What do you think?
Rate this book
Serious Pleasures: The Life of Stephen Tennant
A fascinating biography of Britain’s most legendary and flamboyant aristocratic aesthete. Out of Tennant’s bizarre and outrageously eccentric life, Hoare has created a superb biography that reflects an age of intellect, indolence, narcissism, and pure style. 32 pages of photographs; 22 drawings.
480 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1990
16 people are currently reading
838 people want to read
About the author
Philip Hoare
44 books133 followersPhilip Hoare is an English writer, especially of history and biography. He instigated the Moby Dick Big Read project. He is Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Southampton and Leverhulme artist-in-residence at the Marine Institute, Plymouth University, which awarded him an honorary doctorate in 2011.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 30 of 32 reviews
December 21, 2021
Excellent biography of one of England's great eccentrics. I was torn between fascination (an interesting and colourful character) and irritation (a life lived in a totally self absorbed way; talent wasted)
Tennant was born at Wilsford Manor, his family home in Wiltshire and he died there in 1987 aged 81. He is a bit of an enigma; he had bright purple hair a long time before punk, he was one of the bright young things in the 1920s, openly gay at a time when it was really not safe to be so. He had a relationship with the war poet Siegfried Sassoon and famously spent a good part of his later years in bed. He attempted poetry at times and spent much of his life writing a novel called Lascar; set in Marseille and about the life and culture of the sailors there. I believe he did a good deal of research! He also did the artwork. He never actually finished it.
Tennant's life was set from the beginning. When his father asked a very young Stephen what he wanted to be when he grew up, he replied:
"I want to be a Great Beauty Sir". He certainly worked at it and his flamboyance was captured by Evelyn Waugh; he was the model for Sebastian Flyte in Brideshead. He is also the model for Cedric Hampton in Nancy Mitford's novels.
In his middle years he travelled a great deal and his list of friends is impressive; Garbo, Capote, E M Forster, Cecil Beaton, Virginia Woolf and Willa Cather (he was a great supporter of her work).
There is something of a contrast and also similarities between Tennant and the other great flamboyant characters of the time Brian Howard
Brian Howard: Portrait of a Failure
I have more sympathy for Howard because of his vocal opposition to Nazism at an early stage, but both are fascinating.
Tennant lent most of Wilsford Manor to the Red Cross during the war (he lived in a small part of one wing). Typical of Stephen he walked into a ward full of tough soldiers recovering from injuries one morning and announced;
"Now you're all going to have a treat today. If you watch carefully out of that window, you'll see a buddleia being transplanted from one end of the garden to the other". Posterity hasn't recorded the response.
Hoare records that in London Stephen was found standing decoratively by the golden fountain in the Ritz foyer by Michael Duff (a friend from the 20s), who had two American GIs with him. "Darling Boys, come all this way to save us". He spent a good deal of time at the American camps in Wiltshire.
This is a remarkably good biography of a great British eccentric and captures the era of the bright young things very well. I couldn't help liking Stephen Tennant, despite being annoyed at his wasting his remarkable talents.
Tennant was born at Wilsford Manor, his family home in Wiltshire and he died there in 1987 aged 81. He is a bit of an enigma; he had bright purple hair a long time before punk, he was one of the bright young things in the 1920s, openly gay at a time when it was really not safe to be so. He had a relationship with the war poet Siegfried Sassoon and famously spent a good part of his later years in bed. He attempted poetry at times and spent much of his life writing a novel called Lascar; set in Marseille and about the life and culture of the sailors there. I believe he did a good deal of research! He also did the artwork. He never actually finished it.
Tennant's life was set from the beginning. When his father asked a very young Stephen what he wanted to be when he grew up, he replied:
"I want to be a Great Beauty Sir". He certainly worked at it and his flamboyance was captured by Evelyn Waugh; he was the model for Sebastian Flyte in Brideshead. He is also the model for Cedric Hampton in Nancy Mitford's novels.
In his middle years he travelled a great deal and his list of friends is impressive; Garbo, Capote, E M Forster, Cecil Beaton, Virginia Woolf and Willa Cather (he was a great supporter of her work).
There is something of a contrast and also similarities between Tennant and the other great flamboyant characters of the time Brian Howard
Brian Howard: Portrait of a Failure
I have more sympathy for Howard because of his vocal opposition to Nazism at an early stage, but both are fascinating.
