The Temple at Thatch was an unpublished novel by the British author Evelyn Waugh. It was his first adult attempt at full-length fiction. The story was evidently semi-autobiographical, based on Waugh’s Oxford experiences. The protagonist was an undergraduate and the work’s main themes were madness and black magic.
About The Temple at Thatch in brief
The Temple at Thatch was an unpublished novel by the British author Evelyn Waugh. It was his first adult attempt at full-length fiction. The story was evidently semi-autobiographical, based on Waugh’s Oxford experiences. The protagonist was an undergraduate and the work’s main themes were madness and black magic. After his friend Harold Acton commented unfavourably on the draft in June 1925, Waugh burned the manuscript. In a fit of despondency from this and other personal disappointments he began a suicide attempt before experiencing what he termed ‘a sharp return to good sense’ The earliest record of a novel appears in a letter dated May 1924, in which Waugh writes: ‘Quite soon I am going to write a little book and will be all about magic and madness’ Some of the novel’s ideas may have been incorporated into his first commercially published work of fiction, his 1925 short story “The Balance”, which includes several references to a country house called “Thatch” and is partly structured as a film script, as apparently was the lost novel. 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. As a schoolboy at Lancing College, he wrote a parody of Katherine Mansfield’s style, entitled ‘The Twilight of Language’. He also wrote a novel, but soon gave this up to concentrate on a school-themed play, Conversion, which was performed before the school in the summer of 1921.
In 1928 he completed his first novel, Decline and Fall, which was published with great success in 1928. His father, the publisher Arthur Waugh, was a respected literary critic for The Daily Telegraph; his elder brother Alec 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 1924 he appeared in an amateur film entitled 666, which he certainly appeared and which he may have written. At Oxford Waugh did little work and dedicated himself largely to social pleasures, but he developed a reputation as a skilful graphic artist. 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. He also formed close personal friendships with aristocratic and near-aristocratic contemporaries such as Hugh Lygon and Alastair Graham, either of whom may be models for Sebastian Flyte in his later novel Brideshead Revisited. From such companions Waugh acquired the fascination with aristocracy and country houses that would embellish much of his fiction.
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This page is based on the article The Temple at Thatch published in Wikipedia (as of Nov. 01, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
