"An interesting and pathetic phenomenon, a great writer who can’t write.

December 11, 2022 8:55 AM

Stephen Tennant: The Great Writer Who Never Wrote. I suspect many of you will feel an affinity with Tennant whose "lack of stamina, both mental and physical, was to be the prevailing theme of his existence." (s/l The Paris Review)
posted by tofu_crouton (23 comments total)

Here's an article from House and Garden detailing a visit by Nicky Haslam to Tennant and his house.
posted by Hypatia at 9:46 AM on December 11, 2022 [2 favorites]

There but for the grace of not being a wealthy English nobleman go I
posted by The otter lady at 9:49 AM on December 11, 2022 [9 favorites]

"Talent is cheap, Grit is hard".

This reminds me so much of myself. I too peaked at 20 and am objectively a loser now in my middle age. But that is on me.
posted by indianbadger1 at 10:17 AM on December 11, 2022 [7 favorites]

I haven’t RTFA yet but I don’t know if I believe that anyone — writers, bricklayers, coders — owes the world their talent and effort. If money or fame aren’t motivating then you should be free to live in peace.
posted by heyitsgogi at 10:44 AM on December 11, 2022 [8 favorites]

I spent thirty years working on one novel. Finally, just to excise it from my system and put it behind me, I uploaded it to AO3. Then I wrote the next novel. It took three months.
posted by jabah at 10:56 AM on December 11, 2022 [16 favorites]

A bit on the homestead. You can stay there if you've a mind to it.

It's quite possible that there really wasn't all that much inside the fellow to come out in the first place. His talent seems to have been conversation and correspondence, no mean talents by any means. Brings to mind Sydney Smith, who could have dinner companions shrieking with laughter, but the jokes irreproducible. I've known a few people with those gifts.
posted by BWA at 11:02 AM on December 11, 2022 [5 favorites]

Finishing a novel is hard. Maybe Stephen was a painter in his heart of hearts and the novel was an amusing distraction.
posted by tuesdayschild at 11:04 AM on December 11, 2022

The important thing about Tennant is not whether we should care about his unfinished novel, but to consider exactly how horrible of a boyfriend he would've made. Would you end up like Sassoon, so bitter you go marry the first Steenie doppelganger you find? Would you of necessity become the gruff counterweight to all that aristocratic meringue (the Jack Dunphy to his Capote)? How should society best deal with the problem of the wealthy asthenic twink? Surely a strong hand is called for. "Get off of those pillows and pick up a shovel, a hammer, anything that gives you a callus!" These boys are so frustrating, isn't science working on this problem at all?
posted by mittens at 11:07 AM on December 11, 2022 [10 favorites]

I don’t know if I believe that anyone — writers, bricklayers, coders — owes the world their talent and effort.

I was pretty good at drawing, painting, writing in my twenties. For reasons I still don't fully understand, while I greatly enjoy having the finished product, I found the process unbearably miserable and anxiety inducing. I'm proud of what I've created, so it's on display.

I have been told a few times, practically as a direct quote, that with that talent I owe it to the world to continue producing. My question is, what then, does the world owe me? Not a damn thing, it turns out, so the feeling is mutual.

I may have a talent for the creation part, but I have no capacity for the endurance part, and that's just as important. If my legs and lungs were built for running, but I had a serious heart condition, I wouldn't become a sprinter and I don't think anyone would tell me I owed the world my literal heart. Lasting talent is rare because it requires an intersection of so much luck, skill, temperament, etc. There is no shame in not having them all.
posted by tllaya at 11:12 AM on December 11, 2022 [18 favorites]

I for one am looking forward to the inevitable biopic starring Tom Holland.

Also, there's nothing wrong with being a dilettante, if one can afford it. He seems to have done all right for himself in the end; an interesting life with interesting people doing interesting things, and sometimes he even showed up in their work.
posted by jscalzi at 12:38 PM on December 11, 2022 [5 favorites]

I recall, hopefully correctly, John Waters saying Stephen Tennant showed it is possible to be too gay and using the example of Stephen having had a fainting fit on seeing a flower to show that. I am sure he meant it in a good way and was as impressed as I am.
posted by Richard Upton Pickman at 12:43 PM on December 11, 2022 [5 favorites]

I wrote a lot through my 20s and 30s. As well as stage-managed.

And the whole while I had a day job - because despite doing as much as I was doing, I wasn't getting paid enough to live on. I would bust my ass at work, carving out time to research and write the things I wrote for my one client (a theater company in Scranton, PA who hired me to do educational pamphlets to accompany their productions), and then go to a theater and bust my ass for another few hours in rehearsals or performances. And it got to the point where I was too tired to do much aside from that. And then came one year where my family and I compared notes about our vacation plans; my brother and his wife were heading to the Cook Islands for three weeks, my parents were heading to Rome for two weeks, and as for me, I was heading to Chicago for 4 days.

That whole time I agonized over whether I was doing enough, or whether maybe I just needed to hustle and market myself even more. But I was so exhausted as I was I didn't know how I could do things any harder. I was already marketing myself the best way I knew how, I already was telling people I wrote stuff, but it wasn't really getting me any further than polite nods and the occasional comment that I was good and that being where the conversation ended.