Tennant lent most of Wilsford Manor to the Red Cross during the war (he lived in a small part of one wing). Typical of Stephen he walked into a ward full of tough soldiers recovering from injuries one morning and announced;
"Now you're all going to have a treat today. If you watch carefully out of that window, you'll see a buddleia being transplanted from one end of the garden to the other". Posterity hasn't recorded the response.
Hoare records that in London Stephen was found standing decoratively by the golden fountain in the Ritz foyer by Michael Duff (a friend from the 20s), who had two American GIs with him. "Darling Boys, come all this way to save us". He spent a good deal of time at the American camps in Wiltshire.
This is a remarkably good biography of a great British eccentric and captures the era of the bright young things very well. I couldn't help liking Stephen Tennant, despite being annoyed at his wasting his remarkable talents.
January 28, 2023
4.5, rounded down.
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.
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 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". 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. But basically, he was famous for being famous - sort of an amalgamation of Wilde and Quentin Crisp.
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. V.S. 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.
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. 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. 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.
Be 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. I only wish some enterprising writer/director would make a film centering on Tennant's life.
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.
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 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". 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. But basically, he was famous for being famous - sort of an amalgamation of Wilde and Quentin Crisp.
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. V.S. 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.
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. 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. 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.
Be 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. I only wish some enterprising writer/director would make a film centering on Tennant's life.
January 18, 2020
"Stephen Tennant was just a flamboyant gay who didn't really do anything," says one of the many supporting players in Mr Hoare's exhaustive doorstopper of a biography. True, this is the life of a man who essentially is best known for being a striking-looking girlish boy at London parties in the 1920s (as one of the Bright Young Things), then spending the rest of his life loafing about in his mansion. He was born into wealth and could do whatever he liked. There was no need to prove himself, no ambition, no drive. He did manage to have some modest success as a painter, but never really advanced past the status of cult figure, at best.
But Mr Hoare saw a life that needed to be properly chronicled and celebrated, and his enthusiasm rubs off on the reader. There's just something about Stephen. The ultimate lonely gay aristocrat, so free yet so trapped. This book redeems him, in a way, proving that just being a beautiful boy turned reclusive eccentric is an achievement of sorts.
But Mr Hoare saw a life that needed to be properly chronicled and celebrated, and his enthusiasm rubs off on the reader. There's just something about Stephen. The ultimate lonely gay aristocrat, so free yet so trapped. This book redeems him, in a way, proving that just being a beautiful boy turned reclusive eccentric is an achievement of sorts.
March 3, 2008
Stephen Tennant is my type of guy - he basically dresses super well, hung out with Cecil Beaton, and stayed in bed for the most of his life. Oscar Wilde wrote about it, but Tennant actually lived the grand life of doing.... well, really nothing. But he did it with a sense of genius and adventure. This book should never go out of print!
September 20, 2010
This is probably my all-time favorite book. Both the subject and the writing are exquisite (and John Waters will back me up on both counts).
June 23, 2017
The name of sluggard — Stephen Tennant; he really had an aesthetic, eccentric, aristocrat and homosexual. Tennant, the older you get, the more time spent in bed, but not because of weakness or illness, and for ideological reasons.
He was a principled, staunch slacker, he was only interested in (appropriately understood) the Beauty of everything else makes him or contempt, or (more often) terrified. Stephen Tennant was a typical character of the English aristocratic life of 1920-30-ies, life, brilliantly and exhaustively described by Woodhouse and Evelyn Waugh. Incidentally, the latter used some very fine features sloth in his best novel "Brideshead Revisited," turning, however, the carefree aesthetic in a tragic alcoholic Sebastian Flyte.
Of course, a man like Tennant, literally begged on the page a "psychological" prose of the last century, still concerned that in the XIX century called "characters". Tennant still in his twenties walked in a spotted leopard print pajamas, makeup, painted under the blonde and covered the hair with gold dust.
But he is, after all, was the present aesthetic and not the usual sloth or one of the many British eccentrics, aristocrats. Stephen Tennant is a collector, author of the epistolary prose, and even a painter, if you remember the sketches of costumes for his unwritten novel. As to the first, he collected things that he considered "works of art", relying on their own capricious taste.
