Francis Stevens, "The Nightmare"

[randy_byers]

Francis Stevens was the pen name of Gertrude Barrows Bennett -- a figure of some mystery who wrote for the pulps from 1917 to 1923 while caring for her sick mother and then, after her mother died, stopped writing and more or less disappeared from the face of the earth, even losing contact with her own daughter. Her weird fiction, largely published in the Munsey magazines (she was another discovery of Bob Davis'), was an influence on both A. Merritt and H.P. Lovecraft. She wrote a number of novels that have been reprinted now and again over the years, and in 2004 University of Nebraska Press under its Bison Books imprint published a collection of shorter works called The Nightmare and Other Tales of Dark Fantasy.

So far I've only read "The Nightmare", which is an odd story. It's a lost world story, in some ways reminiscent of Edgar Rice Burroughs' The Land that Time Forgot (1918). A young American gentleman of leisure boards the Lusitania in New York en route to London, and wakes up in the middle of the ocean. He washes up on an island and soon finds out that he is somehow in the Pacific, not the Atlantic. He is soon embroiled in a contest between twin Russian brothers who have come to the island to seek an element in the interior that can change lead to gold. A shifty American guide (for whom the narrator is initially mistaken) is the only one who knows how to find his way through the volcanic cliffs into the interior. The lost world inside the volcano turns out to be full of bizarre creatures such as man-eating cabbages and giant bats.

This is basically an adventure story, but it manages to approach its material in an unusual way. For example, the protagonist is a bit of a bumbling twit, by no means a Burroughsian hero. He does perform some heroic actions despite himsef and through sheer luck, but for the most part he is tossed back and forth between the two rival gangs without much control over his own fate. Also interesting is how his sense of who his allies are shifts almost every time he moves from one group to the other. The story has a certain dream logic in that way, with the narrative shifting its valence as his context changes. There's a fairly large cast of characters for a novelette, and they are all distinct. The two Russian brothers are very charismatic and have a fascinating relationship -- a very powerful bond despite their violently conflicting aims (one a loyal tsarist, the other a nihilist). There's a young woman whose affections are torn between the two, yet whose character does not seem at all subsumed in them. She has her own mysterious reasons and goals.

What's most bizarre about this story is that it builds up a full head of steam, plunging us into the nightmare world of the mysterious island and the hugger-mugger and derring-do and scheming of the two gangs as they try to get the upper hand on each other, and then right at the climax of the action, the protagonist is plunged into the sea again and ... everything turns out to be a dream. WTF?!!!! She didn't really just do that, did she? Complete deflation of what had been an excellent adventure, in the most banal way possible. You have *got* to be kidding me! And then ... and *then* ... another switch is flipped, and it turns out it really *wasn't* a dream, except that everything we saw earlier has now either been disposed of or wasn't what it seemed at the time. So still sort of not real, but with future adventures in a similar vein apparently possible and imminent.

I'm not sure what happened. It almost seems as though Stevens got to a point where she couldn't resolve the story as she had set it up, so she just switched gears and gave up on it. On the other hand, apparently the shtick at All-Story at the time (1917) was stories that appeared to be supernatural or weird but ended up having a rational or common sense explanation, so it's possible that this was the normal structure for such stories. It seems completely self-defeating, in a way, although the way Stevens shifts gears twice at the end is very unusual, so maybe she was playing with the formula she had been handed.

So the verdict is out on whether she wasn't in control of her material or was actually playing an interesting game with it. We'll see if the other stories shed any light on the question. What's clearer is that she had a very good grasp of character and weird adventure. I found "The Nightmare" completely vivid and engrossing up to the point at which the rug was pulled out from under the narrative. A real page turner.

Comments

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Stevens is a favorite (one of many favorites, in truth) of my friend Doug Anderson. Doug once sent me on a library hunt to track down evidence of her residence in San Francisco. I've read one story of hers, "The Elf Trap", which Doug put in his anthology Tales Before Tolkien. I liked it for its evocation of the yearning for Faerie and its resemblance to the story of Beren and Luthien.

[randy-byers.livejournal.com]

Were you able to confirm that she had lived in San Francisco? Your friend is mentioned in the introduction to this collection: "Everts spoke with fellow researcher Douglas Anderson regarding the contents of her final letter to her daughter dated 1939. The letter identified California as Bennett's residence. Following this lead, Everts obtained her death certificate, which listed California as her residence since 1936, twenty-two years before her death in 1948." (Not sure which is the error, 1936 or "twenty-two years before her death".)

"The Elf Trap" is in this collection, so I'll be getting to it. Actually, your review of Tales Before Tolkien may have been one of the things that prompted me to pick up this book, although Stevens had flashed across my radar from several angles in the past two or three years.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

I did, though I don't recall the details.

The really sad story I discovered at Doug's behest was that of James Kenneth Tolkien, a minor poet and distant cousin of JRRT, who I found lies buries in an unmarked grave in a cemetery in suburban LA.

[kim-huett.livejournal.com]

Given your description it does seem likely Stevens lost herself in the creation of both setting and cast and only remembered the story wouldn't sell once once most of it was actually written. Cue much authorial wiggling to make the story acceptable to a well paying and reliable market. A pity she didn't write it as a straight weird and sell it to Weird Tales but I guess when you have a sick mother to support you need a market which pays in a relatively prompt manner.

[randy-byers.livejournal.com]

It's possible that this was the first thing she wrote, too, and that she was still learning the ropes.