The Skeleton in the Cupboard

Note: Maugham has been popular with hardcore pleasure readers (like me!) for going on a century now. In the parables The Razor's Edge, The Painted Veil, and The Moon and Sixpence, he gives implicit advice on how to live a flourishing life.  Where else will busy readers be exposed to Epicureanism? Life is short, so live and let live, and seek out delight as often as you can.

Cakes and Ale: Or, The Skeleton in the Cupboard - W. Somerset Maugham

Set in England, this novel’s time periods are the late Victorian and Edwardian eras, as seen from a writer looking back from around 1930.

The death of elderly writer Edward Driffield, by 1930 esteemed as the Last of the Victorians and recognized as an inimitable man of letters, gives the high-minded widow the opportunity to commission a biography that will relate the life and times with proper reverence. Having selected a best-selling writer to assist her, the two pump for background information a third writer - the narrator Willie Ashenden - one of the few still among the quick, of proper taste and station, to have known Driffield in youth.

The interview prompts Willie to hark to his youth and to his first meetings with Driffield in the 1880s, when Ted was still just an unknown with a passion for writing and his masterpieces were far from anybody’s wildest fancies.  Willie also reflects on Driffield’s first wife Rosie. Though the widow and the hack want Rosie conveniently forgotten, it is the mysterious Rosie who plays a major role in Willie’s story and in the story of the famous writer himself.

A free spirit, Rosie liberates Willie from small town conceit, pig-ignorance, and quirkiness. Her bolting also gives another woman the chance to work her PR magic to make Driffield the famous man of letters. Maugham hints we can’t always be sure about what is good or bad in every situation nor can we predict whether things will turn out good or bad in the long run.

The first-person narrative persona (the mask is maybe the most prominent modernist thing about Maugham) reveals the rest of the story of the skeleton. At first, we readers are made to think that there is not much to this tale but a Forster-like tweaking of respectability (Howards End) and advocacy for individual freedom (Where Angels Fear to Tread).

We soon find ourselves dealing with twists, however. The prose is spare, which contrasts with muddles and tangles the characters land themselves in.  The world-weary Maugham persona provides urbane asides about literary fashions, style, taste, and so-called Beauty (as subject to fashion as clothing). On the happy citizens of the Land of the Free:

The Americans, who are the most efficient people on the earth, have carried [ready made phrases*] to such a height of perfection and have invented so wide a range of pithy and hackneyed phrases that they can carry on an amusing and animated conversation without giving a moment's reflection to what they are saying and so leave their minds free to consider the more important matters of big business and fornication.

Maugham started his career in the late Victorian era and is one of the few major figures whose writing career spanned so much change. A doctor, Maugham brought to his narrative persona a matter-of-factness about the body and its vagaries; unsentimental about birth, death, and marriage; and for 1930 frank about women’s sexuality. Of the modest persons, gentlemen of small means, clergymen, retired officers in the countryside in the 1890s, candid Maugham says:

…People who were condemned to spend their lives within a mile of one another quarreled bitterly, and seeing each other every day in the town cut one another for twenty years. They were vain, pig-headed, and odd. It was a life that perhaps formed queer characters; people were not so like one another as now and they acquired a small celebrity by their idiosyncrasies, but they were not easy to get on with.

The skeleton in the cupboard of the sub-title is Rosie. Her free and easy ways express a tolerant attitude about life in this uptight and messed-up world. At the end of chapter XVII pleasure-seeker Rosie reasons Willie out of his irrational jealousy over her sexing it up with other men. She argues by obsessing about her other affairs, Willie himself undermines the sexual satisfaction and emotional contentment he can get in the here and now. She argues her affairs don’t offer him any harms or threats so he is much better off not worrying about concerns that are none of his business.

Rosie advises that Willie had better take the long view. Soon enough, everybody we know will be gone and the things we thought so important will be dust. Nothing is so important that we need to make ourselves miserable and self-pitying and frustrated by fretting and stewing and ruminating about it. Nothing.

Take other people as they are, life as it really is. The tolerant acceptance of reality, both good and bad, will inspire and set Willie free. He had better focus on managing his own responses to his feelings, other people, events, and then nothing can hold him back. 

Maugham is often beaten up for his alleged icy detachment, his harsh cynical take on ordinary people who do their best only to screw up time after time. But I think he implicitly advocates the ideas above – being present, minding your own business, view from above (a.k.a. taking the long view), disputing irrational beliefs, using free will to embrace necessity - as reasonable ways to deal with the inevitable troubles life throws in our path. And Maugham’s enduring popularity with hardcore readers like us - outsiders, dreamers, rebels, seekers, malcontents, beats, scamps, and slackers – is due to his focus on the ethical question, “How should we live.”

* We're still good at them <sigh>: the bottom line; it is what it is; at the end of the day; iconic; silver bullet; obsessed; side-hustle; and wait for it.