These appalling people would flock down to Wilsford to spend their weekends "screaming with joy" and dressing up in what they fondly imagined to be the style of the rococo French painter Nicolas Lancret. Hoare's account of the heyday of the Bright Young People, the notorious band of English aesthetes who flourished in the 1920s, is particularly grueling. At one point he even remarks that an operation that Tennant underwent "appeared to be successful in restoring his breathing difficulties," and American readers will be surprised to learn of the "Florida desert" across which one must drive to reach Sarasota. Sadly, Philip Hoare's style is often breathless, novelettish and littered with solecisms. Such a subject surely demands an exquisite prose style. When asked by his father what he wanted to be when he grew up, he replied unhesitatingly "A great beauty," and he might have added "like mother." What he did unquestionably grow up to be was an eccentric, homosexual aesthete in the distinguished tradition of William Beckford and Ronald Firbank. Tennant was already seeing himself flatteringly reflected in nature. AT THE AGE of 4, while walking in the gardens of Wilsford, the Tennant family mansion, Stephen Tennant experienced a moment of profound recognition: Catching sight of a pansy he exclaimed, "Oh! Something's looking," and crouched down to commune with the flower.
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