Photographs & Misconceptions
There have been misconceptions and inaccurate pieces of information about Gertrude Barrows Bennett for a very long time now. Our use of the Internet was supposed to have taken care of these things. Instead, bad information spreads like wildfire, while the facts lag far behind. Maybe facts--and ultimately truth--are analog rather than digital.
Birth Year
I'll start with her birth year. It was 1883, not 1884. The Minnesota state census of 1885 made that clear. Wikipedia is wrong.
Middle Name
Next is her middle name. Some people think it was Mabel, and some Myrtle. I used Mabel for a while, but that was based only on what others had written before me. I haven't found any record showing her actual middle name. For all we know, it could have been Minnesota, the place of her birth.
There is this, though: in looking for Mabel Barrows in Minnesota, I came up empty, except for several articles about an actress and stage director named Mabel Hay Barrows (1873-1931). But in looking for Myrtle Barrows, I found two articles mentioning a girl at just the right age and in just the right place for her to have been our subject:
In the 1890s and into the early 1900s, the Minneapolis Journal had a feature called "Journal Juniors." The idea, I think, was for young readers to submit their drawings and essays to the newspaper in hopes of winning prizes. On May 16, 1896, the Journal announced the winners of a drawing contest. Young Myrtle Barrows won honorable mention. Her drawing was not shown. We should note here that Gertrude Barrows had wanted to become an artist but was forced to go to work as a stenographer in order to support her mother following the death of her father and her two brothers. On June 5, 1896, "Journal Juniors" listed the winners of an essay contest on "The History of a Patched Garment." Myrtle Barrows of 1005 University avenue SE, a pupil at Marcy school, won third place in that contest. Gertrude Barrows was of course a writer. If she was a writer in adulthood, why not also in childhood? Anyway, later that year, at Christmastime, Gertrude Barrows' brother, Reginald Barrows, shot himself, and so any happy times in the Barrows family may have come to an end, at least for a while.
So was the Myrtle Barrows of that spring season in 1896 simply Gertrude Barrows, then aged twelve, going by her middle name? It all seems to fit, but I can't say for sure. By the way, the band Marcy Playground is named after Marcy school.
Parents' Death Dates
Gertrude Barrows' father, Charles A. Barrows, died in 1892, not at around the time of World War I. It was her mother, Caroline "Carrie" Pierson (Hatch) Barrows, who died at that time, on August 10, 1918, to be exact.
First Husband's Name
Gertrude's first husband was named Charles Montgomery Stuart Bennett, sometimes C.M. Stuart Bennett or just Stuart Bennett. His name was not Stewart Bennett. Once again, Wikipedia is wrong.
Lovecraft & Merritt
Augustus T. Swift was not H.P. Lovecraft writing under a pseudonym. He was actually his own person. People have claimed that Gertrude Barrows, writing under her nom de plume Francis Stevens, was an influence upon both Lovecraft and A. Merritt or that they were admirers of her work. I haven't seen any evidence of that. I wouldn't say that there isn't any evidence. It's just that I haven't seen it. I kind of doubt that anybody has. In his introduction to The Heads of Cerberus, Lloyd Arthur Eshbach wrote: "Gertrude Bennett, by the way, was an admirer of A. Merritt." (Dover, 2014, p. 15.) So maybe the admiration went the other way around, at least at first.
Religion
Gertrude Barrows Bennett was almost certainly a Christian. There is strong evidence in her work for such a conclusion, especially in "Serapion" and "The Citadel of Fear." That she was a Roman Catholic, as I have speculated, is far less certain. Two of her heroes, Terence "Terry" Trenmore in "The Heads of Cerberus" and Colin O'Hara in "The Citadel of Fear," are Irish Catholics. That's about all of the evidence that I have for my speculation. In any case, it's clear that she was not a nihilist. In fact, she made a nihilist, Archer Kennedy, her human villain in "The Citadel of Fear," one of her most powerful and insightful works. Kennedy shouts, "I worship nothing! Do you understand me? Nothing!" If Gertrude Barrows Bennett was a nihilist, why ever would she have made one of her worst villains a person of that idiotic creed?
