ABSTRACT
Somerset Maugham When Cakes and Ale was first published a lot of fuss was made in the papers because in the character I had called Edward Driffield I was supposed to have had Thomas Hardy in mind. It was in vain that I denied it. It was in vain that I pointed out to the journalists who came to question me how different the life of my hero was from that of Thomas Hardy. It is true that both were of peasant stock, that both had written novels of life in the English countryside, that both had been twice married and that both in their old age had achieved fame. But that was the beginning and the end of the resemblance. I met Thomas Hardy but once and that was at a dinner party in London when the ladies, as is the custom in England, had retired from the dining room to leave the men to drink their port and over coffee and brandy discuss the affairs of the nation. I found myself sitting next to him and we talked together for a while. I never saw him again. I knew neither of his wives. I believe the first, unlike the Rosie of my book, who was a barmaid, was the daughter of a minor dignitary of the Anglican Church.1 I never visited his house. In fact, I knew no more of him than what I had learnt from his works. I have no recollection of what we talked about on that occasion and remember only that I took away with me the impression of a small, gray, tired, retiring man who was, though not in the least embarrassed to be at such a grand party as that was, no more intimately concerned with it than if he had been a member of the audience at a play. I surmised that if he had accepted the invitation of our hostess, who was something of a lion hunter, it was because he had not known how to refuse it without discourtesy. There was certainly nothing in him of the somewhat freakish and ribald attitude toward life which was characteristic in his old age of Edward Driffield.