He was a principled, staunch slacker, he was only interested in (appropriately understood) the Beauty of everything else makes him or contempt, or (more often) terrified. Stephen Tennant was a typical character of the English aristocratic life of 1920-30-ies, life, brilliantly and exhaustively described by Woodhouse and Evelyn Waugh. Incidentally, the latter used some very fine features sloth in his best novel "Brideshead Revisited," turning, however, the carefree aesthetic in a tragic alcoholic Sebastian Flyte.
Of course, a man like Tennant, literally begged on the page a "psychological" prose of the last century, still concerned that in the XIX century called "characters". Tennant still in his twenties walked in a spotted leopard print pajamas, makeup, painted under the blonde and covered the hair with gold dust.
But he is, after all, was the present aesthetic and not the usual sloth or one of the many British eccentrics, aristocrats. Stephen Tennant is a collector, author of the epistolary prose, and even a painter, if you remember the sketches of costumes for his unwritten novel. As to the first, he collected things that he considered "works of art", relying on their own capricious taste.
Read
January 9, 2025a really deft, rich, attentive biography that by around the halfway mark began to make me feel deeply sad ? maybe the sense that his friends, his family, the world, even sometimes his biographer seemed to tire of him, that almost everyone who knew him well seemed to slide, eventually, from eager, admiring love into pity. or maybe that the impatience, the occasional snide-nesses from friends, the flashes of repulsion and disappointment, the private resentments written into diaries, all made the moments of hoare's tenderness for his subject feel even more deliberate, and more heartbreaking.
anyway, i wldn't have read this if i weren't also re-reading lote, and i've thought, sometimes, that this has the capacity to puncture the transfixion-him i carry out of that book, bubbled in the iridescence of his own youth and splendour and hope and promise and dearly belovedness. but then i go back to lote and i see him again, in brief, beautiful shimmers, and i realise the dream he made of himself, the dream others have made of him, survives and shifts and squirms as elegantly away from reality as he did in life. which is, in its own way, a masterful work of art.
anyway, i wldn't have read this if i weren't also re-reading lote, and i've thought, sometimes, that this has the capacity to puncture the transfixion-him i carry out of that book, bubbled in the iridescence of his own youth and splendour and hope and promise and dearly belovedness. but then i go back to lote and i see him again, in brief, beautiful shimmers, and i realise the dream he made of himself, the dream others have made of him, survives and shifts and squirms as elegantly away from reality as he did in life. which is, in its own way, a masterful work of art.
January 11, 2017
I love this biography. I reread it almost every second year. I even ordered the auction book from his estate upon his death and then went on to read biographies of everyone else in his life mentioned in this book like Cecil Beaton and Siegfried Sassoon. A unique individual. I wish they could make a movie of his life. On my tenth reading I am still enamored of this extraordinary life...he touched so many people and had so much talent that never truly arrived as expected. He produced so much that was never published and which was lost over time or was auctioned off piecemeal on his death and his prodigious output was never collected in one place.
March 13, 2023
I finished this book with mixed feelings. Philip Hoare has written a very exhaustive account of the life of Stephen Tennant – a person who clearly inspired great loyalty and acclaim during his lifetime, not to mention his influence on the likes of Cecil Beaton, yet who emerges as a not terribly worthy subject. Utterly spoilt and indulged in childhood, he remained a totally self-centred and attention-seeking adult to the end of his life. Yet he clearly possessed great talent (he went to art school with Rex Whistler and his work was favourably compared with Aubrey Beardsley’s) but with his aristocratic background and inherited wealth he had no need to push himself to produce great works.
And yet he emerges as a fascinating character – eternally interested in the world around him, in foreign travel, in anything and everything that was beautiful. He was a true eccentric with his collections of shells, lizards, hats, fishnets and other such ephemera which decorated his house.
But it cannot be denied that he displayed an astonishing lack of feeling for even the closest of friends (when Cecil Beaton, his dearest friend for over 50 years, suffered a stroke and became physically repugnant to Tennant, he simply cut him off, just as he had terminated his relationship with the devoted Siegfried Sasson once he had tired of him).
The book is overlong, as if Hoare did not want to waste any of his research, and at times it feels like you are wading through a catalogue of friends and acquaintances, travels and journal entries. It also doesn’t really come alive except in the quoted letters and diaries (particularly those of Cecil Beaton’s). Despite this Tennant remains a fascinating subject, a true English eccentric of some talent who inspired those around him, and is rightly remembered as a beautiful young man – THE Bright Young Thing of the 1920’s.
