Cakes and Ale

by W. Somerset Maugham

1981 Pan Books mass market paperback, British import. W. Somerset Maugham (The Razor's Edge). Cakes and Ale is a delicious satire of London literary society between the Wars. Social climber Alroy Kear is flattered when he is selected by Edward Driffield's wife to pen the official biography of her lionized novelist husband, and determined to write a bestseller. But then Kear discovers the great novelist's voluptuous muse (and unlikely first wife), Rosie. The lively, loving heroine once gave Driffield enough material to last a lifetime, but now her memory casts an embarrissing shadow over his career and respectable image. Wise, witty, deeply satisfying, Cakes and Ale is Maugham at his best. - Amazon

Genres: Fiction, Classics, British Literature, Literature, Historical Fiction, Novels, 20th Century

190 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1930

About the author

William Somerset Maugham was born in Paris in 1874. He spoke French even before he spoke a word of English, a fact to which some critics attribute the purity of his style.

His parents died early and, after an unhappy boyhood, which he recorded poignantly in Of Human Bondage, Maugham became a qualified physician. But writing was his true vocation. For ten years before his first success, he almost literally starved while pouring out novels and plays.

Maugham wrote at a time when experimental modernist literature such as that of William Faulkner, Thomas Mann, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf was gaining increasing popularity and winning critical acclaim. In this context, his plain prose style was criticized as 'such a tissue of clichés' that one's wonder is finally aroused at the writer's ability to assemble so many and at his unfailing inability to put anything in an individual way.

During World War I, Maugham worked for the British Secret Service . He travelled all over the world, and made many visits to America. After World War II, Maugham made his home in south of France and continued to move between England and Nice till his death in 1965.

At the time of Maugham's birth, French law was such that all foreign boys born in France became liable for conscription. Thus, Maugham was born within the Embassy, legally recognized as UK territory.

Reviews

[Bill Kerwin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Somerset Maugham's Cakes and Ale (“Dost thou think because thou art virtuous there shall be no more cakes and ale?”--Twelfth Night) takes for its theme the doubleness of human character, ranging from the calculated hypocrisy of the “virtuous” (exemplified by literary opportunist and would-be biographer Alroy Kear) to the animal weaknesses of the goodhearted yet unreformable (Rosie, former barmaid and first wife of distinguished novelist Edward Driffield) and finally—and perhaps most interestingly—the doubleness that lurks at the root of the writer's heart (the recently deceased Driffield, but also Ashenden, Maugham's narrative voice and alter ego), the writer who is capable of exploiting his most intimate experiences, coldly, for the sake of his art.

The theme of doubleness must have come easily to Maugham, a closeted gay Englishman who lived at a time when homosexual conduct was punishable by imprisonment, yet who, while spending most of each year on the Riviera—a destination he once described as “a sunny place for shady people”--lived life openly and freely at his villa La Mauresqueon, becoming notorious, in certain circles, for his pool parties au naturelle. Still, in his writings he avoided gay characters and gay themes and would occasionally utter disparaging remarks about the “homosexual character,” presumably to throw interviewers off the scent.

This is an entertaining book, memorable for the way Maugham gleefully skewers the hypocrites and lays bare the doubleness of both sinner and writer with the scalpel of clinical observation. The major fault of the book, though, is that Maugham never seems to grasp fully the connections between hypocrisy, animal weakness, and artistic calculation--all incidences of the failure of people to achieve—or society to tolerate—a fully integrated human personality.

Maugham expends what little sympathy he has on the socially despised sexual liberality of Rosie, the character who most clearly reflects his own hidden life. But the hypocrites like Kear and the cold, calculating writers like Driffield and Ashenden require of their creator an equal understanding, and Maugham grants them at worst mere sarcasm and at best a prominent, well-lighted place in his Exhibition of Human Contradictions.

I suspect Maugham possessed neither the universal sympathy nor the abstract intelligence to perceive the connections between his characters, how each strives to reconcile personality with performance, private desires with public space. Because of this deficiency, Cakes and Ale--despite its considerable virtues--remains a precariously balanced construction of satire and sympathy, and therefore falls somewhat short of being a great book.

[Julie G · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you can imagine what it would feel like for a man to fumble, slowly, for 4 hours, at your bra, trying to unclasp it, then you can imagine what reading the first 217 pages of this novel felt like to me.

I'm not kidding: I thought I was coming down with narcolepsy, reading this story by W. Somerset Maugham, published at the very beginning of the 1930s.

I tried to read it out in the sunshine, and I face-planted right on my deck. I tried to read it while my daughter was at math tutoring, and I fell asleep with my car on, cold air blasting intentionally right on my face. I tried to read it at night, and fell asleep for an hour with my neck in an awkward collapse, drool dried to a crisp at both edges of my mouth.

I perked up, briefly, at page 184, when I read:

The crown of literature is poetry. It is its end and aim. It is the sublimest activity of the human mind. It is the achievement of beauty. The writer of prose can only step aside when the poet passes; he makes the best of us look like a piece of cheese.

I shouted at the book: HALLELUJAH, AND AMEN! Then, one whole page later, I was back to heavy lidded eyes and drool.

Then, on page 217, the protagonist (who never, ever had a name, as far as I was concerned), old what's-his-name, starts to cry, and a woman “who gave herself as naturally as the sun gives heat or the flowers their perfume” initiates sex with him. THANK OUR MERCIFUL LORD IN HEAVEN.

I have truly never been more grateful for the sex act in all my life. I mean. . . it is so obvious that Mr. Maugham knew how to write the most magnificent sentences. . . but why, oh why, didn't he understand that they must be threaded together to form an actual story??

I mean: character development? There isn't any. Nada. No way, nohow.

Plot? Surely you jest.

But, as soon as these two finally got that damned corset unclasped, I found philosophy and humor and I even cried a bit.

I don't know if I can recommend this book to anyone with a straight face, but it had some wicked one-liners and some brilliant philosophical pauses. . .

And here I am, giving 4 stars to one of the most unformed, meandering novels I've ever read.

I can't drink ALE, and I can't eat wheat, but I've certainly earned a little gluten-free CAKE.

[Paul Bryant · Rating 3 out of 5]

Our narrator at age 15 falls off his bike. Commenting on the guy who’s teaching him to ride he says :

It was very hard under such circumstances to preserve the standoffishness befitting the vicar’s nephew with the son of Miss Wolfe’s bailiff

He is an appalling entitled supercilious snob who says stuff like

I did not like to run the risk of being seen with people whom they (his family) would not at all approve of

Or

They went to the grammar school at Haversham and of course I couldn’t possibly have anything to do with them

At one point the local coal merchant brazenly rings the front door bell at the vicarage where he lives. Panic!

My aunt…felt honestly embarrassed that anyone should put himself in such a false position

Because, you see, it was utterly ghastly and unheard of that a coal merchant – a coal merchant – should have the temerity – the barefaced effrontery – to ring the front door bell! What is this, the French Revolution? This grotesque bell-ringing even discombobulates the maid

Emily, who knew who should come to the front door, who should go to the side door, and who to the back

Well he is poking fun at himself and his family, we are glad to realise. Later he says

The reader cannot have failed to observe that I accepted the conventions of my class as if they were the laws of Nature

That said, he is the most worldly gentleman you have met in a long while. He knows everything about everything. He says

When you are young you take the kindness people show you as your right

and

he had the peculiar manner of the country doctor, bluff, hearty, and unctuous

because he knows all about young people and country doctors and he knows all young people and country doctors are exactly like that. It is so. Sometimes his observations are not quite to be taken seriously

No one can have moved in the society of politicians without discovering that it requires little mental ability to rule a nation

- A contemptuous bon mot that I think many modern readers would swiftly agree with. (It also implies that he has, but of course, knocked around with many ministers of the government). But what about this one – it almost made me gasp aloud :

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 excess of chivalry.

Steady on, sir! This is 1930! Are you allowed to say that?

Unfortunately for Cakes and Ale it was one of those many novels that are about novelists, and I was sadly uninformed of this before I started, because I hate novels about novelists, what a tiresome genre. But Somerset Maugham is an almost funny constantly condescending avuncular hifalutin tale teller, and his portrait of a great-grandmother of today’s manic dream pixie girls was engaging. Imagine – a woman in a 1930 novel who enjoys sex with multiple men and doesn’t get punished for it! And is a thoroughly nice person!

