Cakes And Ale [Paperback]

Somerset Maugham had no inhibitions in writing about true-life characters, dead or alive.Indeed, he barely bothered to disguise them.This delightful and very funny novel deals with the legacy of a Thomas Hardy-type writer, meanwhile delivering a withering portrait of a Maugham contemporary, Hugh Walpole, author of the Herries Saga. Walpole considered himself a friend of Maugham's, and was most hurt by the betrayal. The book covers well the ways history is rewritten to preserve reputations and for other, less noble, reasons.

Here we have a real author (Somerset Maugham) creating a first-person narrator (William Ashenden), who is also a novelist (fictional, of course) and acquainted with another (more successful) writer, Alroy Kear. They disagree over the legacy of the now famous (but still fictional) Edward Driffield: Ashenden thinks "his novels rather boring" while Kear goes along with the consensus which acclaims Driffield "as the greatest novelist of our day". Such literary debate and layering of representations might seem unpromising material to all but those researching a thesis on metanarrative, but don't be put off: this is an engaging novel in which satire and intellect are leavened with humour and warmth and moments of surprising intimacy.

When Ashenden first met Driffield, it wasn't his writing that made an impression but the fact that he taught the young William to ride a bicycle. Integral with the physical thrill of wheeled motion was the knowledge he was disobeying his uncle and betraying his class. Growing up in his uncle's household, a vicarage, at a time in late Victorian society when vicars enjoyed high social standing, he is steeped in the attitudes of his class ("I couldn't possibly have anything to do with" children who go to the grammar school). He shouldn't have been associating with Driffield and his wife (Rosie, an ex-barmaid!) and should have been afraid of the consequences, of falling off, of being punished by his uncle, of being ostracized by his class, but, instead, by the end of the lesson, "I was laughing so much that I positively forgot all about my social status." Try as he might, it "was very hard under such circumstances to preserve the standoffishness befitting the vicar's nephew with the son of Miss Wolfe's bailiff."

Although the adolescent William does not know it and would have been horrified to have learned it, he has more in common with the Driffields than with his own family. It is not so much that he would move to London and move in the same circles as them, or that he would eventually become a writer himself. It is more about an attitude to life expressed many years later by Rosie: "Why not be happy with what you can get? 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." Today we are often indignant at high-street hedonism and at what constitutes a "good time" for other people, but, in the aftermath of World War I, the scale of destruction of young life was a recent and raw fact, and perhaps lends Rosie's view a more serious edge.

The theme of antagonism toward literature - toward telling the truth about life as best we can - is one of the ironic pleasures of reading this novel: if certain people had had their way, we would be denied such pleasures. One reviewer of Edward Driffield's "The Cup of Life" feared it might fall "into the hands of young boys and innocent maidens... The more foolish demanded that the book should be suppressed and some asked themselves gravely if this was not a case where the public prosecutor might with fitness intervene." Ashenden is as scornful of those who would ban Driffield's book (the only one he "should like to have written") as Somerset Maugham must have been of those who wanted to ban his own "Cakes and Ale". At one point Ashenden recalls his uncle's disapproval of a novel by Mrs Humphrey Ward, which "would unsettle people's opinions and give them all sorts of ideas that they were much better off without."

We never find out what was so provoking to the vicar, but we have a pretty good idea what it was about "Cakes and Ale" that the Malvolios of Somerset Maugham's day took such exception to. Toward the end of the novel, Ashenden defends Rosie in terms that even today might raise an eyebrow. "She was naturally affectionate. When she liked anyone it was quite natural for her to go to bed with him. She never thought twice about it. It was not a vice". Earlier, we learn that hers "was a body made for the act of love". Perhaps it was this kind of honesty, together with titillating phrases such as "hard nipples", which enraged the would-be censors? As twenty-first-century readers, we have to make some allowance for the stiff language of the era (perhaps only a character in a romance would now think of themselves as engaging in an "act of love"), but there is nothing in the book that would qualify for a bad-writing-about-sex award.

Ashenden is approaching old age and he tells his story with wry humour rather than bitterness. As a writer he admits that "as we grow older we feel ourselves less and less like God". As a man he recognizes that "from the earlier times the old have rubbed it in to the young that they are wiser than they, and before the young discovered what nonsense this was they were old too". Every reader of fiction must sometimes have wondered whether it's healthy to be so occupied "with the trivial concerns of imaginary people". Somerset Maugham, through his narrator Ashenden, gives us a wonderful reason why we are not wasting our time with novels: "if the proper study of mankind is man it is evidently more sensible to occupy yourself with the coherent, substantial, and significant creatures of fiction than with the irrational and shadowy figures of real life."

This was a good read and the second-hand copy was in excellent condition and very speedily despatched - altogether a good buy and great service.