And yet he emerges as a fascinating character – eternally interested in the world around him, in foreign travel, in anything and everything that was beautiful. He was a true eccentric with his collections of shells, lizards, hats, fishnets and other such ephemera which decorated his house.
But it cannot be denied that he displayed an astonishing lack of feeling for even the closest of friends (when Cecil Beaton, his dearest friend for over 50 years, suffered a stroke and became physically repugnant to Tennant, he simply cut him off, just as he had terminated his relationship with the devoted Siegfried Sasson once he had tired of him).
The book is overlong, as if Hoare did not want to waste any of his research, and at times it feels like you are wading through a catalogue of friends and acquaintances, travels and journal entries. It also doesn’t really come alive except in the quoted letters and diaries (particularly those of Cecil Beaton’s). Despite this Tennant remains a fascinating subject, a true English eccentric of some talent who inspired those around him, and is rightly remembered as a beautiful young man – THE Bright Young Thing of the 1920’s.
December 8, 2025
I read this because I really enjoy Hoare's histories. I had no knowledge of Stephen Tennant's life other than the mentions in Hoare's other books. So, a blank slate, I found this biography utterly captivating as a focused, colorful picture of the world, especially England, in the decades following the War to End All Wars. Tennant was an artist and author but far better known for the crazy flamboyance of his personal life. I was reminded a lot of Huysmans' characters growing older in a society less forgiving of eccentricity or homosexuality. Tennant also knew an amazing number of people and lived in a shifting array of gothic and fantastic scenarios. As a boy, he visited Glamis Castle and told a story of a servant carrying food into an empty wing. As a senior decadent, he almost became the star of a Kenneth Anger movie. In between those bizarre poles lies a kingdom of wonder.
December 13, 2024
A tender, fascinating, and well written portrait.
March 15, 2020
A unique personality and an interesting biography but I found it incredibly sad...it seems there were v few times of his life when he was truly happy.
January 27, 2023
Absolutely first rate and fascinating book about a man who was not only an inspiration for writers like Waugh but also a man who could command the affections and attentions of such as Siegfried Sassoon - the problem is that very quickly Stephen Tennant grows to be a bore - whatever fascination he exercised is hard to fathom - once you remove the the somewhat epicene looks and the money what did you have - a very self absorb and rather boring young man. But the book isn't boring and if it helps to bury under the truth whatever is left of the tatty legend of the bright young things then it will have done a great service.
Still Philip How're is way to clever and perceptive an author not to make something interesting and perceptive out of the rather silly, tawdry and ultimately sad reality of Stephen Tennant's life. That he also resists all the tempting but far to easy snide remarks, unkindnesses and general gloating superiority that it would be so easy to fall into says a great deal about what a good biographer he is.
Still Philip How're is way to clever and perceptive an author not to make something interesting and perceptive out of the rather silly, tawdry and ultimately sad reality of Stephen Tennant's life. That he also resists all the tempting but far to easy snide remarks, unkindnesses and general gloating superiority that it would be so easy to fall into says a great deal about what a good biographer he is.
January 27, 2015
While its been a rough summer, of late I have been transported by Philip Hoare's biography of Stephen Tennant, Serious Pleasures. Tennant is a fascinating individual whose live touched so many luminaries of the 20th-Century. Inspired to read the book after discovering that Tennant served as one of the inspirations for Lord Sebastian Flyte in Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited (one of my favorite books of all time, as all my friends are loathe to hear, over and over again) I have enjoyed reading about Tennant's peculiar life. While Hoare's biography is more hagiography than critical biography it allowed me to transport myself along with Tennant on all his travels, both social and geographical.
