TENNANT PROBLEMS
Byline: James Fallon
LONDON — The Tennants are one of those grand families that have been at the center of English society for over a century. During that relatively short history, they’ve produced more than their fair share of rogues, recluses and near-royalty. After all, there aren’t many families with characters as otherworldly as Stephen Tennant, the fey esthete who shut himself away from the world for decades in his country house, Wilsford, or his mother, the beautiful Pamela, who held seances and other spiritual encounters in an attempt to communicate with the dead. Even today, the model Stella Tennant, Pamela’s great-granddaughter, serves as the very picture of louche English pedigree to the masses.
Then there’s the family curse. The British tabloids, those paragons of reliability, play up the story that the Tennants are cursed because their current head, Colin Tennant, Lord Glenconner, built a holiday playground on St. Lucia on the site of a native holy ground. (Some even attribute the curse to St. Lucian poet Derek Walcott, who vigorously opposed the development.) The curse is said to be why Tennant’s eldest son, Charles, became a heroin addict and had to be disinherited from the family succession at the age of 21 (dying of hepatitis at age 36); why his second son, Henry, who inherited the estate, died of AIDS-related illness, and why his youngest son, Christopher, was brain-damaged in a motorcycle accident.
It’s the strangeness of the Tennants, rather than their grandiosity, that intimidates even some of the family members themselves. So it’s no surprise that it took decades for Glenconner’s half-sister Emma Tennant to build up the courage to write about her relatives.
“I thought about it for many, many years, but I had this fear of something as daunting as our family,” she says, admitting even she doesn’t know whether there is a curse. “It’s daunting because there are so many different strands of odd behavior. I feared I wouldn’t be able to deal with it adequately.”
Tennant’s book, “Strangers: A Family Romance” (to be published in the U.S. by New Directions next spring) mixes undisputed fact and her true-to-life relatives with imagined conversations and characters.
The story revolves around Edward Tennant — Emma’s grandfather — the first Baron Glenconner, and his beautiful wife, Pamela, a descendant of French aristocracy and Irish nobility. Pamela called four of her five children — Bim (killed in World War I at age 20), Stephen, Clare and Christopher (Emma’s father) — her “jewels” and doted upon them lavishly. At the same time, Tennant believes, she created the aristocratic tendencies of the family with her grand entertaining at Glen and at Wilsford, their house in Wiltshire. It was Pamela who also generated the interfamily rivalries that exist even today: Her sister-in-law Margot Asquith, the beak-nosed wife of Prime Minister Herbert Asquith, apparently hated her, always feeling Pamela didn’t truly love her brother and paid too much attention to her children.
While British critics generally praised Tennant’s novel as a well-written vignette of a vanished world, some members of the author’s family have condemned it. Glenconner, who’s no longer speaking to his sister, is particularly upset by her allegation that he once planned to propose to Princess Margaret — a longtime friend — whom he presented with a plot of land on Mustique as a wedding present when she married Anthony Armstrong-Jones.
Tennant’s book claims her half-brother was talked out of proposing by their father, Christopher — who himself once planned, before losing nerve, to propose to the former Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, now the Queen Mother.
“Colin wanted to know how I could imagine conversations when I wasn’t there,” Tennant says, sitting in the living room of her West London apartment. “Well, I was in the house all the time, and I remember what I was told by my mother. I did what any writer does — pass on things one was told. My mother loved the book, and that’s all that really counts to me.”
The family’s fortune was created in Victorian times, when Emma’s great grandfather, a young farmer named Charles Tennant, made a million pounds before he was 23 and increased it through gold mining and eventually by devising the formula for bleach. He was made a baronet in 1885 and built the neo-Gothic family seat, Glen, in remote Peebleshire, Scotland.
Emma Tennant’s father, the solid Christopher, inherited the title on his brother Bim’s death. “Strangers,” she says, partially results from her father’s distance from his family history. “My father never talked about them; he never mentioned his mother, for example. It was as if he deliberately set out to forget them. He married my mother, Elizabeth — who was 21, shy, good-looking and an art student — and seemed to discover how lovely it was never to have to mention his famous ancestors. He seemed to set out to create his own family life away from the Tennants. It took great strength of character to do that.”
