{"id":60,"date":"2014-09-01T17:17:40","date_gmt":"2014-09-01T17:17:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/the-perfect-library.zonkdev.uk\/?p=60"},"modified":"2022-01-20T15:12:07","modified_gmt":"2022-01-20T15:12:07","slug":"60","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/the-perfect-library.org\/?p=60","title":{"rendered":"Cakes and Ale"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

\"Cakes<\/a>W. Somerset Maugham, Penguin Fiction, 1948.<\/strong><\/p>\n

William Somerset Maugham has fallen thoroughly out of literary fashion. But at the height of his fame he outsold most of his contemporaries including Joseph Conrad, Robert Louis Stevenson and James Joyce. Maugham himself admitted that he lacked imagination. His best known book, Of Human Bondage, <\/em>published in 1917, was semi-autobiographical. His other well-known novels, the Moon and Sixpence<\/em>\u00a0and\u00a0Cakes and Ale, <\/em>were both based on historical figures.<\/p>\n

In\u00a0Cakes and Ale,\u00a0<\/em>Maugham\u2019s central character, the famous\u00a0novelist Edward Driffield, was a thinly disguised portrait of Thomas Hardy. However, the damage inflicted on Hardy\u2019s legacy was as nothing to the hatchet\u00a0job Maugham did on the reputation of his friend and fellow novelist Hugh Walpole, barely disguised as the obnoxious Alroy Kear. Walpole was one of the first to read the novel. After returning home from the theatre, he wrote in his diary: \u201cHalf-dressed sitting on my bed, picked up idly Maugham\u2019s\u00a0Cakes and Ale<\/em>. Read on with increasing horror. Unmistakable portrait of myself. Never slept.\u201d<\/p>\n

Maugham\u2019s private life was, to say the least, unorthodox. As a young man he had \u201cmany\u201d homosexual liaisons but nevertheless married Syrie Wellcome, \u00a0the daughter of Thomas Barnado, founder of the Barnado’s Children\u2019s\u2019 Homes. Despite his marriage, the sexually predatory Maugham continued to swing like a sailor’s hammock in a gale. He had so many affairs, with both sexes, that one of his companions described him as the most sexually voracious man he had ever known.<\/p>\n

Between the wars, \u00a0Maugham joined the expatriates who lived on the stretch of coast between Nice and Monaco and held court at his mansion in Cap Ferrat. There were stories of nude bathing parties, drugs, lashings of champagne and nightly seductions of the local boys. Almost everyone who visited was shocked by his decadence. However, it seems that few establishment figures refused an invitation. T.S. Eliot, H.G Wells, Rudyard Kipling, The Duchess of Windsor and Winston Churchill all visited Maugham in the South of France and expressed their horror at what they encountered there. Old age and the Mediterranean sun were not kind to Maugham. Noel Coward waspishly referred to him as The Lizard of Oz.<\/p>\n

In the 1920\u2019s Maugham\u2019s reputation came to the attention of Scotland Yard. They warned his older brother, a High Court judge, that aspects of his behaviour were – at the time – illegal. Maugham ignored the warning and was eventually rewarded with the offer of a knighthood for services to literature. He turned it down, hoping for an Order of Merit.<\/p>\n

In 2009 a biography by Selina Hastings stripped away the establishment veneer that had protected Maugham and revealed him \u00a0as a rapacious and unbridled sex tourist of the most unpleasant kind. The Daily Mail asked, \u201cwas this the most debauched man of the 20th century?\u201d Based on the revelations in Hastings\u2019 book it seems like a reasonable question.<\/p>\n

If you\u00a0\u00a0Google \u201cCakes and Ale\u201d today \u00a0the top entry is a holiday park in Suffolk.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

W. Somerset Maugham, Penguin Fiction, 1948. William Somerset Maugham has fallen thoroughly out of literary fashion. But at the height of his fame he outsold most of his contemporaries including Joseph Conrad, Robert Louis Stevenson and James Joyce. Maugham himself admitted that he lacked imagination. His best known book, Of Human Bondage, published in 1917, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-60","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fiction","category-novels"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/the-perfect-library.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/the-perfect-library.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/the-perfect-library.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the-perfect-library.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the-perfect-library.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=60"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/the-perfect-library.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":346,"href":"https:\/\/the-perfect-library.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60\/revisions\/346"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/the-perfect-library.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=60"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the-perfect-library.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=60"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the-perfect-library.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=60"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}