SHARAFF/SZE COLLECTION
Cakes and Ale (1930)
W. Somerset Maugham
A succès de scandale greeted the publication of Cakes and Ale, Somerset Maugham's satire of English literary life. Center stage in the novel Maugham later described as his favorite is the late Edward Driffield, the grand old man of English letters. It is his widow who engages one Alroy Kear, a eupeptic novelist and man-about-town, to write a biography of her husband. The skeleton in the closet is the enchanting and promiscuous Rosie Gann, Driffield's first wife, who has long since flown the coop.
Although Maugham did not identify her in this roman à clef, the inspiration for his deliciously amoral heroine was the actress Ethelwyn Sylvia Jones, the daughter of the playwright Henry Arthur Jones and the only woman Maugham really loved. In 1913 Jones had turned down Maugham's offer of marriage because she was pregnant with another man's child. "She had grave and maddening faults," Maugham wrote in a later preface to the book, "but she was beautiful and, notwithstanding her incontinence, good."
As for Driffield, London wags pointed out that he was a stand-in for Thomas Hardy, who had died two years earlier. "He was no more in my mind," Maugham wrote, "than George Meredith or Anatole France." But no one doubted that Hugh Walpole, who was fond of buttering up London critics and still very much alive in 1930, was a dead ringer for Alroy Kear.
Walpole had a bad time of it when he confronted his fictional self. In his journal he describes returning home one evening:
"Half-undressed sitting on my bed, picked up idly Maugham's Cakes and Ale.
Read on with increasing horror. Unmistakable portrait of myself. Never slept."
At four A.M. Walpole placed a call to Alexander Frere of Heinemann Ltd. demanding that the book be withdrawn. A month later he unburdened himself to Virginia Woolf, who describes Walpole's mental disarray in a letter to her sister:
"We had a terrific visitation from Hugh Walpole ... poor Hugh is most cruelly and maliciously at the same time unmistakably and amusingly caricatured.... He almost wept ... in telling us."
In a conciliatory letter Maugham wrote to Walpole, "I certainly never intended Alroy Kear to be a portrait of you. He is made up of a dozen people." However, many years after Walpole's death, Maugham acknowledged that he was, in fact, the model.
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