With the first draft complete, the work of revision followed. “Then I go over very carefully62 all I have written & get order into the thing, look for the right words, bother myself with euphony, shorten, make what was obscure clear.” The words did not always flow, and sometimes a single page had to be written and rewritten, but however difficult, the experience never failed to be wholly absorbing. Yet in the final analysis the actual process of creation, “the most enthralling of human activities,”63 as Maugham described it, was impossible to pin down. As many writers have attested, the precise moment of alchemical reaction remains a mystery, explicable only as the work of the subconscious, of “the useful little imp64 that dwells in your fountain pen and does for you all your best writing.” Once he had rid himself of the story by putting it on paper, once the text was revised, the proofs corrected, the final version edited and approved, there was the excitement of seeing the work in print; a brief excitement, however, as by the time the book was published and in the shops, “I am no longer interested65 in it and I don’t really care what people say about it.”
IT WAS NOT LONG after moving into the Villa Mauresque that Maugham in 1929 began work on a novel, his first since The Painted Veil four years before. At last in possession of his own domain, free after years of a miserable marriage, Maugham found that his imagination was all at once thronged with the places and people of his distant childhood: sitting in his study overlooking the Mediterranean his mind’s eye rested on the Kentish countryside of his boyhood and the windblown streets of Whitstable; his thoughts were full of his uncle and aunt and the vicarage; and, finally released from the compulsion to write about Syrie, he returned to memories of the lovely, loving, promiscuous Sue Jones, “who had lingered in my mind66 for the last fifteen years and whom I could never till now find a way of disposing of.” In this new work, to be entitled Cakes and Ale,* Sue appears as Rosie, the first wife of a famous novelist, Edward Driffield, who, once a simple countryman, is now a greatly revered national figure. On the book’s publication, the inspiration for Driffield was immediately identified as Thomas Hardy, a fact at the time energetically denied by the author. “I swear I never thought of Hardy67 at all when writing the book,” Maugham told the Daily Telegraph, although later he became more equivocal when questioned on the subject: “Oh, I don’t know.68 I’ve denied it and admitted it and denied it. [There] might have been some small thread of him in the fabric. In any case, what does it matter?”
Like most novelists, Maugham was irritated by attempts to identify the “real” people behind his fictional characters; yet far more than most writers he made use of actual people with little alteration, putting them onto the page very much as they were in life, with small attempt at disguise. And nowhere in his work is this practice of verisimilitude more striking, indeed more notorious, than in Cakes and Ale. With the character of Edward Driffield, the parallels with Hardy (who, significantly, died in January 1928, not long before Maugham began writing his novel) are too conspicuous to be convincingly denied: both men came from humble backgrounds, both wrote novels about simple folk, both had socially ambitious lower-middle-class second wives,* both in old age retired to their native counties, Hardy to Dorset, Driffield to Kent. Driffield at Ferne Court, like Hardy at Max Gate, became an object of pilgrimage to the literary and fashionable world; both were awarded the Order of Merit.
By early summer the book was almost done, Maugham writing cheerfully to Gerald Kelly on May 30 that “I am just finishing a novel69 y-clept Cakes & Ale or The Skeleton in the Cupboard.” His high spirits were justified, for here Maugham is at the height of his powers, the novel a masterly work, technically dexterous and written in a sinuous, silky prose ideally adapted to the author’s sardonic view of the world. From the very first sentence, written in that familiar conversational style with its air of urbane detachment, the reader is caught. “I have noticed that when someone asks70 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,” he begins in a deliberately casual manner.
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.
