Two of The Weird Sisters - The Eccentricities of Gertrude Stein and Edith Sitwell PDF

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 Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/463808 . Accessed: 13/10/2013 00:38
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Two
of the
Weird
Sisters: Stein and
The
Eccentricities Sitwell
of Gertrude
Edith
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": isfame," DuchessofNewcastle. And whileshe "AllI desire wrote Cavendish, Margaret in herhabits, livedherwishwas granted. Garishin herdress, eccentric chastein her in drawing coarsein her speech,she succeededduring her lifetime conduct, upon theridicule ofthegreat and the applause herself ofthemany.3 101
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: swarmed. It was in honour Steinwhowasthroned on a broken ofMissGertrude Jews is derelict, settee(all Edith's aboutwith furniture to makeup forwhichshe is stuck old ladyinflicted a great likea drowned Thisresolute on all mermaiden). jewels damage all yousay;insists thatshe is notonly theyouth. to Dadie, shecontradicts According and in particular the mostintelligible, but also the mostpopularof livingwriters; all ofEnglish birth. a Jew wellwith her. But Leonard, himself, despises being goton very itwas an anxious, affair.4 exacerbating 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 102
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: I cannotbrisk We arelying crushed ofGertrude under an immense Stein's. manuscript aregenuine it?whether hercontortions andfruitful, oronly such myself uptodealwith as we might all go through in sheerimpatience at having to deal withEnglish spasms Edith Sitwell she's nottheflesh Formy butthespirit). own prose. says gigantic (meaning I wish wecouldskip andGertrude a generation?skip Edith andTomandJoyce and part andcomeoutin theopenagain,wheneverything hasbeenrestarted andruns Virginia I think fulltilt,instead oftrickling and teasing in thisirritating it is bad for the way. character and haveto consort witheccentricities. too,to livein a byestream, (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 first day 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. 103
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 creating the modern are naturally composition authentically onlyof whenthey aredeadbecausebythattimethemodern importance having composition ofitisclassical.... Thatisthereason become andthedescription pastisclassified why thecreator ofthenewcomposition in theartsis an outlaw is until he is a classicthere inbetween toobadvery a moment anditisreally muchtoobadnaturally for the hardly creator but also very muchtoo bad forthe enjoyer, wouldenjoythe theyall really a classic.11 so muchbetter created after it has beenmadethanwhenit is already 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 104
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,
thatalthough itwasthesamelanguage couldtellright whether itwasan anybody away American writer or an English writer whohad written and thathas a great deal to do with their them aliveandtheir them thedeadarenot dead,in England making making deadbecause areconnected others inAmerica with thedeadaredeadthere they living, is no connection withthoseleft living.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
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 105
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?
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
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 issomething thatispuzzling. In thenineteenth the [sic]there century men whentheywerewriting did invent all kindsand a great number of men.The women on theother handnever couldinvent women madethewomen be they always orsadly themselves seensplendidly orheroically orbeautifully ordespairingly orgently couldmakeanyother kindofwomen.From Charlotte to George Bronte theynever wastrue. later this Eliotandmany Nowinthetwentieth itisthemenwho century years aboutthemselves, do it.The menall write arealways as strong themselves orweak they ordrunk orcontrolled ormysterious orpassionate butalways themselves as thewomen usedto do in thenineteenth In thenineteenth century.... He saiditssimple. century werenot butin thetwentieth menwereconfident, thewomen 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 106
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' ofbeingthemselves. Theyare indiscreet, theyaretoo interested experience thatarenot important aboutthings to others, areegomaniacs. write selves, they they human is suchthatifthey oftheinner tellwhatitis liketo be The nature personality themselves are immoralists, exhibitionists, they 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 107
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 platonic believed, one, that bythosewhoseappreciation thepoet's from theheadofJove. Thatisan from head,as Minerva sprang poetry springs ofourgoddess, butit is notone whichsatisfies ofthebirth me. Ifwe easyexplanation were to askanyofthepoetsofthepast,weshould without is doubt be toldthatpoetry as ofspiritual.23 ofphysical justas mucha matter aptitude
