There are some brilliantly vicious lines detailing the colleague: “I could think of no one among m y contemporaries who had achieved so considerable a position on so little talent.
The book is really really British, brimful with snark and occasional pomp, and Maugham evinces a near total command of the language he employs, which is precise and droll and often grey. The narrator, Ashenden, is approached by a writerly colleague for material for a biography being written on another writer, Edward Driffield, who has recently died, a giant of English letters. How wonderful it is to have discovered that an old favorite book can also be a new favorite!Ĭakes and Ale is a novel that reads like a partial memoir, both in the history surrounding its release and in the way that Maugham frames his story. Perhaps because I was so young and knew so little, I didn’t then appreciate the pathos of this fantastically well crafted little book. For a while, I considered it one of my favorite books, always with the secret hope that I would miraculously mature into a writer like Ashenden. I read it twice that year, almost back to back, with only Of Human Bondage in the middle. I picked it up in a second hand book shop, titillated by its pulpy cover and the promise of scandal.
Somerset Maugham’s Cakes and Ale I was almost 15 years old.
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