Who knew Sebastian looked so suspiciously Tennant-ish?
I can’t help but think that I’m playing right into his hand. Oh how lovely you are etc etc. Or maybe it doesn’t really count as paying any kind of real artistic adulation unless it’s a full bronze bust. In that case I am safe.
Illustrated Travel Diary of Stephen Tennant, 1948.
This illustrated diary by Stephen Tennant (1906-1987), a friend of the photographer Cecil Beaton, records a holiday in Gibraltar, Morocco and Tangier in 1948.
‘Plagued by depression and a growing mental instability, Tennant became more and more reclusive, rarely leaving his bedroom. His formerly stylish manor was in complete disarray, yet he never lost his unique sense of the fabulous, or his taste for champagne, and continued to dream his idle dreams. ’
Despite privilege and an outward show of frivolity, the life of Stephen Tennant was hardly a glorious cycle of song, so marked was it by illness (physical in the first half, mental in the second).
The notion of homosexuality as being accepted is really key to that period, in a way. It’s what binds a lot of these people together. There’s a lot of lesbianism as well, because the first lesbian book, The Well of Loneliness, by Radclyffe Hall is published around this time. This is the first time these ‘conditions’, as people would regard them, had been given names. No longer are their sexualities, or their otherness, a means of weakness or of attack, they’re means of strength. The gay characters in Brideshead Revisted, people like Anthony Blanche, who’s based on Brian Howard; these are people who are not effete, but were kind of ‘out’ about it, and very pugnacious about it. They were modern figures, and this is the way they saw the world going.
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| — | Philip Hoare, author of Serious Pleasures: The Life of Stephen Tennant. (via thebrightyoungpeople) |
