Cakes And Ale

Cakes and Ale - W. Somerset Maugham

Worldly Pleasures and the World of Letters

I buy books faster than I read them. There is a large pile of unread books on my shelves, mutely awaiting their turn to be picked up. This hoard is increasing by the day. A nerve-wracking anxiety seizes me as I finish a book and am faced with the decision to begin another. I dare not waste my time – even a day – on a book that I'll later regret having chosen. Time is at a premium. Life has only that many moments to offer. Books I intend to read before I die seem infinite. 

This dilemma tortured me incessantly in the past. Of late, I've reached a truce with my unquenchable lust. I now appreciate that I cannot win this race against time. It is important that I enjoy each moment spent with a book. It would matter little, how many books I have read, once I cease to be. I love seeing beautiful books neatly stacked on my racks and I continue to buy the ones that catch my fancy, without worrying when I'll find the time to read them. I have also started reading again the books that amused me greatly in the past. I have found this most joyful. I derive as much pleasure, perhaps more, as I read a book second or third time – off course after a couple of years. I see the book in a 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. 

In the preface Maugham tells us how he came to write the book. The note he made when the story occurred to him read, ‘I am asked to write my reminiscences of a famous novelist, a friend of my boyhood, living at W (Whitstable, a beach village in England) with a common wife, very unfaithful to him. There he writes his great books. Later he marries his secretary, who guards him and makes him into a figure. My wonder whether even in old age he is not slightly restive at being made into a monument.’ Maugham didn't write the story for a while. Over the years, the characters became more nuanced. Plot suggested many subthemes. Maugham thought that it would be foolish to waste the material on a short story. And thus, was born one of the finest novels of the twentieth century. 

Novel was published in 1930. Maugham was then at the peak of his career. Maturity of his pen is profusely evident in the book. It is a paragon of Maugham’s famous sardonic wit. Book is written in first person. Maugham himself is the narrator, appearing as a writer by the name of Ashenden. Maugham had honed the art of telling a story in first person singular. I haven’t read another author who has used this ploy so effectively to lend an amazing credibility to the narrative. Apart from Of Human Bondage, this is also one of the most autobiographical of Maugham’s novels. Facts from his life are inextricably mixed with the fiction.

This is the story of Edward Driffield, an octogenarian English author who has found immense popularity and reverential fan-following in the evening of his long life, when his best writing-days lie behind him. ‘His outstanding merit was…his longevity. Reverence for old age is one of the most admirable traits of the human race…When he was a young fellow…it was agreed that he had talent, but it never occurred to anyone that he was one of the glories of English literature…At seventy-five everyone agreed that Edward Driffield had genius. At eighty he was the Grand Old Man of English Letters.’ 

In his youth Driffield lived a bohemian life, married to a barmaid, Rosie, in the small beach village of Blackstable. 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 the rigid, narrow, and bigoted provincial culture of Blackstable.

Elderly Driffield later married a nurse, Amy, who competently managed his affairs - at a time when his powers of creation had all but abandoned him. His best work was written when he lived with Rosie. Amy secured for him the fame he came to acquire in his dotage. A fan of Driffield says this of Amy, ‘She’s a very remarkable woman. Of course, the old man had written all his great books before he ever set eyes on her, but I don’t think anyone can deny that it was she who created the rather imposing and dignified figure that the world saw for the last twenty-five years of his life.’

Before Amy came into Driffield's life, he was promoted by Mrs Barton Trafford, a socialite and a literary agent of sorts. Maugham has painted a realistic picture of the literary world in the early twentieth-century England. He spares Mrs Burton Trafford no barb of his caustic humour as he goes about elucidating her sincere, heartfelt love, and selfless service for the upliftment of literature and its practitioners. Mrs Trafford had gained celebrity from her friendship with a great novelist whose death had shocked the English-speaking peoples. ‘Everyone had read the innumerable letters which he (the novelist) had written to her and which she was induced to publish shortly after his demise. Every page revealed his admiration for her beauty and his respect for her judgement…’ Certain of his expressions of passion were such ‘as could not be read without mixed feelings’ by Mrs Trafford’s husband. But her husband ‘was above the prejudices of vulgar men.’ Instead, he wrote ‘a Life of the deceased novelist in which he showed quite definitely how great a part of the writer’s genius was due to his wife’s influence.’ A Life established Mrs Trafford as a prima donna of the world of literary criticism. 

