{"id":144978,"date":"2020-05-12T15:07:22","date_gmt":"2020-05-12T19:07:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=144978"},"modified":"2020-12-09T12:05:02","modified_gmt":"2020-12-09T17:05:02","slug":"the-great-writer-who-never-wrote","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2020\/05\/12\/the-great-writer-who-never-wrote\/","title":{"rendered":"The Great Writer Who Never Wrote"},"content":{"rendered":"

Stephen Tennant\u2019s letters, thought Stephen Spender, were \u201cthe essence of English retention\u2014objects for private consumption, deluxe samizdats.\u201d Tennant also wrote poems, painted pictures, and worked on a novel, never to be completed. His most significant published work was his 1949 foreword to his friend Willa Cather\u2019s essay collection, commended by Cather scholars and still in print today.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Cecil Barton, Stephen Tennant (\u00a9The Cecil Beaton Studio Archive at Sotheby\u2019s)<\/p><\/div>\n

By the time of its reclusive occupant\u2019s death in 1987, the faux-Elizabethan country manor Wilsford, in Wiltshire near Stonehenge, overflowed with a dusty mishmash of valuable antiques, ephemeral gewgaws, and exotic objets d\u2019art. Outside, ivy shrouded the gables and moss thickened on the roof tiles. In the overgrown gardens stood a myriad of neglected statuary, marble urns, stone columns, and rococo fountains. To disperse it all, Sotheby\u2019s hosted hundreds of potential bidders, over four days, at what they described as an \u201cEnglish eccentric\u2019s dream house.\u201d Said eccentric was Stephen Tennant, who was born at Wilsford in 1906 and died there, aged eighty-one. According to his devoted housekeeper and nurse, Sylvia Blandford, he\u2019d have turned in his grave at the spectacle of his possessions being pawed over and auctioned off piece by piece. But he had left no will. Death was not, perhaps, a notion permitted within Tennant\u2019s elaborate fantasy world, into which he had retreated ever deeper as the decades passed.<\/p>\n

Like a fairy-tale character magically granted every conceivable blessing, only to discover those blessings carry a curse, the Honorary Stephen James Napier Tennant began life arrayed with sublime advantage. His father, Sir Edward Tennant, came from a family who owed their vast wealth to a Scottish ancestor\u2019s invention and patenting of bleach powder in 1799. Edward\u2019s blue-blooded wife, Pamela Wyndham, was a socialite who courted the leading artists and writers of the day. Pamela doted on Stephen, her youngest child of five, and encouraged him in his creative pursuits. As he was turning fifteen, she even arranged for his first art exhibition, at a respected London gallery. All the biggest national newspapers covered the event, offering fawning praise of the artist and his work. It must have been intoxicating indeed. And yet, as any former child star will attest, nothing warps one\u2019s sense of self like youthful celebrity.<\/p>\n

If Pamela took a keen interest in her precocious adolescent\u2019s artistic promise, she paid little attention to his reckless behavior, such as his habit of offering local soldiers a cigarette in exchange for a kiss. Once, when an encounter went further than a kiss, he was apprehended and brought home by a policeman, who assumed the boy would face consequences. He was mistaken. Sir Edward had recently died, and it never occurred to Pamela that Steenie, as he was known, should be anything but his uninhibited self. Tennant\u2019s gift for high camp, cultivated as least partly as camouflage for shyness, was always displayed at heroic levels. On one visit to New York, he disembarked the ship in full makeup, his hair in marcel waves, with a bunch of orchids in his hand. \u201cPin \u2018em on!\u201d jeered a customs officer, to which Tennant responded: \u201cOh, have you got a pin? What a wonderful welcome \u2026 you kind, kind creature.\u201d John Waters, who in 2015 named Philip Hoare\u2019s excellent biography of Tennant as one of his ten favorite books, put it thusly: \u201cAubrey Beardsley, Ronald Firbank, Denton Welch<\/a>\u2014believe me, Stephen Tennant made them all seem butch.\u201d<\/p>\n

It was in the late twenties, when Tennant was around twenty-one, that his life peaked. Among the so-called Bright Young People, whose decadence and penchant for fancy dress kept gossip columnists in brisk trade, he shone the brightest. \u201cHis appearance alone,\u201d the Daily Express <\/em>rhapsodized, \u201cis enough to make you catch your breath.\u201d He inspired Nancy Mitford and Evelyn Waugh characters, was sculpted by Jacob Epstein, wrote style columns, and stole the show in the group photographs that helped launch Cecil Beaton\u2019s century-defining career.<\/p>\n