This novel was plucked from the vast lucky dip bag of 1001 Books you should Read before Next Thursday. At this rate it will only take me another 135 years to finish the whole list.

[Chrissie · Rating 4 out of 5]

I like this a lot, so four stars is what I shall give it. There is not one measly thing I feel I need to grumble about!

I have narrowed down what I like about the book to three things. These are summarized in the three following paragraphs.

Humor: the book is a satire criticizing the social snobbery of the literary world and high society in London at the turn of the 20th century. The setting is London and Blackstable, Kent, a fictitious town modeled on Whitstable, on the north coast of Kent in southeastern England, near Canterbury. Satirical irony is fused into almost every line at the start. Then, as the story line picks up, your attention shifts to that. The humor remains throughout, but with less prominence because the plot has captured your interest. Satire comes in many forms. Here, first you think about what is said and then you laugh when you realize what is implied and what is actually being said. The humor is amusing, not nasty.

You enter the story at a tilt. Who is the story really about? It is not whom you guess at the start. You make another guess, and that proves wrong too. The reader is circling around and getting deeper to the core. Along the way, you are gradually gathering information. John Donne's line "No man is an island," aptly fits. How the story is approached is what I am praising and what this says about interactions between people.

What lies under the surface of the characters' behavior ? This is the core of the novel. You come to know whom the story is really about and how one person's life is rolled up in another's. Isn’t it often that we make judgments about one another without adequate understanding?! You look at a person, make a judgment from what you see, but that judgment can be completely off mark! To understand another properly one must go below the surface, beneath what is visible.

Maugham has a way with words. He captures the essence of his characters. This is achieved through how he draws them, through what they say, what they wear, what they do and how they interact with each other. And often through humor.

The audiobook is extremely well narrated by James Saxon. I have given the narration five stars. It is to his credit that I laughed rather than becoming annoyed in the high society of London. He captures that world perfectly, without getting me annoyed, instead making me laugh. You don’t think that the story is being told to you; you just listen and easily follow the events, the dialogs and chuckle at the humor.

On closing the book, I sat back and thought about the title. Cakes and ale are the emblems of the good life in the moral of the fable attributed to Aesop's, “The Town Mouse and the Country Mouse”: Better beans and bacon in peace, than cakes and ale in fear.” (Source Wiki.) Which do you prefer? I like this message too.

Cakes and Ale is by far my favorite by W. Somerset Maugham.

The Painted Veil 4 stars
Christmas Holiday 3 stars
The Moon and Sixpence 2 stars
Of Human Bondage 2 stars

[Kim · Rating 4 out of 5]

Why oh why have I not read anything by Maugham before? Not having done so is my loss, and one which I must continue to remedy without delay.

I decided to read one of Maugham's novels because I knew from Gordon Bowker's biography of George Orwell that Orwell was a great admirer of his writing. This particular novel suggested itself because of its subject (a satire on literary London in the early 20th century) and because it's apparently the novel for which Maugham himself most wanted to be remembered.

Maugham's crystal clear prose and his wry, ironic wit made the audiobook version of this novel an absolute joy to listen to. It has some great characters and an interesting structure which moves back and forward in time. Parts of it - particularly at the beginning - were laugh-out-loud funny. I now understand why Orwell thought so highly of Maugham. It's wonderful to have another prolific writer to explore in depth.

[Trevor · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was a pure delight. Maugham is such an interesting writer and although he did not think himself a great writer, I believe he does have his moments of greatness. I loved Of Human Bondage and this one again uses material from his own life yet again – particularly stuff to do with his childhood spent with his vicar uncle and his aunt in the country.

The book starts off with a bit of a pattern to it. The book is written in first person singular – we will talk a bit more about that later – and the I in the piece begins by mentioning that he has been invited to have a chat with an old ‘friend’ and fellow writer. There then follows a digression on the nature of friendships with writers (a not terribly kind discussion). There is then the meeting itself where it becomes fairly clear that this writer is interested in what the I in the book knows about another writer who has fairly recently died. The I in the book had grown up in a village where the dead writer had lived part of his early life and then went back to in his final years. However, about the only thing the I can remember is that the dead writer had taught him how to ride a bicycle. The other writer says the dead writer’s first wife was a bit common and not well liked – however, this is definitely not how the I in the book remembers her.

They part, with the other writer less than happy with the outcome of their chat, and this sets the I in the novel thinking back to his childhood and in particular his curious relationship with the dead novelist and his wife – which turns out to be much more involved than he had admitted to the other writer.

This pattern is then repeated. I won’t tell you the whole story, but the point is that up until the point in the story that I have told you about Rosie, the wife of the dead novelist, is only a minor character. That doesn’t last.

I find jealousy, particularly sexual jealousy, to be a fascinating theme in novels. There was a time when I could be painfully jealous – but over the years I have decided that jealousy is a pointless and stupid emotion. All the same, it is a beast we are best not to trifle with. If we can learn nothing from Othello, we ought to be able to learn at least that. This is not your usual cautionary tale about jealousy though. In fact, this is nothing like your usual tale about anything.

I don’t want to give too much away about this book, as part of the joy of it really is in finding out what was going to happen next – all the same, it must have been quite a shocking book when it first came out. The idea that perhaps women might actually even enjoy sex may have been deeply shocking, in fact, probably is deeply shocking to some people. At least, people both at the time and now are and were prepared to pretend that such an idea was deeply shocking.

Cakes and Ale, the title, comes from a line in Twelfth Night by Sir Toby Belch, “Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?” And this is the central tension that drives the novel; a novel of a society coming out of Victorian sensibilities and trying to come to terms with a woman who clearly does not fit comfortably into those particularly tight corsets

This was a lovely book, one I liked very much. There are many quotable quotes (and I do like a book with lots of quotable quotes). But the best thing about it was that it never seemed to have to try too hard. Like I said, it was dealing with a theme that would have been quite controversial in 1930 and it did so in a clear, up front and interesting way.

The back cover of the edition I have (printed in 1966, the year of Maugham’s death) says this is his gayest (meaning most cheerful) novel. All I can say is that his other novels must be pretty depressing – this one isn’t really all that depressing, but it is hardly a laugh-fest, except when he is being nasty about his fellow writers, of course, or Americans, or prudes. The saddest character in the novel, I think, is the second wife, the nurse and assurer of the dead novelist’s ongoing reputation (posterity may be a fickle mistress, but a mistress of a dead artist is forever faithful). The scene in which the I writer runs his finger along the spine of the books in the dead writer’s library to see how much dust is there and finds none (implying they have been recently purchased for appearance sake) – to which he ironically makes a mental note that the housekeeper must be very efficient is almost painful to read.

Now, in chapter 16 of this book there is a wonderful discussion of the benefits and disadvantages of writing a book in the first person singular – in fact, this occurs at just about the time when the main character would have his personal pronoun at just about its most perpendicular – if that isn’t being too crude. There is a lovely bit where he makes fun of books on how to write novels, ‘On his advice I read The Craft of Fiction by Mr Percy Lubbock, from which I learned that the only way to write novels was like Henry James; after that I read Aspects of the Novel by Mr E. M. Forster, from which I learned that the only way to write novels was like Mr E.M. Forster; then I read by Mr Edwin Muir, from which I learned nothing at all.’

In this bit of the novel he says something which I think is terribly interesting and terribly important about the decision to write a novel in first person (i.e. with lots of ‘I’s) or to decide to write it in omniscient narration (where the writer has privileged access to the inner workings of the minds of everyone in the novel).

“Sometimes the novelist feels himself like God and is prepared to tell you everything about his characters; sometimes, however, he does not; and then he tells you not everything that is to be known about them but the little he knows himself; and since as we grow older we feel ourselves less and less like God I should not be surprised to learn that with advancing years the novelist grows less and less inclined to describe more than his own experience had given him. The first person singular is a very useful device for this limited purpose.”

And if I didn’t love him before, it was impossible not to love him after his saying that. I enjoyed this book very much. Not as much as Of Human Bondage, but enough – more than enough.

[Nigeyb · Rating 5 out of 5]

Cakes and Ale (1930) is a multi-layered novel that was apparently Maugham's favourite, and understandably so as it's a delight from start to finish.

