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The Temple at Thatch summary

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thumb|upright|Evelyn Waugh as a young man The Temple at Thatch is the title of an unpublished novel by the British author Evelyn Waugh, his first adult attempt at full-length fiction. He began writing it in 1924 at the end of his final year as an undergraduate at Hertford College, Oxford, and continued to work on it intermittently in the following 12 months. After his friend Harold Acton commented unfavourably on the novel in June 1925, Waugh burned the manuscript. By his own account he then made a half-hearted suicide bid before returning to his senses.

In the absence of the text, the only information as to the novel's subject comes from Waugh's contemporary correspondence and diary entries. It was evidently semi-autobiographical; its protagonist was an undergraduate, and its main themes were madness and black magic, both topics of considerable interest to Waugh at the time. It is possible that some of the novel's material may have formed the basis of Waugh's first commercially published work of fiction, the 1925 short story "The Balance". This work includes several references to a country house called "Thatch" and, like the novel, is partly structured as a film script. "The Balance" contains characters, perhaps carried over from The Temple at Thatch, who appear by name in Waugh's later fiction.

Acton's severe judgement affected Waugh's confidence to an extent that delayed for several years the production of his next novel, the highly successful Decline and Fall (1928). Before then a further attempt at a comic novel, Picaresque, or The Making of an Englishman, had been either abandoned or destroyed.

Background

Hertford College, Oxford, where Evelyn Waugh conceived the idea of The Temple at Thatch in 1924

Evelyn Waugh's literary pedigree was strong. His father, the publisher Arthur Waugh (1866–1943), was a respected literary critic; his elder brother Alec (1899–1981) was a successful novelist whose first book The Loom of Youth became a controversial best seller in 1917. Evelyn wrote his first extant story "The Curse of the Horse Race" in 1910, when he was seven years old. In the years before the First World War he helped to edit and produce a handwritten publication called The Pistol Troop Magazine, and also wrote poems. Later, as a schoolboy at Lancing College, he produced a parody of Katherine Mansfield, entitled "The Twilight of Language" He also tried to write a novel, but soon gave this up to concentrate on a school-themed play, Conversion, which was performed before the whole school in the summer of 1921.

At Hertford College, Oxford, where Waugh arrived in January 1922 to study history, he became part of a circle that included a number of future writers and critics of eminence—Harold Acton, Christopher Hollis and (a little later) Anthony Powell, among others. He also formed close personal friendships with aristocratic and near-aristocratic contemporaries such as Hugh Lygon and Alastair Graham, either of whom may have been models for Sebastian Flyte in Waugh's later novel Brideshead Revisited. From such companions Waugh acquired the fascination with the aristocracy and country houses that would embellish much of his fictional work. At Oxford, Waugh devoted much time to literary activities, contributing regular articles, reviews and short stories to both the main university magazines, The Isis and The Cherwell. One of the Isis stories, "Unacademic Exercise: A Nature Story", describes the performance of a magical ceremony by which an undergraduate is transformed by his fellows into a werewolf. Waugh's interest in the occult at that time was further demonstrated by his involvement in an amateur film entitled 666, in which Waugh certainly appeared and may have written.

Work in progress

The first indication that Waugh was contemplating a novel appears in a letter dated May 1924, to his friend Dudley Carew. Waugh writes: "Quite soon I am going to write a little book. It is going to be called The Temple at Thatch and will be all about magic and madness". This writing project may have been a reaction to Waugh's immediate circumstances; he was in the last weeks of his Oxford career, contemplating failure in his examinations and irritated by the fact that most of his contemporaries appeared to be on the verge of brilliant careers. On 22 June 1924 he spent time working out the plot, a continuation of the supernatural theme explored in "Unacademic Exercise". The basic premise was an undergraduate inheriting a country house of which nothing was left except an 18th century folly, where he set up house and practised black magic.

Waugh's diary indicates that he began writing the story on 21 July when he completed a dozen pages of the first chapter; he thought it was "quite good". He appears to have done no more work on the project until early September, when he confides to his diary that it is "in serious danger of becoming dull", and expresses doubts that it will ever be finished. However, Waugh apparently found fresh inspiration after reading The Cypresse Grove, by the 17th-century Scots poet William Drummond of Hawthornden, and considered retitling his story The Fabulous Paladins after a passage in Drommond's book. The autumn of 1924 was spent largely in the pursuit of pleasure until, shortly before Christmas, the pressing need to earn money led Waugh to apply for teaching jobs in private schools. His diary entry for 17 December 1924 records: "Still writing out letters in praise of myself to obscure private schools, and still attempting to rewrite The Temple". He eventually secured a job as assistant master at Arnold House Preparatory School in Denbighshire, North Wales, at a salary of £160 a year, and left London on 22nd January to take up his post, carrying with him the manuscript of The Temple.

During his first term at Arnold House Waugh found few opportunities to continue his writing, and his attention wandered from time to time to other subjects, such as a book on Silenus that he admits "may or may not even be written". After the Easter holidays he felt more positively about The Temple: "I am making the first chapter a cinema film, and have been writing furiously ever since. I honestly think that it is going to be rather good". He would sometimes work on the book during classes, telling any boys who dared to ask what he was doing that he was writing a history of the Eskimos. By June he felt confident enough to send the first few chapters to his Oxford friend Harold Acton, "asking for criticism and hoping for praise".

Rejection

While waiting for Acton's reply, Waugh heard that his brother Alex had arranged a job for him as secretary to the Scottish writer Charles Kenneth Scott Moncrieff, based in Pisa, Italy. He promptly resigned his position at Arnold House, in anticipation of "a year abroad drinking Chianti under olive trees." Then came Acton's "courteous but chilling" response to The Temple at Thatch. Acton wrote that the story was "too English for my exotic taste ... too much nid-nodding over port." He recommended, facetiously, that the book be printed "in a few elegant copies for the friends who love you...", and gave a list of the least elegant of Waugh's and Acton's acquaintances. Waugh did not query his friend's judgement, but took his manuscript to the school's furnaces and unceremoniously burnt it. Then came the news that the job with Scott Moncrieff fell through.