Gertrude's maternal grandparents, Charles Hatch (1808-1850) and Clymene (or Clymena) Rebecca (Pierson) Hatch (1813-1899), came out of the "burned-over district" of central and western New York State during the Second Great Awakening in America. Charles Hatch was an abolitionist. Abolitionism in America was, to be sure, a Christian movement. I don't know anything about the religion of Gertrude Barrows' parents, but the body of her mother, Caroline, was cremated and interred at what is now Chelten Hills Cemetery in Philadelphia. I take that as evidence that she was not Catholic, but then I never thought that she was. More likely, she and her husband were Protestants, possibly in a mainstream denomination, but then again, maybe not.
Finally, Gertrude Barrows Bennett's only child, Josephine Christy Bennett, later Constance B. "Connie" Wilson Osborne (1910-2001), was a member of Self-Realization Fellowship in California, World Unity-England, and Edgar Cayce's Association for Research and Enlightenment (A.R.E.) of Virginia Beach, Virginia. I can't say that these are religious institutions, but they are or may be, in one way or another, associated with religious or spiritual belief systems. So maybe there was searching in the Hatch and Barrows and Bennett families, a kind of treasure-hunting that led them from one end of the country to the other. Constance Bennett remained in her native state, Pennsylvania. Gertrude Barrows Bennett, on the other hand, finally made it to California, the Golden State, that land of milk and honey, finally completing the journey that her grandfather had begun fourscore years before her, a journey that came to grief near the banks of a lonely Wyoming river.
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There are things that are factual and things that are not factual. Nonfactual things can be lies, but they may also be merely inaccurate or incorrect. The Internet is full of nonfactual things. We all saw that for ourselves the other day when American and European media unquestioningly repeated a horrific lie--a kind of blood libel--regarding the murder in Gaza of hundreds of people by a bunch of terrorists, their coreligionists. Even the next day, even when the whole world knew better, National Public Radio (NPR), which is basically a fount of lies, by commission and omission, was calling it a "bombing." There was no bombing. Those poor people were killed by an errant rocket meant to murder Jews. NPR and everyone else who repeated and peddled that lie ought to be ashamed of themselves. But we live in world without shame, embarrassment, remorse, or regret, and so the whole lot of them go blithely on . . . on to the next lie. Gaza, by the way, is from a Hebrew word. Tell us all again who was there first.
So there is the factual versus the nonfactual. Then there are opinions and interpretations. A person can say (as Wikipedia does) that Gertrude Barrows Bennett "has been credited as having 'the best claim at creating the new genre of dark fantasy'." It's not factual to say that she created so-called "dark fantasy." It's also not nonfactual. It's really just an opinion or an interpretation. I think it's actually a misreading and misinterpretation of her work, but that's my opinion. But I can also say that that specific claim, originally made by Gary Hoppenstand, is internally contradictory, to wit: in his introduction to The Nightmare and Other Tales of Dark Fantasy by Francis Stevens (University of Nebraska Press, 2004), Dr. Hoppenstand wrote:
Dark fantasy is nihilistic fiction in its prediction (directly or indirectly) of a terrible end to our world that we inhabit in blissful ignorance. (p. xxiv)
If dark fantasy is nihilistic fiction, and Francis Stevens did not write nihilistic fiction, then Francis Stevens did not invent dark fantasy. QED. Beyond that, as I've already pointed out and as everybody ought to know by now, dark fantasy was not named until late in the twentieth century, it has not been adequately defined by anybody, and there isn't any wide acceptance of any particular definition of that term, or even whether there is such a thing. For example, the online Encyclopedia of Science Fiction doesn't even have an entry on this supposed genre or sub-genre or sub-sub-genre of fantasy fiction. Although, in his definition, Dr. Hoppenstand echoed H.P. Lovecraft in "The Call of Cthulhu"--"our world that we inhabit in blissful ignorance"--I would say that it's more likely that he, Gary Hoppenstand, invented dark fantasy, and not anybody else, least of all Francis Stevens. He, after all, has defined it and described it. It's his genre. Or sub-genre. Or sub-sub-genre. We should note that Dr. Hoppenstand dedicated his book to Karl Edward Wagner, one of the namers and I guess practitioners of what is called "dark fantasy." Wagner was a nihilist. The other namer of dark fantasy, Robert M. Price, is an atheist. I don't know where Dr. Hoppenstand stands.