A satire about the then contemporary literary trends but also, in a counter narrative, a study of personal freedom. Both narratives converge upon a recently deceased writer called Edward Driffield, however it is Driffield's first wife, the guileless Rosie, who is the star of the show. Rosie scandalises her snobbish neighbours who live and breathe Victorian morality.

The plotlines cleverly twist and turn, revealing surprise after surprise, and it all ends with one final unexpected twist.

Cakes and Ale pulls off the unlikely trick of being both light, cheerful and funny, but also very perceptive and profound.

I have now read most of W. Somerset Maugham's novels and can confidently say that if you only ever read one, then make it Cakes and Ale.

5/5

[Cheryl · Rating 4 out of 5]

She had the serenity of a summer evening when the light fades slowly from the unclouded sky.

There is something luscious about Maugham's beguiling sentences and vocabulary that had me underlining sentences, journaling through the margins, and circling words. For a Maugham book to overcome the depth and meaning of my favorite ( Of Human Bondage ), will be similar to finding a Cather read that surpasses the intentions within My Ántonia. Still, I tread through a few of his works because one never knows what one will find.

Cakes and Ale is the juxtaposition of social conventions and free spiritedness; it is the parallelism of high society tea gathering and working class society after-work bar huddle. The book both explains and disdains the idea of judgement and societal frameworks that seemed to define a person in those days and yet it reveals the stereotypes that unfortunately, sometimes unveil themselves in the one stereotyped.

But who is the fearless, arresting, and incorrigible woman Maugham develops into a nuanced female character? This is who I followed in the novel: Rosie Driffield, the mysterious being. Expecting much of the narrator, Willie Ashenden, is a bit heartbreaking because he is dull and judgmental, until he talks about Rosie. Alroy Kear, on the other hand, is a famous writer who must write a biography of his mentor, Edward Driffied; so aside from admiring his ambition, there is little of Kear to know.

Finally, there is Rosie and her husband Edward Driffield (the writer whose life story is outlined). Driffield's story without Rosie is not too meaningful, especially since he wrote his many books while with her. He is as mysterious and avant-garde as Rosie, a man who seems to pay no mind to what society thinks of him. Yet with his second wife, Edward becomes a different man who lives the life expected of a celebrated author. His new wife, who has organized the notes for Driffield's biography, does not want any mention of the former wife. But hidden between the words spoken, is an intriguing and melancholic story that, if not revealed, does not make for an authentic biography.

'You see, she's all gold, her face and her hair, and yet she doesn't give you a golden effect, she gives you a silvery effect.'

I knew what he meant. She glowed, but palely, like the moon rather than the sun, or if it was like the sun it was like the sun in the white mist of dawn.

How does a woman, a former barmaid, live a life of unconventionality within a society that draws a clear line between 'gentlemen' and working men, a society that does not allow the vicar's nephew to associate with a novelist? I'm drawing a blank on which classic female Rosie resembles, but perhaps in some small way she is unique: her descriptions, the affecting way she encounters people, the sexual nonchalance, and even the way she still manages to maintain a love-filled marriage until later.... Every now and then, the narration sneaks into sensory detail that is engaging, the way the story moves is fulfilling, and the omissions later revealed are enticing - just what one would expect from Maugham.

[Lisa · Rating 5 out of 5]

And because Somerset Maugham is a cure for reader's block, I gobbled this one up too!

Never start a sentence with "and", my teacher said. And when I became I teacher myself, I started repeating that. However, as teachers tend to break all their nice little rules as soon as they are off duty and out of sight of the teachable generation, it is only fitting to contradict the official self to make a case for private pleasure.

This delicious little colleague-trashing gem of a book me want to read all Somerset Maugham's novels, and those of Thomas Hardy as well. There is something so fascinating about how authors react to each other, and the caricature of Hardy that Maugham offers here is as much hommage as it is ridiculing. I am inclined to always like both authors in these circumstances, just out of rebellion against being forced to choose sides. Someone once told me I could not love Heine and Goethe at the same time, or Thomas Mann and Bertolt Brecht, so I set out to do some serious both-loving, and it worked just fine!

This is another such case. The novelisation of Hardy through the perspective of Somerset Maugham is just too brilliant!

[Kushagri · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 stars

The stars seen in this review are for the writing since I couldn’t connect with the story and the characters very much. But I will revisit it sometime in the future to give it another look.

From Preface to The End, his books are a pleasure to read. So, this review will be mostly quotes. Still, this wasn’t his best one I have read yet. The choice was between 3 and 3.5 stars, but the book picked up good momentum in the second half.

It must be that there is something naturally absurd in a sincere emotion, though why there should be I cannot imagine, unless it is that man, the ephemeral inhabitant of an insignificant planet, with all his pain and all his striving is but a jest in an eternal mind.

The prose is terrific if you consider it standalone but comparing with his other works, not his best. The satire is amusing and fun. Maugham's capacity to study the eccentricities of social life is just wonderful!

Though catastrophe overwhelmed the family they held their heads high and ignored it. One of the sons might have married an actress, but they never referred to the calamity, and though the neighbours said it was dreadful, the took ostentatious care not to mention the theatre in the presence of the afflicted. We all knew that the wife of Major Greencourt who had taken the Three Gables was connected with trade, but neither she nor the major ever so much as hinted at the discreditable secret; and though we sniffed at them behind their backs, we were too polite even to mention crockery (the source of Mrs Greencourt's adequate income| in their presence. It was still not unheard of for an angry parent to cut off his son with a shilling, or to tell his daughter (who like my own mother had married a solicitor) never to darken his doors again.

The way Maugham studies people and notices the subtleties of human nature is just ingenious.

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.

The book is filled with witty observations on such human tendencies.

He takes the name of Ashenden again, which was his semi-fictional persona in the book Ashenden, through which he narrates the story and builds his characters. It’s a look into the literary society of England and in particular life of an author and his wife, in the late 1800s to early 1900s.

As always, his writing is more like having a chat with the author over tea and discoursing over ideas or listening to his stories, where like in a discussion we may have disagreements on certain ideas. That’s the distinctive charm of the book.

When the thing of beauty has given me the magic of its sensation my mind quickly wanders, I listen with incredulity to the persons who tell me that they can look with rapture for hours at a view or a picture. Beauty is an ecstasy, it is as simple as hunger.
There is really nothing to be said about it. It is like the perfume of a rose: you can smell it and that is all: that is why the criticism of art, except in so far as it is unconcerned with beauty and therefore with art, is tiresome. All the critic can tell you with regard to Titian's 'Entombment of Christ', perhaps of all the pictures in the world that which has most pure beauty, is to go and look at it. What else he has to say is history, or biography, or what not. But people add other qualities to beauty - sublimity human interest, tenderness, love - because beauty does not long content them. Beauty is perfect, and perfection such is. human nature holds our attention but for a little while.
The mathematician who after seeing Phédre asked: 'Qu'est-ce que ça prouve!' was not such a fool as he has been generally made out. 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 than in Titian, in the incomplete achievement of Shakespeare than in the consummate success of Racine. Too much has been written about beauty. That is why I have written a little more. 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. Let us face it: beauty is a bit of a bore.

[Anne · Rating 4 out of 5]

Cakes and Ale is much lighter in tone than other novels I’ve read by Somerset Maugham. It is fun and funny as well as clever and perceptive. I imagine Maugham had a good time writing this novel which was meant as a vehicle for his character “Rosie,” who is a stand in for a woman he once loved and/or admired.

This book satirizes the snobbery of 1930s literary and social life. English society, the writers and critics are all game for Maugham’s witty remarks. Insults were never written so well (except by Oscar Wilde). This novel, especially the beginning, is full of these witty remarks about writers:

“I had watched with admiration his rise in the world of letters. His career might well have served as a model for any young man entering upon the pursuit of literature. I could think of no one among my contemporaries who had achieved so considerable a position on so little talent.”


Another stinging but humorous quote is delivered by one writer (Ashenden, who is considered a stand in for Maugham) about another writer:


"But of course what the critics wrote about Edward Driffield (a writer in the novel) was eyewash. His outstanding merit was not the realism that gave vigour to his work, nor the beauty that informed it, nor his graphic portraits of seafaring men, nor his poetic descriptions of salty marshes, of storm and calm, and of nestling habits; it was his longevity. . . But why writers should be more esteemed the older they grow, has long perplexed me. . . . After mature consideration I have come to the conclusion that the real reason for the universal applause that comforts the declining years of an author who exceeds the common span of man is that intelligent people after the age of thirty read nothing at all. As they grown older the books they read in their youth are lit with its glamour and with every year that passes they ascribe greater merit to the author who wrote them.”

