Not long ago, someone insisted that I read Serious Pleasures: The Life of Stephen Tennant (a biography of the oft-described Brightest of the Bright Young Things by Philip Hoare). This person's fur-lined trenchcoat, Van Cleef & Arpels jewelry, and recent private tour of Sissinghurst made me feel as though we may have similar tastes. I had to order it, and can now say that it's the most wonderful book that I've ever read. It's fascinating and gripping, in the sense that there are some people who seem to exist wholly on a separate plain. Even though the story is fairly straightforward (gay heir fails to amount to much by conventional standards, while consistently mesmerizing every person he comes into contact with), it's impossible to do it justice with such short shrift. Stephen's love of beauty, from nearly beyond-comprehension extravagance to the fundamentally zen, is awe-inspiring.
Like the best books, and the best sources for inspiration, Serious Pleasures illuminates a path unique to the reader's imagination pointing the way to what to do next. I especially wished he'd published The Second Chance, his "novella written in pencil in what looks like a feverish pace," a Vile Bodies-esque satire (Tennant himself was a model for several characters in literary works of this era, including novels by Waugh and Mitford) of Jazz Age excess writ large across the exploits of heroine Marcella Maine: "On their arrival in New York, Marcella and company are besieged by reporters and drooled over by her American friends –– again, Stephen's own observation of hospitality in America, where, he later noted, one is 'pelted' with bouquets. Stephen's description of Marcella's levee in her New York apartment is worth recording in full, not only for its humour, but for its prescience of Stephen's own later habits au lit that he would develop into a lifestyle and an art in itself: [The passage concludes with] 'She leapt from the bed, upsetting a box of marrons glaces, a white enamel telephone, a plate of biscuits, a basket of peaches and an avalanche of books.' ...Marcella's audience is a ruse, designed to impress the two female reporters with her 'decadence.' She is in a darkened room, dressed in black velvet, with white maquillage and gold dust in her hair. Absinthe and iced caviar are served, and the whole scene is reminscent of the Marchesa Casati, the epitome of the twenties vamp."
Apparently much to the surprise of nearly everyone, Tennant was a passionate early fan and lifelong champion of Willa Cather, who he became close friends with after discovering her writing and sending her a thoughtful letter, which she took seriously (apparently an unusual type of regard for him). Despite several trips to Nebraska in the last few years for literary festivals and publishing conferences, I haven't read any Cather. It's especially prescient because I'm publicizing Nebraska native turned New Yorker Terese Svoboda's new novel, Bohemian Girl, this fall. Don't miss her take on Cather, and the creative parallels: But how could I go so far as to steal the title of her most famous short story? By following in her footsteps. She stole part of the plot of her story--and some of the lines--from the Balfe opera “The Bohemian Girl” first staged in 1843. The opera’s influence was so pervasive that Joyce mentions it twice in Dubliners, published two years after Cather, and Laurel and Hardy did a version in 1936. The opera itself was based on Cervantes “La Gitanilla.” And did anyone mention Flaubert? The barn-raising scene in Cather’s story is similar to the wedding scene in Madame Bovary. If literary thievery is always a form of flattery, Cather is neck-deep... So that's next.
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