Reading Roundup, June 2025
Jul. 3rd, 2025 06:02 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
phantomtomatoI read other things after the dark academia! Though honestly the second book took me two weeks and I finished it up just yesterday; let us forgive this slight accounting error and treat it as June. In July I’m planning to try Emily Tesh’s The Incandescent and one of my bookstore backlog items, but as always, we’ll see what turns up. Hope you’re staying cool and enjoying some fresh produce. My red currant bush was so productive in its first fruiting year and I’m delighted.
Cakes and Ale, W. Somerset Maugham
Maugham’s Wikipedia page contains an involved discussion of his literary mediocrity, detailing criticisms of his output both contemporary and retrospective. Particular attention goes towards his supposed lack of brilliance and beauty, despite the clever correctness of his prose and storytelling. I would have understood that, perhaps agreed with it, until I reached the final chapter of Cakes and Ale.
This is a classic sort of navel-gazing novel in which an author writes a fictionalized sketch of things known from life. Willie Ashenden (not the spy novel protagonist; Maugham reuses his name here) narrates in the first person as he navigates a present-day friend’s attempt to write a post-mortem biography of a dead Great Author. The friend, Alroy Kear, knew the Great Author, Edward Driffield, later in Driffield’s life. He wants Ashenden’s youthful recollections of the author before he was great, when they were acquaintances in the same small village. Ashenden reminisces about his life and knowledge of Driffield.
This framing belies how much the story turns on its female characters. The largest presence is Driffield’s first wife, Rose, a beautiful former barmaid. But more retiring personalities, like Driffield’s second wife or his literary patron Mrs. Barton Trafford, play important roles in the sequence of events which make up Driffield’s reputation as one of the greats.
This is absolutely a book about authors and their reputations, and that kind of inwardly-focused interest can be off-putting. Maugham’s take is full of wry little commentaries which are probably even better appreciated by a reader more widely familiar with late Victorian and Edwardian authors. He makes many digs at Henry James. The book uses this focus to contemplate legacy broadly, and the effort which goes into shaping it. This is what makes Cakes and Ale worth reading. Ashenden and Kear, through their contrasts, illustrate different approaches to the cultivation of ambition, something that we see through their responses to reflecting on Driffield’s life. Kear chooses to memorialize and edit, agreeing ultimately with the second wife who has spent decades reworking Driffield into a presentable society man; this biography is her culminating effort. Ashenden comes away only more strongly appreciative of Driffield’s common interests and the ways he bucked tradition, especially through his first marriage to Rose and the ways that she inspired his work.
Really, what Ashenden finds in all of that is not Driffield’s personality or his writing, but the force that was Rose, and how significantly that relationship shaped what came to define his career. The marriage was disreputable: they created scandals both sexual and financial, though on a scale small enough to be easily forgotten with time. And Driffield’s second wife is counting on that, and on Kear’s discretion. But Ashenden’s reflections result in a revelation which ties back beautifully to his earlier comments on Driffield’s writing. This reveal recontextualizes Rose and that first marriage, and it’s deeply emotional, speaking to something that I feel in my own writing—that I put truths of myself into it—which was such a strong end to the book. It’s a quick and easy read, and I would recommend it.
Lord Dismiss Us, Michael Campbell
Terence P. Carleton is a senior prefect at the Weatherhill School starting his final summer term. He’s already sat his exams and will be headed to Oxford in autumn. A new Head of school, Crabtree, and his wife and teen daughter are beginning at Weatherhill following the prior Head’s death. Existing masters, like the old Dr. Rowland and young Cambridge scholar Eric Ashley, must adjust to the new Head’s regime; a wide cast of secondary characters includes the school reverend Cyril Starr and a pretty, new boy named Nicky Allen.
This 1960s portrait of British public schools was written to be contemporary and critical, for the discerning adult reader. It’s blurbed by Christopher Isherwood. Campbell set out to write a fictional treatise on homosexuality in schools, and he covers his subject to an amazing extent. Crabtree wants to root out this “muck” and will extract blood by the end of term. Dr. Rowland is the repressed older teacher; he initially turns a blind eye towards sex and romance among the boys, but is swayed towards Crabtree. Ashley is the wild young instructor still reeling from his own boyhood romance, driven to ever-more instability by the eradication crusade. Reverend Cyril Starr might not desire fleshly things, but he does collect a stable of his favorite type of boy. And the boys, well—Carleton falls for Allen and is absurd in his ascetic attempt to keep that love pure, i.e. nonsexual. Most other named boys in the book are fucking someone. The ones who aren’t become arms of Crabtree’s crusade. It’s a messy, homosocial, homosexual world in which women and girls are foreigners or enemies, but the greatest enemy of all remains the patriarchal definition of acceptable masculinity.