Ouch. The next quote is aimed at a poet, critics and the reading public:

“Now that he is so completely forgotten and the critics who praised him would willingly eat their words if they were not carefully guarded in the files of innumerable newspaper offices, the sensation he made with his first volume of poems is almost unbelievable. The most important papers gave to reviews of it as much space as they would have to the report of a prize-fight, the most influential critics fell over one another in their eagerness to welcome him. They likened him to Milton (for the sonority of his blank verse), to Keats (for the opulence of his sensuous imagery), and to Shelley (for his airy fantasy); and, using him as a stick to beat idols of whom they were weary, they gave in his name many a resounding whack on the emaciated buttocks of Lord Tennyson and a few good husky smacks on the bald pate of Robert Browning. The public fell like the walls of Jericho.”

Maugham must have had a great deal of experience with the whims of critics and the ups and downs of literary fame. He certainly seems to have had a good time satirizing them here.


The main story, as conveyed by the narrator, revolves around an unexceptional author who has been commissioned to write a biography of a famous British author. (Hence, the book is about a writer writing about a writer, narrated by another writer.) However, the commission is provided by the late author's second wife who wants no mention of the author's first wife, Rosie, the "skeleton in the cupboard,” which is the alternative title of this novel.

Rosie is beautiful, she enjoys life and she has no qualms about having sex with any man she desires. She is meant to represent a fully “modern woman,” free from the shackles of Victorian morality. It is, I think, intentionally funny that Maugham wrote a book as a vehicle for his character Rosie and in that same book a fictional author is writng a book in which Rosie is not allowed to appear. She and all that she represents, fun, freedom, and sexuality, are meant to stay in the cupboard (closet). This seems like one of Maugham’s jokes about uptight high society and it’s Victorian morals compared to the the more modern “Rosies” who have dropped Victorian morals and values which were so limiting, especially for women.

Rosie may be left out of the priggish fictional biography but she is the star of Cakes and Ale. Rosie, the one modern and free woman is this novel is used by Maugham to show the difference the new and the old moralities, especialy when Rosie is juxtaposed against her neighbors who are still holding tightly to Victorian morals. They are scandalized by Rosie who doesn’t care in the least. Rosie’s philosophy on life:

"Enjoy yourself while you have the chance, I say; we shall all be dead in a hundred years and what will anything matter then?"

A person doesn’t have to be a free woman to provoke class snobbery. The town vicar (the least likable character in the novel) is outraged when he hears that his young nephew has been spending time (bicycling) with a local, as yet unknown writer who is considered low-class and vulgar. He happens to be married to Rosie. The fact that his bored visiting nephew finally found some company and was, for the first time, enjoying himself while bike riding and chatting with his new companionable friends is not a matter to consider for the Vicar. The writer and his wife are deemed unsuitable company for a young gentleman. Fun doesn’t come into it for class conscious Victorians.

This brings me to the main title and one of the major themes underlying this novel: fun. According to Wikipedia, Cakes and Ale, “comes from a remark by Sir Toby Belch to Malvolio in William Shakespeare's Twelfth Night:, “Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?”

Rosie has plenty of cakes and ale, i.e. fun and pleasure in her life. For the virtuous townsfolk the title is ironic. They have no fun at all.

Maugham’s ability to string words together is on fine display in this novel. So is his skill at characterization. There is a great deal more to this story than what I have mentioned in this review. I’ve left out a great deal so as not to spoil the fun for future readers.

Speaking of fun, here is one last quote from this very quotable novel that has nothing to do with writers or society:

“Don’t talk to me about the country. The doctor said I was to go there for six weeks last summer. It nearly killed me, I give you my word. The noise of it. All them birds singin’ all the time, and the cocks crowin’ and the cows mooin’. I couldn’t stick it. When you’ve lived all the years I ’ave in peace and quietness you can’t get used to all that racket goin’ on all the time.”

Maugham definitely had a good time writing this book and I had fun reading it.

[Diane Barnes · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love Somerset Maugham, and this one did nothing to change my mind. Good writing and a good story, enjoyment from first page to last.

[Lorna · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Dost thou think, because thou
art virtuous, there shall be no
more cakes and ale?” — William Shakespeare, TWELFTH NIGHT

Cakes and Ale was a 1930 wickedly satirical novel by W. Somerset Maugham that he considered his favorite and finest work. It is narrated by William Ashenden, a middle-aged writer thought to be Maugham’s alter ego as he looks back on his youth in the Kent countryside. It targets the hypocrisy of the London literary establishment between the wars while exploring memory, social climbing and personal freedom.

At the center of the book is Edward Driffield, the famous old man of English letters, loosely modeled on figures like Thomas Hardy. The novelist's first wife was Rosie Driffield, a former bar-maid with a free spirited uninhibited nature. She was his true muse with his best books written when he was with her. However, her unconventional past becomes an embarrassment for Driffield’s second wife obsessed with his literary legacy after his death.

Rosie Driffield represented natural affection, generosity, and freedom from Victorian hypocrisy, contrasting sharply with the cold status-driven respectability of the literary elite. When published it caused a stir in London. The book has been widely praised for its sharp and sardonic wit. I loved the narrator as we see him from the time when he was a young man living with his uncle, a curate at the local church, finding companionship and camaraderie with Driffield and his wife, Rosie. Later their friendship was renewed when William Ashenden was living in London and attending college as well as beginning to write books.

“The crown of literature is poetry. It is its end and aim. It is the sublimest activity of the human mind. It is the achievement of beauty.”

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's so relaxing to read Maugham again. Get away from the silly goings-on of our U.S. political puppets. So tiring, and disturbing. But with Maugham, at least how I perceive him--so sophisticated yet engaging. He writes stories that don't let you wander. (Not wonder, but wander.) In other words, never a dull moment.

In Cakes and Ale, he draws a scene wherein the characters know each other, either socially, locally, or in their respective occupations whether in an English village or in London or beyond. They stay in touch, lose contact, then reconnect usually. Yet, questions remain until mysteries and rumors are mostly resolved.

The story involves love (can you have a novel without it), ambition, loyalty, sex, lust (can you have sex without it), and an affability among rivals (can you have England without it). For me personally, I was happy to see my old friend Ashenden again. If you want to meet "The Hairless Mexican" (and no it's not a dog) and spies that are up to no good, please treat yourself to the short stories of W. Somerset Maugham, but before that, you might sit down with the rather short novel, Cakes and Ale.

[Paula Mota · Rating 4 out of 5]

Edição portuguesa, "Destino de um Homem", Círculo de Leitores

A hipocrisia é o mais difícil e extenuante dos vícios, pois exige uma vigilância contínua, um raro desprendimento, não podendo ser praticado espaçadamente como o adultério ou a gula: é uma ocupação de todos os momentos. Não dispensa também certo humor cínico.

Em forma de sátira, W. Somerset Maugham levanta questões muito interessantes sobre a tarefa delicada e hipócrita que é escrever a biografia de alguém a pedido de um parente, neste caso, de um escritor consagrado e respeitado cujo passado é um pouco mais nebuloso do que convém a um homem com o seu estatuto. O título “Cakes and Ale or the Squeleton in the Cupboard” revela sucintamente o conteúdo deste livro: há um esqueleto no armário, um passado que deve agora ser abafado, devido sobretudo a uma questão de classe, um conflito sempre tão prevalente na sociedade e literatura britânicas, e ainda mais no século passado. Com um olhar implacável sobre os meandros do mundo literário, abrilhantado por uma personagem feminina controversa e um estilo de escrita preciso em que cada frase é deliberada, Maugham continua a cativar-me.

