The Temple at Thatch
Encyclopedia
The Temple at Thatch was an unpublished novel by the British author Evelyn Waugh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. 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".
In the absence of a manuscript or printed text, the only information as to the novel's subject comes from Waugh's diary entries and later reminiscences. The story was evidently semi-autobiographical, based around Waugh's Oxford experiences. The protagonist was an undergraduate and the work's main themes were madness and black magic
. Some of the novel's ideas were incorporated into Waugh's first commercially published work of fiction, the 1925 short story "The Balance", which 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 did not deter Waugh from his intention to be a writer, but it affected his belief that he could succeed as a novelist. For a time he turned his attention away from fiction, but with the gradual recovery of his self-confidence he was able to complete his first novel, Decline and Fall
, which was published with great success in 1928.
(1866–1943), was a respected literary critic for the Daily Telegraph; 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
's style, 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
, Anthony Powell
and Cyril Connolly
, 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 did little work, in a life largely dedicated to social pleasures: "The record of my life there is essentially a catalogue of friendships". However, he developed a reputation as a skilful graphic artist, and contributed 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 is further demonstrated by his involvement, in the summer of 1924, in an amateur film entitled 666, in which he certainly appeared and may have written. He appears to have been in a state of some mental confusion or turmoil; analyst Simon Whitechapel cites a letter to a friend, written at this time: "I have been living very intensely the last three weeks. For the past fortnight I have been nearly insane. I am a little saner now."
. 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 Drummond's essay:
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 22 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. He was tired by the end of the day, his interest in The Temple flagged, and from time to time his attention wandered to other subjects; he contemplated a book on Silenus
, but he admitted that it "may or may not ... 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 sometimes worked 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". 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".
, 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. Waugh promptly resigned his position at Arnold House, in anticipation of "a year abroad drinking Chianti under olive trees." Then came Acton's "polite but chilling" response to The Temple at Thatch. This letter has not survived; its wording was recalled by Waugh 40 years later, in his biography A Little Learning. 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 their mutual acquaintances. Many years later Acton wrote of the story: "It was an airy Firbankian trifle, totally unworthy of Evelyn, and I brutally told him so. It was a misfired jeu d'esprit."
Waugh did not query his friend's judgement, but took his manuscript to the school's furnaces and unceremoniously burnt it. Immediately afterwards he received the news that the job with Scott Moncrieff had fallen through. 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". In his biography Waugh writes: "I went down alone to the beach with my thoughts full of death. I took off my clothes and began swimming out to sea. Did I really intend to drown myself? That was certainly in my mind". He left a note with his clothes, a quotation from Euripides
about the sea washing away all human ills. A short way out, after an attack by jellyfish, he abandoned the attempt, turned round and swam back to the shore. He did not, however, withdraw his resignation from the school, returning instead to London.
, where his father was managing director, included it in a short stories collection the following year. "The Balance" has no magical themes, but in other respects has clear relationships to The Temple at Thatch. Both works have Oxford settings, and the short story is written in the film script format that Waugh devised for the first chapter of the novel. 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. Imogen Quest, the protagonist Adam's girlfriend, lives at Thatch; a watercolour of the house is displayed in Adam's undergraduate's rooms; the end of the story describes a house party at Thatch, during which the guests gossip maliciously about Adam. The names "Imogen Quest" and "Adam" were used by Waugh several years later in his novel Vile Bodies
, leading to speculation as to whether these names, like that of the house, originated in The Temple at Thatch.
The desire to write fiction persisted, however, and in the autumn of 1927 Waugh began a comic novel which he entitled Picaresque: or the Making of an Englishman. 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. This was not in fact the case; Waugh had merely put the work aside. Early in 1928 he wrote to Harold Acton, asking whether or not he should finish it. On this occasion Acton was full of praise; work was resumed and the novel completed by April. It was published later that year under a new title, Decline and Fall. According to his recent biographer Paula Byrne
, Waugh had "found his vocation as a writer, and over the next few years his career would rise spectacularly." The Temple of Thatch was quickly forgotten, and as Whitechapel points out, has failed to arouse much subsequent interest from scholars. 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."
Evelyn Waugh
Arthur Evelyn St. John Waugh , known as Evelyn Waugh, was an English writer of novels, travel books and biographies. He was also a prolific journalist and reviewer...
