University of Tulsa

Two of the Weird Sisters: The Eccentricities of Gertrude Stein and Edith Sitwell
Author(s): Susan Hastings
Source: Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature, Vol. 4, No. 1 (Spring, 1985), pp. 101-123
Published by: University of Tulsa
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Two

of the

Weird

of Gertrude

Sisters:
Stein

and

The

Eccentricities

Edith

Sitwell

Susan Hastings
University of Tulsa

Early in June 1926, a strange and imposing procession marched down the
aisle of a Cambridge University lecture hall. The occasion was historic, for it
marked the beginning of Gertrude Stein's career as an officiallysanctioned
public speaker. Yet the external circumstances of the speech could hardly
have seemed more eccentric, if not entirely outside the law of academic
visual proprieties. Flanked by three vertical giants?Osbert, Sacheverell,
and Edith Sitwell?and a "gipsy acolyte" (Alice B. Toklas), Stein faced the
standing-room-only audience of intelligentsia looking, as Harold Acton
later wrote, like "a squat Aztec figure in obsidian, growing more and more

monumental as soon as she sat down."1

If any member of the audience experienced a sense ofdeja vu upon seeing
the three women on the platform?Alice quite probably in exotic earrings
and flowered dress, Edith in an abbess's gown and her customary dramatic
headdress, Gertrude in her Chinese brocade robe designed especially forthe
occasion?the sensation was not, perhaps, entirely coincidental. Two of the
women had already achieved a certain amount of fame and notoriety
through the eccentricities of their writings. Edith Sitwell had convinced
Gertrude Stein to make the trip to England, to Cambridge and Oxford,
largely because she believed that her friend's"actual presence. . . would help
the cause" of advancing Stein's work to an English public. "It is quite

undoubted," an enthusiastic Sitwell had argued to a reluctant Stein, "that a

personality does help to convince half-intelligent people."2 The person?
alities displayed at the lectures certainly seem to have been designed to
convince, designed very much in the same mode as that in which Virginia
Woolf, only a year before, had created her portrait of an earlier woman
writer who "always took delight in a singularity":
"AllI desireisfame,"wroteMargaret
Cavendish,DuchessofNewcastle.And whileshe
livedherwishwas granted.
Garishin herdress,eccentricin herhabits,chastein her
conduct,coarsein her speech,she succeededduringher lifetimein drawingupon
theridiculeofthegreatand the applauseofthemany.3
herself
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By restoring to the contemporary imagination this long-forgotten legend of

the past, Woolf might almost have been preparing the university audiences
for the experience of Gertrude Stein's lecture.
In 1925 Virginia Woolf was an established spokeswoman for the literary
scene. Knowing she was in a position to convince with a certain degree of
authority, she could, by confessing her own fascination with the eccen?
tricities of Margaret Cavendish, open the eyes of the reading public to the
motives and methods of the seventeenth-century poet. She could without
fear of criticism rejoice in the Duchess's "diffused,uneasy, contorted vitality,"
and feel pride in her own descent as a writer from a woman to whom "order,
continuity, the logical development of an argument are all unknown" (81).
But about Gertrude Stein and Edith Sitwell, writerswhose descent from the
Duchess was just as direct, she felt far less certain. Woolf admitted to

suffering"a good deal of misery" at Edith Sitwell's welcome-to-England tea

forGertrude Stein only a few days before the Cambridge lecture. Her private
reaction to the exaggerated personalities of both hostess and honored guest
seems characteristically biting and even a little brutal, especially in view of
the faith she must have known Sitwell was placing in her by including her at
the select gathering:
It was in honourofMissGertrude
Steinwhowasthronedon a broken
Jewsswarmed.
is derelict,to makeup forwhichshe is stuckaboutwith
settee(all Edith'sfurniture
a greatdamageon all
Thisresoluteold ladyinflicted
mermaiden).
jewelslikea drowned
all yousay;insiststhatshe is notonly
theyouth.Accordingto Dadie, shecontradicts
and in particular
the mostintelligible,
but also the mostpopularof livingwriters;
despisesall ofEnglishbirth.Leonard,beinga Jewhimself,
goton verywellwithher.But
itwas an anxious,exacerbating
affair.4
It is quite probable that Woolf's caustic remarks had motives that were only
too personal: a modicum of jealousy cannot be ruled out, nor can a slight
dosing of sour grapes not be suspected. Woolf at this period of her life was
attracted to Edith Sitwell (Victoria Glendinning in her recent Sitwell
biography makes a fair case for an attempted seduction5); Woolf appears to

have found the interloper, Gertrude Stein, physically repellent. And Vir?
ginia Woolf's Bloomsbury was, after all, in 1926 the literary center of
London: Sitwell's tiny Bayswater flatcould hardly have been large enough to
contain "a Dutch medieval madonna," and "Easter Island idol," and still
allow room enough for Woolf's "exquisitely carved beauty"6 to shine in as it
did at home.
Virginia Woolf's personal reaction to the two women embodies the
ambiguities of her professional judgments about them. Her fear of the
damage Stein might inflict really does not amount to less praise than
Sitwell's own tribute to Stein: "She will doubtless have a great influence, but
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I hope that influence will be over experienced writers,and not over the very
young ifthey are also rather silly."7Woolf's restrained doubt when she wrote
about Stein and Sitwell as writers reveals her concern with women who
consciously strayed from the current fold and exploited immanently their
divergences. Always as wary of the dangers hiding in the shadows created by
"the fierce light of publicity"8 as she was of the angel in the house, Woolf as a
publisher sought and found excesses in the work of her two contemporaries
that, for her, mirrored their exaggerated public postures. Falling prey to
Sitwell's plea that the Hogarth Press publish Stein's monumental The
Making of Americans, Woolf had agreed in 1925 to read the manuscript.
Although she ultimately turned it down, her perceptions tell us something
about Stein, about Sitwell and herself (as well as the other great moderns),
that in turn leads to a larger perception of writers and of eccentricity:
We arelyingcrushedunderan immensemanuscript
ofGertrude
Stein's.I cannotbrisk
aregenuineandfruitful,
oronlysuch
myself
uptodealwithit?whetherhercontortions
in sheerimpatienceat havingto deal withEnglish
spasmsas we mightall go through
Formyown
prose.EdithSitwellsaysshe'sgigantic
(meaningnotthefleshbutthespirit).
EdithandGertrude
andTomandJoyceand
partI wishwecouldskipa generation?skip
hasbeenrestarted
andruns
Virginiaandcomeoutin theopenagain,wheneverything
fulltilt,insteadoftrickling
and teasingin thisirritating
way.I thinkit is bad forthe
character
too,to livein a byestream,and haveto consortwitheccentricities.
(Letter
1583)
Perhaps it was through identifyingher own experiments, both personal and
literary,with those of the eccentrics Sitwell and Stein that Virginia Woolf's
feelings of ambiguity finally turned to expressions of outright support.

Hogarth Press published in that very year Edith Sitwell's Poetryand Criticism
with its extravagant praise of Gertrude Stein. In 1926, it became the first
British publisher to print and distribute a work by Stein herself: ironically
that work was Composition as Explanation, a written version of the lectures
Stein delivered in England.

