A late beginner
Sometimes at book festivals I am asked which historical novelists I most admire and enjoy. ‘Alfred Duggan,’ I say first, and am usually met with a blank response. This is not entirely surprising. Duggan died in 1964 and most of his books are out of print.
Some will know of him as a friend of Evelyn Waugh from Oxford days. ‘A fullblooded rake ... we were often drunk ... Alfred almost always.’ He remained in this condition for some 20 years, Waugh himself eventually doing much to rescue him from alcoholism. So there was an unusual pattern to his career, as Waugh remarked in an article published in The Spectator soon after his friend’s death. ‘In recent years we have become so familiar with the spectacle of personal frustration and disaster in the artistic life that we have come to regard it as normal.’ He cited Scott Fitzgerald and Dylan Thomas as examples of writers ‘who began with early brilliance and popular recognition, only to find in early middle age that their powers were exhausted and that nothing remained for them except self-pity and drunkneness’. He might have added Hemingway to the list.
Alfred Duggan’s case was the reverse. Drunk and dissolute for years, he seemed like a man doomed to waste his life. Then he gave up drink, was received into the Catholic church, set himself to write, and published the first of his 15 novels, Knight with Armour, in 1950.
That first novel was about the Crusades; so was his last, Count Bohemund. Between them he ranged over the Roman empire, the Dark Ages and early mediaeval times. None of the books is set later than the 13th century. According to Waugh, he said, with ‘less than candour’, that he chose to restrict himself to these periods because the scantiness of the sources relieved him of the labour of research. If there was any truth in this remark, it showed that he was possessed of a fine artistic sense. Research can so easily smother a novel. More to the point, by confining himself to these centuries he found a solution to the most taxing problem that confronts a writer of historical fiction: how best to render the speech of your characters. None of Duggan’s spoke English. Therefore he was free to have them speak in the language of his own time. It was as if he was translating their words and thoughts into modern speech.
Yet the real reason for his choice of period and setting was that he felt at home there. He had read widely for years, even in his drinking days, and had travelled extensively in Europe and the Levant. He was soaked in his material, and it had been long maturing. This accounts for what Waugh identified as ‘the sense of intimacy’ which the novels offer. It is ‘as though he were describing personal experiences and observation’.
There is in the novels that unmistakable ring of authority and authenticity. This is the case, whether they are written in the first person or the third. He employed both with equal felicity, and it is impossible to decide why he selected one mode for a particular novel, the other for another.
The narrative style is generally deadpan, without flourishes, though laced with irony. Family Favourites begins, ‘You may think it odd that a mere Praetorian can write easily enough to compose his memoirs; in general we are a rough lot.’ Utterly convincing, and a splendidly flat introduction to the story of the teenage Elagabalus, blond beauty (and god) equally devoted to his esoteric religion and to stable-boys. The book is very funny and strangely moving.
The acuteness and depth of Duggan’s historical imagination allow him time and again to hit on a revealing moment. The Conscience of the King, for instance, tells the story of Cerdic. He is a Romanised Briton who becomes, by a series of quite probable accidents, the leader of a Saxon war-band and then founder of the Wessex kingdom. The turning point of his life comes one afternoon in August: ‘I was sitting in the courtyard behind my father’s house, basking in the sun and reading the poems of Ovid (now I come to think of it, that was the last occasion I read a book).’ In that casual parenthesis Duggan illuminates for us the passage of Roman civilisation to the barbarian world. And how appropriate his choice of Ovid, elegant and artificial poet of love, author also of Metamorphoses, as Cerdic’s last read. Duggan brings off such strokes time and again.
Allan Massie
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