, 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
Hertford College, Oxford
Hertford College is one of the constituent colleges of the University of Oxford in England. It is located in Catte Street, directly opposite the main entrance of the original Bodleian Library. As of 2006, the college had a financial endowment of £52m. There are 612 students , plus various visiting...
, and continued to work on it intermittently in the following 12 months. After his friend Harold Acton
Harold Acton
Sir Harold Mario Mitchell Acton CBE was a British writer, scholar and dilettante perhaps most famous for being wrongly believed to have inspired the character of "Anthony Blanche" in Evelyn Waugh's novel Brideshead Revisited...
commented unfavourably on the novel 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".
In the absence of a manuscript or printed text, the only information as to the novel's subject comes from Waugh's diary entries and later reminiscences. The story was evidently semi-autobiographical, based around Waugh's Oxford experiences. The protagonist was an undergraduate and the work's main themes were madness and black magic
Black magic
Black magic is the type of magic that draws on assumed malevolent powers or is used with the intention to kill, steal, injure, cause misfortune or destruction, or for personal gain without regard to harmful consequences. As a term, "black magic" is normally used by those that do not approve of its...
. Some of the novel's ideas were incorporated into Waugh's first commercially published work of fiction, the 1925 short story "The Balance", which 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 did not deter Waugh from his intention to be a writer, but it affected his belief that he could succeed as a novelist. For a time he turned his attention away from fiction, but with the gradual recovery of his self-confidence he was able to complete his first novel, Decline and Fall
Decline and Fall
Decline and Fall is a novel by the English author Evelyn Waugh, first published in 1928. It was Waugh's first published novel; an earlier attempt, entitled The Temple at Thatch, was destroyed by Waugh while still in manuscript form. Decline and Fall is based in part on Waugh's undergraduate years...
, which was published with great success in 1928.
Background
Evelyn Waugh's literary pedigree was strong. His father, the publisher Arthur WaughArthur Waugh
Arthur Waugh was an English author, literary critic, and publisher. He was the father of the writers Alec and Evelyn Waugh.-His life:...
(1866–1943), was a respected literary critic for the Daily Telegraph; his elder brother Alec
Alec Waugh
Alexander Raban Waugh , was a British novelist, the elder brother of the better-known Evelyn Waugh and son of Arthur Waugh, author, literary critic, and publisher...
(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
Lancing College
Lancing College is a co-educational English independent school in the British public school tradition, founded in 1848 by Nathaniel Woodard. Woodard's aim was to provide education "based on sound principle and sound knowledge, firmly grounded in the Christian faith." Lancing was the first of a...
, he produced a parody of Katherine Mansfield
Katherine Mansfield
Kathleen Mansfield Beauchamp Murry was a prominent modernist writer of short fiction who was born and brought up in colonial New Zealand and wrote under the pen name of Katherine Mansfield. Mansfield left for Great Britain in 1908 where she encountered Modernist writers such as D.H. Lawrence and...
's style, 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
Christopher Hollis
Maurice Christopher Hollis, known as Christopher Hollis was a British schoolmaster, university teacher, author and Conservative politician.-Life:...
, Anthony Powell
Anthony Powell
Anthony Dymoke Powell CH, CBE was an English novelist best known for his twelve-volume work A Dance to the Music of Time, published between 1951 and 1975....
and Cyril Connolly
Cyril Connolly
Cyril Vernon Connolly was an English intellectual, literary critic and writer. He was the editor of the influential literary magazine Horizon and wrote Enemies of Promise , which combined literary criticism with an autobiographical exploration of why he failed to become the successful author of...
, among others. He also formed close personal friendships with aristocratic and near-aristocratic contemporaries such as Hugh Lygon
Hugh Patrick Lygon
Hugh Patrick Lygon was the son of William Lygon, 7th Earl Beauchamp, and is often believed to be the inspiration for Lord Sebastian Flyte in Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited. He was a friend of Waugh's at Oxford Hugh Patrick Lygon (2 November 1904 – 19 August 1936 Rothenburg, Bavaria) was the...
and Alastair Graham, either of whom may have been models for Sebastian Flyte
Sebastian Flyte
Lord Sebastian Flyte is a fictional character from the Evelyn Waugh novel Brideshead Revisited.-Character:Sebastian is the younger son and second eldest child of the Marquess of Marchmain and a member of the aristocratic Flyte family, which is portrayed as symbolic of the decline of the English...
in Waugh's later novel Brideshead Revisited
Brideshead Revisited
Brideshead Revisited, The Sacred & Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder is a novel by English writer Evelyn Waugh, first published in 1945. Waugh wrote that the novel "deals with what is theologically termed 'the operation of Grace', that is to say, the unmerited and unilateral act of love by...