Gertrude Stein's speech at the universities openly defied any challenge to

her personal or literary reputation for eccentricity, and there, if not in
London, she was rewarded immediately. On the firstday of the lectures, the
audience was "very enthusiastic." The second day,her nervousness dispelled,
was a triumph. Feeling like a "prima donna," she spoke, she answered
questions, she laughed with her audience, and to Edith Sitwell's great
delight, she got the best of her distinguished hecklers in the most pleasant of
ways. One member of the audience "was so moved that he confided. . . that
the lecture had been one of his greatest experiences since he had read Kant's
Critique of Pure Reason."9 Since the Woolfs' foresight has preserved the
content of the lecture, it is not difficultto believe in Stein's report of the day.
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In her appearance, in her delivery of the speech, in her very confidence in

what she had to say, Gertrude Stein must have underlined everything she
was saying. No mere "eccentric visionary, [no] Madame Blavatsky in fabu?
lous clothes," but a solid "latent force,"10 like the Buddha figureLipchitz saw
in her, she spoke of creativity outside the margins of what tradition, both
academic and popular, had formerlyordained as "art":
Those who are creatingthe moderncomposition
are naturally
authentically
onlyof
whentheyaredeadbecausebythattimethemoderncomposition
importance
having
ofitisclassical.... Thatisthereasonwhy
becomepastisclassified
andthedescription
thecreatorofthenewcomposition
in theartsis an outlawuntilhe is a classicthereis
forthe
hardlya momentinbetweenanditisreallytoobadverymuchtoobadnaturally
creatorbut also verymuchtoo bad forthe enjoyer,theyall reallywouldenjoythe
createdso muchbetterafterit has beenmadethanwhenit is alreadya classic.11
Shining through Stein's words is the innocent pride in being "entirely
unafraid of and uninfluenced by the opinions and vagaries of the crowd"
which her friend Edith Sitwell would later write about in her own auto?
biography (126). Sitwell, in Taken Care Of, associates this kind of pride with
the eccentricities allowed only to "the aristocracy of the mind and of
behavior" (126). Gertrude Stein, foreveras confident about her genius as she
was about her difference, would never stop carrying the association one step
further.Inevitably her writing is the level on which she hopes to convince
her audience, in person and in print. "A sentence," says Stein, "hopes that

you are well and happy. It is very selfish.... A sentence can be taken care of.
The minute you disperse a crowd you have a sentence."12
Unlike those college lectures which bred Virginia Woolf's now classic A
Room of Ones Own, Gertrude Stein's lecture was not aimed at women and it
did not attempt to build a unity from the women writers and readers of the
past and present. "Creator" and "enjoyer" were in this case for Stein totally
androgynous, totally singular and totally immediate. Yet in a curious way,
curious because it admits not only the positive but also the negative powers
that operate in the lecture form, Stein's speech, the lengthy discussions it
chose to
raised, and the reactions to both which she experienced?and

record?are all part and parcel of that feminist tradition which equates
women's literature with outlawry. Virginia Woolf might in a few years warn
that the public nature of lecturing "incites the most debased of human
passions?vanity, ostentation, self-assertion, and the desire to convert"13 ?
in other words, all the "masculine" sins of domination; she would prefer to
rally her forces in the covert fashion women had employed in the past. But
Edith Sitwell would proudly disagree, saying that speech making gave her, as
a woman, the power to do battle with those sins on their own territory."One
of the reasons for which I was made," she would write, "was to give Tublic
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susceptibilities' a good shaking, and, if possible, to get them on their feet

instead of on their hands."14 Rebellion in the open arena of the lecture hall
was, for both Woolf and Sitwell, a dangerous affair,making them at once
more vulnerable and more powerful, because it admitted even more than
writing a latent awareness of the pressures used to subdue the language of
women. Gertrude Stein saw this too, as her concern with identity and
publicity in Everybody'sAutobiographymakes eminently clear. Stein's seem?
ingly naive statement about the women in her Cambridge audience ("The
women said nothing. Gertrude Stein wondered whether they were supposed
not or just did not"?ABT,
221) is a calculated irony,offsetas it is by her
recollection of having bested by immediate example the heirs to authority
who believed they could catch her in an illogical progression of thought.
Such an act was surely a form of outlawry in an ancient hall devoted to the
lessons of the past. But it was safely contained too by its own logical
connection to the very content of the lecture and the obvious character of
the lecturer. "I said in England when I was talking to the Cambridge
students," Gertrude Stein wrote,

thatalthoughitwasthesamelanguageanybody
couldtellrightawaywhether
itwasan
Americanwriter
or an Englishwriter
whohad written
and thathas a greatdeal to do
withtheirmakingthemaliveandtheirmakingthemdead,in Englandthedeadarenot
deadbecausetheyareconnectedwithothersliving,inAmericathedeadaredeadthere
is no connectionwiththoseleftliving.15
Only through the living force of her immediate presence?excused briefly
but not conclusively by her Americanness and by her quite visible rejection
of the conventions of the past?could Gertrude Stein have gotten away with
shaking tradition as she did. It was, then, in her English university lectures
that Gertrude Stein first, and perhaps most emblematically, proved her
sisterhood in the triumvirate of feminist modernist writers?"Edith and

Gertrude.. .and Virginia," teasing, irritating eccentrics all, each with her
own methods, each with her own style, but all united in their desire to have

themselves as women accepted as writers too.

Of three Norns of modernism, Virginia Woolf has been installed by
feminist literary critics as "the Mother of us all." Gertrude Stein and Edith
Sitwell, the catalyst of the ephemeral sisterhood, are today seen com?

paratively rarely in feminist criticism, and they are studied only marginally
as feminist critics. Although much of the reasoning behind this feminist
hierarchy must be based upon the sheer quantity of material available
(Woolf certainly wrote a good deal more about herself and about other
women as writers than did either Stein or Sitwell), much too is probably
based upon the difference in perspective that Woolf, Stein and Sitwell were
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likely to take in regard to women and writing. Woolf's vision is a wide one:
she contemplates a continuum of women as writersthroughout history; from
a hypothetical Shakespeare's Sister to the latest woman to appear in print
she is always ready to discover a pattern, to findthe paradigm of a specifically
female sentence. Edith Sitwell and Gertrude Stein have respectively nar?
rower focuses: instead of picturing themselves as members of a procession
they tend to paint portraits of themselves and other women against back?
drops of history or contemporary life that are farfrom stable. Even so, Stein
and Sitwell's writings are hardly of the shrill and complaining sort that
Virginia Woolf would caution against, and their joy in their personal
eccentricities only acts to bolster this literary point. As twentieth-century
women, Stein and, to a lesser degree, Sitwell are "no longer bitter. . .no
longer angry... no longer pleading and protesting as they write."16 Rather,
their stories and their criticisms?which are to a remarkable extent about
their eccentric selves?are expressions of what they would term the longsought "confidence" or "Self-Development." Of her appearance, Edith Sit?

well once said, "I am now as highly stylised as it is possible to be?as stylised
as the music of Debussy or Ravel."17 Given the context of the remark (a
Sunday supplement article published at the height of her fame as a poet), no
reader could ignore the connection with her work. Even Gertrude Stein,
standing as she did at the opposite end of the critical spectrum from Woolf,
could take a rare step backward from her characteristically narrow point of
reference and triumphantly insert her own method into the history of
women's writing. While revealing in Everybody'sAutobiographyher comfort
with the form she used, she records a conversation with Dashiell Hammett;
in it we can see perhaps most clearly why she nearly always chose to write
about women as women?especially

when they were artists, too:

