The Artist and Outsider in Society

I’m still on my Somerset Maugham jag. Today’s novel is “Cakes and Ale.” Like all Maugham’s fiction, it somehow becomes a fascinating exploration of how we should live, and how not. I still see “The Razor’s Edge” as the peak of these investigations. But this one also goes deep. The narrator, initially as a boy being raised by a repressive clergyman uncle in a small English town, has tried unsuccessfully to learn to ride a bike. A young couple approaches him on their own bicycles, and they proceed to teach him how to balance on his contraption. The man is a writer, and his wife is a lovely former barmaid about whom there are ample rumors around town. They’re both outsiders to “polite society” both because of their poverty and their backgrounds. They befriend the boy, who is innocent of their reputations, and he becomes a part of their lives. The man comes to be one of the most famous and celebrated authors of the day. But the main focus of the story is actually on his wife, Rosie, who is sometimes described as “one of the most delightful heroines” of twentieth century literature. She’s blond, small waisted, and amply blessed, as country star Dolly Parton might say. She has a good sense of humor, a constant friendliness, and “mischievously smiling” eyes.

The narrator grows up and surprisingly becomes Rosie’s lover, as perhaps do many other of her acquaintances, across a wide range of ages. After a passage whose explicitness surprised me for something written in England in the late 1920s (page 142 in my paperback edition), our narrator, who is now himself an author, describes Rosie’s physicality, as she admires herself in a big mirror after one of their dalliances, with the words, “It was a body made for the act of love.” And this, it turns out, is clearly a favorite act of hers, to be experienced often. She spends intimate time with favored male friends as others might go out to coffee or take a walk. And she strikingly ends up for a time being the most admired character in the story, perhaps for her natural and unfettered sensibilities, which I suspect was a bit scandalous an implication for the era in which the story was written. And yet, in the end, she seems to lack a normal sensitivity to the feelings of others, as her natural whims take her on adventures apart from their expectations and emotional needs. Is she a hero freed of artificial constraints, or an egoist oblivious to the needs and sensibilities of others? But as you might imagine, much of the book is also a reflection on the life of a writer, in general, and on broader issues of public acceptance and popularity. Some non scandalous excerpts:

She talked with a kind of eagerness, like a child bubbling over with the zest of life., and her eyes were lit all the time by her engaging smile. I did not know why I liked it. (53)

The ideal has many names and beauty is but one of them. (92)

The elect sneer at popularity; they are inclined even to assert that it is a proof of mediocrity; but they forget that posterity makes its choice not from the unknown writers of a period, but from among the known. (91)

He was pleased and flattered. It is always pleasant to be assured that you are a genius. (127)

As we grow oder, we become conscious of the complexity, incoherence, and unreasonableness of human beings … (140)

I saw that Roy was not inclined to be amused. I did not mind, for I am quite used to people not being amused at my jokes. I often think that the purest type of the artist is the humorist who laughs alone at his own jests. (107)

For the book, click HERE.