The story is told in the first person, the narrator once again William (“Willie”) Ashenden, a literary gentleman to all intents and purposes the author himself. Ashenden is invited to lunch by an old friend and fellow writer, Alroy Kear, a boastful, bumptious, self-satisfied fellow who has made a successful career out of his second-rate novels by assiduously sucking up to critics and cultivating the prominent. Kear has just been commissioned to write the life of the famous novelist, the late Edward Driffield, whom Ashenden knew when he was a boy. Kear’s questioning takes Ashenden back to memories of his early life, of his boyhood at the vicarage with his uncle Henry and aunt Sophie, and of his friendship with Driffield and Driffield’s much younger wife, Rosie. They first meet after Willie Ashenden is given a bicycle. Unsuccessfully trying to master it he runs, literally, into the Driffields. Driffield kindly offers to teach him to ride, and Willie, a priggish boy, accepts with some reluctance, aware that the couple are socially beneath him. Willie is soon won over, however, by Driffield’s amiability and by Mrs. Driffield’s sweet nature and sensual beauty, and he becomes a regular at the hearty teas and sing-alongs held at their cozy cottage. Idolizing Rosie, he loyally dismisses the ill-natured gossip he hears about her, and it is thus a shock when he comes across her making love in a hedgerow with the Blackstable coal merchant, a colorful, swaggering character known in the neighborhood as “Lord” George Kemp.* It is soon after this that the Driffields, heavily in debt, disappear from Blackstable.
Some years later Ashenden, now a medical student in London, by chance meets Rosie in the street. Driffield is beginning to earn a considerable reputation as a novelist, with the help of a lady highly regarded in society as a distinguished literary patron. Mrs. Barton Trafford, it appears, has marked Edward Driffield out for great things, promoting him vigorously to the critics, showing him off to her fashionable friends. Rosie, so sexy, so common, is a problem, of course (the skeleton in the cupboard), but a problem with which Mrs. Trafford knows exactly how to cope. “[Her] manner with Mrs. Driffield71 was perfect…. She was cordial, playful, and gently determined to put her at her ease. It was strange that Rosie could not bear her.” Ashenden becomes infatuated with Rosie, and they enjoy a brief affair, important to Ashenden if not to Rosie, who, generous as ever, sleeps with him out of kindness. By now Ashenden has come to accept Rosie’s promiscuity, but he is nonetheless stunned when Rosie suddenly runs off with none other than the Blackstable coal merchant, Lord George. Abandoned by his wife, the frail and elderly Driffield eventually moves back to Kent and, shockingly, marries his nurse. It is Amy, the second Mrs. Driffield, a tireless keeper of the flame, who after her husband’s death, and assuming that Rosie, too, has died, commissions Alroy Kear to write the biography. Kear, smugly satisfied to have landed such a plum job, takes Ashenden down to Ferne Court, the Driffields’ house outside Blackstable, where the widow proudly displays the great writer’s study, no longer a workroom but a showplace. Harking back to a scarring incident with Syrie, Maugham has Kear explain how Amy had had to replace with new all the awful old furniture Driffield brought with him.
“She told me the hardest job she had72 was with his writing-desk. I don’t know whether you’ve noticed the one there is in his study now. It’s a very good period piece…. Well, he had a horrible American roll-top desk. He’d had it for years, and he’d written a dozen books on it, and he simply wouldn’t part with it…. You must get Amy to tell you the story how she managed to get rid of it in the end. It’s really priceless. She’s a remarkable woman, you know; she generally gets her own way.”
“I’ve noticed,” I said.
&
nbsp; Shortly afterward, Ashenden leaves for New York to oversee the production of a new play, and it is here that he meets Rosie for the last time, a contented widow in her seventies, stout, red-faced, white-haired, but with the same sweet smile. That she is alive and in full possession of the facts about her first husband’s life is information unlikely to be passed on to Alroy Kear.