I saidtoHammet[sic]thereissomething
thatispuzzling.
In thenineteenth
the
century
men whentheywerewriting
did inventall kindsand a greatnumberof men.The
womenon theotherhandnevercouldinventwomentheyalwaysmadethewomenbe
orsadlyorheroically
themselves
seensplendidly
orbeautifully
ordespairingly
orgently
theynevercouldmakeanyotherkindofwomen.FromCharlotteBronteto George
Eliotandmanyyearslaterthiswastrue.Nowinthetwentieth
itisthemenwho
century
do it.The menall writeaboutthemselves,
as strong
orweak
theyarealwaysthemselves
ormysterious
orpassionateordrunkorcontrolled
butalwaysthemselves
as thewomen
usedto do in thenineteenth
century.... He saiditssimple.In thenineteenth
century
menwereconfident,
thewomenwerenot butin thetwentieth
century.... Anyway
iseasylikeitornotautobiography
iseasyandso thisistobe everybody's
autobiography
(EA, 5-6)
autobiography.
With all of its conscious eccentricity, Stein's defense of writing about herself
points quite directly to her wish to see herself?and to be seen?in as many
lights as possible. This prolixity is as much Stein's technique of relating her
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own experiences to those of other women writers as Virginia Woolf's

cautious multiple heroine of A Room of One's Own is hers, and Edith Sitwell's
autobiographical antitheses are hers.
In making their experiences as writers experiences that were specifically
female, Stein, Sitwell and Woolf knew that they faced risks Stephen
Spender would later write about: these were risks that were far more
formidable to women than to Spender's "everybody,"for the three chanced
dangers that were far more likely to be incurred by a writer who, before she
even began writing, already stood apart from tradition's center:
. . . what one has to defendis the autobiographers
who writeabout the intimate
in them'
Theyare indiscreet,
theyaretoo interested
experienceofbeingthemselves.
to others,theyareegomaniacs.
selves,theywriteaboutthingsthatarenot important
is suchthatiftheytellwhatitis liketo be
The natureoftheinnerhumanpersonality
themselves
exhibitionists,
theyare immoralists,
pornographers.18
The autobiographical crime of indiscretion is obvious in the writings of all
three women, but its degree is perhaps highest in Stein and Sitwell, fortheir
excesses are so much easier to apprehend. Each of the women, however,
provides ample positive evidence (often it is the same evidence as that used
by the harshest of judges) to show that she, as a woman, has the rightto write
about herself whatever the cost, and that, consistent with this belief, each
merits readers who have equal rights (although facing different risks) to
"dream about a personality" (EA, 69) creating the work. Through this
perspective it is possible to see that Edith Sitwell and Gertrude Stein were
not, after all, so very far from the goal Virginia Woolf envisioned. Their
writings?especially their autobiographical writings?are indeed very well

"adapted to [their] bodies"19 and to their own very eccentric female geniuses.
The boundaries of the genre of literary autobiography are, as every critic
agrees, elusive, and in many instances they merge with the realms of theory
and criticism. Mary G. Mason, in tracing some of the earliest women
autobiographers in English, notes that the task of marking such boundaries
becomes doubly complex when the subject is a woman, because, for her,
established models forthe "drama of the self [do] not accord with the deepest
realities of a woman's experience."20 Of the great many autobiographical
works of poetry and prose that Gertrude Stein and Edith Sitwell produced
between them, only one book could, in the traditional sense of the word, be
termed an autobiography proper. That book is Edith Sitwell's Taken Care Of:
Edith Sitwell'sAutobiography, and even here there are problems. Published
posthumously, Taken Care 0/(1965) was partially written, partially dictated,
during the last painful years of Sitwell's life. It was undertaken as a matter of
necessity: Sitwell desperately needed (or thought she needed) the money it
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could earn to keep herself alive. The success of her latest book, The Queens
and the Hive (1962), the sale of her manuscripts and notebooks to the
University of Texas, the discovery and sale of several important modernist
paintings in her possession, all precluded that need. In the end, it was not
Edith Sitwell who "pulled [the book] into shape," but her secretary Elizabeth
Salter who, with "scissors and paste" and Sitwell's blessing, tried as hard as
she dared to make Taken Care Of representative of its subject's "art of
presentation of her materials."21
It is unlikely that two other prose works by Edith Sitwell, both written
when she was strong, would be considered autobiographies by a librarian
trying to catalog them. Unlike Taken Care Of, the struggles of which were
often veiled by another person seeking to allay the pain of a friend'sold age,
these books hide their autobiographical truthbehind the mask of a different
genre, a differentname. Sitwell's critical biography Alexander Pope (1931)
and her novel I Live Under A Black Sun (1937) are, however, as much about
Edith Sitwell as they are about the eighteenth-century male geniuses whose
lives they claim to dramatize. About the firstbook Edith Sitwell said, "I set
some store on the chapter about his poetry."22She was talking about the last
chapter?the chapter which all before had led up to, the chapter which she
wrote at the same time she was collecting and altering her own poems. It
begins:
It is generally
of verseis a platonicone, that
believed,bythosewhoseappreciation
fromtheheadofJove.Thatisan
fromthepoet'shead,as Minervasprang
poetry
springs
me. Ifwe
easyexplanationofthebirthofourgoddess,butit is notone whichsatisfies
wereto askanyofthepoetsofthepast,weshouldwithoutdoubtbe toldthatpoetryis
justas mucha matterofphysicalaptitudeas ofspiritual.23

Given this philosophical stance, as well as the common factor of "physical

pain and weak physique" that constrained both the tiny Pope and the
outsized Sitwell throughout their lives, the Sitwell/Pope parallels cited by so
many critics do not seem unpremeditated. Paradoxical as it may seem,
Sitwell's decision to make Pope her subject perhaps also had a great deal to
do with her feelings about being a living woman poet. For Sitwell, that often
"flawless" poet was a "definite entity": a genius who, even in the throes of
inspiration, best exercised his technical muscles by obeying the rules of
poetic order. Her advice to aspiring women poets a few years before the
biography reflectsjust how self-referentialher admiration of Pope was: "it is
not wise for women to dispense with rules as men may,"24 she warned,
sounding unexpectedly in awe of tradition, although the logic of her
statement is far from conventional.
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I Live Under A Black Sun presents an equally complex relationship

between the personality of the author and the literarycharacter of the work,
but because this time the hero's "work" is seen as a consequence of actions
motivated by his physical and spiritual capacities, the synthesis is an even
more intricately woven one. The novel places subject and event into a
structure of process rather than into the static equation "physical ap?

titude + spiritual aptitude+much work and care=poetry." Because the book,

like Alexander Pope, is about a poet, and ultimately his poetry, it is not
surprisingto learn that Edith Sitwell called it her "ewe lamb," and later, "part
of myself." The rare, nearly maternal, metaphors may have occurred to her
as she countered tradition's portrait of Swift's misogyny and made his
strengths and weaknesses so similar to her own. Sitwell called the novel an
"allegory" too, and in doing so she must have had in mind those words with
which she began her early memoirs: "there is no such thing as truth, there
are only points of view; and I have no nature and no character?only
personality and gusts of cold air in the midst of loneliness,"25 for the same
aura of always being an outsider and an "adventurer," of always having to
come up with a terrible thrust of energy to maintain contact with the
outside world, hovers over every character in JLive Under A Black Sun.
Mary G. Mason found that the one pattern which seems to emerge most
consistently in the works of the women autobiographers of the past is the
pairing of the self "with another, equal image" (231). As one of the most
overt manifestations of this tendency to pair, Mason cites the multi-faceted
Margaret Cavendish's attachment of her autobiography to the Life she wrote
of her husband; Mason also notes a subtler form of pairing by calling to
attention the True Relation's definition of self through identification with an
"other." Edith Sitwell's identification of her self with the hero of JLive Under
A Black Sun, with Alexander Pope and even with Elizabeth Salter, falls into

this pattern quite neatly, and the parallels which can be drawn when several
of Gertrude Stein's works are compared with hers serves to support the
pattern which is so often termed "eccentric." Three of Gertrude Stein's most
autobiographical works display titles that mask their subject in a manner
curiously similar to Sitwell's. Everybody's Autobiography (1933) is not by
Everybody,nor is it about Everybody: it is by and about Gertrude Stein. Yet
in its lengthy,almost defensive, discussions of the reactions of Everybody to
the completed work of the successful "genius," and the genius's own attempts
to deal with those reactions, it closely resembles Alexander Pope. Gertrude
Stein's expressed fascination with the eighteenth century ("a nice period
when everybody forgetsto be a father or to have been one"?EA, 142) brings
the lines of Alexander Pope and Everybody'sAutobiography even closer to?
gether. The title of Stein's novel The Making of Americans (1925) bears the
same double disguise of J Live Under A Black Sun. As "Americans" can be
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narrowed down over time and space to the semi-fictional Dehning-Hersland