. From such companions Waugh acquired the fascination with the aristocracy and country houses that would embellish much of his fictional work. At Oxford Waugh did little work, in a life largely dedicated to social pleasures: "The record of my life there is essentially a catalogue of friendships". However, he developed a reputation as a skilful graphic artist, and contributed articles, reviews and short stories to both the main university magazines, The Isis
Isis magazine
The Isis Magazine was established at Oxford University in 1892 . Traditionally a rival to the student newspaper Cherwell, it was finally acquired by the latter's publishing house, OSPL, in the late 1990s...
and The Cherwell
Cherwell (newspaper)
Cherwell is an independent newspaper, largely published for students of Oxford University. First published in 1920, it has had an online edition since 1996. Named after the local river, Cherwell is published by OSPL , who also publish the sister publication ISIS along with the Etcetera Supplement...
. 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 is further demonstrated by his involvement, in the summer of 1924, in an amateur film entitled 666, in which he certainly appeared and may have written. He appears to have been in a state of some mental confusion or turmoil; analyst Simon Whitechapel cites a letter to a friend, written at this time: "I have been living very intensely the last three weeks. For the past fortnight I have been nearly insane. I am a little saner now."
Composition
The earliest record of Waugh's intention to attempt a novel appears in a letter dated May 1924, to his schoolfriend Dudley CarewDudley Carew
Dudley Charles Carew was an English journalist, writer, poet and film critic. He was a special correspondent of The Times in the 1920s and 1930s, and reported on cricket matches for the paper. From 1945 until his retirement in 1963 he was the paper's film critic...
. 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
Folly
In architecture, a folly is a building constructed primarily for decoration, but either suggesting by its appearance some other purpose, or merely so extravagant that it transcends the normal range of garden ornaments or other class of building to which it belongs...
, 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
William Drummond of Hawthornden
William Drummond , called "of Hawthornden", was a Scottish poet.-Life:Drummond was born at Hawthornden Castle, Midlothian. His father, John Drummond, was the first laird of Hawthornden; and his mother was Susannah Fowler, sister of William Fowler, poet and courtier...
, and considered retitling his story The Fabulous Paladins after a passage in Drummond's essay:
- Death is the sade estranger of acquantance, the eternall diuorcer of mariage, the rauisher of the children from their parentes, the stealer of parents from the children, the interrer of fame, the sole cause of forgetfulnesse, by which the liuing talke of those gone away as of so manie shadowes, or fabulous paladines.
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
Denbighshire
Denbighshire is a county in north-east Wales. It is named after the historic county of Denbighshire, but has substantially different borders. Denbighshire has the distinction of being the oldest inhabited part of Wales. Pontnewydd Palaeolithic site has remains of Neanderthals from 225,000 years...
, 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.
During his first term at Arnold House Waugh found few opportunities to continue his writing. He was tired by the end of the day, his interest in The Temple flagged, and from time to time his attention wandered to other subjects; he contemplated a book on Silenus
Silenus
In Greek mythology, Silenus was a companion and tutor to the wine god Dionysus.-Evolution of the character:The original Silenus resembled a folklore man of the forest with the ears of a horse and sometimes also the tail and legs of a horse...
, but he admitted that it "may or may not ... 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 sometimes worked 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". 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".
Rejection
While waiting for Acton's reply, Waugh heard that his brother Alec had arranged a job for him based in PisaPisa
Pisa is a city in Tuscany, Central Italy, on the right bank of the mouth of the River Arno on the Tyrrhenian Sea. It is the capital city of the Province of Pisa...
, Italy, as secretary to the Scottish writer Charles Kenneth Scott Moncrieff who was working on the first English translation of Marcel Proust
Marcel Proust
Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust was a French novelist, critic, and essayist best known for his monumental À la recherche du temps perdu...
