Serious Pleasures (2*)

Perhaps if I'd indulged Serious Pleasures when I first bought it in 1990 after reading John Waters's rave in the New York Times, I might not have reacted quite so negatively to Philip Hoare's tediously detailed life of utterly vapid privilege.  Although trans wasn't a term yet in vogue, it pretty much captures Stephen Tennant, one of England's brightest young things between the two world wars.  None of his aristocratic peers or literary friends--who included the Bloomsbury crowd--seemed to mind that he partied in make-up and permed hair; everyone simply wanted to leave behind the wholesale slaughter that had decimated the ranks of their generation.

I finally picked up the book after seeing the Sassoon family exhibit at the Jewish Museum last summer which heightened my interest in Siegfried and led me to Benediction, a movie which depicts the young Tennant as a, hedonistic flirt who callously rejects the World War I pacifist poet after a brief fling.  While at odds with the man Hoare conjures here from contemporary sources, Tennant at least comes across as interesting in the film.  Only his peculiar, across-the-pond friendship with Willa Cather meets that threshold IRL, perhaps because they instinctually recognized what today would be called their shared gender dysphoria.

Tennant shares some qualities with another American writer, Truman Capote, including a never-finished masterpiece that he couldn't shut up about but Capote, entirely self-made, left behind a body of work that outlives his televised bitchery.  Tennant's greatest achievement--beyond the photographic immortality conferred upon him by best friend Cecil Beaton whom he didn't treat any better than Sassoon in the end--was his interior decoration of Wilsford, the family manor left to him by his remote mother.  Hoare published his book not long after Sotheby's auctioned off the contents in the wake of multiple obituaries in London newspapers desperate to memorialize an era dispatched by the election of a shop girl's daughter as prime minister 15 years earlier.

Still, Hoare's meticulous research, including close consultation with Hugo Vickers, Beaton's own hagiographer, did yield an epiphany for this very bored reader:  the struggle to become trans is its defining characteristic.  No struggle, and you're left to be judged on your own merits which in this case only add up to a few poems and charming illustrations.  Four hundred pages to tell the life story of a man who never looked much beyond his vanity mirror is an extravagance that even Tennant himself might not be able countenance.