Cakes and Ale by W. Somerset Maugham
One look at Rosie and Willie Ashenden is knocked for six. Trouble is, he’s just a boy and not only is Rosie married, she’s the village scandal.
Overcoming his prejudice against the lower classes, Ashenden deigns to befriend Rosie and Ted Driffield, the latter set to become one of England’s most celebrated novelists.
“I don’t like going for walks, and I’m not interested in other people’s chickens.”
Years later, after Driffield’s death, trashy novelist Alroy Kear begins to write Driffield’s biography. He begs Ashenden’s help, but there are a few skeletons from those way-back days that Ashenden’s not sure he’ll share with a biographer as clean-nosed and censorious as Kear.
“People have so much more respect for a novelist if he writes something serious now and then.” 98
“After mature consideration I have come to the conclusion that … intelligent people after the age of thirty read nothing at all.”
There are plenty of laughs and bon mots in this satire of literature and class. The literary world is well-roasted: authors are celebrated for their age not talent, wives are snubbed, literary critics are bribed, and the mark of a gentleman’s literary distinction is his sanitary, discreet, heroic text.
“We all know that there are coarse and wicked and vicious people in the world, but I don’t see what good it does to write about them.” 81
Unfortunately, Ashenden lapses into tedious discourses that stifle the forward-motion of the story, and the description of Rosie as a white nigger makes for uncomfortable reading.
Though Rosie captivates Ashenden from the start, she only gets her own voice at the very end of the narrative, as a baggy old widow. It’s a moving scene with critical revelations, and in it we see that the dreary wives, overlooked and socially slighted, are by far the most interesting characters of all.
