But who was ‘the Skeleton in the Cupboard’?
When another of Hardy’s pallbearers, the novelist John Galsworthy, asked Maugham why on earth he had written Cakes and Ale, he replied: ‘I wrote it because I had the character of my heroine with me for 20 years and at last hit upon a plan which gave me the opportunity of using it.’
Maugham concurred with those critics who judged Of Human Bondage his best work. But ‘the book I like best is Cakes and Ale … because in its pages lives for me the woman with the lovely smile who was the model for Rosie Driffield.’
Second only to Willie Ashenden, Rosie Driffield is Maugham’s most engaging creation. She is also responsible for Ashenden’s single known seduction. Up until this moment, Ashenden’s unique romantic lapse in the short-story canon is his flirtation with Baroness von Higgins – a flirtation he considers, then rejects. But with Rosie in Cakes and Ale, he has an affair that lasts for ‘more than a year’.
Like other characters in the novel, Rosie is so thinly disguised that her original features poke through. Ethelwyn Jones, known as Sue, was an actress to whom Maugham was introduced at an afternoon party in Wimbledon in 1906, when she was 23 and he 32. Unembarrassable, openly and innocently sexual, unstifled by respectability or class, Sue Jones was the nearest Maugham came to finding in England that type of informal and vivacious female whom he was to encounter eleven years later in Tahiti. He paints her in his novel in the primitive colours of a Gauguin. ‘When she liked anyone, it was quite natural for her to go to bed with them. She gave herself as naturally as the sun gives heat or the flower her perfume … She was like a clear, deep pool in a forest glade.’ One night after dinner he took her back to his lodgings at 56 Pall Mall. The seduction as dramatized in Cakes and Ale is among the most moving passages written by Maugham, normally a scrupulous avoider of heartfelt emotions – and someone who described his sexual make-up as three-quarters ‘queer’, one quarter ‘normal’. His unexpected bursting into tears and her instinctive need to comfort him, rocking him back and forth in her arms like a mother, points up the lacerating absence in Maugham’s life of his own mother – who had died in childbirth when he was eight. Soon after meeting Sue, he commissioned Gerald Kelly, who would likewise sleep with her – as did many of Maugham’s friends – to paint her portrait (Mrs Leveaux in White, 1907), saying that although ‘she wasn’t much to look at’ he was ‘desperately in love’ with her. As in the novel, the painting served to convert Sue’s image in his eyes. ‘She had grave and maddening faults,’ he wrote in his 1950 Preface, ‘but she was beautiful and honest.’ Their affair lasted another seven years and only ended when he asked her to marry him. In November 1913, Maugham arrived in New York ostensibly for the opening of his play Land of Promise. Days later, he took a train to Chicago where Sue was appearing on stage, invited her out to dinner and proposed. ‘Then we’ll get on a ship and go to Tahiti.’ He afterwards speculated that her emphatic reply – I don’t want to marry you’ – may have been because she was pregnant by someone else. He returned the engagement ring to the jeweller, receiving a full refund minus ten per cent, but her rejection cut deep. ‘The memory of her lingered on in my mind year after year,’ and she was evidently still in his thoughts when he sat down in the Villa Mauresque, with the light streaming onto his writing table through the Gauguin glass window of a Tahitian Eve, to begin Cakes and Ale. The writer has one consolation, he reveals at the end of his novel: he only has to convert what troubles him into a story, in order ‘to forget all about it’.
And yet Cakes and Ale is as much about forgetting, about savaging the lionisers, as it is an exercise in remembrance. Nowhere else in his work does Maugham’s boyhood receive such fresh, unclenched treatment. The carefree young Ashenden free-wheeling through the Kent countryside on his bicycle is a dead-ringer for the orphaned young Maugham: the shy and constantly blushing solicitor’s son with the priggish conventions of his class who, aged ten, is sent to the care of his snobbish uncle and German-born aunt in the windswept fishing town of Whitstable. Maugham’s detractor in Gin and Bitters says of him with some justice that he ‘was quite unable to work without someone actual to work upon’, and he fails to disguise at all the identities of those local characters whom he sweeps into his story. Rosie Gann, as Rose Driffield was born, owes her surname to Henry Gann, a Whitstable shipowner known as ‘Lord Stallion’ for his willingness to write off a tenant’s rent if he could sleep with the tenant’s wife. ‘Lord’ George Kemp, with whom Rosie runs away to New York, owes his full name to George Kemp, respected treasurer of the Whitstable Oyster Company, who in 1886, when Maugham was twelve, after pocketing £2,664, dramatically absconded to London and then to America. In his uncle’s choir at All Saint’s church, Maugham’s biographers have even tracked a C.M. Driffield – who was ‘disqualified by reason of nonattendance’. Of the supposed local author to whom he gave the name Driffield, there is alone no sign. In the event, Maugham fulfilled that role.