Aproveitei para reflectir sobre a vida do escritor. (...) Como princípio, deve começar por sofrer a pobreza e a indiferença do mundo e, depois, tendo conquistado uma parcela e sucesso, tem de se submeter sem protestos aos seus riscos. Depende de um público inconstante e está à mercê (...) de mulheres que o querem para marido e de mulheres que querem divorciar-se dele, (...) de senhoras sentimentais que lhe solicitam a opinião sobre assuntos matrimoniais, de rapazes sérios que pedem opinião sobre as suas composições, de agentes, editores, empresários, admiradores, críticos e da própria consciência. Mas existe uma compensação. Sempre que tiver alguma coisa no espírito, seja uma reflexão torturante, a dor pela morte de um amigo, o amor não correspondido, o orgulho ferido, o ressentimento pela falsidade de alguém que lhe devia ser grato, enfim, qualquer emoção ou qualquer ideia obcecante, basta reduzi-la a preto e branco, usando-a como assunto de uma história ou adorno de um ensaio, para se esquecer de tudo. O escritor é o único homem livre.

[Werner · Rating 2 out of 5]

This particular book was adopted as a common read in one of my Goodreads groups, which is how I came to read it (previously, I'd actually never heard of it). My previous exposure to Maugham's work was only through a couple of his short stories. As an introduction to his long fiction, this novella was perhaps not as successful as might have been wished; I didn't rate it as highly as a couple of my Goodreads friends in the group did.

The Goodreads description for the book is reasonably accurate, though would-be biographer Kear doesn't suddenly "discover" the existence of his subject's spectacularly unfaithful first wife Rosie; he's known about her all along --and knows she's going to be a difficult "skeleton in the cupboard" to deal with in writing the kind of sanitized biography he wants to write. But it doesn't deal with the role of Willie Ashenden, Kear's fellow novelist, as narrator and viewpoint character, and keeper of voluminous (and scandalous) Driffield family secrets that are strategically disclosed to the reader as the book progresses. Ashenden (who is also the protagonist of the earlier Maugham novel Ashenden, or the British Agent) is a character clearly modeled on the author himself; they share a substantial body of biographical details, and Maugham was known as "Willie" to his friends. As such, Ashenden serves as the mouthpiece for Maugham's own viewpoints and lectures on matters related and unrelated to the plot.

Part of Maugham's agenda in writing this work, as the description makes clear, is to deliver a devastating satire on the self-contained, status-obsessed little world of the ca. 1930 British literary scene, which still packs a bite, and applies wherever snobbery, vanity and self-aggrandizement rules the realm of letters (which is to say, usually). Another target of his satire is the class snobbery of his Victorian and Edwardian boyhood and youth: a mindset in which people's personal worth is determined solely by what their parents did for a living, with manual labor being viewed as the most absolutely demeaning thing a human being can do, and in which this status dictates who's good enough to associate with, what you can do and be with your life, even which door of a house you're fit to knock on. This viewpoint was stronger in England than in America; but it's not wholly dead in either country, even today. Maugham does a commendable job at calling this kind of prejudice out and exposing it for ridicule.

Ultimately, though, his main message here is of a piece with that of some other early 20th-century writers: advocacy for liberation from moral ideals of chastity and marital fidelity, which are seen as hopelessly antiquated, repressive structures that choke everything healthy, natural, free, and generally warm and fuzzy (not to mention hip and trendy). The main carrier for this particular cargo is Rosie's character, which is carefully sketched as noble, warm, kind, generous, all-around adorable --and "innocently" promiscous, with Ashenden's narration used to stack the deck and direct the reader's impressions. (Rosie's comment at one point, "Enjoy yourself while you have the chance, I say; we shall all be dead in a hundred years and what will anything matter then? Let's have a good time while we can," is a perfect capsule statement of the philosophy of existential meaninglessness and absolute hedonism; and if Rosie isn't educated enough to think of it in those terms, Maugham definitely was.)

In the 85 years since this was written, of course, the Western world has changed epochally. Maugham's view is now accepted orthodoxy for the ruling political and socio-economic elites and the media, and the popular masses that uncritically accept it, exemplified by the abolition of legally-binding marriage in the 1960s. For more critical observers, though, who consider the current explosion of impoverished female-headed households and the resulting train of social pathologies this has fostered in the unmoored generations raised in these, the epidemics of AIDS and other STDs, the skyrocketing of out-of-wedlock childbirths to rates previously unprecedented in human history, the development of the flesh trade and pornography into worldwide billion dollar growth industries with powerful political influence, and the creation of a culture in which one third of all women can expect to be sexually assaulted or abused in their lifetime, it is a defensible conclusion that the message has not worn well with time.

The novel is a quick read, with an unintimidating style, and Maugham's skill at characterization is much in evidence (though I personally don't find Rosie as unqualifiedly winsome as some readers do). But Maugham's frequent asides of obiter dicta on various abstractions or side subjects tend to be boring, off-beam, and as generally irritating in a first-person narrator as they sometimes were in 19th-century third person narrators (think, Thackeray at his worst). And the discussion late in the book over whether or not Rosie is a "white nigger," because of her "thick lips and broad nose" is likely to offend any reader who has enlightened racial sensibilities.

[Gabrielle (Reading Rampage) · Rating 4 out of 5]

Maugham has become a comfort read for me over the past few years. I discovered him first through “The Painted Veil” and fell in love completely with “Of Human Bondage”. I didn’t expect “Cakes and Ale” to have the same impact on me as Philip Carey’s story did, but I needed something beautifully written and witty that would take me out of this stressful November week, and this was just the ticket.

I would struggle to explain what this story is about. Is it about William Ashenden’s memories, or about the lovely, lively Rosie Driffield’s impact on both him and her husband, celebrated author Edward Driffield? Is it about the way social conventions stifle people, about the horrible pretensions of the artistic sets, the hypocrisy and ambition that runs through both social strata? The way what inspires us is not always what’s proper but it is always beautiful to us? Is it a metaphor for the life Maugham was himself not quite allowed to live?

The framing device alone almost sounds like a (very English) joke: this is the story of a mediocre writer commissioned to write a book about an illustrious writer, who seeks help from another writer to gather his recollection of the early years of the aforementioned celebrated writer. The problem is that this commission comes from the author’s second, and respectable, wife – who is adamant there should be no mention of her late-husband’s first wife in this biography. But how do you write the life of an artist and erase his muse from it entirely?

I think that like most of the characters, I fell maybe not in love, but definitely in awe of Rosie, who walks that strange line of child-like innocence and enjoyment of things not considered quite proper. There is something about the way Maugham writes her that is simply irresistible, and how much she baffles the narrator Ashenden, with her lack of self-consciousness or guile is both sweet and a little sad – as only someone as young and inexperienced can fail to see that this won’t end well…

Obviously, the prose is pure enchantment, as I have come to expect from Maugham, and the lack of a proper plot can’t even bring the book down a notch when the sentences are so dazzling and sweet to read. I really feel like you can tell Maugham was having fun writing this book when you read it, by the way he writes beautiful passages that made me snort in my coffee.

I do not think that this little novel has quite the same caliber as “The Razor’s Edge” or my beloved “Of Human Bondage” (hence the 4 stars instead of 5), but it is a delightful part of Maugham’s catalogue, a gentle poke at a duplicitous society that caused him a lot of suffering and his upper-class attempt at forgiving the free-spiritedness and liberality of good-natured people who simply seek happiness. Sweetly nostalgic and very lovely!

[Sketchbook · Rating 3 out of 5]

At MOMs Villa Mauresque, 1949, he was ordering diaries, letters, personal papers grilled. Someday there'd be bios, he knew, and he wanted control, if possible, of the content. 20 years earlier he pondered his literary status and the problems of bio writing in this semi-satire, which tweaks the idea of A Literary Reputation. Hadnt Dickens, James, Samuel Johnson and Hardy burnt papers that might stain their Fame? Who has it, who doesn't and how some play the promotion game -- literary teas, and salons, courting critics. MOM offers witty and deadly examples of the upward Fame Game.

MOM also had something else in mind. His story is wrapped around a pushy, very popular novelist (Alroy Kear) who preens his careerism as he preps a bio of a lauded Victorian novelist (Edward Driffield) based on Thomas Hardy, recently deceased. MOM writes with his usual adroitness, moving easily from present to past. You will be impressed by his technical dexterity.

The Kear character is based on Hugh Walpole (does anyone read him today?), and MOMs real aim was to humiliate him for being a success. Jealousy, you know. A gadabout charmer, Walpole was liked by many, a mentor to many and with a good nature. MOM couldnt bear Walpole's personal and professional likeability.

