TENNANT, Stephen. My Brother Aquarius.

TENNANT, Stephen. My Brother Aquarius.Did You Ever See a Starry Man With So Beautiful a Face? TENNANT, Stephen. My Brother Aquarius. Bournemouth: Nash Publications. 1961 [with:] HOARE, Philip. Serious Pleasures. The Life of Stephen Tennant. London: Hamish Hamilton. 1990. Tennant: 8vo. Original blue cloth lettered in gilt to spine and upper board, lacking the dust jacket; pp. [x], 62; full colour frontispiece by the author (the same image graces the missing wrapper); cloth rubbed to

‘Did You Ever See a Starry Man | With So Beautiful a Face?’

TENNANT, Stephen. My Brother Aquarius. Bournemouth: Nash Publications. 1961

[with:]

HOARE, Philip. Serious Pleasures. The Life of Stephen Tennant. London: Hamish Hamilton. 1990.

Tennant: 8vo. Original blue cloth lettered in gilt to spine and upper board, lacking the dust-jacket; pp. [x], 62; full colour frontispiece by the author (the same image graces the missing wrapper); cloth rubbed to extremities with a few small marks, marginal marks to a few pages; else a very good copy; front free endpaper inscribed ‘For Rupert Lord, with kindest thoughts and best wishes from the author Stephen Tennant’ in blue ink (see below).

Hoare: 8vo. Original black cloth lettered in gilt to the spine, in the dust-jacket designed by the Senate, priced £20.00 net to the front flap; pp. xvi; 463, [1]; minimal pushing to lower spine tip, else a fine copy in near-fine jacket.

Stephen Tennant’s sole volume of poetry; an intimate self-portrait of the brightest of the Bright Young Things; with a fine first printing of Philip Hoare’s landmark Tennant biography.

Few figures better capture the glamour, eccentricity, and aesthetic sensibility of interwar England than Stephen Tennant (1906–1987). The brightest and most glamorous of the Bright Young Things, he moved among an extraordinary constellation of writers, artists, and socialites, counting among his friends and admirers Rex Whistler, Cecil Beaton, Virginia Woolf, E.M. Forster, and Truman Capote. He is thought to be the model for the character of Cedric Hampton in Nancy Mitford’s Love in a Cold Climate and may also have contributed something to Sebastian Flyte in Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited. His turbulent relationship with Siegfried Sassoon was formative for both men, while Wilsford Manor, his Wiltshire home, became a gathering place for many of the century’s most celebrated literary and artistic personalities. V. S. Naipaul rented a cottage on the estate for a time (Tennant’s tenant, if you will), an experience later finding its way into his semi-autobiographical The Enigma of Arrival (1987).

My Brother Aquarius, Tennant’s only volume of poetry, was privately printed in 1961. Taking its title from Keats’s Endymion – ‘Crystalline brother of the belt of Heaven: Aquarius’ – and dedicated to Barbara Hutton, the American heiress and socialite, the collection brings together fifty-two poems, many addressed to friends and members of his circle. The prefatory letter to Princess Bibesco serves as both poetic manifesto and acknowledgement of literary debts, a curious list including Ruth Pitter, Lawrence Whistler, Bruce Cutler, Thomas Parkinson, and Dylan Thomas. The book’s chief interest lies less in its literary achievement than in its disarmingly intimate self-revelation: recalling travels and lost romances, the poems amount to a lyrical self-portrait of one of the century’s most elusive and fascinating personalities.

This copy is lavishly and affectionately inscribed in blue ink on the front free endpaper by Tennant: ‘For Rupert Lord, with kindest thoughts and best wishes from the author Stephen Tennant’, complete with quotations from Persian poetry and proverbs. In the upper corner he has written, ‘Conceal thy gold, thy destination, and thy creed’, glossing it as ‘(a very ancient saying) oriental, I think – I love it’ (a proverb, or part of one, referring to forms of dissimulation in the interests of self-protection). At the foot of the page Tennant adds, ‘only love that which can carry you away, a horse—a ship—’ (Persian), perhaps recalling a line from Rumi.

SKU: 2124143