family and then to Gertrude Stein herself, so, too, does the totally fictional,
nearly abstract "Jonathan Hare" stand in place of the real but legendary
Jonathan Swift who, in turn, is a representation of the living artist Edith
Sitwell.
The relationship between Stein's Autobiographyof Alice B. Toklas (1933)
and Taken Care Of might, on the surface, seem to be less complex. In both

cases an inversion occurs. Gertrude Stein is not writing about the ostensible
subject, her friend Alice B. Toklas, but about herself: hence the valid
inclusion of "Autobiography" in the title, but the "lie" about Alice B.
Toklas.26 Edith Sitwell, who directed her friend Elizabeth Salter to accom?
plish the immense task of selection and compilation of already-written
memoirs, is both more and less honest about the sub-title that follows Taken
Care Of: although Salter is not given credit for her work except in the

"Acknowledgements," the syntactical simplicity and completeness of "Edith

Sitwell'sAutobiography"seems to admit the presence of an other by lessening
the usual distinctions between the concepts of the self and the work. The

seemingly resigned title phrase "Taken Care Of" may in fact not be as passive
as it looks. Borrowed from Gertrude Stein ("a sentence can be taken care
of"), the phrase could be a further,albeit obscure, reference to the active
influence that Gertrude Stein had for Sitwell when it came to the auto?
biographical problem of describing without freezing into definition the
eccentric self. These deliberate confusions of the "easy" straightforwardform
of autobiography, these simultaneous compressions and expansions of the
self, the work, and the other, are symptomatic of what is to come within the
books themselves, and they point to a complexity that is perhaps far deeper
than that of either of the other pairs of autobiographies. Although Alexander
Pope and Everybody's Autobiography, I Live Under A Black Sun and The
Making of Americans contain many of the same elements that Taken Care Of
and The Autobiographyof Alice B. Toklas contain, and although these books
often reinforce the concepts forwarded in the major autobiographies, they
do not, by title alone, make nearly so clear the enhancing powers that can be
created by a linking of the eccentricity of the self and the eccentricity of the
work. In both these books, the authors seem to emphasize the special
necessity that women have to stand a little off-center?Stein by assuming
the guise of Alice B. Toklas, Sitwell by allowing Elizabeth Salter's choice?
when exposing themselves to public view. Like Virginia Woolf's methods
when lecturing, an element of self-protection exists in the device, but there
is an element of outlawry too, of an implied threat to engulf tradition, foran
entire established form is being subverted to the needs of two very special
and, as Woolf indicated, very consciously influential women.

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There are several points of conjunction in The Autobiographyof Alice B.

Toklas and Taken Care Of, but the one that seems to overshadow all the
others can be found in Gertrude Stein's and Edith Sitwell's almost identical
claims to genius. The theme is repeated so often in both books that the
curious or suspicious reader would find it difficultto resist the power of the

statements. By the fourth page of The Autobiographyof Alice B. Toklas, it has

been announced that Gertrude Stein is a "First Class Genius." Edith Sit?
well's confidence in herself is displayed almost as early. There is humor in her
account of her infancy and childhood:
I was unpopularwithmyparentsfromthe momentofmybirth,and throughout
my
childhoodandyouth.I wasindisgrace
forbeingfemale,andworse,as I grewolderitwas
obviousthatI wasnotgoingto conform
offeminine
to myfather's
standards
beauty.. .
norcoulditbe denied,evenat theearliest
alas,I neverbehavedin theusualmanner,
ofcerebrum,
cerebellum
andmedullary
substance.
indications
age,thatI showedstrong
I was a disappointment.27
(TCO, 26)
I wasan embarrassing
child.Therewasan occasionwhenDaviswasaskedto bringme
down to the drawing-room
at Wood End to see one of Mother'sfriends.... "You
remember
me, littleE?"she enquired.. . ."No". . . ."What areyougoingto be when
removed
fromthe
littleE?"... "A genius,"I replied.I waspromptly
youaregrown-up,
and putto bed. (TCO, 29)
drawing-room
It is, however, a humor that is achieved by a tempering of her confidence, a
weakening of conviction through the application to her past self of the same
ironic, not "agreeing," tone she uses to discredit others.
Gertrude Stein's confidence is never shaken in this manner. In The
Making Of Americans Stein had discussed the difference between being
young and being old:
in livingis finding
Disillusionment
thatno one can reallyeverbe agreeingwithyou
in livingis thebeginning
ofbeingan old
in anything.. . disillusionment
completely
manoran oldwoman... no longera growing
olderyoungmanora growing
olderyoung
woman.. .. thisis a sad thing.. .. Youngones oftenthinktheyhave it in them,this
thing,some youngones kill themselvesthen, stop living then, this is often
happening.28
Perhaps it has something to do with Stein's distinction between being
English?being aware always of all those geniuses of the past trying to lock
one out of the tradition?and being American, living only for the continu?
ous present when the number of geniuses is sure to be "very few." Perhaps,
though, it has more to do with the presence of an always-convincing other
in the life and in the works. For Sitwell, the constant tension aroused by the
subject of genius points to a mere conviction, held on and offduring her life,

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held more or less strongly depending upon how all sorts of others reacted to
it, held, but now near the end of her life, almost ready to be relinquished. For
Stein, who always had Alice there to confirm her genius, it is a living
knowledge. In Everybody'sAutobiography Stein writes, "What is genius. If
you are one how do you know you are one. It is not a conviction." (EA, 84).
Stein's distinction was surely not an attack on Edith Sitwell (who, when
Stein knew her, was exhibiting quite publicly all the same embarrassing
precosities of her youth), for Stein seems, by all the evidence available, to
have retained for Edith Sitwell an unusually loyal friendship and respect.29
Comparisons of the constancy of genius implied by Gertrude Stein's "knowl?
edge" and the vibrating tensions implied by Edith Sitwell's ironic defenses,
however, can lead readers of both women to make literary distinctions
between them that seem to illustrate their eccentricities of personality.
Edith Sitwell's autobiography is structured around independent anec?
dotes, many of which seem to have been designed to convince readers of her
genius. Gertrude Steins, while it does contain anecdotes, always possesses a
strong connective tissue that manages to outlive the near dead-and-gone
nature of the anecdote. Some of the reasoning underlying this difference in
structure can, of course, be explained away by the relative ages of the authors
when they wrote. More pertinent observations about the differences in
structure might, however, arise from an understanding of the eccentric, and
yet very different,life-styles of the subjects. Although Edith Sitwell had a
few life-long attachments (most notably to her brothers and to Helen
Rootham), these seem almost transitory when compared with Gertrude
Stein's many-levelled commitment to Alice B. Toklas. The presence of Alice
in Stein's life is reflected in The Autobiography:her literarypersona is, in fact,
a personification of the connective tissue. When the absence of such a figure
in Sitwell's autobiography is contrasted, the function of Alice becomes even
more marked. Alice B. Toklas represents an other in the autobiography that
takes her name, but since she is so much Steins equal in life, her literary
otherness is not of the same hierarchal kind that Sitwell, in her irony,tends