December 21, 2025
Stephen Tennant was an admirer and subsequently friend of the novelist Willa Cather; late in life, he befriended a Cather scholar, Patricia Lee Yongue, and invited her to stay for the summer at his country house, Wilsford in Berkshire (his neighbour Cecil Beaton referred to its chaotic ambience as ‘Miss Havisham gone berserk’). After a few days, he informed her that since he required solitude to create she should now leave. As she had nowhere else to go and had borrowed money to travel from America, his servants John and Mary Skull asked her to stay with them, which Tennant agreed to, and she was thereafter a regular visitor to the house. She had this to say:
I don’t think [Stephen] had the slightest real feeling for any of us, none that he acknowledged or even recognized. I’ve never had that experience before. I do not feel trifled with; I just felt odd that I spent so much time in Stephen’s house and in his presence and had not the slightest sense that he cared in any remotely human way for me. I established the normal, expected relationships with others I met through Stephen, including a wonderful one with John and Mary. But Stephen’s whole approach to me was performance.
Tennant is not then a ‘likeable’ character in any usual sense of the word. The term ‘narcissistic’ gets bandied about a lot these days, and if it can’t be applied to him, it might as well be taken out of the dictionary. He had charm, which seemed to work on most people, and in his youth was considered a beauty (not least by himself), and was sculpted and painted and photographed and written up in the gossip columns. As far as I can tell, his charm at that time consisted of the impact of his physical appearance plus the free and apparently guileless acknowledgement of his raging self-absorption and selfishness. Musing on a proposed group portrait in a letter to Beaton, he noted:
Competition for prominence will be a very touchy business I foresee... my tongue is already flickering like an adder, lest one iota of foreground be denied me – in fact I have suggested such a nice idea – i.e. – that I should recline in the foreground & behind me, knee deep in a Buttercup field, a group in the distance of you all.
I didn’t warm up to Serious Pleasures until its second half. Tennant as a Bright Young Thing isn’t terribly interesting, and I wondered whether his posing and preening merited any kind of biography, let alone one of this length. However, post-war Tennant, fat and strange and reclusive, aristocratically indifferent to the opinions of others, his peculiarities coming into full bloom as his house falls down around him, becomes bizarrely fascinating.
Judging from the examples we’re given, he was strictly an amateur practitioner of the arts (although he took his own work very seriously and knew a great many talented people): his sketches look like book illustrations or doodles for fashion magazines; his poems are embarrassingly bad; and I don’t think the world was deprived of anything much when Lascar, his projected great novel of the Marseilles waterfront remained uncompleted. Of all his artistic efforts, his decorated letter-writing seems to have been where he excelled, and he can be very funny (see the account of himself and a page boy shot through the swing doors of the Ritz by the blast of a nearby bomb ‘like Peter Pan and Wendy’). But his greatest work of art was himself, not as a youthful beauty, but as, in the words of Beaton, a ‘real and true eccentric with deep passions for the things he loves, living in a hovel entirely of his own making with… frenzy and zeal.’
I don’t think [Stephen] had the slightest real feeling for any of us, none that he acknowledged or even recognized. I’ve never had that experience before. I do not feel trifled with; I just felt odd that I spent so much time in Stephen’s house and in his presence and had not the slightest sense that he cared in any remotely human way for me. I established the normal, expected relationships with others I met through Stephen, including a wonderful one with John and Mary. But Stephen’s whole approach to me was performance.
Tennant is not then a ‘likeable’ character in any usual sense of the word. The term ‘narcissistic’ gets bandied about a lot these days, and if it can’t be applied to him, it might as well be taken out of the dictionary. He had charm, which seemed to work on most people, and in his youth was considered a beauty (not least by himself), and was sculpted and painted and photographed and written up in the gossip columns. As far as I can tell, his charm at that time consisted of the impact of his physical appearance plus the free and apparently guileless acknowledgement of his raging self-absorption and selfishness. Musing on a proposed group portrait in a letter to Beaton, he noted:
Competition for prominence will be a very touchy business I foresee... my tongue is already flickering like an adder, lest one iota of foreground be denied me – in fact I have suggested such a nice idea – i.e. – that I should recline in the foreground & behind me, knee deep in a Buttercup field, a group in the distance of you all.
I didn’t warm up to Serious Pleasures until its second half. Tennant as a Bright Young Thing isn’t terribly interesting, and I wondered whether his posing and preening merited any kind of biography, let alone one of this length. However, post-war Tennant, fat and strange and reclusive, aristocratically indifferent to the opinions of others, his peculiarities coming into full bloom as his house falls down around him, becomes bizarrely fascinating.