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. 108
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 109
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
"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
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
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" straightforward form 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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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 unpopular withmyparents ofmybirth, and throughout from the moment my childhood andyouth. I wasindisgrace andworse, as I grew older for itwas female, being obvious thatI wasnotgoing father's offeminine to conform to my standards beauty.. . behavedin theusualmanner, norcoulditbe denied,evenat theearliest alas,I never ofcerebrum, cerebellum andmedullary substance. indications strong age,thatI showed I was a disappointment.27 (TCO, 26) I wasan embarrassing me child.Therewasan occasionwhenDaviswasaskedto bring down to the drawing-room friends.... "You at Wood End to see one of Mother's E?"she enquired. . . ."No". . . ."What areyougoingto be when remember me, little I replied. I waspromptly removed from the little E?"... "A genius," 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 everbe agreeing withyou Disillusionment thatno one can really . . disillusionment in livingis thebeginning ofbeingan old in anything. completely manora growing manoran oldwoman... no longer older older a growing young young think woman.. .. thisis a sad thing.. .. Young ones often have it in them, this they then, stop living then, this is often thing,some youngones kill themselves 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,
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
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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. . . womanretouches herself to herconstantly in order to hearan "other constantly.... One mustlisten meaning" which is constantly in the at thesametime ofweaving itself, process embracing ceaselessly words andyet toavoid them immobilized.30 casting becoming off fixed, 112
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 ButDagobert and Peregrine Werechildren likeshygazelles then,we walked Amongthemusicofthinflower-bells. And lifestillheldsomepromise,?never ask Of what,?butlifeseemedlessa stranger, then, Than everafter in thiscold existence. I always was a little outside life? And so thethings we touchcouldcomfort me;.. . I lovedtheshydreams we couldhearand see? ForI was likeone dead,likea smallghost, A little and lost.33 cold airwandering 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 human man;and his being?tobe lovedas an ordinary madethis tohim.He wasnailedtotheouter wallsofthecity seemimpossible deformity His friendship hunchback. as MrPopethefamous poet,Alexander Pope,thecrippled which fell tohim, thedeformity conferred a favour, because hewasfamous; butthefame suffer likeother which he endured, thathe should madeitseemimpossible men,orfeel men.(AP, 21) likeother pleasure 113
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, ofidentity. is likethis,it is all a question It is all a question oftheoutside The thing andtheinside theinside. As longas theoutside doesnotputa being beingtheoutside butwhenitdoesputa valueon youthenit gets valueon youthenit remains outside orrather iftheoutside inside tobe outside. I inside a valueon youthenall your puts gets successful howbadthiswasfor usedto tellall themenwhowere them and young being thenI whowasno longer washaving it happen.(EA, 47) young 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 114
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: ofhislife.Ifhe wasill,he sentfor a partofthefabric [Anna]wasthere, her;ifhe was Itwastoherhe went had shemust soothe. when he wasinpainorwhentheworld angry him. But he was neverentirely hers:theremustalwaysbe a shadow disappointed that he hadcreated.... So shefellintothebackground ofhis a shadow between them, as necessary a constant attendant to himas thebreadhe ate; buthe never life, 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: all the timeofhis raging did he speak:whenHans was madness, during Onlytwice, voicesaid"Fool... itisa stone." Andwhen a large Susan, pieceofcoal,a harsh breaking in hispresence, tookit as he wasaboutto snatchit, had been left seeingthata knife ofunutterable thedepths from washeard. Itsaid"I amwhat thena voicecoming 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, 115
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
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
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:
or explanation, has been called eccentricity This attitude, bythose protest, rigidity, whosebonesaretoo pliant.Butthesemummies castshadows thatdo notlie in their and from thesedistortions, laughter mayarise. proportions, dusty geometrical proper (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. so Gertrude areabstract Americans, They they suchas most arecruel.Theyhaveno closecontact arenotbrutal withtheearth they isnotthematerialism itis orpossession, have.Theirmaterialism ofexistence 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 116
