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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...