Judging from the examples we’re given, he was strictly an amateur practitioner of the arts (although he took his own work very seriously and knew a great many talented people): his sketches look like book illustrations or doodles for fashion magazines; his poems are embarrassingly bad; and I don’t think the world was deprived of anything much when Lascar, his projected great novel of the Marseilles waterfront remained uncompleted. Of all his artistic efforts, his decorated letter-writing seems to have been where he excelled, and he can be very funny (see the account of himself and a page boy shot through the swing doors of the Ritz by the blast of a nearby bomb ‘like Peter Pan and Wendy’). But his greatest work of art was himself, not as a youthful beauty, but as, in the words of Beaton, a ‘real and true eccentric with deep passions for the things he loves, living in a hovel entirely of his own making with… frenzy and zeal.’
December 30, 2020
I first read this extraordinary biography of an extraordinary life in 1992 - my first commission as a wannabe reporter at The Scotsman at a time when I was discovering Evelyn Waugh and Nancy Mitford - and it has stayed with me ever since. I reread it over Christmas to prepare for a conversation with the director John Waters, for my new podcast/radio show, Read by Famous, and it is every bit as good I remember. If there is anyone more delightfully eccentric in 20th century history than Stephen Tennant, I'd like to know - he could out-eccentric the best of them, but he was also charming, deeply alive to nature, profoundly literary (his lifelong friendship with Willa Cather stemmed from his abiding love of her writing), and - best of all - utterly at ease with being gay at a time when sexual relations between men were prohibited. Rereading this, at a distance of 28 years, I felt infinitely more sympathy for Tennant's spurned lover, Siegfried Sassoon, than I had the first time around, and charmed, too, by Cecil Beaton, presented as something of a naif who found himself inside Tennant's circle without sharing his aristocratic confidence or inherent sense of privilege. There's a telling anecdote of an outing to the Circus at Olympia, an emporium of fairground rides and circus acts, at which Tennant and the Guinness sisters and Cecil Beaton are all dressed up as richly as the performers - Tennant in black leather coat with a large Elizabethan collar of Chinchilla. Hoare notes that: “Cecil was the only one to notice that ‘people stared and glowered and even laughed at us.’ Stephen and the Guinness girls couldn’t have cared less. It was he difference in class; they, the aristocracy, would give no quarter to such public astonishment, whereas Beaton, acutely aware of his background, did.”
November 4, 2024
Well-written and meticulously researched, this book is a fascinating look at a man who was openly gay at a time when it was illegal in the UK. Tennant was a talented artist and writer who never achieved fame as anything but a socialite, but he was friends with dozens of luminaries of the art and writing worlds. He counted among his inner circle Cecil Beaton, Siegfried Sassoon (the love of his life), Willa Cather, Nancy Mitford, E.M. Forster and Virginia Woolf. He was a central member of the Bright Young Things, a group of fun-loving, wealthy and beautiful people who made headlines for their sometimes outrageous behavior in the Roaring Twenties. Both Mitford and Evelyn Waugh based characters on Tennant in their novels.
This book is dense with tales of his travels, his correspondence with these luminaries and many others, and his whimsical drawings. It is not fast reading, but it immerses the reader in a way of life that is now long gone, taking us from the beginning of the 20th century though the 1980s. Many details of Tennant's life are sad. He really never reached the level of fame he felt he deserved and never found a long-term companion. And he is often portrayed as selfish and a bit cruel in his treatment of longtime friends. In his old age, he isolated himself at his lavishly and eccentrically decorated estate in the English countryside.
When I finally finished this detailed account of his life, I found myself missing him. He was a true individual who traveled among some of the most elite cultural figures of the 20th century. This is an intimate portrait not only of him, but of those people as well.
This book is dense with tales of his travels, his correspondence with these luminaries and many others, and his whimsical drawings. It is not fast reading, but it immerses the reader in a way of life that is now long gone, taking us from the beginning of the 20th century though the 1980s. Many details of Tennant's life are sad. He really never reached the level of fame he felt he deserved and never found a long-term companion. And he is often portrayed as selfish and a bit cruel in his treatment of longtime friends. In his old age, he isolated himself at his lavishly and eccentrically decorated estate in the English countryside.
When I finally finished this detailed account of his life, I found myself missing him. He was a true individual who traveled among some of the most elite cultural figures of the 20th century. This is an intimate portrait not only of him, but of those people as well.
