"Cakes and Ale" by W Somerset Maugham

Rosie enjoys life and refuses to conform to the austere expectations of the English class system.

Maugham's favourite novel (because it reminded him of the real good-time girl on which he based Rosie) kicks off when Alroy Kear, an author with more ambition that talent, asks William Ashenden, the first person narrator and another writer, for help in writing about a third writer, the recently deceased Edward Driffield, whom Ashenden knew. 

There is a detailed synopsis of the plot under the byline.

It's one of the classic plots: the war between individuality and social conformity, fought on the battleground of sexual love. Romeo and Juliet but with Juliet very much in the foreground and the Montagues and Capulets becoming the disapproval of the so-called higher echelons of society.

On the other hand, it's a bit incestuous: an author writing about authors, one of whom wants to write about an author. And authors don't comes out of it well:

• The wannabe biographer is the improbably named Alroy Kear (whose name is an anagram for Royal Rake). He has worked hard to assume his position of leading novelist: being athletic, hunting and playing cricket when these things were fashionable. When starting out he praised every leading writer of the time and humbly asked for their opinion on his work. He thanked critics who praised him and invited those who condemned him to lunch so he might discuss where he had gone wrong. He is introduced to us in two chapters of vitriolic irony:
• “Than Roy no one could show a more genuine cordiality to a fellow novelist whose name was on everybody's lips.” (Ch 1)
• “Roy has always sincerely believed what everyone else believed at the moment.” (Ch 1)
• “His villains have always been villainous, his heroes heroic, and his maidens chaste.” (Ch 1)
• “Though now and then he pretended to be at a loss for a word, it was only to make it more effective when he uttered it.” (Ch 1)
• “His conversation was not as a rule brilliant or witty, but it was fluent and he laughed so much as you sometimes have the illusion that what he said was funny.” (Ch 2)
• Later we encounter the equally improbably named Allgood Newton who, if possible, is even more pompous than Alroy:
• “The quiddity of bucolic humour is often a trifle obscure to the uninitiated.” (Ch 19)
• Of course, Ashenden himself is a novelist, as is Rosie's husband Driffield. 

In Twelfth Night, Sir Toby Belch, the gourmandising clown, asks Malvolio: 'Dost though think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?' Maugham's book is about how the upper classes attempt to use puritanism to prevent lower-class Rosie forgetting her place; it is about power strangling joy. There are many Malvolios: Ashenden's vicar uncle, Alroy Kear, the second Mrs Driffield etc. On the whole it is the lower orders who sympathise with Rosie: Ashenden's London landlady Mrs Hudson, Mary-Ann, the maid at the vicarage, his father's curate etc.

As for the narrator, he has a long journey to travel. He starts as a pompous schoolboy, infected by his uncle's moralism but tempted by the Driffields joie de vivre. As a young man he is further tempted by Rosie's body but snobbishly rejects her when he realises that her love of life includes promiscuity and why not? But, in the end, older and wiser, he realises: “She wasn't a woman who ever inspired love. Only affection. It was absurd to be jealous over her. She was like a clear, deep pool in a forest glade, into which it's heavenly to plunge, but it is neither less cool nor less crystalline because a tramp and a gypsy and a gamekeeper have plunged into it before you.” (Ch 25)

Selected quotes:

• “His views on marriage were abstract, for he had successfully evaded the state which so many artists have found difficult to reconcile with the arduous pursuit of their calling.” (Ch 1)
• “We know of course that women are habitually constipated, but to represent them in fiction as being altogether devoid of a back passage seems to me really an excessive chivalry.” (Ch 11)
• “Posterity makes its choice not from among the unknown writers of a period, but from among the known.” (Ch 11)
• “No one has ever been able to explain why the Doric temple of Paestum is more beautiful than a glass of cold beer except by bringing in considerations that have nothing to do with beauty. Beauty is a blind alley. It is a mountain peak which once reached leads nowhere. That is why in the end we find more to entrance us in El Greco then in Titian, in the incomplete achievement of Shakespeare then in the consummate success of Racine. ... Beauty is that which satisfies the aesthetic instinct. But who wants to be satisfied? It is only to the dullard that enough is as good as a feast.” (Ch 11)
• “From the earlier times the old have rubbed into the young that they are wiser than they, and before the young discovered what nonsense this was they were old too, and it profited them to carry on the imposture.” (Ch 11)
• “I often think that the purest type of artist is the humorist who laughs alone at his own jests.” (Ch 11)

