ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the way the distance and detachment of an impersonality-driven high modernism paradoxically led to the growing demand for authorial personality. It discusses two high modernists who turned to memoirs late in their careers, Gertrude Stein and Wyndham Lewis, examining the role played by the memoirs in the transition toward a modernism engaging more directly with a distrustful audience, more personally and personably. The memoirists plays an important role in the crossing of 'the great divide' between high modernist authors and artists and a broad, middlebrow readership, as sought to encourage a belief in the authenticity and sincerity of the modernist figures who had attracted much attention, but not always the trust of the ordinary reader. The resulting trust on the part of the readers and reviewers almost certainly paved the way for the ongoing success of the modernists in becoming firmly established as the ascendant literary movement of the first half of the twentieth century.