September 4, 2021
it seems rather apropos that i spent too much money on this, but oh well. i really like the nuanced perspective on mr tennant, a lot of the time he’s presented as “what a weird guy!!” with no attention to the mental illnesses he likely had.
January 27, 2024
Superlative biography of Stephen Tennant, aesthete and failure. Charmingly and humorously written - managing to make a life that amounted to almost nothing fascinating. In the end, a desperately sad book - not the ending but throughout.
May 7, 2017
Stephen Tennant was a remarkably unique individual whose life makes for a very entertaining read.
December 9, 2023
Philip Hoare shows how it's possible to write a great biography about an entirely frivolous subject.
August 13, 2025
they don’t make nepo baby twinks like this anymore.
April 19, 2020
Definitely one of my favourite biographies. I wish there were more books on Stephen Tennant.
October 23, 2016
**UPDATE** After learning that quite a few Stephen Tennant artifacts are on permanent display at The Last Tuesday Society, in London, I knew I had to see them. Luckily for me I was to visit friends there, and am glad that I was able to see original drawings and photographs by Stephen, and of Stephen. Prompting me to reread this book, I have to say that I now view it in a completely different light. Even so much that I cried after finishing it the second time round. Read this book if you have any human emotion at all, and would like to try and understand queer life in England during most of the 20th century.
******************************************************************************
**Original Review** Ever since I became aware of the enigmatic figure, the Hon. Stephen Tennant, I have gobbled up ANY information/ images that I could possibly find related to him and his friends, a group know as the bright young things. So naturally when a friend told me that a biography on him existed I had to find it!
This book must be, aside from some random dusty archive buried deep in an English museum, or perhaps one of Tennant's relatives estates, the most complete collection of Information of Tennant's life, as well as some wonderful images. And although I did enjoy learning more about Mr. Tennant, I found Phillip Hoare's writing, simply put, dry and lackluster. I have a feeling that Hoare was trying to take what many people might see as a frivolous subject and turn it into something more academic, to be taken more seriously. But in doing so I feel as if he has lost the spirit of the bright young things, and Stephen himself. The bright young things were all about beauty, pleasure, fun, excitement, partying, and privilege... This biography is hardly any of those things.
If you are not specifically interested in Stephen, the bright young things, or this particular era, then I would not recommend this book to you.
******************************************************************************
**Original Review** Ever since I became aware of the enigmatic figure, the Hon. Stephen Tennant, I have gobbled up ANY information/ images that I could possibly find related to him and his friends, a group know as the bright young things. So naturally when a friend told me that a biography on him existed I had to find it!
This book must be, aside from some random dusty archive buried deep in an English museum, or perhaps one of Tennant's relatives estates, the most complete collection of Information of Tennant's life, as well as some wonderful images. And although I did enjoy learning more about Mr. Tennant, I found Phillip Hoare's writing, simply put, dry and lackluster. I have a feeling that Hoare was trying to take what many people might see as a frivolous subject and turn it into something more academic, to be taken more seriously. But in doing so I feel as if he has lost the spirit of the bright young things, and Stephen himself. The bright young things were all about beauty, pleasure, fun, excitement, partying, and privilege... This biography is hardly any of those things.
If you are not specifically interested in Stephen, the bright young things, or this particular era, then I would not recommend this book to you.
December 3, 2014
I don't know how anyone could give this book fewer than five stars. I've finished it slightly obsessed with Stephen Tennant although I don't quite know why. It's probably to do partly with the quality of the writing. But it's also to do with Tennant's character: privileged, flamboyant, eccentric, charming and very, very camp. And he's so funny. There's also a sense of tragedy running throughout largely due to the sense that he could have done so much more with his talents and that so much went to waste. I've been enjoying Tennant's company immensely throughout its pages. Now onto something else by Hoare...
Want to read
August 4, 2011'Cause luxlotus says so http://www.luxlotus.com/lux_lotus/201...
Read
September 11, 2016Recommended by Lauren Cerand.
Want to read
May 3, 2016This is a book that I feel I should like, and want to read. But, I find myself not reading it. I could not put down "Strangers - A Family Romance" by Emma Tennant
February 23, 2015
I am interested in the ways in which the 1910s and '20s affected moral consciousness. This book certainly reveals the stark contrast between "visible" Victorians and their libertine offspring!
Displaying 1 - 30 of 32 reviews