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 Kear sees a great opportunity in this enterprise: service to the profession towards which he has devoted his whole life and a humble offering to the memory of the greatest English writer of the twentieth century. 

In Alroy Kear, Maugham has invented an incomparable character of a successful and popular writer who possesses little skills. ‘I could think of no one among my contemporaries who had achieved so considerable a position on so little talent. This, like a wise man’s daily dose of Bemax (a popular tonic of early twentieth century England), might have gone into a heaped-up tablespoon’. Alroy Kear is the real hero of the book. His portrait, crafted with the precision of a lapidary, must rank as one of the greatest literary creations. In his smooth prose, clear like pure honey, Maugham lays bare the hypocrisy, the pomp, the bombast, and the hoax of a minor writer who makes big because of his social skills. ‘He was so young, so bluff, so gay, he laughed so merrily at other people’s jokes that no one could help liking him.’ Alroy banks on his sociable nature, gift of gab and complaisant demeanour to bridge the gaping void in his writing skills and his lofty ambition. Nowhere does Maugham disparage Alroy overtly, although each sentence about him seems to be mocking the shallowness and superficiality in Alroy’s life. ‘The most shining characteristic of Alroy Kear was his sincerity. No one can be a humbug for five-and-twenty years. Hypocrisy is the most difficult and nerve-racking vice that any man can pursue; it needs an unceasing vigilance and a rare detachment of spirit. It cannot, like adultery or gluttony, be practised at spare moments; it is a whole-time job.’

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 doesn't intend to write about the reverential father-figure of written English and raking-up his disreputable past, of which Ashenden has had glimpses from close quarters. Mrs Driffield and Alroy Kear have decided to produce 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 not credit 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. Alroy tells Ashenden, ‘…in writing his (Driffield’s) life I shall have to use a good deal of tact. I don’t see how one can deny that he was just a wee bit unscrupulous…and he had a kink in him that made him take a strange pleasure in the society of his inferiors…I don’t think that side of him was the most significant. I don’t want to say anything that’s untrue, but I do think there’s a certain amount that’s better left unsaid.’ What Alroy Kear wants to leave unsaid, Maugham says in his story of Driffield. And with a flair that leaves you awestruck.

Rosie of Cakes and Ale is one of the liveliest of Maugham’s heroines. Rosie’s parents were common village folks. She was unpretentious, easy to please and at complete peace with her circumstances in life. She was a philistine and never pretended to be a highbrow. She was uninhibited in her sexual life. She had been to bed with most of Driffield’s friends. ‘She was naturally affectionate. When she liked anyone, it was quite natural for her to go to bed with him…It was not vice; it wasn’t lasciviousness; it was her nature. It was a pleasure to her and she liked to give pleasure to others. It had no effect on her character; she remained sincere, unspoiled, and artless.’  

It is through Rosie and young Driffield, that Maugham celebrates the ‘cakes and ale’, the good things in life. A struggle between voluptuous pleasures and self-denying virtuosity was a recurring theme in Maugham’s stories. In this book he most effectively contrasts the captivating, unselfconscious joie-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 to. 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’. 

Book drew flak for denigrating the personality of Thomas Hardy, on whom Maugham was seen to have fashioned the character of Driffield. He denied it with his suave tongue-in-cheek rebuttal. ‘He (Thomas Hardy) was no more in my mind than George Meredith or Anatole France.’ He said that he 'had never been so much taken by Hardy’s books’. And that he ‘did not think his (Hardy’s) English very good.’ In Alroy Kear critics saw a keen resemblance to one of Maugham’s friends, a younger novelist, Hugh Walpole. Walpole had by then published a couple of successful books. He was piqued by the ridicule the book brought him, for there was no denying that Alroy Kear bore an uncanny likeness to him. He stopped talking to Maugham. Maugham was not new to the charge of plagiarism of material from the life of living people. He laughed off the criticism. ‘This character was a composite portrait; I took the appearance from one writer, the obsession with good society from another, the heartiness from a third…and a great deal from myself. For I have a grim capacity for seeing my own absurdity and I find in myself much to excite my ridicule.’

Book is an incomparable satire on the lives and ways of the high and mighty of the world of letters; the literary impostors. Some may find enough evidence of Maugham’s fabled cynicism in the book but none can deny its unshakable 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, uncompromising brevity yet an unwavering clarity, stunning characters carved most scrupulously, and a beguilingly lucid prose, simply take your breath away.