This book is difficult to discuss without spoilers for its events because the central plot to eliminate homosexual behavior drives everything for the characters. I think the best way to explain is to say that Crabtree and his family represent a force of regressive reformation: a return to idealized traditionalism, with all of the gay stuff edited out. Crabtree wants school spirit and manly sports and some academic merit at Weatherhill, but without such modern invasions as the masters falling in love and marrying wives, or female employees being notable community members. (He sacks a popular female nurse.) That this is so at odds with the goal of promoting heterosexuality escapes him.
Dr. Rowland embodies one side of the conflict. He’s a math instructor and Carleton’s head of house, and he’s taught for 47 years. Under the old head, he was permissive of the school standard wherein boys carried on romances and flirtations. Rowland is the archetype of the contented eternal bachelor, a creature of the School, and so definitely part of its homosocial/sexual fabric—but Rowland loved the old head, seemingly not explicitly romantically, and any desire he has or has not felt has been subsumed by math. He disdains strong emotion. Though he starts out opposed to Crabtree and loyal to the old way, he changes: Carleton and Ashley and other characters encounter big, emotional shifts that make Rowland recoil and begin to agree that perhaps there is too much “muck” at Weatherhill. He never actively aids Crabtree, but he is argumentative with people previously close to him, and most importantly he stops protecting others. He’s an old teacher, someone who may as well be the institution, and his intervention could help calm tempers or mediate tense situations before they become consequential. He chooses not to do that, and so he represents complicity.
Eric Ashley is the other side, then. He’s the brilliant gay scholar archetype, the one with a sad romantic history who cannot manage to conform to the societal expectation of marrying/settling (or at least being quiet and celibate, as Rowland). He teaches French, but it’s not his dream—he recently failed to be hired at Cambridge. At the start of the book we learn that he was an inspirational teacher and that he was respected and befriended by colleagues; by the end of the book he is dead. In between, we watch him spiral into depression as the main voice of resistance against Crabtree and specifically against the anti-homosexuality parts of Crabtree’s reform. Unfortunately, in order to have that role, Ashley is subjected to that death and depression, as well as a descent into irritability and dishevelment, an embarrassing sexual violation by a female acquaintance, and an upsetting attempt to come on to his student, Carleton. His argument for sexual freedom ruins him, or the book thinks that a ruined character is the only type which could argue so openly for it.
(Sidebar: the publication of this predates Maurice’s in 1971, but one of Ashley’s past paramours was a “Clive at Cambridge,” which feels like a sly reference. So Campbell must have known Forster and seen the manuscript?)
So those are the two main angles. There are others. Reverend Starr is the most interesting of the other adults, because he’s more gross to me than Ashley in his collection of boys that he finds attractive, but it’s also clearly true that he never sexually harasses or assaults them—he just likes to have them around to admire. His final sermon of term calls Crabtree repressive and backwards because of the ban on sexual activity, which is a weird choice for a clergyman character! Some of the straight masters (two couples get engaged) are admonished for the “shame” they bring to the school in their choice of partners, because it is an excessive display of emotion (read: sexuality). A third (straight) master puts on a school play with the usual boys in drag for female roles, and that offense is seen as supporting or leading the students to homosexuality. There’s a medical doctor who interrogates the entire school to root out the gay ones and that results in four expulsions right at the end of term. Everyone is involved in one way or another in the question of “can you eliminate sex from the public school?”
The main student character, Carleton, is our contrast to the gloominess of the crusade. He starts as a naïve 18 year old boy (I think this is a contradiction; more later) mostly above the sex and romance of the school, though observant of it, and ends up falling for 16-year-old Allen, a transfer student. They are mutually in an intense first love but agree not to have any kind of sex, which is more pure, wholesome, or religious. (Allen wants to enter the cloth.) It goes awry eventually under the stress of the crackdown against romance, and even more so during an episode when making out with Allen makes Carleton get hard/come in his pants. (Very funny! Great angsting over your own boner, Carleton.) The breakup is painful and horrendous and then made worse by Allen’s eventual admission that he moved on with another boy. (Who might even be having sex with him!) But until that happens, Carleton’s love for Allen is how the novel chooses to show us a bright spot and happiness.
