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.

LIZA OF LAMBETH - Book review

Somerset Maugham’s first novel Liza of Lambeth was published in 1897; my edition is 1978.

Almost all of the dialogue is in the vernacular of the period, a bold decision for a first book. Maugham uses the omniscient point of view, which was probably appropriate at the time of publication due to the story’s controversial nature. ‘That is not precisely what she said, but it is impossible always to give the exact unexpurgated words of Liza and the other personages of the story; the reader is therefore entreated with his thoughts to piece out the necessary imperfections of the dialogue’ (p10). ‘Oh, you - ! she said. Her expression was quite unprintable, nor can it be euphemized’ (p12).

Liza Kemp is a nineteen-year-old factory girl who lives with her ailing often drunk mother in fictional Vere Street in Lambeth. Her best friend is Sally, who is being courted and is eventually wed: Sally had ‘an enormous mouth, with terrible square teeth set wide apart, which looked as if they could masticate an iron bar’ (p22). The Blakeston family has just arrived in the street – Jim, his wife and five children.

 Liza is popular with everyone, especially Tom who wants to court her. She likes him, but not that much: ‘Na then, she repeated, tike yer ’and away. If yer touch me there you’ll ’ave ter marry me’ (p33). She’s quite outspoken yet ingenuous at the outset. ‘Neither modesty nor bashfulness was to be reckoned among Liza’s faults’ (p40).

On a hot day, during a jolly street outing that entailed the quaffing of much beer, they all have a good time. ‘The ladies removed their cloaks and capes, and the men, following their example, took off their coasts and sat in their shirt-sleeves. Whereupon ensued much banter of a not particularly edifying kind respecting the garments which each person would like to remove – which showed that the innuendo of French farce is not so unknown to the upright, honest Englishman as might be supposed’ (p34). It is during this outing that Jim makes a pass at Liza, which has a stirring effect upon her. ‘Her heart seemed to grow larger in her breast, and she caught her breath as she threw back her head as if to receive his lips again. A shudder ran through her from the vividness of the thought’ (p49).

There is quiet humour, ribaldry, and black humour – notably when there’s a discussion about a corpse seemingly too large for his coffin. The grimness of the life in the slums is conveyed without layering it on with a trowel. Apparently, when first published this book received a mixed reception due to its subject matter, working-class adultery and its consequences and its tragic end, and yet it sold out within three weeks and was reprinted. Maugham was a medical student by day and wrote at night, qualifying shortly after the publication of Liza. While a student he encountered the poorest working-class, ‘life in the raw’ as he put it.

Maugham’s Liza is a vividly revealed character – as is her mother (‘me with my rheumatics, an’ the neuralgy!’ (p73)). It’s a moral tale, delivered with empathy, told by a twenty-three-year-old observant writer who quit medicine and relied on his writing for the rest of his life.

Editorial comment (for the benefit of writers):

 ‘he lifted her off her feet and threw her to the ground’ (p106). Unfortunately, this happens indoors, so ‘ground’ should properly read ‘floor’.

Spies and more spies

Last night BBC4 TV aired the final part of Andrew Marr’s series on genre paperback fiction – Sleuths, Spies and Sorcerers. (See my earlier blog here).

This time it was the turn of the spies.

We visited Berlin, the remnants of the Wall, the prison where betrayed agents were incarcerated and tortured physically and mentally, and glimpsed old images of traitors such as Blake and Philby. All grist to the mill for John Le Carré’s breakthrough novel The Spy Who came in from the Cold. An old interview revealed that he wasn’t surprised that no communists liked his spy tales!

Another interview was with Frederick Forsyth; we’re shown film clips from The Day of the Jackal, whose protagonist was not a spy but an assassin; the point was that both Le Carré and Forsyth, along with several other scribes of this genre had some background in intelligence work. One of the first of these was Somerset Maugham (notably Ashenden), who confessed that looking back on his fiction he found it difficult to separate fact from fiction in his work.

 Maugham's Ashenden

Perhaps too much attention was given to the (admittedly interesting) William Le Queux’ popular sensationalist novel The Invasion of 1910 (1906) regarding a fictional account of a German armed invasion of Britain. The furore following its publication prompted the setting up of a British secret intelligence department, The Secret Service Bureau headed by Mansfield Smith-Cumming in 1909.

