He was married twice, once to Rose, a country girl and then to his nurse. Driffield came from the village of Blackstable, Kent.
Nothing to be proud of, obvious as it is. I’d never heard of Walpole before but from the very beginning, Driffield reminded me of Thomas Hardy. Then Guy, seeing in the Currently Reading pad that I was reading Cakes & Ale, mentioned that Kear was supposed to be Walpole and Driffield, Thomas Hardy. I picked up Cakes and Ale without knowing anything about its background and I sure didn’t expect a satire of London’s literary life. Ashenden starts reminiscing about his past and relates the reader how he met and started to see Edward Driffield. Kear needs writing material about this part of Driffield’s life. Ashenden befriended Edward Driffield at the time he was married to his first wife Rose. Kear intends to write a biography of Edward Driffield, a famous Victorian writer that Ashenden happened to knew in his youth.
Add to this perfect skills to manage his literary career and you have a pillar of the London literary world.Īshenden knows that Kear wants something from him to issue such an invitation. In our modern world, Kear would be a novelist who dutifully attended creative writing classes, understood the rules and became a good enough craftsman to be widely read. I could think of no one among my contemporaries who had achieved so considerable a position on so little talent. Kear is a very successful writer of honest novels but he’s without the literary gift he’d need to reach immortality. He’s surprised when his fellow writer Alroy Kear invites him to lunch. He’s middle aged, a bachelor who lives in a boarding house. He’s a writer, not an excellent one, according to him. It proved to be a great idea, stress-wise and literary wise. As my mind stretched out to grab a healthy dose of humour to ease the stress, reading Cakes and Ale, or the Skeleton in the Cupboard seemed to be a sort of supreme irony. Recently, a lot of skeletons fell onto me when I opened cupboards at work. Cakes and Ale : or the Skeleton in the Cupboard by William Somerset Maugham.
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