Trigger warnings:

• The phrase “white nigger” is used with reference to thick lips and broad nose
• The anti-semitism displayed by the protagonist when a rich Jew called Jack Kuyper buys Rosie a fur; Ashenden breaks up with Rosie because he cannot bear that she is accepting gifts, and presumably embraces, from Kuyper.

June 2025; 190 pages

First published by William Heinemann in 1930

My paperback edition was issued by Pan books in 1976.

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

A detailed synopsis of the plot (spoiler alert):

William Ashenden, the narrator, is invited to lunch by a fellow writer, Alroy Kear and quizzed about a third, recently dead, writer Edward Driffield, whom Ashenden had known. Later we discover that Kear has been asked by Driffield’s second wife to write a biography of the great man.

Ashenden remembers meeting Driffield, a man who has had a chequered career and is not trying to write novels, and his first wife Rosie when he was a schoolboy. They were socially unacceptable to his vicar guardian because Rosie had been a barmaid and the awareness of ‘class’ leads Ashenden into behaving snootily and snobbishly; nevertheless, when he lets his guard down, he enjoys spending time with the pair.

The pair then flee Kent owing money left, right and centre; it’s a scandal.

Later, having become a medical student in London, Ashenden again meets Rosie. Driffield is now an established novelist. Rosie has a number of male friends and adds Ashenden to her rota; they start sleeping together. When he discovers that she has accepted an expensive present from a Jew, he can no longer close his eyes to her behaviour and dumps her.

He later hears that Rosie has run off with an old friend from her Kent days, the now bankrupt ex successful merchant ‘Lord’ George, and that they have fled to America. Driffield becomes a respected elderly novelist and, having been ill, marries his nurse.

Ashenden agrees to help out with the biography project but becomes angry when Mrs Driffield #2 insults Rosie (whom she believes is dead). He defends Rosie and fails to divulge that she is still alive in the US.

It's a bit of a roman a clef. The locations in Kent are disguised but thinly:

• Blackstable = Whitstable
• Tercanbury = Canterbury
• Haversham = Faversham
• Ferne Bay = Herne Bay

It is said that the real characters are:

• Edward Driffield = Thomas Hardy. Hardy became estranged from his first wife (but she didn't run off with someone else as in this book) and later married his secretary (rather than his nurse as in the novel) who was much younger than him. 
• Alroy Kear = Hugh Walpole. Given that Alroy is a writer with more talent in marketing himself than in writing his books, Walpole was very angry and, it is said, considered legal action.
• William Ashenden is clearly Maugham himself, who was brought up by his uncle and aunt in the vicarage in Whitstable and spent some years as a medical student; he was primarily homosexual but did have a long liaison with a friend's wife

Other notes:
One of my pet hates is the introduction of an untranslated foreign phrase. There are two moments when Maugham's narrator Ashenden quotes from French writers, presumably because he can, making those of his readers who can't feel stupid. Much of the book is a diatribe against class snobbery but this is intellectual snobbery at its height.

• In chapter 3, describing the beautiful June day, Maugham quotes the first line of a sonnet (Le Cygne, the Swan) written by Stephane Mallarme in 1887. The line reads: “le vierge, le vivace et le bel aujord’hiu” which in my aided translation becomes: 'The unsullied (‘vierge’ means virgin), the everlasting and the beautiful now'.
• “Venus toute entiere a sa proie attache” (Ch ) = 'Venus totally devoted to her prey', a line from Racine’s Phèdre (1677) act 1, sc. 3

Ashenden is the title of a series of linked short stories based on Maugham's experience as an espionage agent during the First World War. 

Other novels by the wonderful writer include the autobiographical (and big!) novel Of Human Bondage, in which the vicarage at Blackstable makes another appearance, and The Moon and Sixpence about a stockbroker who runs away to become an artist.