Soon after Beaton was introduced to Tennant in late 1926, he accepted an invitation to Tennant\u2019s home, Wilsford, for the weekend. \u201cMy whole visit from beginning to end,\u201d the twenty-three-year-old Beaton recorded in his diary, \u201cwas like being at the most perfect play. Here Stephen was saying glorious things the entire time\u2014funny, trite, vital, importantly exact things.\u201d Tennant\u2019s influence was formative, believes Beaton\u2019s biographer, Hugo Vickers. \u201cWhile Stephen was far from short of ideas, he lacked the stamina to carry them out himself. Thus he was often the inspiration of an idea and Cecil its executor.\u201d<\/p>\n

Tennant\u2019s lack of stamina, both mental and physical, was to be the prevailing theme of his existence. His fragility haunted and doomed his one grand passionate affair: with Siegfried Sassoon, the revered poet and war hero turned pacifist. They first met through friends in the summer of 1927, when Tennant was twenty-one and Sassoon forty-one. Tennant\u2019s initial impression of Sassoon, he later reminisced, was of \u201csome charming wild animal\u2014one never felt he was really tame (or tameable).\u201d An instantly smitten Sassoon wondered if this fey youth, so beautiful and narcissistic, was capable of love. Yet fall madly in love Tennant did. Soon, he was addressing Sassoon as \u201cMy heart\u2019s best beloved\u201d in letters, and the poet was composing sonnets to him. During their relationship, Sassoon assumed the role of caretaker to his delicate, pampered lover\u2014who, having grown up a sickly child and suffered from tuberculosis since his late teens, periodically took to his bed for weeks. Sassoon happily kept close vigil. \u201cI ask for nothing,\u201d he wrote in April 1929, when Tennant was recovering from a lung operation, \u201cbut to be near him always.\u201d<\/p>\n

To Sassoon\u2019s torment, Tennant began asking for solitude during his bouts of invalidism. In reaction to this rejection, the poet moved into a house near Wilsford and took to lurking around the grounds, before going home to drink and weep. His hopes that they might, after all, have a future were raised when he was allowed in to see Tennant on a few occasions. And after the patient was diagnosed with neurasthenia and admitted to a psychiatric hospital, Sassoon visited him there, too. But the final break, when it occurred, was brutal. In May 1933, Sassoon received a letter from Tennant\u2019s doctor. \u201cHe says you upset him and make him feel ill,\u201d Dr. T. A. Ross wrote, \u201cand that he cannot see you again.\u201d Sassoon was stunned. By the end of the year, he had proposed to a woman, Hester Gatty. She was Tennant\u2019s age, twenty-seven, and said to resemble him. The marriage was not a success.<\/p>\n

From then on, Tennant romanticized his time with Sassoon, whom no other lover would eclipse in his self-mythology. \u201cIt is quite paradoxical,\u201d Philip Hoare observes, \u201cthat having so summarily dismissed Siegfried, Stephen should seemingly spend the rest of his life regretting the action\u2014or, at least, continually recalling the years he spent with Sassoon as an idyllic lost past.\u201d Rose-tinted memories, abstractions, were preferable to a reality in which his idealizations might be threatened. \u201cI am one of those sad people,\u201d Tennant wrote, \u201cwho would like to be loved without being known\u2014to be a wonderful memory, a legend, a glory\u2026\u201d His arch manners, ultra-glamorous primping, and brazen flouting of masculine taboos all kept the world at arm\u2019s length. As Beaton reflected, \u201cso many of Stephen\u2019s eccentricities and poses were a part of his illness.\u201d Alas, these self-preservation strategies were fallible, and Tennant relapsed into physical illness and depression many more times. In the late forties and again in the fifties, he underwent several rounds of ECT under general anesthetic.<\/p>\n

The same phobia of being seen thwarted Tennant\u2019s literary ambitions. As a young man, he wrote at least one novel, which he chose not to publish. And he spent many decades on his projected magnum opus, a Marseilles-inspired novel to be titled \u201cLascar,\u201d conceived in 1938 and never to be completed. He revised, rewrote, and reconfigured the story of, in his words, \u201ccrude desires, lusts, fidelities, and treacheries.\u201d He began other novels, and engaged in such procrastinatory activities as illustrations and designing covers, only to return to it. In 1941 Cyril Connolly\u2019s magazine, Horizon<\/em>, published a \u201cLascar\u201d cover featuring one of Tennant\u2019s own paintings. In Connolly\u2019s opinion, he was \u201can interesting and pathetic phenomenon, a great writer who can\u2019t write.\u201d E. M. Forster, meanwhile, read sections and urged Tennant to stick with it. Various other author friends offered kind words and advice, including Elizabeth Bowen, Rosamond Lehmann, and Willa Cather, whose work he idolized. (He wasn\u2019t very interested in male writers.) The American novelist, an unlikely but close friend, said she had high hopes for \u201cLascar.\u201d In the eighth decade of Tennant\u2019s life, and of the century, by which point he rarely ventured beyond the perimeter of Wilsford, he was still, supposedly, working on it.<\/p>\n

