Well, I knew I'd read (and loved) another Somerset Maugham novel fairly recently, but I'd forgotten that it was actually for another of Simon and Kaggsy's clubs - the 1944 one in fact - here's the review. So I was really pleased to discover that this one fitted the latest brief, books published in 1930.
Cakes and Ale, or The Skeleton in the Cupboard, is narrated by William (Willie) Ashenden, a successful novelist, based - not all that loosely - on Maugham himself. As the novel begins he is contacted by an acquaintance, Alroy Kear. Kear, a best-selling but inferior novelist, has been asked to write a biography of a recently deceased literary giant, Edward Driffield. The request has come from Driffield's widow Amy, his second wife, who was originally his nurse. Kear knows that Ashenden was brought up in Driffield's home village and that in his teens he got to know the then up and coming novelist, who was living there with his first wife Rosie. He has therefore invited Ashenden to visit Driffield's country house, where Amy still lives, to share his reminiscences. Ashenden is somewhat unwilling to participate in this project, but eventually allows himself to be persuaded. His unwillingness is rooted in the very recollections that Kear is hoping will be useful fodder for the book. Ashenden's memories of the celebrated novelist and his wife are complex, and essentially very private - and what's more he is aware that the very prudish Amy will not want to hear about Rosie, who she is attempting to more or less erase from the historical record.
We learn in flashbacks that when the teenage Ashenden first met Driffield, the novelist was early in his career and had just started attracting interest for his outspoken novels, which depicted Victorian working-class life in the countryside. Ashenden's uncle, a stern man who brought the boy up, looks down on the Driffields as members of an inferior social class. Nevertheless a friendship springs up when young Willie acquires a bike and a chance meeting with the Driffiields, both keen cyclists, results in some enjoyable joint excursions. Willie gets into the habit of calling on the Driffields for tea and grows fond of them despite still considering them to be his social inferiors. So he is deeply shocked when he hears that Rosie is widely believed to be having an affair with a local man, 'Lord' George Kemp. What's more, shortly after this discovery, the Driffields disappear overnight from their rented cottage, leaving behind a string of debts.
Years pass by and Ashenden moves to London to study medicine and to begin his career as a novelist. He re-encounters the Driffields and is soon part of their now very lively circle - Edward has become a much feted novelist by this time and they are much in demand. However Ashenden soon becomes aware that Rosie has a reputation for promiscuity. He is unwilling to believe this but is eventually forced to accept it is probably true after he himself starts a passionate affair with her. Some time later, London society is scandalised when the news breaks that Rosie has run off to America with George Kemp. Her reputation, already damaged by general knowledge of her promiscuity, is now completely in ruins. But Ashenden has come to love and admire her, and accepts her behaviour as being an essential part of her loving, honest and generous nature - when she liked someone it was natural for her to go to bed with them.
Even if Ashenden had wanted to share this knowledge with Amy and Kear, which he does not, it's clear that they would have rejected it. Amy's whole existence is bound up with the whitewashing and elevating of the reputation of her husband and has only damaging things to say about Rosie, despite the fact that Driffield's best novels were written while he was living with her. Ashenden finally tracks Rosie down to where she is living near New York City. Now widowed she has lost none of her joie de vivre and Ashenden is cheered by their meeting.
There's so much to love about this novel, about which Maugham wrote: '"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." Yes Maugham, who was, according to his own account, 75% homosexual, had in his youth a passionate seven year affair with an actress named Sue, on whom he based his most memorable character. This knowledge adds even more depth to the moving scene where Ashenden is initially seduced by Rosie. But Sue is not the only real-life figure who appears in the novel. Although Maugham strenuously denied it at first, Alroy Kear is modelled on the novelist Hugh Walpole, and, though he never owned up to it, Driffield is quite clearly based on Thomas Hardy. Walpole was furious - understandably, as Kear is an unattractively egoistic, sycophantic, untalented writer ('I could think of no one among my contemporaries who had achieved so considerable a position on so little talent'). And of course Willie Ashenden is none other than a barely disguised Maugham himself, who was also orphaned and brought up by an unsympathetic uncle and aunt, went to London to study medicine and gave it up to become a novelist. The novel is also, as the 2009 introduction puts it, 'a wincingly accurate mirror of the literary world' of the period, which is brutally satirised both in the person of Kear and that of his erstwhile patroness Mrs Barton Trafford. And of course it's also a brutally honest depiction of the sort of social snobbery which, like young Willie, Maugham was brought up to share.
I could go on, but as you can probably tell I really loved this novel and am so grateful to Simon and Kaggsy for getting me to read it. Incidentally I just looked up Of Human Bondage on Amazon UK and it's for sale at the moment for 99p. So I hope I'll be reading that soon. More people should read Maugham - he's brilliant.