In a preface to a later edition of Cakes and Ale, Maugham wrote, “I had long had in mind73 the character of Rosie. I had wanted for years to write about her, but the opportunity never presented itself.” There is no doubt that he had continued to think about Sue after she refused his proposal all those years ago in Chicago; and there is even a small but crucial indication that they met at least once after this, by which time Sue had turned into the stout, red-faced woman described in the novel. In half a sentence in The Gentleman in the Parlour, Maugham writes that while riding through the Shan States his thoughts turned to “the yellow hair of a girl74 with a sweet smile, hair now grey and shingled.” Now, in this intensely autobiographical novel, Maugham distills the essence of his affair with Sue, reproducing on the page, as Gerald Kelly had done on canvas, her voluptuous blond beauty as well as her amorousness and calm good nature. The scene in which Willie Ashenden for the first time makes love to Rosie and breaks down in tears, overwhelmed by emotion, has all the signs of having been drawn from life, even down to such details as Rosie’s wrapping her corsets in newspaper before slipping out of the house at dawn the next morning. The portrait of Willie himself is enormously engaging, a touching young man, conventional, slightly snobbish, very conscious of his dignity and of the dashing figure he believes himself to cut in his smart new clothes.
But it is in his delineation of the London literary world that Maugham as social satirist shows himself at his most lethal and incisive. Ashenden’s entry on the scene compares closely with that of the author’s, when as a very young man he was invited to literary teas in South Kensington, to Edmund Gosse’s at-homes in Hanover Terrace, and under the wing of Augustus Hare to dinner with hostesses such as Lady St. Helier: it was while dining with Lady St. Helier in Portland Place that in 1908 he had met Thomas Hardy. In Cakes and Ale there is more than a vestige of the indefatigable Lady St. Helier in the character of Lady Hodmarsh, “who neither read the books75 nor looked at the pictures of the people to whom she offered hospitality”; Gosse and Hare combine in the person of the influential critic Allgood Newton, who “was very amiable to the authors76 he met … and said charming and flattering things to them, but when they were gone he was very amusing at their expense.” The queen of the metropolitan literati is the influential Mrs. Trafford, wife of an exquisitely scholarly civil servant; she is regarded with deference, in particular for her close friendship with a very famous writer indeed, whose letters to her after his demise Mrs. Trafford had graciously allowed to be published, her husband following up with an elegant biography, “in which he showed quite definitely77 how great a part of the writer’s genius was due to his wife’s influence.” The originals of the Barton Traffords were a prominent pair, the Sidney Colvins, he the director of the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, she an intimate friend of Robert Louis Stevenson; as in the novel, after Stevenson’s death Colvin produced an edition of his letters, and in such manner as to shed the most flattering light upon his wife.
The Colvins, together with Gosse, Hare, and Lady St. Helier, were all leading members of the cultural establishment and, as such, tempting targets for the irreverent streak in Maugham’s nature. And yet his treatment of them is positively benign compared to that meted out to a fellow writer, his old friend Hugh Walpole. By 1930 Walpole, too, was a member of the literary elite, the self-appointed “viceroy of the literary world.”78 He was the author of numerous popular novels, chairman of the Book Society, an indefatigable lecturer in Britain and the United States, busy on numerous boards and committees, a devoted friend to the famous (who, however, quickly found themselves dropped if their reputations declined), and above all was an assiduous promoter of his own career. Over time Maugham had grown quite fond of old Hugh, while at the same time regarding him as eminently ridiculous. In recent years, however, the ruthlessness of Walpole’s self-promotion, coupled with a lack of generosity—“he was mean as cat’s meat,”79 said Maugham—had begun to repel him. Hugh, it seems, had behaved badly to a couple of good friends of Maugham’s, Gerald Kelly being one; he had also, in the course of a recent and prestigious Cambridge lecture, omitted Maugham’s name from a list of well-regarded contemporary novelists; and yet in none of these instances does the offense seem sufficient to inspire such a deadly attack: there must surely have been something more at the bottom of it. A clue may lie in a brief reference to the subject by the thriller writer Eric Ambler, describing a dinner party given by the publisher A. S. Frere in Albany. Maugham was present, as were Noël Coward and J. B. Priestley. In the course of the evening somebody mentioned Walpole. “I knew Hugh Walpole80 for a great many years,” said Maugham.
“I can tell you from my own knowledge that he behaved disgracefully to several talented young writers, one of whom I knew personally. Hugh Walpole ruined his life.”