Tennant\u2019s slide into inanition was gradual but inexorable. In early middle age, he still took trips abroad and socialized in between periods of seclusion. Then, from around age fifty, he spent ever more time at home. In his bedroom, strewn with his favorite books, paintings, old photographs, diaries, and mementos, he could luxuriate in remembrance and forget he was no longer that ravishing young aesthete, so full of promise. \u201cI used to be beautiful like you, can you see that?\u201d he asked Marie Helvin, who dropped by one summer with the interior designer Nicky Haslam. \u201cI used to be so beautiful\u2026 It\u2019s a thing we can never stop being, can we?\u201d<\/p>\n

Callers were received as Tennant reclined on his unmade bed. He only got up in June, he\u2019d explain, to see the roses. In truth, he sometimes went shopping: a lifelong occupation was buying furniture and curios for the house and gardens; the more recherch\u00e9, the better. A 1966 letter from his brother Christopher, who looked after his finances, suggested mildly: \u201cI think the first thing to find out about the seal pool is how much it would cost to maintain and look after the seals.\u201d<\/p>\n

The correspondence Tennant produced from his sequestration was copious, and arrived scented and illustrated. He also continued to paint, and occasionally exhibited. In 1976, at age seventy, he had a joint show at a Mayfair gallery with the surrealist artist Cecil Collins. The Connoisseur<\/em> magazine said of Tennant\u2019s work: \u201cEverything conspires to create an air of mystery and romance… There is an air of fin de si\u00e8cle<\/em>, a time past and desirable, but now irrevocably out of reach.\u201d Tennant, unwilling to burst his own carefully fashioned bubble of nostalgia and illusion, declined to attend the exhibition\u2019s private view. \u201cI don\u2019t want to see<\/em> any friends or neighbors ever again,\u201d he told Beaton a couple of years later. \u201cI am a total sad recluse alas. I\u2019m a complete failure in every way.\u201d The photographer, who had recently suffered a stroke, was shaken. \u201cIt is the end of an epoch!\u201d he noted sadly in his diary.<\/p>\n

Tennant\u2019s closest neighbor in his final years was V. S. Naipaul, who lived with his wife, Patricia Hale, in a cottage on Wilsford\u2019s grounds between 1971 and 1986. The two men never met, though Tennant would send his housekeeper over with little gifts of poems and pictures. And thanks to the stories Naipaul heard from staff and visitors, Tennant became a central presence in his autobiographical novel The Enigma of Arrival<\/em>. In this melancholic introspection on the idea of home, the writer\/narrator diagnoses his hidden landlord with acedia, a profound spiritual dejection. He astutely speculates on the cause: \u201cPerhaps he had stalled in what might be considered an earlier state of perfection,\u201d that is, his youthful identity in all its glory. \u201cBut that perfection \u2026 had turned to morbidity, acedia, a death of the soul.\u201d He also muses on how the Tennant character\u2019s extreme privilege, rooted in the dying British Empire, is the mirror image of his own impoverished beginnings in the colonial Caribbean. \u201cI felt I could understand his malaise; I saw it as the other side of my own\u2026 Privilege lay between us. But I had an intimation that it worked against him.\u201d<\/p>\n

Tennant never read The Enigma of Arrival<\/em>, which was published in March 1987, less than three weeks after his death. He would have appreciated it, given his discerning literary taste and desire for immortality. As he inquired of a friend, happily and rhetorically, a few years earlier: \u201cAm I a legend? I suppose I am. How exciting!\u201d He remains so, a century on from his first taste of the limelight as a teenage artist. In the publicity for \u201cCecil Beaton\u2019s Bright Young Things\u201d (an exhibition previously due to run this spring<\/a> at London\u2019s National Portrait Gallery), and the accompanying book (out now in the UK and the U.S.<\/a>), Tennant upstages his peers just as he did in the twenties. Beaton\u2019s photographs capture that portentous, perfect moment upon which, in a tragic sense, Tennant\u2019s entire life would pivot. He appears in them as he always wished to be seen: otherworldly, untouchable in his beauty, and eerily, eternally modern.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Emma Garman has written about books and culture for\u00a0<\/em>Lapham\u2019s Quarterly Roundtable,\u00a0<\/em>Longreads,\u00a0<\/em>Newsweek,\u00a0<\/em>The Daily Beast,\u00a0<\/em>Salon,\u00a0<\/em>The Awl,\u00a0<\/em>Words without Borders, and other publications.\u00a0<\/em>She was the first writer of the Daily’s <\/a><\/em>Feminize Your Canon<\/a> column<\/a><\/em>.<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Tennant wrote letters, painted pictures, and worked on a novel, never to be completed. His most significant published work was his 1949 foreword to his friend Willa Cather\u2019s essay collection.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1048,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[419],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-144978","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arts-culture"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nThe Great Writer Who Never Wrote by Emma Garman<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"May 12, 2020 \u2013 Tennant wrote letters, painted pictures, and worked on a novel, never to be completed. 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