to make of any sort of otherness. Alice B. Toklas's constant presence as both

subject and object reinforces The Autobiography'sconnectiveness. Gertrude
Stein, in her dual relationship with Alice B. Toklas, might, in this light, thus
be seen as an avatar, at home and in The Autobiography,of the psychological
and literary theories to be advanced many years later by the French femi?
nists:
She is infinitely
otherin herself.... In her statements.
. . womanretouchesherself
in orderto hearan "other
constantly.... One mustlistento herconstantly
meaning"
whichis constantly
in theprocessofweaving
at thesametimeceaselessly
itself,
embracing
wordsandyetcasting
themofftoavoidbecoming
immobilized.30
fixed,
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Edith Sitwell's near echo of Gertrude Stein's "I feel with my eyes and it
does not make any difference to me what language I hear.... I hear tones of
voice and rhythms" (ABT, 65-66) occurs at almost the same distance
through her autobiography as it does in Stein's. The italicized word in
Sitwell's account, however, points to a great difference in their personalities
and in their histories. "I have no physical life excepting that of two of the
senses?hearing and seeing" (TCO, 44).31 For the virginal Sitwell, otherness
is always carefully demarcated, whether it is in the irony of her portraits or in
the structure of her compositions (asterisks abound in Taken Care Of:
dissonance is as important to her poetry as any other rhetorical element)?
or, whether it is in the presentation of the self. As a modernist artist, Sitwell
wanted to consider herself "highly individualized and separate,"32 but fore?
saw the tragedy that might ensue if her wish were granted. The connec?
tiveness with others that she might have felt as a child gradually dissipates in
her literature and leaves her "a little outside life." This progression seems to
creep through even the nostalgic mythological background of her early
poem, "Colonel Fantock":
and I
ButDagobertand Peregrine
Werechildrenthen,we walkedlikeshygazelles
Amongthemusicofthinflower-bells.
And lifestillheldsomepromise,?never
ask
Of what,?butlifeseemedlessa stranger,
then,
Than everafterin thiscold existence.
I alwayswas a littleoutsidelife?
And so thethingswe touchcouldcomfort
me;.. .
I lovedtheshydreamswe couldhearand see?
ForI was likeone dead,likea smallghost,
A littlecold airwandering
and lost.33
In her later poetry,especially in her dreadfully graphic "Poems of the Atomic
Age," the theme of "the separation of brother and brother.. . the migration
into the desert of Cold"34 is all-pervasive.
The modernist sense of a failure to "only connect" with an other seems to
reach a personal epitome in Sitwell's biography of Alexander Pope. Not
surprisingly,the physical deformity which is cited as the cause of Pope's
mastery of style is also the cause of his sexual unfulfillment:

He longedto be regarded
as a humanbeing?tobe lovedas an ordinary
man;and his
madethisseemimpossible
tohim.He wasnailedtotheouterwallsofthecity
deformity
as MrPopethefamouspoet,AlexanderPope,thecrippledhunchback.His friendship
conferred
a favour,
becausehewasfamous;
butthefamewhichfelltohim,thedeformity
likeothermen,orfeel
whichhe endured,
thathe shouldsuffer
madeitseemimpossible
pleasurelikeothermen.(AP, 21)
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In a manner almost as anecdotal as that of Taken Care Of, Sitwell makes

humanly bearable the hopelessness of this situation for Pope with accounts
of his friendships forJonathan Swift and Martha Blount. But the temporary
nature she assigns to these friendships, the quarrels and losses, makes them
seem mere connections within an exchange economy: there is hardly the
idea of "protection from dispersal because the other is a part of [Pope] and is

autoerotically familiar to him."35

Stein's evenness of style, her "simple middle-class monotonous" repeti?
tions, her accentuation of the continuous present before all else, denies even
the hierarchy of event, and makes the presence of the connective other seem

essential to maintain her autobiography's delicate equilibrium. Her abstrac?

tion of the relationship between herself and Alice in The Autobiography
becomes a ritualized act throughout, an act that defies the tag of "symbolic"
because it reaches no climactic point of "doing something." Because Alice
B. Toklas is so much an equal part of Stein's self there is no question here of
the other superseding in importance the self.

This was a problem which came to haunt Stein once The Autobiography
had made her a literary "success." In her sequel, Everybody'sAutobiography,
she writes,
It is all a questionoftheoutside
The thingis likethis,it is all a questionofidentity.
beingtheoutsideandtheinsidebeingtheinside.As longas theoutsidedoesnotputa
valueon youthenit remainsoutsidebutwhenitdoesputa valueon youthenit gets
insideorratheriftheoutsideputsa valueon youthenall yourinsidegetstobe outside.I
usedto tellall themenwhowerebeingsuccessful
younghowbadthiswasforthemand
thenI whowasno longeryoungwashavingit happen.(EA, 47)
Stein's consideration of how the moral aspect of the success and identity

problem relates to herself is reinforced later by a subtle reference to her style:

"a really good saint does nothing....
Generally speaking everybody is more
interesting doing nothing than doing something" (EA, 109).
Perhaps because of the counteracting, non-proprietary existence of Alice,
the question of success and identity does not continue to haunt Stein for as
long as it does Edith Sitwell. I Live Under A Black Sun, is more than a
thematically complex novel: as a modern hagiography it explores the
various levels of connection or contiguity that an author can experience
with an other in order to augment or even just maintain his?or her?literary
integrity.Jonathan Hare never achieves sexual union with any of the three
women he loves: because of this his work suffersand, at the end, he goes
mad. Hatred intrudes upon every relationship?hatred that is produced by
the valuing effectsof war, jealousy and fear.The intrusions are not as stark as
Taken Care O/'s asterisks or Alexander Pope's critical commentary, but they
exist and they sever the connective tissue of the major love story.Jonathan's
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fear of sexuality is thus presented as the cause of a tragedy,a tragedy that for
him ends in "Silence," inevitably linking the subjects of sex and language.
For his inability to create an unbreakable bond with an other?Anna
(Stella)?there is no substitute in the long-sought fame that "seem[s] to him
nothing but an empty sound that echo[es] down the long passages and in the
lead-cold darkened rooms." His "eccentricity.. .becomefs] more and more
noticeable" when Anna is gone; "even his appearance grow[s] stranger"; his
deafness increases "to such a pitch that conversation [is] impossible, so that
he [is] surrounded by a thick black half-mad silence like the plumage of the
raven he resemble[s]."36 The tone of sadness at being "a little outside life" is,
in I Live Under A Black Sun, far more intense than it was in "Colonel
Fantock," for here its source is the absence of a completed other:
[Anna]wasthere,a partofthefabricofhislife.Ifhe wasill,he sentforher;ifhe was
shemustsoothe.Itwastoherhe wentwhenhe wasinpainorwhentheworldhad
angry
disappointedhim. But he was neverentirelyhers:theremustalwaysbe a shadow
ofhis
betweenthem,a shadowthathe hadcreated.... So shefellintothebackground
as necessary
to himas thebreadhe ate; buthe never
life,a constantattendant
figure,
sawheralone again.(IL, 178-79)
Anna's death, the loss of any potential to connect, results in a bitterness that
is far greater than that used to describe people's responses to Alexander
Pope's deformity.Jonathan's farfrom abstract physical manifestations of this

loss?this deformity?paradoxically prevent him from producing any tangi?

