The Temple at Thatch
Some of the novel's ideas may have been incorporated into Waugh's 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.
His father, the publisher Arthur Waugh (1866–1943), was a respected literary critic for The Daily Telegraph;[2] his elder brother Alec (1899–1981) was a successful novelist whose first book The Loom of Youth became a controversial best seller in 1917.
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.
[7] 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, Anthony Powell and Cyril Connolly, among others.
[8] 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.
[10] However, he developed a reputation as a skilful graphic artist, and contributed articles, reviews and short stories to both the main university magazines, Isis and Cherwell.
[11] He appears to have been in a state of some mental confusion or turmoil; the writer Simon Whitechapel cites a letter from Waugh to a friend, written at this time: "I have been living very intensely the last three weeks.
[1] "Death is the sad estranger of acquaintance, the eternal divorcer of marriage, the ravisher of the children from their parents, the stealer of parents from the children, the interrer of fame, the sole cause of forgetfulnesse, by which the living talk of those gone away as of so many shadows, or fabulous Paladins" 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".
[11] 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.
[18] 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 22 January to take up his post, carrying with him the manuscript of The Temple.
[1] Earlier that year Waugh had commented warmly on Acton's book of poems, An Indian Ass, "which brought back memories of a life [at Oxford] infinitely remote".
[24] While waiting for Acton's reply, Waugh heard that his brother Alec had arranged a job for him based in Pisa, Italy, as secretary to the Scottish writer Charles Kenneth Scott Moncrieff who was working on the first English translation of Marcel Proust's novel sequence À la recherche du temps perdu.
The double blow affected Waugh severely; he wrote in his diary in July: "The phrase 'the end of the tether' besets me with unshakeable persistence".
[32] There are several references in "The Balance" to a country house called "Thatch", though this is a fully functioning establishment in the manner of Brideshead rather than a ruined folly.
[34] However, a short story called "A House of Gentle Folks", was published in The New Decameron: The Fifth Day, edited by Hugh Chesterman (Oxford: Basil.
[33] The first pages were read to another friend, the future novelist Anthony Powell, who found them very amusing, and was surprised when Waugh told him, just before Christmas, that the manuscript had been burned.
Whitechapel, however, considers it a loss to literature, and adds: "Whether or not it matched the quality of his second novel, Decline and Fall, if it were still extant it could not fail to be of interest to both scholars and general readers.
