Reviews for Serious Pleasures : The Life of Stephen Tennant

The average rating for Serious Pleasures : The Life of Stephen Tennant based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2010-12-29 00:00:00 Tama Tamitaboy 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.

Review # 2 was written on 2011-04-15 00:00:00 Jerry Petty "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.