W. Somerset Maugham, _Cakes and Ale_

THE BUBBLE REPUTATION...when I was in middle school and high school, I repeatedly got the impression that Maugham was a serious and respected novelist. While I was in college, though, my teachers never mentioned him, and none of my fellow students seemed to have read him (we had all read Kerouac, Salinger, Hesse, Plath, Vonnegut, Catch-22, and they came up a lot).

When I was in graduate school in Chicago, I could find copies of The Razor's Edge, The Moon and Sixpence, and Of Human Bondage in practically any used book store I entered, but none of my fellow students dropped his name, and my teachers ignored him or even chuckled a little dismissively if he came up.

He seems to have fallen off the map as a topic of scholarship. The research library nearest me holds only two books about him published this century, both biographies. The list of scholarly articles looks similarly lean.

And that, briefly, is why I never bothered to read a single thing by W. Somerset Maugham, until this month.

I picked up Cakes and Ale because I had read that Hugh Walpole (a British novelist who was a contemporary of Maugham, very successful during his lifetime, but now even more neglected than Maugham) was so mortified by his all-too-recognizable likeness in a character in Cakes and Ale that he thought he could never show his face in public again. He recovered enough from his embarrassment to resume his social life, but some say Walpole felt himself in the shadow of Maugham's caricature for the rest of his life.

I have to admit--I was curious. What kind of caricature could be that devastating?

So I read Cakes and Ale. And enjoyed it, actually. Maugham was a pro.

Cakes and Ale is narrated by a novelist named Ashenden, who has accepted a lunch invitation from another novelist, Alroy Kear. Kear is the Walpole character, depicted as having a modest-to-negligible talent for writing, but a preternatural genius for schmoozing and networking. Kear has landed an appointment as official biographer of another novelist, the late and well-respected Edward Driffield, through his careful cultivation of Driffield's widow and second wife, who has high hopes that the biography will secure her late husband's status as a major British novelist. Kear knows that Ashenden, as a young man, was acquainted with Driffield, and is hoping to pump him for his memories of the great writer.

Well, this is interesting, yes? The novel goes on to alternate between Ashenden's memories of Driffield and the first Mrs. Driffield, Rosie, a former barmaid and someone who like a good time, and his fencing with Kear and the second Mrs. Driffield over who Driffield was and who Rosie was. Moving back and forth like this between two time-frames, between the story's past and its present, takes skill, and Maugham does it masterfully. He also does a great job of bringing out Rosie as a character--she turns out to be a much more central figure in the novel than her husband.

Maugham explores some interesting ideas about the relation of fiction to experience, and (like Henry James in "The Aspern Papers") scholarly readers' somewhat vampiric relationship to the secrets of a dead writer.

I can also see why Walpole would have been mortified.

Not sure when I will have the time to look at another novel by Maugham, but this one made a favorable impression.