What’s so hard to convey is that I actually think this is a fairly bad book. The writing’s not great: the chapters are mostly told in third omniscient, but there are a few first-person diary chapters from Carleton. When we’re in third, we jump between characters’ heads so rapidly and without indication that it’s earnestly confusing. You’ll read three paragraphs before understanding you need to go back and reread them as Ashley, since we switched off of Carleton some time ago. This doesn’t help the pacing, which is already messy—380 pages in my copy for a single summer term, which has seemingly endless weeks in it. Too much is happening to too many characters, and all of it ties somehow into the main plot.
And our main lead, Carleton, strains my disbelief. I don’t want the novel to be exclusively his POV because I would hate that. He’s eighteen and a senior prefect and we see him have sex with another boy (not Allen); we’re told that he has kissed and flirted with that boy for a long time. We watch him comment on other boys’ romances and think them brazen or excessive, but in all this he clearly knows what they’re doing and how it all works. Nonetheless he is our boy-protagonist and must be pure/beyond reproach and so the narrative will suddenly drop his knowledge when it’s convenient for setting up a contrast between him and someone else. If he needs to miss an allusion in order to demonstrate his moral goodness, the story will let him—no matter how obvious, or how many others of its kind he’s caught or made. This is a very uneven reading experience. It also downgrades his likeability in my modern lens, because it makes him priggish and judgmental of other boys for actions that he himself does/would do.
Despite this I have so many thoughts about the story (evidenced above!) and even want fix-it fic for Ashley. I should be repulsed by him, and I am squicked by the scene where he came on to Carleton, but I want Ashley to get to be a different version of his own character. I want him to fuck (hate-fuck or reconciliation fuck) his old school crush, who we see in the background on the Old Boys’ day; I want him and Carleton to make up and fall in love after school; I think I even want them to fuck while Carleton is still a student. There’s just some story wherein Ashley is not cosmically punished for a sin that the book doesn’t even believe in (!!) and where he gets the romance and/or sex that he wants. I can’t help but like Ashley, and be compelled by the wider setting, because in so many ways it is startlingly direct. It’s a fresh contrast to most boarding school novels, even if it’s also frustrating.
And forregshoe, this exchange:
Cakes and Ale, W. Somerset Maugham
Maugham’s Wikipedia page contains an involved discussion of his literary mediocrity, detailing criticisms of his output both contemporary and retrospective. Particular attention goes towards his supposed lack of brilliance and beauty, despite the clever correctness of his prose and storytelling. I would have understood that, perhaps agreed with it, until I reached the final chapter of Cakes and Ale.
This is a classic sort of navel-gazing novel in which an author writes a fictionalized sketch of things known from life. Willie Ashenden (not the spy novel protagonist; Maugham reuses his name here) narrates in the first person as he navigates a present-day friend’s attempt to write a post-mortem biography of a dead Great Author. The friend, Alroy Kear, knew the Great Author, Edward Driffield, later in Driffield’s life. He wants Ashenden’s youthful recollections of the author before he was great, when they were acquaintances in the same small village. Ashenden reminisces about his life and knowledge of Driffield.
This framing belies how much the story turns on its female characters. The largest presence is Driffield’s first wife, Rose, a beautiful former barmaid. But more retiring personalities, like Driffield’s second wife or his literary patron Mrs. Barton Trafford, play important roles in the sequence of events which make up Driffield’s reputation as one of the greats.
This is absolutely a book about authors and their reputations, and that kind of inwardly-focused interest can be off-putting. Maugham’s take is full of wry little commentaries which are probably even better appreciated by a reader more widely familiar with late Victorian and Edwardian authors. He makes many digs at Henry James. The book uses this focus to contemplate legacy broadly, and the effort which goes into shaping it. This is what makes Cakes and Ale worth reading. Ashenden and Kear, through their contrasts, illustrate different approaches to the cultivation of ambition, something that we see through their responses to reflecting on Driffield’s life. Kear chooses to memorialize and edit, agreeing ultimately with the second wife who has spent decades reworking Driffield into a presentable society man; this biography is her culminating effort. Ashenden comes away only more strongly appreciative of Driffield’s common interests and the ways he bucked tradition, especially through his first marriage to Rose and the ways that she inspired his work.
