Serious Pleasures: The Life of Stephen Tennant

‘Witty and amazing ... both scholarly and hilarious at the same time’ John Waters, New York Times

Stephen Tennant was barely a being of his time. A fixture of London’s high society during the 1920s, he was once driven around town wearing a striped football jersey, a pair of earrings, silver glitter in his hair and Vaseline on his eyelids. He was a transformative, performative, gender-challenging figure – a decadent and alien icon of his age, like Dorian Gray, David Bowie or a Warholian superstar.

Republished for the first time since it became an international bestseller in 1990, Serious Pleasures goes in search of this charismatic, enigmatic aesthete. Patron of Cecil Beaton, lover of Siegfried Sassoon, confidante of E. M. Forster and T.E. Lawrence, Vita Sackville-West and Willa Cather, Tennant would later become a kind of oracle of a faded glittering era, lying like Sleeping Beauty in his overgrown Arts and Crafts manor in deepest Wiltshire, where he would receive visitors such as Truman Capote, Christopher Isherwood, V.S. Naipaul, Greta Garbo, David Hockney and Derek Jarman. All the while he was creating lusty, deeply queer images of matelots and coquettes from an imaginary Marseilles for his never-ending, never-to-be-completed illustrated novel.

Was Tennant an obscure, selfish figure, stranded in time? Or an extravagant, heroic pioneer without regard for societal norms? Philip Hoare recreates, with astonishment and affection, the extraordinary trajectory of an outrageous life lived as a work of art.