Though MOM (smugly, perhaps) calls this a favorite novel of his, it does intrigue when all is said and done. The central woman named Rosie, Driffield's first wife, has won pundit praise for "delicious" characterization. But she's not as memorable as Julia Lambert in MOMs "Theatre," a terrific backstage comedy. Rosie, MOM let it be known -- or, flaunted? -- was based on his first, great love, actress Sue Jones who rejected his offer for marriage in 1914. So next came Syrie and Gerald Haxton. A good sport, Sue liked sex and slept around; she also had a warm, maternal personality.

In this story, Rosie Driffield sleeps around right and left, and her husband doesnt seem to know or care. It just doesnt make any difference. This fanciful "plotting" makes no sense. The real Rosie didnt have a husband. The fictional Rosie does. Other than Rosie's busy sex life we know v little about her or why she later leaves her getting-famous husband. MOM doesnt try to provide an answer. Driffield himself is a mere sketch : he's at his newspaper editing or in his sanctum writing madly, gladly away.

I think MOMs stuffed peppers are unbelievable here because he simply didnt care. He wanted to sound off on Fame and he just wanted to insult Walpole who'd been a friend for some years. Virginia Woolf chortled. "Poor Hugh," she wrote her sister in 1930, "it was a clever piece of torture...." With customary precision, MOM inserts himself into the saga as a young doctor who also beds the first Mrs Driffield. Her body "was made for the act of love." O Susie ! "The only color was the rosy pink of the hard nipples." And, then, he bursts into tears. ~~ I have to ponder this--.

[F.R. · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was given this book by a girl I dated a couple of times last year. On our second meeting she brought it along and dropped it into my lap with a casual “I think you’ll like this”. It was a bit of a surprise, as I don’t recall us having any particularly literary conversation the first time we met – and I’m certain that we never discussed Somerset Maugham. Nothing lasting developed between myself and this young lady, but I am thinking of getting in touch with her again to thank her once more – as her judgement has proved very much correct.

This is sharp and clever examination of literary reputations and the critics, poseurs and other interested parties who fuel them. Our narrator is asked for his reminiscences of a great author – Edward Driffield – who the narrator had met while he was a young boy and Driffield was a struggling writer. Since his death Driffield has been hailed by polite literary society as lion, a man whose work reflects impeccable taste of the world around him. But the figure our narrator remembers is a more roguish and wilder character; and besides he has stronger memories of Driffield’s wife – a former barmaid – who history dismisses as vulgar and of no importance, but is clearly one of the loveliest women our narrator has ever met.

For those with a yen for a particularly literary read, which is interested in authors and the world around them then ‘Cakes and Ale’ is highly recommended. It brought to mind both Gissing’s ‘New Grub Street’ and Byatt’s ‘Possession’; and in its depiction of literary life and of the way a reputation is shaped and preserved, it can perhaps be seen as the missing link between them.

[Susan · Rating 5 out of 5]

This novel was one of the very first I read from the adult section of the lending library, when I was finally allowed to ascend the stairs to what I perceived as, ‘the real books,’ and leave the children’s section behind. W. Somerset Maugham has always remained one of my favourite authors and re-reading this was a delight. It features a returning character; the narrator being William ‘Willie’ Ashenden. Much of this novel is autobiographical and, indeed, Maugham himself always said it was his favourite.

Ashenden is a novelist, who knew the great ‘man of letters,’ Edward Driffield as a young man. Driffield has recently died, leaving his widow, and former nurse, looking for a biographer to help present the vision of his life that she approves of. She asks Alroy Kear to write Driffield’s life and he, in turn, asks for Ashenden’s help. Ashenden knew Driffield well, and also his first wife, Rosie. Rosie is something of an embarrassment in terms of the biography – a former barmaid, she was notoriously unfaithful and Driffield’s widow is keen to play down her role.

This is very much a satire of literary London and you sense that Maugham is having a great deal of fun in writing this. He is keen to point out literary trends; gleefully pointing out that nobody remembers many of the people he met at literary soirees at the time. It is said that Edward Driffield was based on Thomas Hardy, while Alroy Kear, who approaches Ashenden for his reminiscences, is based upon Hugh Walpole. It was later suggested that this novel ruined Walpole’s literary reputation and, indeed, the remaining years of his life, although Maugham refused to acknowledge the suggested connections between the above mentioned authors and his characters. He certainly takes a side swipe at Evelyn Waugh (another favourite author of mine) and is at his best when sniping at the literary world and also laughing at himself as a young, priggish and snobbish youth.

Rosie, it is obvious, is not the embarrassment that Driffield’s widow wants her to be. As Ashenden recalls his life and his relationship with Driffield, it is Rosie who really comes to life on the page. Her character, charm, beauty and humour which draws everyone around her; like moths to a flame. This is a wonderful book and I am not surprised that Maugham wanted to be remembered for it. It contains much of himself and he obviously uses his young life to good effect, while cleverly poking fun at literary pretentions and how reputations are created.

[Bettie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Description: Cakes and Ale is a satire of London literary society between the Wars. Social climber Alroy Kear is flattered when he is selected by Edward Driffield's wife to pen the official biography of her lionized novelist husband, and determined to write a bestseller. But then Kear discovers the great novelist's voluptuous muse (and unlikely first wife), Rosie. The lively, loving heroine once gave Driffield enough material to last a lifetime, but now her memory casts an embarrissing shadow over his career and respectable image. Wise, witty, deeply satisfying, Cakes and Ale is Maugham at his best.

HUZZAH! Brazilliant has located an online version. Read here...

The full title is Cakes and Ale: or, The Skeleton in the Cupboard. The narrator is Ashenden, so does this mean Cakes and Ales is also semi-autobiographical? Ashenden is also the narrator of Maugham's novels The Moon and Sixpence and The Razor's Edge.

The skeleton in the cupboard seems to be a certain Rosie, a sweet barmaid with a broad libido - Edward Driffield's first wife. And Oh Larks! is Blackstable a skit on Whitstable?

Factoids from wiki: Cakes and Ale was first published in serialised form in four issues of Harper's Bazaar (February, March, April and June 1930). Maugham drew his title from the remark of Sir Toby Belch to Malvolio in William Shakespeare's Twelfth Night: "Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?"

5* Of Human Bondage
4* The Razor's Edge
4* The Painted Veil
4* The Moon and Sixpence
CR Cakes and Ale
4* The Collected Stories
3* The Magician
3* Ashenden
TR Liza of Lambeth
3* Mrs Craddock
3* The Narrow Corner
TR The Merry go round
TR The Chinese Screen
2* The Circle

[Zoeb · Rating 4 out of 5]

Actual Rating: 3.5 Stars

This was the first novel by William Somerset Maugham that I read; hitherto my only brush with him was with his charming book on Spain, "Don Fernando", last year and a little of his Ashenden spy stories and I had been impressed, if not completely won over by him yet. But "Cakes And Ale" had been lingering in my mind for a while - I had been intrigued by the premise of a novel that, as the blurb and numerous other reviews here on Goodreads said it, was a satirical story set in the English literary society of the early twentieth century and also a compelling character study of a rebellious, uninhibited woman through the eyes of an author and also of his own tumultuous relationship with the same. And Mr. Maugham's reputation as one of the most compelling masters of realistic fiction is well-known too and it was high time since I had embarked on discovering his fiction.

"Cakes And Ale" also carries with it some notoriety. Maugham was as interested in satirizing the cosy but stifling world of literary appraisal and praise and in carving out a spirited, effervescent and utterly unforgettable heroine who challenges and defies the norms of respectability of her times as he was in deconstructing, with blistering acid wit, the very idea and identity of a Grand Old Man of letters. The story, jumping forward and mostly backwards as a device of narrative flashbacks, that form most of the meat of the novel, is narrated by William Ashenden, Maugham's alter-ego, who also wields the same scabrous wit and biting tongue at fellow storytellers - the overly sycophant popular writer Alroy Kear is loosely based on Hugh Walpole who was even reportedly upset at this bit of blatant referencing while the late literary lion Edward Driffield, whose life Kear is about to chronicle and whose own innermost truths and memories Ashenden, associated with him since boyhood, revisits as well, was loosely based on Thomas Hardy himself. Maugham was never one to mince his words and through much of the novel, as Ashenden is reluctantly compelled to think and recall of his own memories and acquaintances with Driffield, and most notably with his first wife - the bubbly barmaid Rosie Gann - he also indulges fully his sarcastic views of the literary circles in which he himself moved and lends what could have been merely a wistful story of melancholia and lost love a hard, acerbic edge.