ble evidence of his feelings:
Onlytwice,duringall the timeofhis ragingmadness,did he speak:whenHans was
a largepieceofcoal,a harshvoicesaid"Fool... itisa stone."AndwhenSusan,
breaking
seeingthata knifehad been leftin hispresence,tookit as he wasaboutto snatchit,
thedepthsofunutterable
washeard.Itsaid"I amwhat
thena voicecomingfrom
misery
I am.... I am whatI am...."
And silencefell.(IL, 322-23)
Since I Live Under A Black Sun was written under the doubly terrifying
conditions produced by the death of Sitwell's own "Alice" (Helen Rootham)
and the rejection by Pavlov Tchelitchew37 of her sexuality, the negative
tone of the novel is understandable on even the simplest of autobiographical

planes. But lying behind this obvious explanation is the admission of the
necessity, for the writer as well as for the human being, to have "requited"
love, to have, entirely, the presence of another in order to create. Evelyn
Waugh's critique of the novel, condensed into the description of "psycholog?
ically terrifying"is surely more instinctively appropriate than other critics'
impressions of its "confused intent and execution."38 Like the book itself,
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his judgment admits the searing difficultythat occurs when language and
reality try to come together without that connective other.
Edith Sitwell's Englishness might lie at the core of the terriblyemotional,
terribly personal sense of tragedy that pervades I Live Under A Black Sun.
Stein's characterization of the English as being connected always with the
dead itself gives readers of both Stein and Sitwell a theoretical base for

making their own connections between Edith Sitwell, Jonathan Hare and
Jonathan Swift as well as forviewing Sitwell's autobiographical ties with the
past as a distinct contrast to Stein's ties with a positive representation of the

living continuous present. When Edith Sitwell called the English "eccen?
tric" because of their "rigid and even splendid, attitude of Death, some
exaggeration of the attitudes common to Life," she was perhaps defining the
form her own eccentricity would take in terms Gertrude Stein was particu?
larly well adapted to accept:

This attitude,rigidity,
bythose
protest,or explanation,has been called eccentricity
whosebonesaretoo pliant.Butthesemummies
castshadowsthatdo notlie in their
and fromthesedistortions,
mayarise.
proportions,
dustylaughter
propergeometrical
(EE, 16)
Stein's distinction between Americans, Spaniards and Europeans, however,
carries the process of becoming eccentric one step further and offersyet
another method of accounting for I Live Under A Black Sun's sense of
tragedy:
Steinsays,arelikeSpaniards,
andcruel.They
so Gertrude
Americans,
theyareabstract
arenotbrutaltheyarecruel.Theyhaveno closecontactwiththeearthsuchas most
isnotthematerialism
itis
have.Theirmaterialism
ofexistenceorpossession,
europeans
thematerialism
ofactionand abstraction.
(ABT, 86)
The failure, then, of Jonathan to have another in his possession enters a
tradition, a tradition which, because of its very moment-to-moment physicality as well as its longevity, is inherently capable of arousing the strongest

emotions on the parts of both writer and reader. Gertrude Stein's Americanness?her disembodiedness?permits her to escape from tradition into a
realm where abstract ritual needs no "connection with anything but ritual"
(ABT, 86), where the very idea of tragedy?and all the established value
systems tragedy implies?is irrelevant. The immediate cooperating literary
presence of Alice in The Autobiography,the continuous equality of charac?
ters in The Making of Americans, the consistent levelling of event and
personality in Everybody's Autobiography, all negate the historical urge,
however eccentric it might be, to create forthe self formsof containment for
purposes of unity. Thus, while Edith Sitwell in her autobiographical works
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can be comic (as she is, often, in Taken Care Of) or critical (as in Alexander
Pope) ox tragic (as in, most dramatically, I Live Under A Black Sun), Gertrude
Stein's commitment to her "metier,"her own artistic integrity,will not allow
for such well-practiced devices. Always ready in an instant to dispense with
the rules, she saw herself, in her writing and in her life, more as a result than
a cause. Her literary eccentricity thus runs counter to Sitwell's neoColeridgean organicism, a factor which influences their public postures as
much as it does their writings: while Stein remains an abstract figure,
capable of being cast into an infinite number of solid shapes in space, Sitwell
is ever ready to assume another battling Romantic position forher audience.
"Harold Acton [that ubiquitous recorder of his time] might be useful
altogether" (How To Write, 236) in explaining the link between the eccen?
tricity of the self and the eccentricity of style that exists in so much of
Gertrude Stein's and Edith Sitwell's autobiographical writings. In How To
Write Gertrude Stein draws a distinction between the narrative form and
the portrait form: situated within the same chapter as her portrait of Acton
("In Narrative"), the distinction seems to be a lesson which she wants him in
particular to learn, but it might apply to Edith Sitwell also:
A narrative
allowsa changeinthisbeingthatforthebestofthetimethatmakesletting
whilea portrait
hasbeenwhiletheywere
itbe whentheymightcompareitaltogether
A narrative
allowsittobe mostofitattachedtotheirhavinglostit
keptapartcordially.
iswhatmightbe whiletheywereeasilyenoughall aboutitmakesitdo, a
anda portrait
makesitbe one at a time.(HTW, 229)
and a narrative
portrait
together
Neither a portrait nor a narrative alone can support the continuous present
that Gertrude Stein was always seeking in autobiography. Harold Acton's
portraits of both Stein and Sitwell freeze them into sculpture?remarkably
descriptive pieces of sculpture to be sure, pieces that capture at once Stein's
literary and physical solidness (that "Aztec figure")and Sitwell's urge to soar
above the ordinary (a "Gothic virgin"39). Yet, in their classifying they seem
calculated to immobilize their subjects within the past. And while Stein, in
her assurance of her genius, really had no argument with those who wished
to look upon her as part of a tradition, she did object to having one moment
of her ever-pliant life, one look, frozen for eternity."There is no reason why
Harold Acton should have taken exception," she wrote, and continued,

"Going on with his life." The emphasis, enforced by repetition, is certainly

upon "his," and Stein's annoyance is made even clearer by her emotional
paragraph of conclusion: "Harold Acton famous in life and in death."
Acton's culpability in this matter applies particularly to women for Stein,
because he makes no distinction "between a girl and a boy." He "quells" (or
"kills") the living personality of his Beatrice by withdrawing fromher totality
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(the sexual reference in inescapable): the still-life artist in "Harold would

infinitely rather have roses between pear trees than a child" (HTW, 233).
In contrast to Harold Acton's works of sculpture, Gertrude Steins own
portrait of Edith Sitwell seems remarkably lively:
Absentlyfacesbyand bywe agree.
we agree.
Byand byfacesapparently
facesbyand bywe agree.
Apparently
we agree.
Byand byfacesapparently
facesbyand bywe agree.40
Apparently
In this part of the portrait composed a year before the university lectures
"many things come out in the repeating that makes a history of each for any
one who always listens to them."41 Not only is the history of the relationship
between Gertrude Stein and Edith Sitwell explored in a running account of
changes and returns, of syntactical differences in opinion and then conclu?
sions in harmony, but the author's and the subject's very personalities are
related in terms of physical appearance?the
faces that they show to the
world. They are faces that are at once alike because they belong to the same
species (noun, woman, writer) and differentbecause their antecedents are
different.Changes of rhythm in each episodic sentence also seem to portray
individuality, making the portrait appear as a conversation between Stein
and Sitwell with "faces" and "we agree" remaining as the solid constants in
the experience. This repetitive tension between sameness and difference
thus imbues even the brief eccentric portrait with depth and life in addition
to its inherent solidity: all three qualities are those which Gertrude Stein
thought essential to the integrity of her art; all three make for a distinctly
autobiographical portrait.
Edith Sitwell's portrait of Gertrude Stein offers a contrast to Stein's
portrait of herself. The portrait's solidity is given a narrative, living quality
by the adoption to it of the essence of Stein's own metier?her prose?and,
even though the portrait is composed in the past tense, there is a strong
sense of continuing throughout, a sense that is made even stronger by its
position in Taken Care Of between the accounts of Helen Rootham's death
and Pavel Tchelitchew's many endings:
Gertrudewas verbally
the moreso as she invariably
veryinteresting,
got everybody
likean EasterIslandidol,wasimmensely
and
goodhumoured,
wrong.She lookedrather
had a remarkable
abilityto workin themidstofanyamountofnoise.She had been
withcomplete
knownto sit in a garagewhilehermotorwas beingrepairedwriting
concentration.
Butshedidnotsuffer
foolsgladly.
Hersalon,forwhichshewasfamous,
wasdivided....
I was,I amgladto say,alwaysputnextto Gertrude!
It wasat myinvitation
thatshe
cameto Englandlateron to lecturein thiscountry.
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ofthesuccessandalsoofthedangers
Herworkisan illustration
ofrevaluation.
She is
intheworldwhomanyotherwriter
thelastwriter
shouldtakeas a model;butherwork,
forthemostpart,is veryvaluablebecauseofitsrevivifying
qualities,and itcontainsto
mymind,considerable
beauty.. . .
She threwa wordintotheair,and whenitreturned
to thegrounditborewithinit
theoriginalmeaningitborebeforecustomand misusehad blurredit. (TCO, 136-37)
The portrait, perhaps more than any of Sitwell's other anecdotal ones, shows
the influence of Stein on her perceptions. One at a time, the various
elements of Gertrude Stein's personality are paraded before the reader, with
Stein and Sitwell's commonality as writers binding the whole.
Even as they worked to break the barriers of tradition, Gertrude Stein and

