There are books one reads, and books one is quietly read by. Somerset Maugham’s Cakes and Ale falls into the latter camp – it observes you from over the rim of its brandy glass, raises a bemused eyebrow, and says absolutely nothing. Not because it’s shy, but because it knows better than to interrupt the theatre of human absurdity. And in that silence lies one of its most devastating gifts: the gentle, unflinching exposure of the masks we wear — particularly those of the ‘literary’ variety.
Ostensibly, this is a novel about a dead author and the sanitised myth-making that inevitably follows a writer’s demise. But it is really a story about truth — not the sort that wins court cases, but the squishier, stickier kind that lingers in memory and motive and wine-stained recollection. The narrator, William Ashenden (a thinly veiled Maugham himself), is tasked with contributing to a polished biography of the now-canonised novelist Edward Driffield — a once mildly scandalous bohemian turned posthumous national treasure. But as Ashenden sifts through the layers of legacy and literary revisionism, he reveals a version of Driffield — and more importantly, of Driffield’s exuberant first wife — that threatens the clean narrative preferred by posterity.
Now, to say this is a satire would be both accurate and misleading. It is, of course, a deeply funny book — one that quietly mocks the preening manners of writers, biographers, critics, and those dreadful people who speak reverently of ‘great literature’ while never once considering whether the subject liked a decent curry or had false teeth. But Cakes and Ale is also compassionate. Maugham doesn’t despise the people he skewers. He sees them clearly — which is far crueller — and forgives them anyway. Even the pompous Alroy Kear (a character widely understood to be a jab at Maugham’s contemporary Hugh Walpole, though Maugham, like all good gossips, denied it with just enough ambiguity to keep the rumour alive) is portrayed with an almost surgical sympathy.
The phrase ‘cakes and ale’ comes from Twelfth Night, where Sir Toby Belch — drunk and unrepentant — rebukes the killjoy Malvolio: “Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?” That line could well serve as Maugham’s spiritual manifesto. This is a novel that defends pleasure, laughter, physicality — not in a hedonistic sense, but as an antidote to the arid moralism of those who try to turn life into a tidy résumé of virtues. It reminded me a little of C.S. Lewis’ distinction between joy and mere ‘fun’ — but with Lewis scrubbed of his pipe-smoke seriousness and sprinkled instead with a touch of Oscar Wilde, a squeeze of Dorothy Parker, and a very English shrug.
Reading this, I was haunted not by ghosts, but by the spectres of sanitised greatness. We’re forever turning human beings into statues — often by stripping away the flesh that made them interesting. Maugham’s target is not the author per se, but the literary estate: the committees, foundations, and critics who chisel away the inconvenient bits of biography until what’s left is a dull marble god who liked tea and wrote sensible things about sunsets. What he offers instead is a novel that feels like overhearing a conversation at a private dinner party — the sort of dinner where someone laughs so hard they spill gravy and someone else gets quietly naked upstairs.
But beneath the satire lies a rather earnest question: What is art, and where does it come from? Maugham suggests that it doesn’t arise from moral superiority or social conformity — quite the opposite. It emerges from messiness, from contradiction, from the warm-blooded, half-remembered chaos of real life. The very people we push to the margins — the Rosies of the world — might in fact be the muses, the life-force, the ones who unknowingly make beauty possible. But they are rarely the ones awarded plaques or library wings.
As someone who has loitered at the edges of both literary and ecclesiastical worlds — places equally obsessed with image, reputation, and legacy — I found Maugham’s irreverence deeply comforting. It reminded me that one can be clever without being cruel, honest without being severe, and above all, wise without being tedious. He shares with George Eliot the ability to see human folly and still lean toward mercy. But where Eliot weeps, Maugham smirks.
I came away from Cakes and Ale not merely entertained but lightened — relieved, even. Not because it avoids hard truths, but because it refuses to dress them in solemn robes. Instead, it dresses them in slightly rumpled linen, pours a drink, and invites them to dinner. And when the meal is over, it reminds you that virtue without laughter is just another kind of death.
It’s an antidote, this book — to pretension, to pomposity, and to the great British disease of Taking Oneself Too Seriously. And as a writer, reader, and habitual over-thinker, I am very grateful for the cure.
Wording 