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Z:\My Documents\Evelyn Waugh\Evelyn Waugh Studies EVELYN WAUGH NEWSLETTER AND STUDIES Vol. 33, No. 2 Autumn 2002 Adam and Evelyn: "The Balance", The Temple at Thatch, and 666 by Simon Whitechapel There are more and stronger parallels between the Marquis de Sade (1740-1814) and Evelyn Waugh (1903-66) than some partisans of the latter may care to recognize, but one of the oddest is also, at first glance, one of the most innocent. De Sade and Waugh both wrote novels that are now, short of the invention of a chronoscope or -scoop, permanently lost to literature. Even the titles of these novels were oddly similar, for de Sade’s was called Les Journées à Florbelle, or The Days at Florbelle, and Waugh’s The Temple at Thatch. Their fates were even more similar, for they were both burnt in manuscript, de Sade’s by his own son in about 1814 and Waugh’s by the author himself in 1925. Which novel represents the greater loss to European literature is debatable, though personally I would plump for The Temple at Thatch. Les Journées à Florbelle was very likely just more of the sanguinary same from an author who had already been extensively published; The Temple at Thatch was Waugh’s very first novel.[1] 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, though neither scholars nor general readers have shown much interest in it as things stand. This is not only a pity but also a puzzle. Waugh’s first surviving book, the dull but worthy biography of a figure, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who is now probably much less famous than Waugh himself, sheds only indirect light on Waugh’s own life, but The Temple at Thatch was a novel and Waugh the novelist is much better described as transcriptive than creative: [T]here was … urgent business … a hamper of fresh, rich experience — perishable goods.[2] Waugh’s novels are almost invariably autobiographical: he unpacked hampers of "fresh, rich experience" for Decline and Fall (1928), Vile Bodies (1930), Black Mischief (1932), A Handful of Dust (1934), Scoop (1938), Put Out More Flags (1942), and The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold (1957), from which the above lines are taken, and hampers of slightly less fresh but still rich experience for Brideshead Revisited (1945) and The Sword of Honour trilogy (1952-61). Only The Loved One (1948) and Helena (1950) stand outside this autobiographical tradition, and even then not very far. Waugh wrote about what he experienced and that in itself should make The Temple at Thatch, on his own admission, of peculiar interest in the career of a writer who later became a partisan and some might even say bigoted Roman Catholic: I also wrote some pages of a novel I had begun. I remember only that it was named The Temple At Thatch and concerned an undergraduate who inherited a property of which nothing was left except an eighteenth-century classical folly where he set up house and, I think, practised black magic.[3] That was written in his public autobiography at a distance of nearly forty years, long after his conversion; this was written in a private letter at no distance at all, and some years before his conversion: I am going to write a little novel … "The Temple At Thatch" … about madness and magic.[4] His diary contains several entries referring to the "little novel" but the entry for "Monday 6 file:////uol.le.ac.uk/...c144/My%20Documents/Evelyn%20Waugh/Evelyn%20Waugh%20Studies/Newsletters/Newsletters/Newsletter_33.2.htm[04/12/2013 14:44:54] October 1924" is perhaps the most interesting, because it offers a second valuable clue to the themes of The Temple at Thatch: On Friday evening I read again and with vast delight Drummond of Hawthornden’s Cypress Grove. On Saturday I wrote more of The Temple at Thatch which I consider calling The Fabulous Paladins after a passage from a [sic] Cypress Grove. Prima facie, a book that Waugh read with "vast delight" might seem unsuitable to supply a title for a book about "madness and magic". If you sample A Cypress Grove, however, you discover that his reaction not only offers a second valuable clue to the themes of The Temple at Thatch: it also offers a valuable insight into his state of mind at the time. A Cypress Grove, which was first published in 1623, is not a book many young men will read with "vast delight": Thou art here, but as in an infected and leprous inn, plunged in a flood of humours, oppressed with cares, suppressed with ignorance, defiled and distained with vice, retrograde in the course of virtue; small things seem here great to thee, and great things small, folly appeareth wisdom and wisdom folly. … For the most wicked are Lords and Gods of this earth … and the virtuous and good are but forlorn castaways.