Edith Sitwell both in their own time created legends out of their own
personalities as well as one another's. Working sometimes with, sometimes
against, the flood of public opinion, Stein let her famous persona of "the
Mother Goose of Montparnasse" grow in scope to include all of those

religious icons (the Buddha, the Aztec and Easter Island images), until she
resembled for many the historically real figureof a Roman emperor; Sitwell
grew from a "bee-princess" to a medieval madonna (Dutch, Flemish, Siennese or Florentine), to a reincarnation of yet another figureof authority,the
Virgin Queen, Elizabeth I. But, as Donald Sutherland has commented about
Gertrude Stein's writing style, "There is danger in this method; it can
become sheer decoration."42 The self-sustained legend of Gertrude Stein's
flouting of traditional female roles, of her very love of gossip, like Edith
Sitwell's desire to "shake the public susceptibilities" with her spectacular
appearance and argumentative temperament, can create a balance that is
almost too delicate to be maintained: one step too far and the difference
between subjectivity and objectivity, between privacy and publicity, is
erased. By way of proof as to the danger of such conscious creation is the
evidence of critics?both feminist and traditionalist. Discussing Gertrude
Stein's voyage into the realm of the abstract, Patricia Meyer Spacks seems to
think that Stein, by making of her life and her writing so much the same
thing, may have gone too far in one direction:
theprimacy
theworldbyreproducing
of
it,andbydenying
Stein]dominates
[Gertrude
she preserves
herfreedom
emotion.Her life,fullofpeople,lacksrealattachments;
by
frommostaspectsof"normal"
feminine
herself
experience.43
severing
In contrast, Edith Sitwell's carefully groomed legend (more than ably abet?
ted by the photographer Cecil Beaton) may have taken her too far in the
other direction. FR. Leavis spoke for at least a few of his colleagues when he
said, "Edith Sitwell belongs to the history of publicity rather than poetry."44
He may have been speaking in advance for the many feminists concerned
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with liberating women from neo-Platonic commercial value systems that

perpetuate the myths of demi-gods in literature.45 In overstepping the
boundaries of the traditional world, in linking so closely their highly
individuated selves with their eccentric writings, both Gertrude Stein and
Edith Sitwell stepped into territoryfar more dangerous, more brutal and
cruel, than the lecture hall could ever be.
But, like Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein and Edith Sitwell had their
answers for the critics: like hers, their answers are presented within a

dialectic that assumes women speak froma perspective differentfromthat of

men, simply because their history?as women and as individuals?is differ?
ent. The eccentric Tightness of Gertrude Stein's autobiographical perspec?
tive can be judged more closely through a systematic study of her writing
style than through out-of-context extracts of her work. In the womanly
mode, her business involves a verypersonal "conceiving" of the reality that is
always around her, rather than the more masculine "perceiving" that always
seems to imply an imposed value system lurking behind it.46 Edith Sitwell's
dedication to her art is no less than Stein's, but her argument takes into
account, more than Stein's, an acceptance of the existence of the mass as
well as the type and the individual. In doing so, she comes very close to
Virginia Woolf, but she remains a little eccentric still in her insistence that
women especially must retain their "magic" individualities. Sitwell's warn?
ing to women writersquite deliberately repulses T.S, Eliot's now-classic one:
Artis magic,notlogic.Thiscrazeforthelogicalspiritin irrational
shapeispartofthe
an age whenwomentryto abolishthe
presentharmfulmania foruniformity?in
difference
betweentheiraspectsand aimsand thoseofmen?in an agewhentheedict
has gone forthforthe abolitionof personality,
forthe abolitionoffaces,whichare
extinct.It is becauseof thishatredof personality,
thatthe crowd,in its
practically
dislikesartistsendowedwithan individualvision.47
uniformity,
Her admiration forEliot (he was to her "one of the greatest [poets] of the last
one hundred and fiftyyears") is tempered by her implied contrast to herself:
"I do hate romantic wanderers who are too great spiritsto be in the city.Tom
Eliot was a bank clerk for ages and is still a publisher!"48

Warnings and exhortations sound throughout the works of Virginia

Woolf, Edith Sitwell and Gertrude Stein. Each in her own way tries to
escape the common sitting room in order to discover and relate her own
vision of reality and art to others. Time and study,a great deal of hard work
and care, a little subversion and, perhaps, a wise sense of eccentricity are for
all of them the means to achieve their goals. For Virginia Woolf, creation of
one's own world?dangerous as it might appear?could have its rewards; in a
review of the Memoirs of yet another woman eccentric, Woolf writes,
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Arewenoteachintruththecenterofinnumerable
rayswhichso strikeuponone figure
and completely
backagain,and
onlyand is it notourbusinessto flashthemstraight
on thefarsideofus/SarahBernhardt
at least,by
neversuffer
a singleshafttobluntitself
willsparkleformanygenerations
a sinisterand
reasonofsomesuch concentration,
too
enigmatic
message;butstillshe willsparkle,whiletherestofus?is theprophesy
arrogant??lie
dissipatedamongthefloods.49
Woolf's message, despite her youthful protestations, has continued to shine,
but so too have the messages of Gertrude Stein and Edith Sitwell. Despite,
or because, of all their personal eccentricities, their messages, perhaps even
more than Virginia Woolf's, are inextricably entwined with their lives.
Stein's roses and her pigeons, Sitwell's Fagade, hold equal ground with the

sad story of Virginia Woolf's life in literary studies and in the public
imagination. In composing the portrait of "Sitwell Edith Sitwell" that was
read at the English University lectures, Gertrude Stein was perhaps sum?
ming up as well as anyone could the importance of the eccentricity that lies
at the core of the legends of both Edith Sitwell and herself. "She had a way
of, she had a way of not a name"50 exposes undeniably the links of eccen?
tricity which connect Gertrude Stein and Edith Sitwell to their work.