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 will not allow Stein's commitment to her "metier,"her own artistic integrity, 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: inthis A narrative allows a change that for thebestofthetime thatmakes letting being whilea portrait were italtogether hasbeenwhilethey itbe whenthey might compare A narrative ittobe most ofitattached lostit allows totheir having kept apart cordially. itdo, a iswhatmight be whilethey were all aboutitmakes anda portrait easily enough 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 117
(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: facesbyand bywe agree. Absently 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: Gertrude was verbally the moreso as she invariably very interesting, got everybody She looked rather likean Easter Islandidol,wasimmensely and goodhumoured, wrong. had a remarkable in themidst ofnoise.She had been to work ofanyamount ability withcomplete known to sit in a garage whilehermotor was beingrepaired writing concentration. Butshedidnotsuffer fools Hersalon,for shewasfamous, which gladly. wasdivided.... I was,I amgladto say, It wasat myinvitation thatshe putnextto Gertrude! always cameto England lateron to lecture in thiscountry. 118
isan illustration ofthesuccess andalsoofthedangers Herwork ofrevaluation. She is intheworld thelastwriter whom writer should takeas a model; butherwork, anyother for themost is very valuable becauseofitsrevivifying and itcontains to part, qualities, considerable mymind, beauty.. . . She threw a word intotheair, and whenitreturned to theground it itborewithin custom theoriginal itborebefore and misuse had blurred it. (TCO, 136-37) meaning 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 theworld of it,andbydenying Stein]dominates [Gertrude byreproducing Her life, full ofpeople,lacksrealattachments; she preserves herfreedom emotion. by from mostaspects of"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 119
fromthat of dialectic that assumes women speak froma perspective different 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: in irrational Artis magic, notlogic.Thiscraze for thelogicalspirit ofthe shapeispart an age whenwomentryto abolishthe harmful mania foruniformity?in present difference between their and aimsand thoseofmen?in an agewhentheedict aspects has gone forth forthe abolition of personality, offaces,whichare forthe abolition It is becauseof thishatred of personality, extinct. thatthe crowd, in its practically dislikes artists endowed withan individual vision.47 uniformity, Her admiration forEliot (he was to her "one of the greatest [poets] of the last one hundred and fifty years") 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
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
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, 120
ofinnumerable which thecenter so strike Arewenoteachintruth rays uponone figure to flash themstraight and completely backagain,and onlyand is it notourbusiness shaft toblunt itself on thefar sideofus/ at least, never suffer a single SarahBernhardt by willsparkle formany a sinister and reasonofsomesuch concentration, generations whiletherest ofus?is theprophesy butstillshe willsparkle, too enigmatic message; arrogant??lie dissipated amongthefloods.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,Memoirs (London:Methuen,1948), quoted in Geoffrey ofan Aesthete Sitwell: A Biography Edith NewYork: Elborn, (Garden 1981),56. City, Doubleday, Gertrude Stein R. Mellow, Charmed Circle: and Company 2Edith Sitwell, quotedin James AvonBooks,1982), 153. (NewYork: First Series TheCommon Reader: "The DuchessofNewcastle," Woolf, (NewYork 3Virginia and London,n.d.),70. Letter Bell,2 June 4Woolf, 1644,toVanessa 1926,TheLetters III, 1923-28, ofVirginia Woolf, Trautman andLondon:Harcourt BraceJovanovich, ed. NigelNicolsonandJoanne (NewYork 1978),269-70. Edith Sitwell: A Unicorn Lions(NewYork: 5See Victoria A. Alfred Among Glendinning, 1981),11142. Knopf, isHarold vision Sitwell. An "Easter 6Thefirst characterization Acton's ofEdith Islandidol" is Stein as described Sitwell's (London: by Sitwellin TakenCare Of: Edith Autobiography carved in Sitwell's Hutchinson, 1965),136,and "exquisitely (85) is contained beauty" portrait in thetext ofVirginia Woolf. Further references to Taken CareO/willbe citedparenthetically as TCO. ofGertrude Stein:A Modern Writer Who Brings Literature "TheWorks Nearer 7Sitwell, to theApparently World ofMusic," 66: 11 (October, Irrational (London), 1925),98. Vogue TheDeathofthe Moth andOther "Letter To A Young and 8Woolf, Poet," (NewYork Essays London:Harcourt BraceJovanovich, 1970),224. B. Toklas 9Gertrude Stein,TheAutobiography 1933)inSelected ofAlice (originally published ed. CarlVanVechten Stein, (NewYork: Books,1972),221. Further Writings Vintage ofGertrude willbe citedparenthetically in thetextas ABT. to TheAutobiography references 121
