In this roman à clef, the author contrasts Victorian repression with the freer attitudes, values, and behaviors of the 1920s. The novel’s protagonist is Willie Ashenden, a representation of Maugham himself. Ashenden, a writer, is friends with another writer, Alroy Kear, whom Maugham based on the novelist Hugh Walpole (eventually admitting the correspondence), a writer of modest talent and large sales of titles he tailors to the tastes of a mass audience.
Kear is about to undertake the task of composing a biography of the great Victorian writer Edward Driffield (based on Thomas Hardy), author of the controversial novel The Cup of Life (an amalgam of Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure). Since Ashenden had been associated with Driffield and his first wife, Rosie (Maugham’s original creation and the symbol of the new century’s liberation), Kear wants information about the great man’s earlier life.
W.Somerset Maugham
His motivating force is Driffield’s second wife, Amy, who has appointed herself to be the guardian of the great man’s memory. The biography she wants Kear to write is to be a reverential and heart-warming picture of noble artistry; Ashenden, however, knows that Driffield’s early life and his relationship with his first wife do not fit the mold in which Amy and Kear intend to cast the biography. He knows that the true story is much less typically Victorian, much more complex, and a much greater affirmation of the human potential to create and share joy. He knows that, in order to tell the truth, Kear will have to forgo easy platitudes and comforting stereotypes in preference to the iconoclastic particularity of unique real lives.
Maugham structures his story in a series of long flashbacks initiated by Kear’s request and by an invitation from Amy Driffield. After his first conversation with Kear, Ashenden recalls how he met Edward and Rosie Driffield: as a boy, Ashenden’s uncle and guardian served as the vicar of Blackstable, the coastal town that was also the home of the Driffields. While Ashenden was still a boy in public school, he met the Driffields during school vacation; as a young Victorian enmeshed in a form of training designed to prepare him for a position of influence in the English social hierarchy, Ashenden had not yet learned to question the establishment. He embraced the snobbery of the English class system as a matter of course—and he found Driffield to be a rather common person of no great distinction, drawing this conclusion on the basis of his uncle’s report of Driffield’s marriage to a local barmaid.
Upon receiving an invitation from Amy to visit her at Blackstable, Ashenden once again returns to his memories of the great man. In time, he had overcome his initial disinterest; in fact, Edward and Rosie Driffield had taught Ashenden how to ride a bicycle and then had invited the boy along on numerous outings. During their acquaintance, Ashenden had gradually realized that Rosie was unfaithful to her husband—but that awareness mystified him, since the two seemed to have a happy and fulfilling personal relationship.
By the time Ashenden is a young man studying medicine in London, he is once again introduced into the Driffields’ circle, and this time his curiosity about Rosie—a beautiful, loving, and unselfish woman—is resolved in an unexpected way. Even after the Driffield marriage dissolves, Ashenden maintains an infrequent acquaintance with Rosie, who eventually relocates to New York and lives to be a wealthy and contented widow.
As Ashenden relates what he knows of Rosie and Edward, Kear and Amy present a contrasting view: they see Rosie in particular as a promiscuous woman who need not be given the respect of serious consideration. The sympathetic and admiring view of her that Ashenden presents upsets the simple stereotype of Edward Driffield they had planned to create. Revealing their own backward-looking acquiescence to Victorian repression, they wish to depict Edward Driffield as a pillar of conventional morality, even though his novels constitute an attack on that very concept and despite the fact that his life had been anything but conventional until old age and disease weakened him.
In contrast, Ashenden recognizes that Rosie’s spontaneous, unself-conscious sexuality and her generous love provided Driffield with the example of a life lived beyond the bounds of repression and enabled him to create characters who could cast off the repression of the past and create a new model of human relationships—a modern story very much worth the telling.
Bibliography
Curtis, Anthony. The Pattern of Maugham: A Critical Portrait. New York: Taplinger, 1974.
Curtis, Anthony, and John Whitehead, eds. W. Somerset Maugham: The Critical Heritage. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987.
Morgan, Ted. Maugham. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1980.
Categories: British Literature, Literature, Novel Analysis
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