugham uses these incidences deftly to highlight the particular personality of his characters that he has been striving in the story to portray subtly.

Maugham, as Ashenden appears in the narrative often. He has captured poignantly certain tender moments of his childhood and his time spent in London studying medicine.

Book is an incomparable satire on the lives of high and mighty of literary world, people who usually are miles from the real purpose of any art, which is creation of a work of beauty. Some may find enough evidence of Maugham’s infamous cynicism in the book but none can deny its cast-iron form and the searing beauty of its structure. This is the work of a master, sitting at the apogee of his creative powers. The taut narrative, stunning characters carved most scrupulously, and a beguilingly lucid prose, simply take your breath away.