British Comic Novels

I enjoyed Cakes and Ale a fair bit.  I did find it a bit sad that Maugham, who was clearly poking fun at Thomas Hardy and mercilessly lampooning his frenemy Horace Walpole in this novel was so thin-skinned himself, actually taking another author to court to block the publication of a novel that satirized him.  It's not a good look for sure to be such a hypocrite.  I suppose he never really got over the fact that he wasn't a major literary figure, though he certainly produced a few solid novels.  I didn't actually care for Of Human Bondage much.  I liked The Razor's Edge better, though it is probably more of a tragicomedy than a comedy (and I think I still need to sit down and watch the whole movie, though I saw the opening scenes).  One of these days, I'll probably read The Painted Veil, though I'm in no hurry.  I suspect Cakes and Ale will likely remain my favourite of his books.

This dialogue involving Rosie (the somewhat slatternly first wife of the British literary lion (who was so clearly not Hardy, according to Maugham...)) was a bit droll, particularly as Maugham didn't seem to embody it or embrace the philosophy behind it: “Well, then. It’s so silly to be fussy and jealous. Why not be happy with what you can get? Enjoy yourself while you have the chance, I say; we shall all be dead in a hundred years and what will anything matter then? Let’s have a good time while we can.”

She put her arms round my neck and pressed her lips against mine. I forgot my wrath. ...

“You must take me as I am, you know,” she whispered.

“All right,” I said.

While I think the philosophy espoused by Rosie can certainly lead to extreme hedonism, if one also remembers to be kind, then it may not be such a bad way to look at things.  Of course, in today's world, our actions and inactions might well leave the planet nearly uninhabitable for humans in one hundred years, so I personally will probably never adopt such a devil-may-care attitude.

In contrast, I have never read anything by Evelyn Waugh and was coming to him new.  I believe I own essentially all of his short stories and novels with the exception of Love Among the Ruins (a political farcical novel that may not have aged that well) and Put Out More Flags.  I hadn't really been planning on reading Put Out More Flags, but this critic makes a lengthy case that it is in fact a very good novel, so I shall at least consider it.

I'm currently about 25% into Decline and Fall, his first novel, and it is a pretty good, if very broad, satire of English schools and schoolmasters.  (I get the sense that this novel succeeds where (for me) Amis's Lucky Jim never does.)  I have too many other things to read to make a sustained push into Waugh's oeuvre at the moment, but I'll probably get to Vile Bodies next year (perhaps right after I read Fitzgerald's The Beautiful and the Damned).  The fact that I do have them on my shelves and can just grab them as I head out for the train gives them a bit of a leg up.