He glowered at us. His meaning was plain. We all knew perfectly well that what he was really talking about was not a talented writer but a stolen boyfriend, an unrequited love and an old canker of jealousy….
Maugham’s depiction of Walpole as the self-serving Alroy Kear, hearty, humorless, and vain, is devastatingly true to life. “[I had] a considerable affection81 for Roy,” Ashenden begins innocently enough, before going on to describe with relish the man in all his glorious fatuity:
Than Roy no one could show a more genuine cordiality to a fellow novelist whose name was on everybody’s lips, but no one could more genially turn a cold shoulder on him when idleness, failure, or someone else’s success had cast a shade on his notoriety…. I could think of no one among my contemporaries who had achieved so considerable a position on so little talent.
Like Walpole, Alroy Kear is desperate to be liked, anxious to be a friend to all the world so that nothing will threaten his standing as a good fellow. When he describes the important biography he plans about Driffield, Ashenden can see all too clearly the sort of oleaginous hagiography it will turn out to be. “I’ll tell you the sort of book82 I want to write,” says Roy,
a sort of intimate life, with a lot of those little details that make people feel warm inside, you know, and then woven in with this a really exhaustive criticism of his literary work, not ponderous, of course, but although sympathetic, searching….
Would it not be more interesting to draw the man warts and all? Ashenden asks.
“Oh, I couldn’t … I must behave like a gentleman.”
“It’s very hard to be a gentleman and a writer.”
“I don’t see why…. Of course I don’t deny that if I were thoroughly unscrupulous I could make a sensation [but] they’d only say I was imitating Lytton Strachey. No. I think I shall do much better to be allusive and charming and rather subtle, you know the sort of thing, and tender.”
About Alroy Kear’s private life Ashenden is comparatively discreet, although there was a great deal more he could have said, as Walpole was as boastful about his sexual conquests as about everything else. After a vigorously active young manhood, Hugh in middle age had contentedly settled down with a married policeman; in the past, however, Maugham had had to listen to a great deal about Hugh’s affairs, in particular about his frustrating passion for the famous, and very handsome, Danish tenor Lauritz Melchior, an episode obliquely referred to in the novel thus:
[Alroy Kear’s] views on marriage83 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. It was generally known that he had for some years cherished a hopeless passion for a married woman of rank, and though he never spoke of her but with chivalrous admiration, it was understood that she had treated him with harshness.
Cakes and Ale, ranked by Maugham as his favorite among his novels, was published by Heinemann on September 29, 1930, and four days later by Doubleday, Doran in New York. A new novel by Somerset Maugham was naturally a noteworthy event; no one, however, could have foreseen the brouhaha that broke out among the cognoscenti over the caricature of Walpole as Alroy Kear, described by one commentator as “one of the most memorable literary dissections84 since Dickens’s treatment of Leigh Hunt as Mr. Skimpole in Bleak House.” Hugh himself, completely unaware, had received an advance copy a few days before publication. On September 25, he had come back in the morning in a very happy mood from a visit to Cambridge, attended a meeting of the Book Society, then dined with a friend with whom he had gone to the theater. Returning home after midnight, he had started to undress when he caught sight of Maugham’s book on his bedside table. Sitting on the edge of his bed in his pajamas he idly picked it up and began to read. “Read on with increasing horror,”85 he recorded in his diary. “Unmistakeable portrait of myself. Never slept!” At 4:00 A.M., by now in a frenzy, he telephoned Maugham’s publisher, A. S. Frere, imploring him to stop publication, which Frere told him he was unable to do. “I can’t see any resemblance86 to you in any of the characters,” he assured him. Walpole spent all the next day, “dreadfully upset,” calling on his friends, desperate to know what was being said. Most did their best to persuade him he was imagining it, while others swore that Maugham was already strenuously denying the rumor. “But how can he,” wailed Hugh, “when there are in one conversation the very accents of my voice? … He has used so many little friendly things and twisted them round.”
The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham Page 39