Really, what Ashenden finds in all of that is not Driffield’s personality or his writing, but the force that was Rose, and how significantly that relationship shaped what came to define his career. The marriage was disreputable: they created scandals both sexual and financial, though on a scale small enough to be easily forgotten with time. And Driffield’s second wife is counting on that, and on Kear’s discretion. But Ashenden’s reflections result in a revelation which ties back beautifully to his earlier comments on Driffield’s writing. This reveal recontextualizes Rose and that first marriage, and it’s deeply emotional, speaking to something that I feel in my own writing—that I put truths of myself into it—which was such a strong end to the book. It’s a quick and easy read, and I would recommend it.
Lord Dismiss Us, Michael Campbell
Terence P. Carleton is a senior prefect at the Weatherhill School starting his final summer term. He’s already sat his exams and will be headed to Oxford in autumn. A new Head of school, Crabtree, and his wife and teen daughter are beginning at Weatherhill following the prior Head’s death. Existing masters, like the old Dr. Rowland and young Cambridge scholar Eric Ashley, must adjust to the new Head’s regime; a wide cast of secondary characters includes the school reverend Cyril Starr and a pretty, new boy named Nicky Allen.
This 1960s portrait of British public schools was written to be contemporary and critical, for the discerning adult reader. It’s blurbed by Christopher Isherwood. Campbell set out to write a fictional treatise on homosexuality in schools, and he covers his subject to an amazing extent. Crabtree wants to root out this “muck” and will extract blood by the end of term. Dr. Rowland is the repressed older teacher; he initially turns a blind eye towards sex and romance among the boys, but is swayed towards Crabtree. Ashley is the wild young instructor still reeling from his own boyhood romance, driven to ever-more instability by the eradication crusade. Reverend Cyril Starr might not desire fleshly things, but he does collect a stable of his favorite type of boy. And the boys, well—Carleton falls for Allen and is absurd in his ascetic attempt to keep that love pure, i.e. nonsexual. Most other named boys in the book are fucking someone. The ones who aren’t become arms of Crabtree’s crusade. It’s a messy, homosocial, homosexual world in which women and girls are foreigners or enemies, but the greatest enemy of all remains the patriarchal definition of acceptable masculinity.
This book is difficult to discuss without spoilers for its events because the central plot to eliminate homosexual behavior drives everything for the characters. I think the best way to explain is to say that Crabtree and his family represent a force of regressive reformation: a return to idealized traditionalism, with all of the gay stuff edited out. Crabtree wants school spirit and manly sports and some academic merit at Weatherhill, but without such modern invasions as the masters falling in love and marrying wives, or female employees being notable community members. (He sacks a popular female nurse.) That this is so at odds with the goal of promoting heterosexuality escapes him.
Dr. Rowland embodies one side of the conflict. He’s a math instructor and Carleton’s head of house, and he’s taught for 47 years. Under the old head, he was permissive of the school standard wherein boys carried on romances and flirtations. Rowland is the archetype of the contented eternal bachelor, a creature of the School, and so definitely part of its homosocial/sexual fabric—but Rowland loved the old head, seemingly not explicitly romantically, and any desire he has or has not felt has been subsumed by math. He disdains strong emotion. Though he starts out opposed to Crabtree and loyal to the old way, he changes: Carleton and Ashley and other characters encounter big, emotional shifts that make Rowland recoil and begin to agree that perhaps there is too much “muck” at Weatherhill. He never actively aids Crabtree, but he is argumentative with people previously close to him, and most importantly he stops protecting others. He’s an old teacher, someone who may as well be the institution, and his intervention could help calm tempers or mediate tense situations before they become consequential. He chooses not to do that, and so he represents complicity.
Eric Ashley is the other side, then. He’s the brilliant gay scholar archetype, the one with a sad romantic history who cannot manage to conform to the societal expectation of marrying/settling (or at least being quiet and celibate, as Rowland). He teaches French, but it’s not his dream—he recently failed to be hired at Cambridge. At the start of the book we learn that he was an inspirational teacher and that he was respected and befriended by colleagues; by the end of the book he is dead. In between, we watch him spiral into depression as the main voice of resistance against Crabtree and specifically against the anti-homosexuality parts of Crabtree’s reform. Unfortunately, in order to have that role, Ashley is subjected to that death and depression, as well as a descent into irritability and dishevelment, an embarrassing sexual violation by a female acquaintance, and an upsetting attempt to come on to his student, Carleton. His argument for sexual freedom ruins him, or the book thinks that a ruined character is the only type which could argue so openly for it.