A natural short-story writer, Maugham the novelist could be awkward and uncertain. In his worst books, he is every bit as ‘half-trashy’ as his harshest critics would have him. His voice to find its best expression requires the medium of a first-person narrator, a Marlow figure. He rarely settles on a more convincing persona than when he dresses himself up as the neat-minded and fastidious playwright Willie Ashenden. Ashenden’s lone sortie into the novel form is memorable for the reasons that make Maugham’s finest stories memorable. His gaze on life is clear, direct and unshockable. He understands our impermanence. He has faith, but only in our foibles. Maugham never again wrote a novel that so satisfyingly marries author, style and subject. Cakes and Ale is funny, intelligent, moving, and carries on its sharp bones not an ounce of fat. Fashions change; we may no longer wash in tin baths that we store under our beds, or live in lodgings with landladies who cook for us, or consider it normal to eat in one meal a pork chop and a dover sole, all washed down with a glass of port; but in our ambitions, insecurities, petty jealousies and hypocrisies we remain unshifting. Reputation, Maugham seems to say, has always relied slightly less on intrinsic merit than on the external smoke and mirrors that assist to conjure celebrity. Rosie is made ‘beautiful’ as Driffield is made ‘great’ by the intercession of others: a society painter in the first instance; in the second, a society hostess called Mrs Barton Trafford (‘She can work the trick if anyone can’). Maugham’s readers, present and future, will never not be able to supply their own contemporary versions of his literary cast. In that sense, his characters are eternal. Alroy Kear’s fictional bestseller The Eye of the Needle anticipated by 40 years an actual bestseller with that title. Likewise, the predicament which Maugham analysed with silky wickedness in Cakes and Ale, and which caused so much fuss, soon afterwards found its counterpart in ‘real life’. As Jeffrey Meyers puts it in his biography of Maugham: ‘It is wonderfully ironic that T.S. Eliot, who succeeded Hardy as the most prominent poet in England, also married his much younger secretary, who devoted the rest of her life to covering up the discreditable aspects of his first marriage.’
A wincingly accurate mirror of the literary world, then. But also a novel that puffs breath into those for whom books are secondary to life and who don’t have much time for reading, like Rosie. ‘Enjoy yourself while you have the chance, I say; we shall all be dead in a hundred years and what will anything matter then?’ Maugham was aware that he never wrote anything more alive – and, for that reason, more likely to endure. Casting about one evening in the Villa Mauresque for a good book to take to bed, he sighed: ‘What a pity that I wrote Cakes and Ale. It would be the very thing.’
Nicholas Shakespeare, 2009
Author’s preface
It was as a short story, and not a very long one either, that I first thought of this novel. Here is the note I made when it occurred to me: ‘I am asked to write my reminiscences of a famous novelist, a friend of my boyhood, living at W. with a common wife, very unfaithful to him. There he writes his great books. Lat
er 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.’ I was writing at the time a series of short stories for the Cosmopolitan. My contract stipulated that they were to be between twelve hundred and fifteen hundred words, so that with the illustration they should not occupy more than a page of the magazine, but I allowed myself some latitude and then the illustration spread across the opposite page and gave me a little more space. I thought this story would do for this purpose, and put it aside for future use. But I had long had in mind the character of Rosie. I had wanted for years to write about her, but the opportunity never presented itself; I could contrive no setting in which she found a place to suit her, and I began to think I never should. I did not very much care. 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. But when once that character is set down on paper it belongs to the writer no more. He forgets it. It is curious how completely a person who may have occupied your reveries for many years can thus cease to be. It suddenly struck me that the little story I had jotted down offered me just the framework for this character that I had been looking for. I would make her the wife of my distinguished novelist. I saw that my story could never be got into a couple of thousand words, so I made up my mind to wait a little and use my material for one of the much longer tales, fourteen or fifteen thousand words, with which, following upon Rain, I had been not unsuccessful. But the more I thought of it the less inclined I was to waste my Rosie on a story even of this length. Old recollections returned to me. I found I had not said all I wanted to say about the W. of the note, which in Of Human Bondage I had called Blackstable. After so many years I did not see why I should not get closer to the facts. The Uncle William, Rector of Blackstable, and his wife Isabella, became Uncle Henry, vicar, and his wife, Sophie. The Philip Carey of the earlier book became the I of Cakes and Ale.