Today, the thrice-married Tennant herself divides her time between London and a cottage in Dorset. Wilsford was sold after Stephen Tennant died in 1987 and Glen, now owned by Henry’s widow, Tessa, is mainly a conference center with only a few rooms left for the family’s use. Having grown up at Glen, Emma Tennant no longer misses the huge castle, although it took her a long time to forget it. The family center now, if there is one, is the farmhouse owned by her younger brother Toby (father of the model Stella) in Roxboroughshire.
Tennant has written a number of novels, the best-known of which is “Pendennis,” a continuation of “Pride and Prejudice.” But “Strangers” has unleashed a desire to tell more of her family’s history, and she’s just finished a book about her life in the Fifties and Sixties, which will be published in the U.K. next spring. She’s even coined her own word for the title to describe the prevailing mood of the times: “Girlitude.”
“It starts out with my coming-out ball in 1955, where I’m being photographed by a young photographer named Armstrong-Jones,” Tennant says, smiling. “It then goes on until I’m 30 in 1969 and just given birth to my daughter Daisy.”
The book traces Tennant’s path through several failed marriages, the birth of two children, a string of romances, a brief stint in New York, various trips to Paris and her flirtation with the left-wing politics of the late Sixties. Its conversational style is sprinkled with the names of the great and the good, from Princess Margaret to Andy Warhol, Bruce Chatwin to Henry Green (the author who encouraged her to write her first book).
“It’s a pathetic story, frankly,” Tennant says, laughing. “I thought that if I was going to do it at all I may as well show how ridiculous and tragic it is. I could have called it ‘The Story of a Ridiculous Girl.’ I was lacking anything essential, like a certain element of calculation to catch a husband. I was a bit of a goose, I think.”
Her problem was that she always felt like an outsider in the world in which she mingled. The family’s title led acquaintances to conclude she was immensely wealthy (a misconception that prevails), while Tennant felt constricted by the rules of her class and by always being asked if she was Colin Tennant’s sister. She had wider interests, having been educated at home until 16, where her mother had the likes of Cyril Connolly and Stephen Spender to dinner. The unspoken assumption of her class was simply that nice girls like her got married to a rich peer shortly after “coming out” and then spent the rest of her life raising children, entertaining his friends and overseeing the staff.
Tennant had her fair share of such suitors (she calls them “lordlings”) but was disenchanted with most of them. She became engaged to one — she won’t identify him — who turned to her shortly before their announced wedding date and said, “I wonder what it will feel like waking upon the morning after our wedding with coronets on our heads.”
Her reply? “The funny thing is, I don’t think we will be.” And she called the engagement off.
Tennant originally planned for the book to stretch through to the present but decided last summer that it made the most sense to finish it at age 30, “the end of girlhood.” She didn’t stop writing, however, and recently completed the third volume of her story, which she calls “The Notting Hill Diaries.”
Publishers in Britain have been somewhat nervous about the book because it deals with a revered figure in the literary establishment — the late poet Ted Hughes. Tennant met Hughes when she was editing the magazine Bananas in the Seventies, “and he and poets like Yevtushenko would sit in my basement reciting their poems.” She and Hughes had an affair from 1977 to 1980, and the bulk of “Notting Hill Diaries” covers that period.
“It deals with both the romantic and cruel sides of him,” Tennant says, emphasizing she’d started her book long before Hughes died in October at age 68. “I wanted to give real insights into his character. But I do sense a nervousness about it because he’s become almost canonized now.”
The two saw each other only a few times through the Eighties and Nineties, and Tennant wasn’t aware how ill Hughes was when she was writing her memoir.
But Tennant feels Hughes, who was fascinated with magic and spirits, is still around. His work dealt extensively with the natural and with animals such as crows, bears and foxes. The couple was always seeing foxes when they would walk together in the park. The eerie thing is that in recent months Tennant has begun seeing a fox in the garden across the street.
“I call it ‘The Haunting,’ ” she says, smiling shyly. “It’s a very strange experience. But the fox is what he was really like.”