Evelyn Waugh's Preface to Count Bohemond

 Alfred Duggan's death on 4th April 1964 brought to an abrupt end a literary career of peculiar interest. 

The present, posthumous work is the last of a series of fifteen historical novels which began in 1950 with Knight in Armour. It was finished shortly before his death. Other projects were in his mind. He had planned, but not committed to writing a novel about Tancred in which the later stages of Count Bohemond would have been recounted. Besides these fictions he wrote three biographies, and seven historical studies for younger readers, one of which, Growing up with the Norman Conquest, is due to appear in 1965. It is the opus of a full life-time accomplished in fourteen years, which has attracted the most dissimilar devotees and is likely to retain and multiply them.

The author shunned personal advertisement and the public performances of the literary world, so that to most of his readers he was a somewhat remote figure. A biographical note may be helpful.

Alfred's life was the exact antithesis of the familar contemporary failure who starts as a writer, loses his powers in middle-age and falls into impotent debauchery.

He was born in 1903. His father, who died when Alfred was a small boy, was a rich Argentine of Irish descent. His mother was the beautiful daughter of an American diplomatist. His mother brought him and his younger brother and sister to England for their education and in 1917 married Lord Curzon, then a member of the Inner War Cabinet and at the height of his powers. Alfred's boyhood and youth were thus spent in the heart of the dominant English class in his step-father's four great houses, with his own ample fortune to spend on pleasure and travel. Neither at Eton nor at Balliol did he show great application for work and he went down from Oxford prematurely. While there he kept a string of hunters for his use in winter and a night chauffeur to carry him to London night-clubs on summer evenings. None of his friends of forty years ago could have forecast the literary achievement of his later years. Lord Curzon was one of the very few who discerned his intellectual quality.

At the age of twenty he professed Marxism and atheism but a few years later he returned to the Church of his childhood and remained a devout Conservative Catholic for the last thirty-five years of his life. His travels took him far but his main interest was the remains of the Crusader occupation of the Levant and of the Eastern Mediterranean. He visited and studied many castles which were then unknown except to a few adventurous experts. His first novel, and this, his last, deal with the Crusades, the period with which he was most familiar and sympathetic. As his fortune dwindled and finally disappeared he read more and more, exercising a remarkable memory for historical detail. He read without ambitions to professional scholarship for sheer zeal for the subject.

He became a keen patriot and in 1939, though beyond the normal age of recruitment, not only enlisted as a private soldier but contrived to join a 'free company' (the forerunners of the Commandos), volunteers for hazardous service then being raised in a somewhat haphazard manner. In one of these bodies he was involved in the rear-guard of the reatreat in Norway in conditions of great hardship which impaired his health and doubtless hastened his death. Invalided from the army he fulfilled his wish to serve his country by working for the rest of the war at the bench in an aeroplane factory.

In 1953 he married and in 1956 settled at Ross-on-Wye, devoting himself assiduously to his newly found skill at writing. The complete happiness of his domestic life sustained him in his work and he seldom left home in his later years.

This is all the biographical detail that the reader will need. Alfred's wiritng is strictly impersonal and offers little scope for the critics who seek to relate the novelist's intention to his personal experience. He spoke of his work with a modest detactment which concealed the dedication of an artist. When asked why he always concerned himself with obscure periods and places rather than with those more likely to excite popular curiosity, he would reply, with less than candour, that the scantiness of sources made research less laborious. In fact he was drawn to the dark ages by a real sense of kinship with them. Though in his working years entirely happy in his private life, he surveyed contemporary history with nothing but calm despair. He understood the Roman Empire and feudal Europe as he did not understand the world of the United Nations.

His literary style remianed constant. It is crisp and clear in this posthumous novel as in his first. Most writers come to maturity after experiments they regret. There is no groping in Alfred's work. At the age of forty-seven he published his first book. It was lucid and masterly, absolutely free of affectation or ostentation. He always in life, even in his years of dissipation, maintained a certain gravitas and formality. That is apparent in his prose but the severe good taste is lightened by dry humour, and a genial tolerance of the defects of human nature. His religious faith is latent in all his wrote. Never a propagandist or an apologist, he accepted the Church as the only proper milieu of man and man as being naturally prone to fall below Christian principle. Perhaps one of his finest passges is the ironical conclusion of Conscience of the King in which Cerdic, the remote ancestor of our royal house, reflects that he has survived the barbarian invaders, made his peace with them, defected from the Church, become a ruler among people of gross habits. He has seen a civilisation dissolve but all is well as could be hoped. And then the doubt: 'Suppose all that nonsense' (Christianity) 'that my brother used to preach is really true after all?'

Conscience of the King is my own favourite of Alfred's books. It is to that I should direct an enquirer who wanted a quick look at the quintessential Duggan. But each has his own favourite. The reader is never tricked. The books, for those that love them, are habit forming. Count Bohemond will not disappoint. It is highly appropriate that this, his last work, should end with the triumph of Christian arms against the infidel.

EVELYN WAUGH

'Duggan has a marvellously wry quality in his writing'

Sunday Times

'One of the best historical novelists of the century ... Duggan is among the best of historical novelists ... his vision is so compelling that whether we find ourselves in the Britain of the Saxon invasions or Rome during the Empire we are principally conscious that we are in Duggan country'

Times Literary Supplement

"A witty, scholarly and grim view of "Dark Age" England. Alfred Duggan is a much underrated historical novelist, specialising in Roman times and the Crusades. "The Conscience of the King" is set mainly in 5th century Britain, and is the story of how the unscrupulous Romano-British Cerdic becomes the (unjustly) honoured and respected founder of the royal line of Wessex. There is even a brief part for King Arthur - or rather his cavalry, at Badon. It is narrated by Cerdic himself with a far-from-disarming honesty. It is extremely readable, and highly amusing in a grim way, as well as being something of a tongue-in-cheek comment on some of the hypotheses about this very doubtful period in British history."

David Doughan (dd@juss.demon.co.uk) from London, England , 18 September, 1999 about "Conscience of the King"

Other selected Alfred Duggan novels

Knight with Armour (1950)

The Lady for Ransom (1953)

Family Favourites (1960)

Count Bohemund (1964)

 1999 re-release of 5 Alfred Duggan novels by Methven's Booksellers 

The Little Emperors Conscience of the King The King of Athelney The Cunning of the Dove God and My Right