theconnection Gertrude between 10Mellow, 355, againquotesHaroldActon,whomakes attendant at theCambridge Stein and MadameBlavatsky. Another OsbertSitwell, lecture, Steinas the"latent force" recalls 354). (Mellow, as Explanation 357. (London:Hogarth, nStein,Composition 1927)rpt.in Mellow, HowtoWrite DoverPublications, willbe references 12Stein, (NewYork: 1975),29. Further in thetextas HTW. citedparenthetically TheDeathofthe Moth andOther 231. 13Woolf, "Why," Essays. to Terrence Letter ed. John 27 August Letters, 14Sitwell, 1931,Selected Fytton Armstrong, and DerekParker Lehmann (London:Macmillan, 1970),42. 15Stein, (NewYork: 1971),10. Further Everybody's Autobiography CooperSquarePublishers, willbe citedparenthetically in thetextas EA. references "Women and Fiction," Women and Writing, ed. MicheleBarrett and 16Woolf, (NewYork London:Harcourt BraceJovanovich, 1979),48. 17Sitwell, 1955, rpt.in Fireof The Mind:An "WhyI Look As I Do," Sunday Graphic, ed. Elizabeth Salterand Allanah Harper (London:MichaelJoseph, Anthology, 1976),107. "Confessions and Autobiography," in Autobiography: Theoretical 18Stephen Spender, Essays and Critical, ed. James Princeton Press, 1980),117-18. Olney(Princeton: University A Roomof One's Own (New Yorkand London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 19Woolf, 1957),81. G. Mason,"Autobiographies in Autobiography: ofWomen," Theoretical and 20Mary Essays 210. Critical, 2ElizabethSalter, TheLastYears Sitwell A Memoir The Bodley (London: ofA Rebel: ofEdith Head, 1967),181. to AllanahHarper, 138. Letter 22Sitwell, Letters, 1930,Selected February, Alexander references willbe (Harmondsworth: 23Sitwell, Pope 1948),215. Further Penguin, in thetext. citedparenthetically on WomensPoetry: "SomeObservations A DefenceoftheTheory That Male 24Sitwell, to the Poetry Unsuitable of Women," (London)65: 5 (March, Techniqueis Entirely Vogue 1925),59. Readers andWriters, 25Sitwell, 1922,rpt.in Fire ofTheMind,17. Gertrude Stein inPieces 26SeeRichard Oxford (NewYork: Press, Bridgman, University 1970), ofthehints herownautobiography. a discussion thatAlice Toklaswrote 3, for Chapter TheEnglish 27SeeSitwell, 1933(Harmondsworth: Eccentrics, originally published Penguin, of "cerebrum, or any medulary substance" with 1983) 17 foranotherlinking cerebellum, to English references Eccentrics Further willbe citedparenthetically. eccentricity. in Selected TheMaking 301-03. 28Stein, ofAmericans Stein, Writings ofGertrude in TheAutobiography 29SeeStein's accountoftheir 219. friendship ofAliceB. Toklas, 30Luce "Ce sexequi n'enestpas un"(1977) rpt.in TheNewFrench Feminisms: An Irigaray, andIsabelle de Courtivron ed. ElaineMarks ofMassachusetts Anthology, (Amherst: University Press, 1980),103. 31For a third-person accountofSitwell's see Salter, TheLastYears celibacy, Of A Rebel. 2 (June "Modernist 32Sitwell, Poets," Echanges, 1930),78. Collected Poems 33Sitwell, (London:Macmillan, 1982),174. "SomeNotesOn MyOwn Poetry," Collected xliii. 34Sitwell, Poems, 104. 35Irigaray, Sun(Westport, I LiveUnder A Black Connecticut: Greenwood 36Sitwell, Press, 1973),315. Further willbe citedparenthetically. references between Steinand Sitwell thebondsofwomanhood evenmoreclosely is thefact 37Tying that Gertrude andAlice were in Paris to consoleEdith whenHelendiedthere Care (See Taken Sitwell to Tchelitchew, that Of,Chapter16); as well,it was Steinwho introduced thinking 122
himto paint, "IfI present Sitwell be a goodsubject for butsaying, Pavlik would to you, it's your is notmyaffair." See Elborn, 66. becausehis character responsibility andDay (October condenses theopinions of 21,1937).Glendinning 38Evelyn Night Waugh, 210-11. other critics and addsherownin Edith Sitwell, BBC broadcast 26. 39Sir HaroldActonto John Pearson, (Nov. 1978)rpt.in Elborn, on the Occasion Edith Sitwell "Sitwell EdithSitwell," 40Stein, rpt.in A Celebration for ofher Connecticut: New Directions, Visitto theUnited States, ed., JoseGarcia Villa (Norfolk, 1948), 102. Selected Works "The GradualMakingof The Making 41Stein, ofGertrude ofAmericans," 243. Stein, Gertrude Stein: A Biography 42Donald Sutherland, (NewHaven:YaleUniversity ofHerWork Press, 1951),120. AvonBooks,1976),363. 43Patricia (NewYork: Meyer Spacks,TheFemale Imagination inEnglish D. Brophy, Edith 44F.R. Leavis,NewBearings (London,1932)rpt.in James Poetry Order Illinois Sitwell: TheSymbolist and Edwardsville: Southern (Carbondale Press, University 1968),xii. to The SecondSex (1974) rpt.in New French Introduction 45See Simone de Beauvoir, 41-56. Feminisms, and"perceives" areusedin Sutherland, between 46Theterms "conceives" 54, to distinguish time." Stein's ideasof"subjective and Proust's 80. "Modernist Poets," 47Sitwell, Sitwell Salter Edith Letter to Elizabeth (London:OreskoBooks, 48Sitwell, quotedin Salter, 1974),41. of Sarah Bernhardt," "The Memoirs Cornhill 1908),rpt.in 49Woolf, (February, Magazine Brace Jovanovich, ed. MaryLyon(New Yorkand London: Harcourt Booksand Portraits, 1977),207. 102. "Sitwell EdithSitwell," 50Stein,
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Two of The Weird Sisters - The Eccentricities of Gertrude Stein and Edith Sitwell PDF

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University of Tulsa

Sisters: Stein and

Susan Hastings University of Tulsa

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