CAKES AND ALE - Book review

Somerset Maugham’s novel Cakes and Ale was published in 1930; my paperback copy is its fifth printing, 1981 with an author’s preface. The book’s subtitle is The Skeleton in the Cupboard.

The actual book title doesn’t appear in the text but is, apparently, drawn from a quotation in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night – Toby Belch: ‘Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?’ Or possibly Aesop's fable of ‘The Town Mouse and the Country Mouse’: ‘Better beans and bacon in peace than cakes and ale in fear.’ The phrase is old, understood to mean a life of pleasure, indulgence and ease.

Maugham first thought of the novel’s story as short fiction for the Cosmopolitan – between 1200 and 1500 words in length. However, he found there was no room for a character – Rosie – who persisted in crying out to be written about. ‘A character in a writer’s head, unwritten, remains a possession; his thoughts recur to it constantly, and while his imagination gradually enriches it he enjoys the singular pleasure of feeling that there, in his mind, someone is living a varied and tremulous life, obedient to his fancy and yet in a queer wilful way independent of him’ (p5).  Eventually, Rosie appeared, in this novel.

Still in his preface Maugham sympathises with fellow authors: ‘Every year hundreds of books, many of considerable merit, pass unnoticed. Each one has taken the author months to write, he may have had it in his mind for years; he has put into it something of himself which is lost for ever, it is heart-rending to think how great are the chances that it will be disregarded in the press of matter that weighs down the critics’ tables and burdens the booksellers’ shelves’ (p8). Nothing has changed there, then, even if publication is easier via the self-publish route.

The story is a first-person narrative by William Ashenden, highlighting certain snobbery in the world of books and book-writing. ‘Lady Hodmarsh and the duchess immediately assumed the cringing affability that persons of rank assume with their inferiors in order to show them that they are not in the least conscious of any difference in station between them’ (p43).

Ashenden has been asked to join a select few to visit a famous author, Edward Driffield; as a young fifteen-year-old boy he had known the author and his wife Rosie before he was famous. Rosie had enchanting eyes: ‘She gave herself as naturally as the sun gives heat or the flowers their perfume. It was a pleasure to her and she liked to give pleasure to others’ (p176).

Driffield ‘had written something like twenty books, and though he had never made more than a pittance out of them his reputation was considerable’ (p119). ‘It is always pleasant to be assured that you are a genius’ (p124).

One of the character’s remembered vividly from Ashenden’s childhood is Mary-Ann, a likeable depiction: (she) dropped her aitches freely’ (p56).

Some years later, Driffield’s second wife Amy has asked Ashenden’s writing associate Kear to write a life of her recently deceased husband. Kear seeks Ashenden’s early knowledge of the author, stating ‘... she could trust my discretion. I must behave like a gentleman.’ To which Ashenden responds, ‘It’s very hard to be a gentleman and a writer’ (p102).

This request resonates with Ashenden. ‘... nothing can bring back the past like a perfume or a stench’ (p168).

Cakes and Ale is a fascinating read, perhaps dwelling too much on the vicissitudes of writers and satire on the London literary society of the time, and yet there are plenty of amusing asides, regardless. Ashenden has little time for politicians, it seems: ‘no-one can have moved in the society of politicians without discovering that (if one may judge by results) it requires little mental ability to rule a nation’ (p93). ‘... now that the House of Lords must inevitably in a short while be abolished’ (p117).

Maugham inevitably perhaps inserts vignettes that could be construed as autobiographical, notably Ashenden’s medical studies and then subsequent authorship. There are many instances where his wit, sense of irony and descriptive imagery shine through:

‘... he gave a sort of low roar, like an orangutan in the forests of Borneo forcibly deprived of a coconut’ (p152).

‘The sky was blue and the air, warm and yet fresh, crackled as it were, with the heat. The light was brilliant without harshness. The sun’s beams seemed to hit the white road with a directed energy and bounce back like a rubber ball’ (p54).

‘... the weather was dreadful, a boisterous wind whistled down the street, piercing you to the bone, and the few women who had an errand were swept along by their full skirts like fishing boats in half a gale’ (p73).

There is a fine twist at the end and explains the subtitle.

Maugham seemed to be fixated on the name Ashenden as his First World War secret tales feature a character with that code-name (which are highly recommended). Some other non-spy stories feature the name also.