[5] Waugh’s delight in sentiments like those seems an obvious foreshadowing of the themes of Decline and Fall and Vile Bodies and also, of course, of his attempted suicide in 1925. A Cypress Grove is described in one history of English literature as "the fullest exposition of Drummond’s Christian Platonism"[6] but it seems to me much more Stoic and pagan than Platonic or Christian, as in the passages just quoted and in the passage from which Waugh considered renaming The Temple at Thatch: Death is the sad estranger of acquaintance, the eternal divorcer of marriage, the ravisher of children from their parents, the stealer of parents from the children, the interrer of fame, the sole cause of forgetfulness, by which the living talk of those gone away as of so many shadows, or fabulous Paladins. All strength by it is enfeebled, beauty turned in [sic] deformity and rottenness, honour in contempt, glory into baseness: it is the unreasonable breaker-off of all the actions of virtue; by which we enjoy no more the sweet pleasures on earth, neither contemplate the stately revolutions of the heavens. The sun perpetually setteth, stars never rise unto us.[7] A Cypress Grove is about death, as its title suggests: like the yew in northern paganism, the cypress in southern paganism was a symbol of death and mourning. But William Drummond’s lapidary prose and book about death are much less famous than another seventeenth-century writer’s lapidary prose and book about death, and if Waugh was familiar with the former one would expect him to be familiar with the latter. He was, in fact, and the proof of that is another example of the autobiography in his writing. Waugh considered renaming The Temple at Thatch from a phrase in Drummond; in "The Balance" (1925), an early, experimental, and autobiographical short-story, he name-checked the other and much more famous seventeenth- century writer. Or rather, he did not, because the other writer is so famous that only the title of his book about death was needed. The story’s hero, Adam, has gone to an antiquarian bookseller to raise some money by selling his books: An elderly man is at the moment engaged in investigating a heap of dusty volumes while Mr. Macassor bends longingly over the table engrossed in a treatise on Alchemy. Suddenly the adventurer’s back straightens; his search has been rewarded and he emerges into the light, bearing a tattered but unquestionably genuine copy of the first edition of "Hydr[i]otaphia." He asks Mr. Macassor the file:////uol.le.ac.uk/...c144/My%20Documents/Evelyn%20Waugh/Evelyn%20Waugh%20Studies/Newsletters/Newsletters/Newsletter_33.2.htm[04/12/2013 14:44:54] price. Mr. Macassor adjusts his spectacles and brushes some snuff from his waistcoat and, bearing the book to the door, examines it as if for the first time. "Ah, yes, a delightful work. Yes, yes, marvellous style," and he turns the pages fondly, "The large stations of the dead," what a noble phrase. He looks at the cover and wipes it with his sleeve. "Why, I had forgotten I had this copy. It used to belong to Horace Walpole, only someone has stolen the bookplate—the rascal. Still, it was only the Oxford one—the armorial one, you know. Well, well, sir, since you have found it I suppose you have the right to claim it. Five guineas, shall I say. But I hate to part with it."[8] Hydriotaphia, or "Urn-Burial", was published in 1658 and written by Sir Thomas Browne (1605-82), another soi disant Christian Platonist who seems to me much more Stoic and pagan than Platonist or Christian, although Plato does appear in the passage from which Mr. Macassor’s "noble phrase" is taken: Plato’s historian of the other world lies twelve days incorrupted, while his soul was viewing the large stations of the dead. How to keep the corpse seven days from corruption by anointing and washing, without extenteration, were an hazardable piece of art, in our choicest practice. How they made distinct separation of bones and ashes from fiery admixture, hath found no historical solution; though they seemed to make a distinct collection and overlooked not Pyrrhus his toe.[9] Waugh was perhaps mocking Browne’s fame and reputation through Mr. Macassor, but if he took "vast delight" in A Cypress Grove he seems likely to have taken some delight in Hydriotaphia too, and the way he wove what must have been his own reading into "The Balance" is another example of the autobiography in his writing.
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