serious pleasures the life of stephen tennant

The character of Miles Malpractice in the novel Vile Bodies is based on Tennant. The character of Cedric Hampton in the novel Love in a Cold Climate is based on Tennant. A large archive of his letters, scrapbooks, personal ephemera and artworks is held in The Viktor Wynd Museum of Curiosities, Fine Art & Natural History in Hackney, London. When Tennant died in 1987, he had far outlived most of his contemporaries. Sassoon was reportedly devastated, but recovered to marry in 1933 and become a father in 1936. ( Philip Hoare relates how Tennant discussed plans with Lowndes about bringing his nanny with them on their honeymoon.) His relationship with Sassoon, however, was to be his most important: it lasted some six years before Tennant off-handedly put an abrupt end to it. Prior to this he had proposed to a friend, Elizabeth Lowndes, but had been rejected. Naipaul, who immortalised Tennant in his novel The Enigma of Arrival.ĭuring the 1920s and 1930s Tennant had a sexual affair with the poet Siegfried Sassoon. Yet even then, his life was not uneventful: he became landlord to V. His later reputation as a recluse became increasingly true only towards the last years of his life. Though undoubtedly idle, he was not truly lethargic: he made several visits to the United States and Italy, and struck up many new friendships. It is popularly believed that he spent the last 17 years of his life in bed at the house he inherited from his parents, Wilsford House at Wilsford cum Lake, Wiltshire, which he had redecorated by Syrie Maugham. Miles Malpractice in some of Waugh's other novels.įor most of his life, Tennant tried to start or finish a novel – Lascar: A Story You Must Forget. He is widely considered to be the model for Cedric Hampton in Nancy Mitford's novel Love in a Cold Climate, one of the inspirations for Lord Sebastian Flyte in Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited, and a model for the Hon. His friends included Rex Whistler, Cecil Beaton, the Sitwells, Lady Diana Manners and the Mitford girls. Social set ĭuring the 1920s and 1930s, Tennant was an important member – the 'Brightest', it is said – of the ' Bright Young People'.

His elder brother David Tennant founded the Gargoyle Club in Soho.

Tennant's eldest brother Edward – 'Bim' – was killed in the First World War. On his father's death, Tennant's mother married Lord Grey, a fellow bird-lover. His mother was also a cousin of Lord Alfred Douglas (1870–1945), Oscar Wilde's lover and a sonneteer. Tennant was born into British nobility, the youngest son of a Scottish peer, Edward Tennant, 1st Baron Glenconner, and the former Pamela Wyndham, one of the Wyndham sisters and of The Souls clique. The Wyndham Sisters, by John Singer Sargent, 1899 ( Metropolitan Museum)

Serious pleasures the life of stephen tennant