Other interviewees were Stella Rimington, a former director general of MI5 and author of the MI5 officer Liz Carlyle books, author Charles Cumming who has written eight spy novels since 2001, an early snippet from Len Deighton, and William Boyd who wrote a new Bond novel, Solo (reviewed here.

Other authors who are examined include (inevitably) Ian Fleming, Gerald Seymour, John Buchan, Graham Greene, and Eric Ambler, with intriguing interpretations and motivations.

Quite rightly, Marr states that he is annoyed at the literary snobbery with regard to spy fiction and genre fiction in general. It’s as if being “popular” is anathema.

At their best, spy novels delve into the dark recesses of the human condition, examining the repercussions of betrayal, corruption and deceit. 

Despite the high-tech surveillance in the present, there is still a place for the human spy.

As in the earlier two episodes, there were bound to be some deserving authors omitted, among them Adam Hall (Elleston Trevor), author of the Quiller books, Erskine Childers (The Riddle of the Sands), Dennis Wheatley (Gregory Sallust novels), Helen MacInnes, Alan Furst, David Downing, Desmond Cory (Johnny Fedora series), Colin Forbes (Tweed series), John Gardner (Railton family series, Bond), and Craig Thomas (Aubrey & Hyde series), among others!

The programme is re-broadcast on BBC4 TV tomorrow, Wednesday evening. The series is also linked to the Open University - see here

where you can 'dig deeper into crime, fantasy and spy fiction'...

Ashenden

In the preface to his third volume of Collected Stories (1951), Somerset Maugham stipulated, ‘I wrote a batch of stories dealing with the adventures of an agent in the Intelligence Department during the First World War. I gave him the name of Ashenden. They are founded on experience of my own during that war, but I should like to impress upon the reader that they are not what the French call reportage, but works of fiction. Fact is a poor story-teller. It starts a story at haphazard long before the beginning, rambles on inconsequently, and tails off, leaving loose ends hanging about, without a conclusion. The work of an agent in the Intelligence Department is on the whole monotonous. A lot of it is uncommonly useless. The material it offers for stories is scrappy and pointless; the author has himself to make it coherent, dramatic and probable. That is what I have tried to do in this particular series.’

I first read these stories in the early 1960s and was impressed even then. As far as spy fiction goes, they are dated, and Maugham offends those editors and writers who decry long paragraphs and author intrusion; they are of their time, and none the worse for that. Maugham had the knack to write so that it seemed to the reader to be effortless; he mastered narrative flow. The late Martin Seymour-Smith observes that Maugham ‘was very prolific, and all his novels are readable and intelligent…’ while ‘his short stories are economical and superbly capture the sense of place, and always seem credible.’

Ashenden was an author recruited by a Colonel in the Intelligence Department known by the letter ‘R’. The mysterious ‘R’ is described as a man of ‘somewhat above the middle height, lean, with a yellow deeply-lined face, thin grey hair, and a toothbrush moustache. The thing immediately noticeable about him was the closeness with which his blue eyes were set. He only just escaped a squint. They were hard and cruel eyes, and very wary; and they gave him a cunning, shifty look. He was a man that you could neither like nor trust at first sight. His manner was pleasant and cordial.’

In the much published short story ‘The Hairless Mexican’ Ashenden accompanies the titular character under the cover name of Mr Somerville – which in fact is an alias Maugham used when secretly dealing with the Russian PM Alexander Kerensky in 1917, in the hope of keeping Russia in the war.

This collection consists of seven stories; there were thirty altogether; though fourteen were burned by Maugham as they infringed the Official Secrets Act: published under the title Ashenden, 1928. The stories in this collection are:

Miss King;

The Hairless Mexican;

Giulia Lazzari;

The traitor;

His Excellency;

Mr Harrington’s washing;

Sanatorium.

The Times Literary Supplement said in its review of the Ashenden stories: ‘counter-intelligence work consists often of morally indefensible jobs not to be undertaken by the squeamish or the conscience-stricken.’ Yes, that about sums up a secret agent.

Le Carré called Maugham ‘the first person to write about espionage in a mood of disenchantment and almost prosaic reality.’