Conclusion
Charles Montgomery Stuart Bennett (1874-1910) was supposed to have been a writer for magazines. Maybe a shared interest in writing is how he and Gertrude M. Barrows (1883-1948) met. I have looked for his name in The FictionMags Index and have come up empty. I have also looked for different versions of his name and found an author named Charles Stuart who wrote several stories published in British story magazines in 1910-1911. Was he our man? Who can say?
Gertrude M. Barrows wrote a story under her own name published in 1904. As far as anyone knows, she did not have another of her stories published until 1917, and then only under the pseudonym Francis Stevens. Could she have collaborated with her husband in the time in between? Or if he was an author of stories for magazines, could she have actually been his ghostwriter?
In his introduction to The Heads of Cerberus by Francis Stevens, Lloyd Arthur Eshbach wrote: "He [C.M. Stuart Bennett] had been a newspaper reporter, a fact which probably led his widow to contribute feature articles to the newspaper" (Dover, 2014, p. 14). What newspaper? And if she wrote feature articles for newspapers, is that how she could have met A. Merritt (1884-1943), who worked as a journalist at the Philadelphia Inquirer and The Sunday Supplement and/or The Sunday American Magazine, forerunner to The American Weekly, of which he was later the editor? Again, who can say?
Speculations . . .
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One of the themes in the fiction of Francis Stevens is that of old gods returning to earth after having been banished for many centuries, if not millennia. Her stories with this theme and the gods in them are:
- The scarlet archangel in "Claimed" (The Argosy, March 6-March 20, 1920)
These are dark gods, but they do not triumph in the end. For them to have triumphed would have been uncharacteristic of Francis Stevens, whom I feel certain did not work in the ill-defined, late-twentieth-century sub-genre or sub-sub-genre of dark fantasy. If you're looking for a triumphant old god, see Cthulhu in Strange Eons by Robert Bloch (1978). By the way, The Exorcist (1973), fifty years old this year, also involves the theme of the return of an old god, in this case the ancient Mesopotamian deity Pazuzu. Both "Serapion" and The Exorcist are about demonic possession.
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Other motifs and recurring themes and settings in the work of Francis Stevens are those of treasure hunting, shipwrecks, and islands. Francis Stevens' stories in that vein include:
In "Friend Island," there is an Ancient Mariness who tells her tale and about her relationship with the eponymous island, which is actually a living being. I wonder if Gertrude Barrows Bennett could have known one of her husband's other wives, Marie La Ton (ca. 1886-?), who was a boat pilot and went with C.M. Stuart Bennett on one of his treasure hunting expeditions to the Carolina coast. If the Ancient Mariness was based on Marie La Ton, then maybe she comes by her feelings about men naturally, as Bennett seems to have been a real scoundrel, specifically when it came to women.
There is a group of treasure hunters in "Sunfire," Francis Stevens' only story in Weird Tales. Here I wonder if one of them could have been a portrait of her drowned husband. There would have been precedent for such a thing in fantasy and science fiction: I think of Victor Frankenstein as having been based in part on the authoress' husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822). He drowned, too, by the way, probably also by misadventure.
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I first wrote about Francis Stevens on March 10, 2015. In that posting, I listed her stories, the titles of the magazines in which they were published, and their dates of publication. Her career as a published author lasted a scant six and a half years, from 1917 to 1923, with a prior story having been published in 1904. This is the 100th anniversary year of the close of her career, which came when she was just forty years old. Francis Stevens' stories were rediscovered in the 1940s, though, and were reprinted during that decade, from January 1940 to November 1949 and as late as September 1950, in various pulp magazines. A. Merritt is supposed to have had a hand in that. The last two reprints were posthumous.
The writer behind the pseudonym, Gertrude Barrows Bennett Gaster, last wrote to her daughter, Constance Bennett Wilson, on September 1, 1939, coincidentally the day that Nazi Germany invaded Poland, thus setting off World War II. Thus also, Francis Stevens' stories were first published during World War I and in its aftermath, then published again during World War II and in its aftermath.
Gertrude Gaster lived in California during the 1940s, all or most of that time in San Francisco. If she was paid for her work, then payments would presumably have gone to her at her home in the Golden State. Would any payments made after her death, which came on February 2, 1948, have gone to her husband, Carl F. Gaster? Or to her daughter?
More speculations.
