serious pleasures the life of stephen tennant

My other minor quibble is that although there is a generous 'Notes' section, the Index seemed on the occasions I made use of it to be woefully inaccurate.īe that as it may, I was generally fascinated by the subject and although it took me ten LONG days to finish (the pages are large and the font small), it was well worth the effort. And although copiously illustrated with four sections of photographs, with Tennant's illustrations also dotting the text occasionally - many of the most vivid descriptions of such in the text are absent. Hoare does an excellent job of (again, exhaustively) researching and ferreting out the smallest details of Tennant's life - but there are many instances in which what he discovers is not all that much of interest. Naipaul also rented a cottage on Tennant's estate for 15 years, but never met his reclusive landlord - that didn't deter him from creating a character based on him in his The Enigma of Arrival: A Novel in Five Sections.

He also inspired characters in many other writer's fiction: most notably being one of the inspirations behind Sebastian Flyte in Brideshead Revisited (Tennant carried both a teddy bear and a toy monkey around well past adolescence), and Cedric in Mitford's Love in a Cold Climate. But basically, he was famous for being famous - sort of an amalgamation of Wilde and Quentin Crisp. He somewhat achieved that, as in his youth (see the cover photo by Beaton), he was considered astonishingly handsome, and used cosmetics and hair dyes throughout his life to enhance his natural attributes.

I think the most amusing and telling anecdote in the book comes when he was a mere tot of four: his father queried his sons on what they wanted to be when they grew up, and whereas Stephen's brothers opted for businessman and engineer, the precocious Stephen replied: 'I want to be a Great Beauty, Sir'. Tennant was perhaps the most flamboyant of the 'Bright Young Things' that came to be notorious following the First World War, and despite not having much of a career as either a writer (he spent fifty years composing and rewriting a magnum opus called 'Lascar', that remained unfinished at his death in 1987) or an artist, he continued to fascinate the English public due to his many eccentricities - and the fact he knew virtually everybody who was anybody - from the Queen Mother to Greta Garbo to Cecil Beaton to Virginia Woolf, etc., etc. I'd vaguely recalled the name of Stephen Tennant (he's mentioned once in Holroyd's exhaustive Lytton Strachey: The New Biography), but it wasn't until a recent viewing of Terence Davies' 'Benediction', his magnificent film bio of Tennant's lover, poet Siegfried Sassoon, that I became entranced by the subject - Stephen really steals the show in that film.

Serious pleasures the life of stephen tennant