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 full-blooded 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’.