For the greater part of his adult life, Tennant labored on the production of Lascar: A Story of the Maritime Boulevards, the novel that was supposed to be the fulfillment of all his scattered talents. In both cases extravagant behavior and styles of dress were designed to conceal and protect an essential shyness and innocence, but it was Tennant's fate to be a Firbank who was born just a little too late, a Firbank, furthermore, who never managed to complete a single novel. Stephen Tennant is a character who could easily have stepped from the pages of Firbank's novels, particularly Valmouth and Vainglory, and the two men had much in common. If he had been, it is unlikely that Siegfried Sassoon would have fallen in love with him. But he was not, in fact, the trivial person he appears to be for much of this book. Instead of the wit and concision that this material demands, we are offered page after page of dull gossip, so that Stephen Tennant's chief distinctions seem to be his prodigious talent for shopping and his willingness to wear more makeup in public than any male before or since (stage performers excepted). These appalling people would flock down to Wilsford to spend their weekends "screaming with joy" and dressing up in what they fondly imagined to be the style of the rococo French painter Nicolas Lancret.
Hoare's account of the heyday of the Bright Young People, the notorious band of English aesthetes who flourished in the 1920s, is particularly grueling. At one point he even remarks that an operation that Tennant underwent "appeared to be successful in restoring his breathing difficulties," and American readers will be surprised to learn of the "Florida desert" across which one must drive to reach Sarasota.
Sadly, Philip Hoare's style is often breathless, novelettish and littered with solecisms. Such a subject surely demands an exquisite prose style.
When asked by his father what he wanted to be when he grew up, he replied unhesitatingly "A great beauty," and he might have added "like mother." What he did unquestionably grow up to be was an eccentric, homosexual aesthete in the distinguished tradition of William Beckford and Ronald Firbank. Tennant was already seeing himself flatteringly reflected in nature. AT THE AGE of 4, while walking in the gardens of Wilsford, the Tennant family mansion, Stephen Tennant experienced a moment of profound recognition: Catching sight of a pansy he exclaimed, "Oh! Something's looking," and crouched down to commune with the flower.
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