And yet, while I would have admired the same acerbic edge in any other novel, I could not help feeling that the writer's astute but also didactic soliloquies on the hypocrisy prevalent among popular writers, critics and their preening, earnest publicists get in the way of telling its real story - of an aging and disillusioned writer remembering and longing for a past of innocence, friendship and tumultuous love. It does not help that Ashenden is hardly a memorable enough character, let alone a memorable narrator - his voice is distinguished only because Maugham was a deft, elegantly crisp writer to begin with and not because he possesses any personality or distinction of his own. His subtly barbed observations and remarks about the people at whom he aims his cynicism bring welcome wit to the proceedings but they also turn didactic and self-indulgent; moreover, we are never really allowed to know Ashenden better to find out what really has made him so wary of people and this is why we never relate to him as a character.

And that is also a bit of a problem with the other characters in the narrative, in Ashenden's flashback narrative, that is. Almost everyone is one-note and one-dimensional and it does not help that they all appear either black or white. The society snobs and the respectable countrymen who frown and disapprove of Ted Driffield and Rosie's unorthodox ways in Ashenden's native hamlet of Blackstable as well as in London's intellectual gatherings are always devious and while Maugham balances that with a few chosen characters who still express a grudging admiration for these bohemians, it feels too weak to make a very strong argument in their favour. Much has been said about how Rosie, as the blurb itself puts it, is one of the writer's greatest female creations and indeed, from whatever we learn about her through the narrator's memories of first a boyish admiration for her charms and then a tempestuous affair at adulthood, she emerges as a fully fleshed woman, charming, demure, beautiful, sensual, free-spirited, enigmatic and gleefully rebellious. But again, the overbearing tenor of Ashenden's dislike of everyone else gets in the way in understanding or even experiencing her enigma to a greater extent.

It hurts, nevertheless, to lament these flaws of this novel because, despite all these failings, it is impossible to deny that Maugham was an extremely skilled writer - a storyteller gifted with dialogue and economy, with even the stirrings of atmosphere and milieu and inherently a storyteller who needed more room to cut loose and wield all his prowess more comfortably. "Cakes And Ale", when not rambling about how writers of limited talent become famous or how motherly society women lavish all their praise on novelists, is a deeply sad and exquisitely profound story of a bygone age and place, of a woman who was far ahead of her times, of a revered writer whom everyone admires slavishly but none understand and of a man who knew and understood both these people but cannot quite reconcile himself to what they meant for him in his life. It is about this spirit of freewheeling defiance, it is about honesty misunderstood for greatness or even notoriety and it is about the ecstasy and agony of falling head over heels in love regardless of consequences and losing it all in one swift stroke. The giddy thrill of defiance, the lingering melancholia of solitude and nostalgia, the heart-wrenching pain and jealousy of illicit - these are feelings that leak out through Maugham's clipped, concise but conversational prose and there are many small and vivid scenes that his words convey that linger indelibly in my mind.

The real broken heart and tortured soul of the novel, however, is one that is also criminally overshadowed by the writer's decision to remember only Rosie. Edward Driffield, the mildly eccentric writer to whom Rosie is married and whom she leaves, is that core of stifled pain and anguish that lies simmering at the crux of the novel. He is even more elusive and enigmatic than his wife and unlikely muse - we only see glimpses - and well-written glimpses at that - of a rebellious, free-spirited man trapped inside the entity of a venerated writer who has to be "respectable" and a hapless, melancholic romantic held at bay by his domineering second wife. Even as both Ashenden and Maugham don't quite linger to explore the troubled and pained genius of this man, the final chapter reveals a particularly poignant episode from his past wherein real life mirrors fiction and in the end, both the narrator and the author end up respecting Driffield and even themselves.

Yes, the writing is good, very good, and yet it's never good enough - at least for the story that it wants to tell. At times, Maugham stifles his own and his narrator's feelings too deliberately and after all that one feels, one yearns for more. This is not exactly a major fault with the novel, nor does it dim the emotional impact of the parts which succeed so admirably. It is just that great things are expected from great storytellers and I could not help feeling that at heart, "Cakes And Ale" is a story that deserved a bigger canvas to be told more convincingly and effectively. Or even a storyteller who could tell it with much more deftness even within the same length of two hundred pages (you would know whom I am referring to). Perhaps Maugham's bigger novels then are more rewarding. Still, as a first-time experience of his prose, this novel is far above the usual standard and deserves to be read by all.

[Haaze · Rating 4 out of 5]

"The writer of prose can only step aside when the poet passes; he makes the best of us look like a piece of cheese."
(W. Somerset Maugham)


Maugham's novel initially seems to focus on the literary world of England. The main character, Ashenden, is connected through space and time with the social world of an ascending author. At first I thought the novel only was a vehicle used by Maugham to criticize the literary world, i.e. the path to fame, who knows who, etc, but I was pleasantly surprised as the full spectrum of the novel developed. Maugham subtly weaved layers of circumstances between the different characters while simultaneously combining the present with vivid and engaging recollections from boyhood. It became a journey through memory with all its different facets from happiness to sorrow. I did get the feeling that Maugham shifted in his moods quite a bit while writing this novel. Sometimes he was extremely sarcastic (and funny) throwing literary barbs everywhere. At other times he is very nostalgic and sweet bringing forward the realms of memory and love with great poetic gusto. The novel truly shines in those chapters. It is a marvelous blend of life sparkling among these pages. It is lovely and will be reread. The novel has also sparked my interest in exploring additional works by Maugham. Cakes and Ale took me by surprise. It made me think about nostalgic moments in my own life and the flow of time. A wonderful novel!
4.5/5

[Daniel Villines · Rating 3 out of 5]

While there were moments, this is certainly not the best of Maugham’s novels, even though he personally referred to it as his favorite. The story is told in a meandering roundabout way that seems to bank on Maugham skill as a writer to write interesting things even if those things have very little to do with the plot. Maugham leads us through the minutiae of his characters, albeit with a skill that reflects his greatness as a writer, but at times I had to stop and wonder about the point of it all. It may be that Maugham was living in some episode of his past while he was writing in his present.

The heart of the story is actually very sweet. It tells of a coming of age story of a shy boy in his youth and his reflections on his youth in his later years. It tells of a girl that we could all judge as being loose or promiscuous, but Maugham manages to raise her above the judgments of his readers and his characters. She is the stated reason for Maugham’s calling this book his favorite, and given the tenderness with which he treats her, I suspect that he had the privilege of knowing this girl at some point in his life.

Three starts is a bit harsh, but four would be a bit much.

[Phrodrick · Rating 5 out of 5]

Bottom line first. W. Somerset Maugham Cakes and Ale is several things all of them well written. Highly recommended. Cakes and Ales can be read at several levels, from the surface level satire of the English literati to a Bildungsroman, or coming of age book. It is mostly family friendly, no bad words, violence but some may object to the presence of sex. The very young are likely to find it boring and the YA may miss some of the finer points. To draw my line under it. Maugham loves the gradual reveal, He is also a crafts man such that you can enjoy each page.

My relation with the works of Maugham is rather complex. I feel he is some one a well-read person should read. However, I tend his lighter fare and never quite get to his signature books. Thus, I have read the spy books but almost none of his heavies. Cakes and Ale was a book I picked up mostly on speculation. I was pleased to see that our first person narrator is named Ashenden. This is the name of the spy from his espionage books. This Ashenden is not that Ashenden, so I conclude that Maugham also liked his thrillers.

This Ashenden is an established writer of fiction. He may have had some degree of popularity but thinks of himself as too much of an artist to write to the lumpenproletariat. From the beginning he is cast against exactly that kind of writer. Alroy Kear is younger and deliberately more popular. In fact there is about 25 pages of narration by Ashenden as he praises/lampoons Alroy across the spectrum of his individual personality traits. Every aspect of Alroy is listed and brilliantly lambasted. By the end of this section I was not sure I liked Ashenden. He is a huge snob. Maugham will reveal that he has a deeper inner world.