And then the recession hit and all the energy I had been devoting into my side hustle had to go towards finding a full-time job, and that took a whole decade. I stopped writing for a while, I gave up theater entirely, and went into survival mode - and when I finally got out of that, I found that....I was fine with that, and had absolutely no interest in trying to pick the hustle back up again. I was in my 50s now, for one thing, and I had some regular plain old living stuff I wanted to do for a change - travel, go to the occasional restaurant, hang out with friends. I did start my movie blog, but that was more a way of getting back to where I'd been as a kid, where writing was something fun.

I do still occasionally get people urging me to try to monetize or market my blog better, but I wave them off because I've already got ample evidence that I'm not good at that, and just as ample evidence that the kind of writing I do is not the kind of writing the world favors anyway, so - fuck it. I'll do what I do and just put it out there, and if someone stumbles across it and digs it, then that's gravy. If not, then no skin off my nose. I don't need to beat my head against the wall trying to drag more people over to read my stuff when it's kind of clear they wouldn't like it anyway.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 12:51 PM on December 11, 2022 [8 favorites]

Mid writer, GOAT dilettante.

Anyone can write a book, but not everyone can be born wealthy and pretty.
posted by betweenthebars at 1:45 PM on December 11, 2022 [4 favorites]

Like F. Scott is a two-fer.
posted by clavdivs at 3:08 PM on December 11, 2022

Sassoon - a huge favorite of mine, an enormous weirdo - probably wasn't the world's best boyfriend either. He was not the most emotionally forthcoming guy and it's not too surprising that he was so taken with someone so much younger since he was pretty emotionally young himself. In a way his life paralleled Tennant's. He too became reclusive, he had terrible trouble doing anything literary in later life except retreading his war work and early literary period.

Sassoon married partly because he really wanted a kid. It all ended unhappily, but it wasn't just some kind of "marrying the girl version of my ex" foolery.

The whole thing seems a shame, really.
posted by Frowner at 5:08 PM on December 11, 2022 [1 favorite]

Philip Hoare's biography of Tennant, like the rest of his work, is worth reading. There is a good interview with Hoare about Tennant at Rich Grzesiak's website. As for Tennant himself, I can't think of much positive to say.
posted by paduasoy at 5:12 PM on December 11, 2022

Those are a lot of words to talk about a supposed 'writer' who didn't actually write, but justified by the fact that he was attractive, rich, and well-connected, I guess?
posted by signal at 5:44 PM on December 11, 2022

I know we love to dunk on useless rich people here, but it seems this guy was chronically ill. Bed rest for weeks at a time. Stints in a psychiatric hospital. And going through a lung operation in the 1920s sounds absolutely brutal.
posted by airmail at 6:49 PM on December 11, 2022 [7 favorites]

In the Time of Moss Roses, Stephen Tennant's Library - Livres du Mois.

The Man Who Stayed in Bed.

Why write when one can be the subject matter. To be friends with the Mitford Girls...His circle was drawn and he could shine, his letters are interesting. The Bon Vivant, privledge seem as curtains fluttering in Sandstone rooms gilded to steer conversation, the reminder of wealth and tradition but that age was decimated by the war and then life and he outlasted most of them trying to write
Lascar: A Story You Must Forget.
posted by clavdivs at 8:23 PM on December 11, 2022 [1 favorite]

Are there any scraps of the unfinished manuscript? Was it any good?
posted by thegirlwiththehat at 11:57 PM on December 11, 2022

I also feel like there's a point where someone moves from Useless Rich Person into history, so to speak. It's not like we can guillotine him and seize his riches now, so he's kind of moved on into Eccentric Exemplar.

Siegfried Sassoon ended up wealthy - he inherited as an adult after the war. And it's not like he grew up impoverished, either. But we let him off the hook a bit for being a poet. Should we? Is a useful rich person any better than a useless one from a finance standpoint? He could certainly have given up most of his wealth and worked for socialism, for example, while still being a poet.

And yet I'm very interested by Sassoon and have a bunch of his work and an enormous biography.

I think that, intentionally or not, we make distinctions between people we hold up as moral exemplars of the past and people we just find interesting. There are people who are moral exemplars that I don't think I'd get along with at all, for instance.
posted by Frowner at 8:29 AM on December 12, 2022 [1 favorite]

the Honorary Stephen James Napier Tennant began life arrayed with sublime advantage. His father, Sir Edward Tennant

Minor quibble: that should be "the Honorable" -- and while his daddy was indeed Sir Edward Tennant when Stephen was born, in 1911 he became Lord Glenconnor, which is why Stephen's "the Honorable." I suppose the Paris Review has the same depressing staffing/proofreading/fact-checking problems as every other publication these days.
posted by JanetLand at 12:37 PM on December 12, 2022 [1 favorite]

..the Honorary Stephen James Napier Tennant

I always thought that the children of baronets were styled as "The Honourable." I've never seen "Honorary" used before.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 3:16 PM on December 12, 2022