serious pleasures the life of stephen tennant

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. The attached photos are of the copy we have in our inventory.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. This is not a remainder copy, not a library discard. No former ownership marks, no writing on the text pages. Edges of the text block show some small dots of bump marks to the top edge.

Cover boards are flat, the corners are not bumped or creased, no edge wear to the cover boards. Black cloth covered cover boards, with the author name and title imprinted on the spine in gold. Tear is not very noticeable though as the jacket has been protected with a clear, removable cover.

There is a 1' closed tear on the back panel of the jacket - to the right of the William Hickey blurb. The dust jacket is intact and is not price clipped. 464 pages with Index, Notes and four sections of photos, 6-3/8' X 9-1/2'. An in-depth look at the life of Stephen Tennant, from his early life at Wilsford Manor to his friendships with Rex Whistler and Cecil Beaton, Great Garbo, Christopher Isherwood, and his relationship with Siegfried Sassoon, to his later years in seclusion. First edition hardcover with dust jacket, published by Hamish Hamilton, 1990.

Serious pleasures the life of stephen tennant