Somerset Maugham's Cakes and Ale (“Dost thou think because thou art virtuous there shall be no more cakes and ale?”- Twelfth Night) takes for its theme the doubleness of human character, ranging from the calculated hypocrisy of the “virtuous” (exemplified by literary opportunist and would-be biographer Alroy Kear) to the animal weaknesses of the goodhearted yet unreformable (Rosie, former barmaid and first wife of distinguished novelist Edward Driffield) and finally-and perhaps most interestingly-the doubleness that lurks at the root of the writer's heart (the recently deceased Driffield, but also Ashenden, Maugham's narrative voice and alter ego), the writer who is capable of exploiting his most intimate experiences, coldly, for the sake of his art. After World War II, Maugham made his home in south of France and continued to move between England and Nice till his death in 1965. He travelled all over the world, and made many visits to America. In this context, his plain prose style was criticized as 'such a tissue of clichés' that one's wonder is finally aroused at the writer's ability to assemble so many and at his unfailing inability to put anything in an individual way.ĭuring World War I, Maugham worked for the British Secret Service. Maugham wrote at a time when experimental modernist literature such as that of William Faulkner, Thomas Mann, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf was gaining increasing popularity and winning critical acclaim. For ten years before his first success, he almost literally starved while pouring out novels and plays. His parents died early and, after an unhappy boyhood, which he recorded poignantly in Of Human Bondage, Maugham became a qualified physician. He spoke French even before he spoke a word of English, a fact to which some critics attribute the purity of his style.

William Somerset Maugham was born in Paris in 1874.

Cakes and Ale by W. Somerset Maugham