![]() ![]() Distant in time and space from its material, the composition of the novel, which was to become his favourite book, was unexpectedly pleasurable and easy. Maugham believed that “it is the impressions of a man’s first twenty years which form him”, and at the age of 53 – and extracted from his turbulent marriage to Syrie Wellcome – he had chosen to look back at his boyhood on the Kentish coast and at his early adulthood as a medical student in London. “I have never felt entirely myself,” wrote Maugham, “till I had put at least the Channel between my native country and me.” Cakes and Ale or The Skeleton in the Cupboard was the first book that he completed at the Villa Mauresque on Cap Ferrat where he had gone to live in June 1927. “It’s very hard to be a gentleman and a writer.” Willie Ashenden ![]() “You’re queer fish, you writers.” Rosie Driffield
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