NOTES
Harold Acton,Memoirsofan Aesthete
(London:Methuen,1948), quoted in Geoffrey
A Biography
Elborn,EdithSitwell:
(GardenCity,NewYork:Doubleday,1981),56.
Steinand Company
Circle:Gertrude
2EdithSitwell,quotedin JamesR. Mellow,Charmed
(NewYork:AvonBooks,1982), 153.
TheCommonReader:FirstSeries(NewYork
Woolf,"The DuchessofNewcastle,"
3Virginia
and London,n.d.),70.
Letter1644,toVanessaBell,2 June1926,TheLetters
4Woolf,
III, 1923-28,
ofVirginia
Woolf,
ed. NigelNicolsonandJoanneTrautman
(NewYorkandLondon:HarcourtBraceJovanovich,
1978),269-70.
EdithSitwell:
A Unicorn
5See VictoriaGlendinning,
AmongLions(NewYork:AlfredA.
Knopf,1981),11142.
isHaroldActon'svisionofEdithSitwell.An "EasterIslandidol"
6Thefirst
characterization
is Stein as describedby Sitwellin TakenCare Of: EdithSitwell's
(London:
Autobiography
carvedbeauty"(85) is containedin Sitwell'sportrait
Hutchinson,1965),136,and "exquisitely
in thetext
ofVirginiaWoolf.Further
references
to TakenCareO/willbe citedparenthetically
as TCO.
Stein:A ModernWriterWho BringsLiterature
"TheWorksofGertrude
Nearer
7Sitwell,
to theApparently
WorldofMusic,"Vogue(London),66: 11 (October,1925),98.
Irrational
"LetterTo A YoungPoet,"TheDeathoftheMothandOtherEssays(NewYorkand
8Woolf,
London:HarcourtBraceJovanovich,
1970),224.
9Gertrude
Stein,TheAutobiography
ofAliceB. Toklas(originally
published1933)inSelected
Stein,ed. CarlVanVechten(NewYork:VintageBooks,1972),221. Further
Writings
ofGertrude
willbe citedparenthetically
in thetextas ABT.
to TheAutobiography
references
121

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10Mellow,
355, againquotesHaroldActon,whomakestheconnectionbetweenGertrude
Stein and MadameBlavatsky.
Anotherattendantat theCambridgelecture,OsbertSitwell,
recallsSteinas the"latentforce"(Mellow,354).
as Explanation
(London:Hogarth,1927)rpt.in Mellow,357.
nStein,Composition
HowtoWrite(NewYork:DoverPublications,
willbe
references
12Stein,
1975),29. Further
in thetextas HTW.
citedparenthetically
TheDeathoftheMothandOtherEssays.231.
13Woolf,
"Why,"
Letterto Terrence
ed. John
27 August1931,Selected
Letters,
14Sitwell,
FyttonArmstrong,
Lehmannand DerekParker(London:Macmillan,1970),42.
15Stein,
(NewYork:CooperSquarePublishers,
1971),10. Further
Everybody's
Autobiography
willbe citedparenthetically
in thetextas EA.
references
"Womenand Fiction,"Women
and Writing,
ed. MicheleBarrett(NewYorkand
16Woolf,
London:HarcourtBraceJovanovich,
1979),48.
17Sitwell,
"WhyI Look As I Do," SundayGraphic,1955, rpt.in Fireof The Mind:An
ed. ElizabethSalterand Allanah Harper(London:MichaelJoseph,1976),107.
Anthology,
and Autobiography,"
in Autobiography:
18Stephen
Spender,"Confessions
EssaysTheoretical
and Critical,
ed. JamesOlney(Princeton:
PrincetonUniversity
Press,1980),117-18.
A Roomof One's Own (New Yorkand London: HarcourtBrace Jovanovich,
19Woolf,
1957),81.
G. Mason,"Autobiographies
ofWomen,"in Autobiography:
and
20Mary
EssaysTheoretical
210.
Critical,
2ElizabethSalter,TheLastYearsofA Rebel:A Memoir
(London:The Bodley
ofEdithSitwell
Head, 1967),181.
138.
Letterto AllanahHarper,February,
22Sitwell,
Letters,
1930,Selected
Alexander
references
willbe
23Sitwell,
Pope(Harmondsworth:
Penguin,1948),215. Further
in thetext.
citedparenthetically
on WomensPoetry:A DefenceoftheTheoryThat Male
"SomeObservations
24Sitwell,
Techniqueis EntirelyUnsuitableto the Poetryof Women,"Vogue(London)65: 5 (March,
1925),59.
Readers
andWriters,
25Sitwell,
1922,rpt.in FireofTheMind,17.
Gertrude
SteininPieces(NewYork:OxfordUniversity
26SeeRichardBridgman,
Press,1970),
ofthehintsthatAlice Toklaswroteherownautobiography.
Chapter3, fora discussion
27SeeSitwell,TheEnglish
Eccentrics,
originally
published1933(Harmondsworth:
Penguin,
or any medulary
substance"with
1983) 17 foranotherlinkingof "cerebrum,
cerebellum,
to English
references
Eccentrics
Further
willbe citedparenthetically.
eccentricity.
in Selected
28Stein,TheMakingofAmericans
Stein,301-03.
Writings
ofGertrude
in TheAutobiography
29SeeStein'saccountoftheirfriendship
ofAliceB. Toklas,219.
30LuceIrigaray,
"Ce sexequi n'enestpas un"(1977) rpt.in TheNewFrench
Feminisms:
An
ed. ElaineMarksandIsabellede Courtivron
ofMassachusetts
Anthology,
(Amherst:
University
Press,1980),103.
31Fora third-person
accountofSitwell'scelibacy,
see Salter,TheLastYearsOf A Rebel.
2 (June1930),78.
"Modernist
32Sitwell,
Poets,"Echanges,
Collected
Poems(London:Macmillan,1982),174.
33Sitwell,
"SomeNotesOn MyOwn Poetry,"
Collected
34Sitwell,
Poems,xliii.
104.
35Irigaray,
I LiveUnderA BlackSun(Westport,
Connecticut:GreenwoodPress,1973),315.
36Sitwell,
Further
willbe citedparenthetically.
references
thebondsofwomanhoodbetweenSteinand Sitwellevenmorecloselyis thefact
37Tying
thatGertrude
andAlice werein Paristo consoleEdithwhenHelendiedthere(See TakenCare
Sitwellto Tchelitchew,
that
Of,Chapter16); as well,it was Steinwho introduced
thinking
122

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"IfI presentPavlikto you,it'syour

Sitwellwouldbe a goodsubjectforhimto paint,butsaying,
See Elborn,66.
becausehis characteris notmyaffair."
responsibility
andDay (October21,1937).Glendinning
condensestheopinionsof
38Evelyn
Waugh,Night
210-11.
othercriticsand addsherownin EdithSitwell,
39SirHaroldActonto JohnPearson,BBC broadcast(Nov. 1978)rpt.in Elborn,26.
on theOccasionofher
40Stein,"SitwellEdithSitwell,"rpt.in A Celebration
forEdithSitwell
Visitto theUnitedStates,ed., JoseGarcia Villa (Norfolk,Connecticut:New Directions,
1948), 102.
SelectedWorksofGertrude
41Stein,"The GradualMakingof The MakingofAmericans,"
Stein,243.
Gertrude
Stein:A Biography
42DonaldSutherland,
(NewHaven:YaleUniversity
ofHerWork
Press,1951),120.
43Patricia
(NewYork:AvonBooks,1976),363.
MeyerSpacks,TheFemaleImagination
inEnglish
Edith
44F.R.Leavis,NewBearings
(London,1932)rpt.in JamesD. Brophy,
Poetry
Order(Carbondaleand Edwardsville:
Sitwell:
TheSymbolist
SouthernIllinoisUniversity
Press,
1968),xii.
to The SecondSex (1974) rpt.in New French
45See Simone de Beauvoir,Introduction
41-56.
Feminisms,
and"perceives"
areusedin Sutherland,
between
46Theterms"conceives"
54, to distinguish
time."
Stein'sand Proust's
ideasof"subjective
"Modernist
Poets,"80.
47Sitwell,
Letterto ElizabethSalterquotedin Salter,EdithSitwell
(London:OreskoBooks,
48Sitwell,
1974),41.
"The Memoirsof Sarah Bernhardt,"
Cornhill
1908),rpt.in
49Woolf,
Magazine(February,
ed. MaryLyon(New Yorkand London: HarcourtBrace Jovanovich,
Booksand Portraits,
1977),207.
50Stein,"SitwellEdithSitwell,"102.

123

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