It appears that in writing his introduction to The Heads of Cerberus, Lloyd Arthur Eshbach was in contact with Constance, whom he called "Connie," quotation marks included. The whereabouts of Gertrude Gaster were then unknown, and only Connie could have told him the details of her mother's writing habits or about where and how they had lived in her childhood. Eshbach wrote that the stories of Francis Stevens have "a strong leaning toward the mysterious" (Dover, 2014, p. 13). She seems to have had the same kinds of leanings in her own life, for why ever would she have remained out of contact with her daughter for her last nine years on this earth? Did Constance see that her mother's stories were once again in print during the 1940s? Could she have tracked down Gertrude by going to the editors or publishers of the magazines that did the reprinting? And did Gertrude herself see that her stories were once again in print? Then in her fifties and sixties, could she have taken some final pride and satisfaction in that?
A last coincidence: Lloyd Arthur Eshbach's introduction to The Heads of Cerberus was dated February 1952, the same month in which Gertrude's widower, Carl F. Gaster, was found dead in his home on the other side of the country, in Portland, Oregon.
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I have one more part in this series, inspired by a comment from a couple of weeks ago made by one of the readers of this blog.
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Francis Stevens' Story in Weird Tales
"Sunfire" (two-part serial, July/August-September 1923)
Further Reading
- "Introduction" to The Heads of Cerberus by Francis Stevens, introduction by Lloyd Arthur Eshbach. I have the Dover edition from 2014.
- "The Woman Who Wrote 'Citadel of Fear'" by Sam Moskowitz, his introduction to The Citadel of Fear by Francis Stevens (Paperback Library, 1970).
- The Nightmare and Other Tales of Dark Fantasy by Francis Stevens, edited and with an introduction by Gary Hoppenstand (2004).
- "Navigating the Weird Mind of Gertrude Barrows Bennett--the Mother of Dark Fantasy (pt. 1)" by Taylor, on the website Fandomentals, March 19, 2020, at the following URL:
Taylor's title repeats what I see as a misreading and misinterpretation of Francis Stevens as the inventor of what is called dark fantasy.
- "Fantascienza, un genere (femminile). Gertrude Barrows Bennett, alias Francis Stevens" by Laura Coci, on the website Vitaminevaganti, December 5, 2020, at the following URL:
- There are other websites and blogs that discuss Francis Stevens, some of which are Italian. It looks as though she and her works are of special interest to Italian fans and researchers.
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| "The Funeral of Shelley" by Louis Édouard Fournier, 1889. |
Original text copyright 2023 Terence E. Hanley
Great job on the whole series of posts.
ReplyDeleteHowever, I believe that the writing career of Francis Stevens only lasted for three years, from 1917-1920. The inferior "Sunfire" was most probably rejected by Munsey and/or Street & Smith during that period. Then when Mrs. Bennett saw Weird Tales on the newsstands she dusted off the manuscript and submitted it.
There is also one more mystery which you have not mentioned. Please see Under the Moons of Mars A History and Anthology of "The Scientific Romance" in the Munsey Magazines, 1912-1920 by Sam Moskowitz from Holy, Rinehart and Winston, 1970. On page 407 Moskowitz writes, "A Philadelphia widow named Gertrude Bennett, who resided at 4203 Girard Avenue, supported a daughter and an invalid mother on a secretary's salary. To supplement her income she took to writing fiction and submitted a thirty-four-thousand-word novelette to [Robert] Davis titled The Unwilling Adventurer . . .The author had requested that the story be published under the pen-name of Jean Vail, but when it appeared as the feature story of the April 14, 1917, issue [of All-Story Weekly], it carried the man's byline of Francis Stevens, and the title had been changed to The Nightmare."
Why was the byline changed from the female Jean Vail to the male Francis Stevens? Moskowitz gives no explanation. We can also conjecture about this mystery, but will undoubtedly never know the truth.
Hi, Kevin,
DeleteThank you for staying with me in this series. Sorry for the long delay in my replies.
What you say about the length of Francis Stevens' writing career sounds logical to me. I agree with you that "Sunfire" is inferior to her other stories. I wonder if she could have written it before some of her other, better works. If that's the case, then "Serapion," one of her best and most powerful stories, may have been her last. That would have been fitting.
I looked for "Jean Vail" in The FictionMags Index. There is no such writer listed. However, there is a Daisy Vail in just the right place at just the right time. By the way, "Jean Vail" is not necessarily a woman's name, for "Jean" is the French form of "John." And maybe "Vail" as a homophone for "Veil" was a means of hiding her identity. These are just more speculations.
TH