When the book appeared I was attacked in various quarters because I was supposed in the character of Edward Driffield to have drawn a portrait of Thomas Hardy. This was not my intention. He was no more in my mind than George Meredith or Anatole France. As my note suggests, I had been struck by the notion that the veneration to which an author full of years and honour is exposed must be irksome to the little alert soul within him that is alive still to the adventures of his fancy. Many odd and disconcerting ideas must cross his mind, I thought, while he maintains the dignified exterior that his admirers demand of him. I read Tess of the D’ Urbervilles when I was eighteen with such enthusiasm that I determined to marry a milkmaid, but I had never been so much taken with Hardy’s other books as were most of my contemporaries, and I did not think his English very good. I was never so much interested in him as I was at one time in George Meredith, and later in Anatole France. I knew little of Hardy’s life. I know now only enough to be certain that the points in common between his and that of Edward Driffield are negligible. They consist only in both having been born in humble circumstances and both having had two wives. I met Thomas Hardy but once. This was at a dinner-party at Lady St Helier’s, better known in the social history of the day as Lady Jeune, who liked to ask to her house (in a much more exclusive world than the world of today) everyone that in some way or another had caught the public eye. I was then a popular and fashionable playwright. It was one of those great dinner-parties that people gave before the war, with a vast number of courses, thick and clear soup, fish, a couple of entrees, sorbet (to give you a chance to get your second wind), joint, game, sweet, ice, and savoury; and there were twenty-four people all of whom by rank, political eminence, or artistic achievement, were distinguished. When the ladies retired to the drawing-room I found myself sitting next to Thomas Hardy. I remember a little man with an earthy face. In his evening clothes, with his boiled shirt and high collar, he had still a strange look of the soil. He was amiable and mild. It struck me at the time that there was in him a curious mixture of shyness and self-assurance. I do not remember what we talked about, but I know that we talked for three-quarters of an hour. At the end of it he paid me a great compliment: he asked me (not having heard my name) what was my profession.
I am told that two or three writers thought themselves aimed at in the character of Alroy Kear. They were under a misapprehension. 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, the pride in athletic prowess from a fourth, 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. I am inclined to think that this is why I see people (if I am to believe what I am frequently told and frequently read of myself) in a less flattering light than many authors who have not this unfortunate idiosyncrasy. For all the characters that we create are but copies of ourselves. It may be of course also that they really are nobler, more disinterested, virtuous, and spiritual than I. It is very natural that being godlike they should create men in their own image. When I wanted to draw the portrait of a writer who used every means of advertisement possible to assist the diffusion of his works I had no need to fix my attention on any particular person. The practice is too common for that. Nor can one help feeling sympathy for it. 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 book-sellers’ shelves. It is not unnatural that he should use what means he can to attract the attention of the public. Experience has taught him what to do. He must make himself a public figure. He must keep in the public eye. He must give interviews and get his photograph in the papers. He must write letters to The Times, address meetings, and occupy himself with social questions; he must make after-dinner speeches; he must recommend books in the publishers’ advertisements; and he must be seen without fail at the proper places at the proper times. He must never allow himself to be forgotten. It is hard and anxious work, for a mistake may cost him dear; it would be brutal to look with anything but kindliness at an author who takes so much trouble to persuade the world at large to read books that he honestly considers so well worth reading.
But there is one form of advertisement that I deplore. This is the cocktail party that is given to launch a book. You secure the presence of a photographer. You invite the gossip writers and as many eminent people as you know. The gossip writers give you a paragraph in their columns and the illustrated papers publish the photographs, but the eminent people expect to get a signed copy of the book for nothing. This ignoble practice is not rendered less objectionable when it is presumed (sometimes no doubt with justice) to be given at the expense of the publisher. It did not flourish at the time I wrote Cakes and Ale. It would have given me the material for a lively chapter.
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I have noticed that when someone asks for you on the telephone and, finding you out, leaves a message begging you to call him up the moment you come in, as it’s important, the matter is more often important to him than to you. When it comes to making you a present or doing you a favour most people are able to hold their impatience within reasonable bounds. So when I got back to my lodgings with just enough time to have a drink, a cigarette, and to read my paper before dressing for dinner, and was told by Miss Fellows, my landlady, that Mr Alroy Kear wished me to ring him up at once, I felt that I could safely ignore his request.
‘Is that the writer?’ she asked me.
‘It is.’
She gave the telephone a friendly glance.
‘Shall I get him?’<
br />
‘No, thank you.’
‘What shall I say if he rings again?’
‘Ask him to leave a message.’
‘Very good, sir.’
She pursed her lips. She took the empty siphon, swept the room with a look to see that it was tidy, and went out. Miss Fellows was a great novel reader. I was sure that she had read all Roy’s books. Her disapproval of my casualness suggested that she had read them with admiration. When I got home again, I found a note in her bold, legible writing on the sideboard:
Mr Kear rang up twice. Can you lunch with him tomorrow? If not what day will suit you?
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