(Sidebar: the publication of this predates Maurice’s in 1971, but one of Ashley’s past paramours was a “Clive at Cambridge,” which feels like a sly reference. So Campbell must have known Forster and seen the manuscript?)
So those are the two main angles. There are others. Reverend Starr is the most interesting of the other adults, because he’s more gross to me than Ashley in his collection of boys that he finds attractive, but it’s also clearly true that he never sexually harasses or assaults them—he just likes to have them around to admire. His final sermon of term calls Crabtree repressive and backwards because of the ban on sexual activity, which is a weird choice for a clergyman character! Some of the straight masters (two couples get engaged) are admonished for the “shame” they bring to the school in their choice of partners, because it is an excessive display of emotion (read: sexuality). A third (straight) master puts on a school play with the usual boys in drag for female roles, and that offense is seen as supporting or leading the students to homosexuality. There’s a medical doctor who interrogates the entire school to root out the gay ones and that results in four expulsions right at the end of term. Everyone is involved in one way or another in the question of “can you eliminate sex from the public school?”
The main student character, Carleton, is our contrast to the gloominess of the crusade. He starts as a naïve 18 year old boy (I think this is a contradiction; more later) mostly above the sex and romance of the school, though observant of it, and ends up falling for 16-year-old Allen, a transfer student. They are mutually in an intense first love but agree not to have any kind of sex, which is more pure, wholesome, or religious. (Allen wants to enter the cloth.) It goes awry eventually under the stress of the crackdown against romance, and even more so during an episode when making out with Allen makes Carleton get hard/come in his pants. (Very funny! Great angsting over your own boner, Carleton.) The breakup is painful and horrendous and then made worse by Allen’s eventual admission that he moved on with another boy. (Who might even be having sex with him!) But until that happens, Carleton’s love for Allen is how the novel chooses to show us a bright spot and happiness.
What’s so hard to convey is that I actually think this is a fairly bad book. The writing’s not great: the chapters are mostly told in third omniscient, but there are a few first-person diary chapters from Carleton. When we’re in third, we jump between characters’ heads so rapidly and without indication that it’s earnestly confusing. You’ll read three paragraphs before understanding you need to go back and reread them as Ashley, since we switched off of Carleton some time ago. This doesn’t help the pacing, which is already messy—380 pages in my copy for a single summer term, which has seemingly endless weeks in it. Too much is happening to too many characters, and all of it ties somehow into the main plot.
And our main lead, Carleton, strains my disbelief. I don’t want the novel to be exclusively his POV because I would hate that. He’s eighteen and a senior prefect and we see him have sex with another boy (not Allen); we’re told that he has kissed and flirted with that boy for a long time. We watch him comment on other boys’ romances and think them brazen or excessive, but in all this he clearly knows what they’re doing and how it all works. Nonetheless he is our boy-protagonist and must be pure/beyond reproach and so the narrative will suddenly drop his knowledge when it’s convenient for setting up a contrast between him and someone else. If he needs to miss an allusion in order to demonstrate his moral goodness, the story will let him—no matter how obvious, or how many others of its kind he’s caught or made. This is a very uneven reading experience. It also downgrades his likeability in my modern lens, because it makes him priggish and judgmental of other boys for actions that he himself does/would do.
Despite this I have so many thoughts about the story (evidenced above!) and even want fix-it fic for Ashley. I should be repulsed by him, and I am squicked by the scene where he came on to Carleton, but I want Ashley to get to be a different version of his own character. I want him to fuck (hate-fuck or reconciliation fuck) his old school crush, who we see in the background on the Old Boys’ day; I want him and Carleton to make up and fall in love after school; I think I even want them to fuck while Carleton is still a student. There’s just some story wherein Ashley is not cosmically punished for a sin that the book doesn’t even believe in (!!) and where he gets the romance and/or sex that he wants. I can’t help but like Ashley, and be compelled by the wider setting, because in so many ways it is startlingly direct. It’s a fresh contrast to most boarding school novels, even if it’s also frustrating.
And for
regshoe, this exchange:Ashley: ‘Do you know E. M. Forster’s “The Longest Journey”?’
Carleton: ‘Yes, it’s very difficult.’
Ashley: ‘It’s the most interesting of them all.”