's novel sequence À la recherche du temps perdu. Waugh promptly resigned his position at Arnold House, in anticipation of "a year abroad drinking Chianti under olive trees." Then came Acton's "polite but chilling" response to The Temple at Thatch. This letter has not survived; its wording was recalled by Waugh 40 years later, in his biography A Little Learning. 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 their mutual acquaintances. Many years later Acton wrote of the story: "It was an airy Firbankian trifle, totally unworthy of Evelyn, and I brutally told him so. It was a misfired jeu d'esprit."
Waugh did not query his friend's judgement, but took his manuscript to the school's furnaces and unceremoniously burnt it. Immediately afterwards he received the news that the job with Scott Moncrieff had fallen through. 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". In his biography Waugh writes: "I went down alone to the beach with my thoughts full of death. I took off my clothes and began swimming out to sea. Did I really intend to drown myself? That was certainly in my mind". He left a note with his clothes, a quotation from Euripides
Euripides
Euripides was one of the three great tragedians of classical Athens, the other two being Aeschylus and Sophocles. Some ancient scholars attributed ninety-five plays to him but according to the Suda it was ninety-two at most...
about the sea washing away all human ills. A short way out, after an attack by jellyfish, he abandoned the attempt, turned round and swam back to the shore. He did not, however, withdraw his resignation from the school, returning instead to London.
"The Balance"
Although he had destroyed his novel, Waugh retained his intention to be a writer, and in the late summer of 1925 completed a short story, called "The Balance". This became his first commercially published work when Chapman and HallChapman and Hall
Chapman & Hall was a British publishing house in London, founded in the first half of the 19th century by Edward Chapman and William Hall. Upon Hall's death in 1847, Chapman's cousin Frederic Chapman became partner in the company, of which he became sole manager upon the retirement of Edward...
, where his father was managing director, included it in a short stories collection the following year. "The Balance" has no magical themes, but in other respects has clear relationships to The Temple at Thatch. Both works have Oxford settings, and the short story is written in the film script format that Waugh devised for the first chapter of the novel. 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. Imogen Quest, the protagonist Adam's girlfriend, lives at Thatch; a watercolour of the house is displayed in Adam's undergraduate's rooms; the end of the story describes a house party at Thatch, during which the guests gossip maliciously about Adam. The names "Imogen Quest" and "Adam" were used by Waugh several years later in his novel Vile Bodies
Vile Bodies
Vile Bodies is a 1930 novel by Evelyn Waugh satirising the Bright Young People: decadent young London society between World War I and World War II.-Title:The title comes from the Epistle to the Philippians 3:21...
, leading to speculation as to whether these names, like that of the house, originated in The Temple at Thatch.
Aftereffects
Acton's dismissal of The Temple at Thatch had made Waugh nervous of his potential as an imaginative writer—he deferred to Acton's judgement on all literary issues—and he did not for the time being attempt to write another novel. After "The Balance" he wrote a humorous article, "Noah, or the Future of Intoxication", which was first accepted and then rejected by the publishers Kegan Paul. 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. Blackwell, 1927). Thereafter, for a time, Waugh devoted himself to non-fictional work. An essay on the Pre-Raphaelites was published in a limited edition by Waugh's friend Alastair Graham; this led to the production of a full-length book, Rossetti, His Life and Works, published in 1928.The desire to write fiction persisted, however, and in the autumn of 1927 Waugh began a comic novel which he entitled Picaresque: or the Making of an Englishman. The first pages were read to another friend, the future novelist Anthony Powell
Anthony Powell
Anthony Dymoke Powell CH, CBE was an English novelist best known for his twelve-volume work A Dance to the Music of Time, published between 1951 and 1975....
, who found them very amusing, and was surprised when Waugh told him, just before Christmas, that the manuscript had been burned. This was not in fact the case; Waugh had merely put the work aside. Early in 1928 he wrote to Harold Acton, asking whether or not he should finish it. On this occasion Acton was full of praise; work was resumed and the novel completed by April. It was published later that year under a new title, Decline and Fall. According to his recent biographer Paula Byrne
Paula Byrne
Paula Byrne, born into a large working-class family in Birkenhead in 1967, is a British author and biographer most famous for her bestsellers Perdita: The Life of Mary Robinson and Mad World: Evelyn Waugh and the Secrets of Brideshead...
, Waugh had "found his vocation as a writer, and over the next few years his career would rise spectacularly." The Temple of Thatch was quickly forgotten, and as Whitechapel points out, has failed to arouse much subsequent interest from scholars. 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."