Ashenden on Alroy Kear:
“I had watched with admiration his rise in the world of letters. His career might well have served as a model for any young man entering upon the pursuit of literature. I could think of no one among my contemporaries who had achieved so considerable a position on so little talent. This, like the wise man’s daily dose of Bemax, might have gone into a heaped-up tablespoon. He was perfectly aware of it, and it must have seemed to him sometimes little short of a miracle that he had
been able with it to compose already some thirty books. I cannot but think that he saw the white light of revelation when first he read that Charles Dickens in an after-dinner speech had stated that genius was an infinite capacity for taking pains. He pondered the saying. If that was all, he must have told himself, he could be a genius like the rest; and when the excited reviewer of a lady’s paper, writing a notice of one of his works, used the word (and of late the critics have been doing
it with agreeable frequency) he must have sighed with the satisfaction of one who after long hours of toil has completed a cross-word puzzle. No one who for years had observed his indefatigable industry could deny that at all events he deserved to be a genius. “


How much is Ashenden a snob? As much as I love the sarcasm, it is a tad self-serving:

“The Americans, who are the most efficient people on the earth, have carried phrase-making to such a height of perfection and have invented so wide a range of pithy and hackneyed phrases that they can carry on an amusing and animated conversation without giving a moment’s reflection to what they are saying and so leave their minds free to consider the more important matters of big business and fornication.”

Alroy has seized upon the recent passing of a major English literary giant as an opportunity to write a biography. He has made a relationship (pact?) with the author’s widow, Amy Driffield. She was the writers second wife and has an agenda concerning how she wants her husband to be remembered. Alroy is the perfect pick for what will be The Official Biography (all caps). There is a most inconvenient fact. Driffield had a first wife, and did his best writing while he was with her.
Rosie Driffield/Iggulden (née Gann) will not do. Everything about that part of Driffield’s early life is inappropriate. It was also the time when our narrator knew the soon to be romanticized dead man.
Ashenden is being asked to help Alroy with those parts of the biography that will not fit the image to be imposed on the dearly departed. The bulk of the novel consists of Ashenden’s memories of knowing Driffield and his first wife. First in his public school days and later as a not yet arrived literary figure. He is both a witness to and participate in a world far more alive and un-stuffy than he could have made for himself.

It is at this point that most of the satire falls away and we enter into the real narrative. His thoughts are very like those brought by The Ghost of Christmas Past: happy and bittersweet, but also formative. Cakes and Ale becomes the story of Rosie. She is a wonderful character. Where Driffiels is grand and grandiose; Rosie, is herself.

More than this risks too much of a spoiler. There is artistry in the mix of sharp satire and the narrators recounting of his younger days. .

[Classic reverie · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was ready to read William Somerset Maugham again and decided on "Cakes and Ale" not knowing what I had in store for me but looking forward to it nonetheless. A couple things; as I read this story I started enjoying it even though he was a tad verbose at times but when I came to the middle part and the last half I was thoroughly enjoying this story and after reading the last paragraph and thinking of it all, I loved it!💕💞 Also if you have not read Maugham yet, I would not start with this one but would read "Of Human Bondage" or "Liza of Lambeth" the reason being his thoughts on authors and that surrounds that topic might be a bit trying if just wanting to read a story not a dissertation. I enjoyed it but I did need my whole attention and mind which made it take longer plus looking up books, authors and other things unknown. Thank you, Maugham for all that. My "to read" list increased!🌸

I think an author would enjoy reading about what another author thinks of other authors and things that make up the life of authors. I kept wondering if Maugham actually felt and thought as the main character, Willie Ashenden did in certain authors and books. I love books that can be wordy and Victorian but had to laugh at Maugham because he did start to become what he did not like in other novels, verbose.


"They told me Carlyle was a great writer and I was ashamed that I found the French Revolution and Sartor Resartus unreadable. Can anyone read them now? I thought the opinions of others must be better than mine and I persuaded myself that I thought George Meredith magnificent. In my heart I found him affected, verbose, and insincere. A good many people think so too now. Because they told me that to admire Walter Pater was to prove myself a cultured young man, I admired Walter Pater, but heavens how Marius bored me!”

Also as I read this, I was thinking "Of Human Bondage", I wondered if Maugham was a doctor and after I finished I found out that he qualified as a doctor. I also wondered how much of this story was from his life and I found this from Wikipedia.

" In his introduction to aModern Libraryedition, published in 1950, 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."[1]"


I was wondering which Victorian author that he was thinking of when he wrote of Edward Driffield and who was Alroy Kear modeled after. Thomas Hardy was Driffield but with differences. Alroy Kear was suppose to be Hugh Walpole, it was not to pleasant for Walpole but there nonetheless. This is not a biography of either but they are the driving force for the made up characters.


In comparing the first and the second wives, you see such a difference in characters that is such a stark contrast. Should one be themselves or what society expects of them? One is praised for her behavior yet seems false and the other is more genuine and real but too common. Also the differences when going back home and seeing how you once saw people and life with eyes of inexperience and society's rules. This has a bit of bildungsroman story which you see the changes in Ashenden which make this a sort of "comimg to age" novel. Alroy Kear looking to make everything seem pretty in its package and bending the truths to be so and Ashenden seeing the beauty in imperfection that makes us more human and more perfect in the truth than false perfection.


There is so much to this story you can think about and wonder about that makes it a great read IMO.


The story in brief; Ashenden is wanted by fellow author Kear to remember the great author Driffield, who he knew in his youth. What you get is an elusive portrait of him but he becomes a little clearer when Rosie, his wife is part of the picture. This story is more about her and through her we find out a little more about him, yet still he is an enigma.


As always Maugham did not disappoint me!

[Sarah · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love books about sluts. And Rosie Driffield was a big ol' slut. Everyone who knows Rosie loves her. Everyone that doesn't know her hates her. She's a former barmaid and very much known for her promiscuity. Rosie slept with nearly every man that she met if she took the slightest liking to him, and she didn't feel even remotely bad about it. When Willie Ashenden was a boy, Rosie and her husband Edward befriended him. Many years later, he is asked to give his own personal recollections of Mr. Driffield, a known author of the time, to Alroy Kear who is also an author. Kear is writing a book on the late Mr. Driffield at the request of Edward's second wife. As Willie is reminiscing, he recalls his own affair with the lovely Rosie and comes to discover just how free she was with her favors.

[Shankar · Rating 5 out of 5]

Somerset Maugham has been one of my favourites since my college days. The short stories and the others like Of Human Bondage and Razor's Edge are so vivid in my memory.

This book is similar in its in rendition. Maybe in my long standing loyalty to his style or just the nostalgia of my college days that make me remember these.

Whatever the reason this book about Edward Driffield and Ashenden ( the narrator) is truly and engaging tale. I was pleasantly surprised to read in the GR author profile on Maugham that he was French and English was a language he learnt. Its no surprise how his English is so ...English...

His quote on Beauty - is only in the moment of beholding and then the lure dries up almost instantly...how the guide in a museum waxes eloquent about many things in relation to the history of an artefact do not end up making the visitors to the museum feel as elated or excited as their voice or energy- and many others in the book are strewn along the way as the story unfolds. Recently I had become a fan of Stefan Zweig and I am beginning to see some similarities in their storylines and how they are told - mainly in the language and style.

Recommended highly.

[Lavinia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Random reading. I wanted to read Maugham and I chose this one for no particular reason. I was almost tempted to put the book back on the shelf because of the uninspired Romanian translation - Life's pleasures - which sounds totally cheap, but I congratulate myself for checking the English title; at least it sounds interesting :)

I like a good satire every now and then. And this one was absolutely delicious. English society, mannerism, a writer's life, all these covered in witty, sharp and ironical observations.

I've noticed that many readers around here consider the novel to be Rosie's story, but from my point of view it's not clear whether it's Rosie's, Driffield's or Willie's. I think they call it talent.

Definitely try Maugham again.

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

My first Somerset Maugham book. A wonderful introduction to the authors prose. This satire about class, a thinly disguised description of perhaps Walpole and Thomas Hardy is an amusing read. Rosie, Driffield’s first wife is a free spirit compared to his second wife a snob and control freak trying to glorify his name through untruths.

The description of growing up in the seaside town and then the author going back years later shows him the changes. I liked the way Driffield did a bunk and move to London living an early bohemian life. All in all it has whet my appetite for more books by Somerset Maugham.