'This history of man's dealings with whales is respectful, even mystical.' Daily Mail 'A scintillating, scattershot, blunderbuss of a book. More than the story of the whale, it is also the story of our own obsessions. This book is an investigation into what we know little about - dark, shadowy creatures who swim below the depths, only to surface in a spray of spume. What impelled Melville to write 'Moby-Dick'? After his book in 1851, no one saw whales in quite the same way again.
In 'Leviathan', Philip Hoare seeks to locate and identify this obsession.
Whales have a mythical quality - they seem to elide with dark fantasies of sea-serpents and antediluvian monsters that swim in our collective unconscious. His hair was long and dyed mauve, he wore kaftans and many gilded bangles.The story of a man's obsession with whales, which takes him on a personal, historical and biographical journey - from his childhood to his fascination with Moby-Dick and his excursions whale-watching.Īll his life, Philip Hoare has been obsessed by whales, from the gigantic skeletons in London's Natural History Museum to adult encounters with the wild animals themselves. He became a recluse, redecorating Wilsford with fishnets, pink satin and golden conch shells. When he returned to Wilsford, Tennant led an indolent existence on his comfortable inhertance and worked for 40 years on his novel "Lascar". At this time he became the adored of Siegfried Sassoon and spent his convalescence with him in the Mediterranean. After his 21st birthday, his life went downhill. Here he was photographed by Cecil Beaton to become one of the typical images of 1920s "beautiful" young people. In his early youth he entertained his friends at his mother, Lady Glenconner's manor house Wilsford Manor in Wiltshire. He appears in numerous biographies about the 1920s and 1930s and he was the model for Cedric Hampton in "Love in a Cold Climate" by Nancy Mitford. Stephen Tennant died intestate in 1987, aged 80, and has become a cult figure.
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