Cakes and Ale starts out as a tale of literature and litterateurs: the writers and promoters of writers in London in the early 1930s. Each critique has me wondering, which popular writer is he talking about now?
The most shining characteristic of Alroy Kear was his sincerity. No one can be a humbug for five-and-twenty years. Hypocrisy is the most difficult and nerve-racking vice that any man can pursue; it needs an unceasing vigilance and a rare detachment of spirit. It cannot, like adultery or gluttony, be practiced at spare moments; it is a whole-time job…. Though I have finished few of his novels, I have begun a good many, and to my mind his sincerity is stamped on every one of their multitudinous pages.
Maugham’s story evolves into something much more interesting, as hinted by the otherwise inappropriate cover shown here. 1930 was, after all, the era of trains and motor cars, so why the coach and horses? They suggest that the narrator and his literary friends are stuck in concepts of gentility from an earlier day. Ashenden, the narrator, recalls his childhood in the Blackstable vicarage:
No one thought her [my aunt] a snob. It was accepted as perfectly reasonable. The banker had a little boy of my own age, and, I forget how, I became acquainted with him. I still remember the discussion that ensued when I asked if I might bring him to the vicarage; permission was reluctantly given me, but I was not allowed to go in return to his house. My aunt said I’d be wanting to go to the coal merchant’s next….
Blackstable does indeed have a local coal merchant who is called, in jest, Lord George because he is so grand in his dress and manners. Blackstable also has a local writer, not respected because his father was a Miss Wolfe’s bailiff and he has married a bar maid. Ah, the bar maid — there’s a character to set your class teeth on edge — and she is perfectly charming.
Driffield, the writer who married the bar maid, later becomes subject to gentrification by his second wife. His biographer now needs to purge Driffield’s earlier life of unsuitable tendencies.
“Do you remember what he sang?”
“Perfectly, ‘All Through Stickin’ to a Soljer’ and ‘Come Where the Booze is Cheaper’ were his favourites.”
“Oh!”
I could see that Roy was disappointed.
“Did you expect him to sing Schumann?” I asked.
“I don’t know why not. It would have been rather a good point. But I think I should have expected him to sing sea chanties or old English country airs, you know, the sort of thing they used to sing at fairings–blind fiddlers and the village swains dancing with the girls on the threshing floor and all that sort of thing. I might have made something rather beautiful out of that, but I can’t see Edward Driffield singing music-hall songs. After all, when you’re drawing a man’s portrait you must get the values right….”
The story is perfectly ironic. The fashionable biographer places his subject in an English-village style of life known only through literature. The writer, who really lived that life and tried to tell it true, can no longer be seen as what he was. Cakes and Ale is a morality story of how our class limitations control our understandings of both life and literature.
Posted by SilverSeason 