Anyway, all of this looks to me like an exercise in resume-building, with the resume-builder trying to get all of the rest of us to go along with his own interpretations. On top of that, I would call it a pretty bad misreading and misinterpretation of Francis Stevens' fiction, misreading or misinterpretation being perhaps the first sin of the literary critic. And I would say that Dr. Hoppenstand's introduction as published should never have gotten by his editor, so the University of Nebraska Press is also at fault. I suspect that his introduction was never peer-reviewed, as papers are in the sciences. (Even the sciences are a wreck these days.) But I guess that if you're a professor in the liberal arts, your expectation is that you can put out anything you want and people will go for it because, being an academic, you're "an expert" in your field.* Or at least the people at Wikipedia will go for it. But at least Dr. Hoppenstand did the good work of assembling Francis Steven's stories and at least the University of Nebraska Press issued them in an affordable edition. We should be thankful to both of them for that.
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*As people say, full disclosure: I'm a graduate in the liberal arts, too.
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The nonfactual claims about Francis Stevens keep rolling in. There are more regarding her photographic image, if there actually is one in existence:
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| This is NOT Gertrude Barrows Bennett. This is actually a photograph of Joy Bright Hancock (1898-1986), taken in February 1918, coincidentally in the same year that Gertrude's story "Friend Island" was published in The Argosy. Joy Bright Hancock attended school in Philadelphia. During World War I, she enlisted in the U.S. Navy as a Yeoman (F), (F) for female. This picture has appeared on the Internet in association with "Friend Island," I guess because it shows a woman in the navy. |
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| This is NOT Gertrude Barrows Bennett. Instead it's a picture of the American movie actress Gertrude Bennett (1899-1985). A different picture of her appears on the front cover of a "book" published in 2020. The subtitle of that book repeats the misconception that Francis Stevens invented "dark fantasy." I have altered this image from the original that I found on the Internet. |
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| Here's another image of the actress Gertrude Bennett, this one on a cigarette card. |
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On October 7, 2023, Kevin L. Cook left a long and very informative comment on this blog under the second part of this series on Gertrude Barrows Bennett. Mr. Cook wrote: "First, the two common published photographs of Mrs. Bennett were supplied by her daughter, Constance Osbourne, to Robert Weinberg in 1988." Unfortunately, I don't know exactly what two photographs he was referring to. I can only assume that they are the ones shown above and below. You can find both on the Internet. As far as I can tell, none of the sources of these images gives an original source or provenance for them. So are they of Gertrude Barrows Bennett? I don't know. You'd think we would know for sure. And you'd think that we would have better, larger, and higher-quality images than those shown here. But we don't. So I will remain skeptical until someone can come up with some good supporting evidence. Whoever has Robert Weinberg's papers is a place to start. A member of Gertrude's or Constance's family would be another.
In any case, the image above is obviously older than the one below. I base this on the dress. They may or may not be of the same woman. It's hard to tell. If the image above is of Gertrude Barrows, I would guess that it's a graduation picture, possibly from around 1900 or 1901. Unfortunately, we don't know where she went to high school, nor whether she went to some kind of business school. Either way, it would almost certainly have been in Minneapolis. |
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| Here is the image that appears on the Internet Speculative Fiction Database. The source is a Russian website. So why do Russians have the better or more likely image of Francis Stevens? Don't ask me. This world is full of mysteries. Anyway, judging from the dress, especially the hat, I would guess that this picture was taken as early as the World War I years, possibly in the 1920s, and possibly as late as about 1930. If this is Francis Stevens, is she looking to the west? Towards California and the place in the Lower Forty-Eight where you can watch the sun set over the encircling sea? |
Original text copyright 2023 Terence E. Hanley
