Stringer's Swan Song

The Devastator
Arthur Stringer

Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1944

198 pages

Arthur Stringer's first novel, 1903's The Silver Poppy, concerns a young woman named Cordelia Vaughan who passes off a manuscript left by a dead man as her own. When published, the stolen work tops the bestseller lists, and its supposed authoress becomes the toast of Manhattan The narrator of The Silver Poppy, English poet John Hartley, discovers Cordelia's fraud, but is too much of a gentleman to destroy her life.

The Silver Poppy was one of my favourite reads of 2019.

I thought of The Silver Poppy often when reading The Devastator, Arthur Stringer's final novel. It too features a male narrator who becomes enmeshed in the life of a seemingly successful female novelist. This time out, the novelist is authentic.

It's narrator, Paul Ruxton, is not an aspiring writer, rather a New York attorney who'd once handled a copyright infringement case for London publishers Dearness & Dengate. Some time has passed, and now Mr Dengate has asked Ruxton to assist Sibyl Sencourt, one of D&D's more lucrative authors, as she disembarks for a new life in the New World. Ruxton acquiesces, waiting three hours on a windy Hudson River wharf. The reader is meant to understand that the lawyer's patience has much to do with Miss Sencourt's most recent novel, The Night of Denial, which he's found "sufficiently interesting, with its frankness and phrasing and its rather manlike sturdiness in exploring the timeworn paths of illicit passion."

Sibyl Sencourt is not quite the woman Ruxton was expecting; petite and practical, there's a whiff of tweed about her. In the months following their meeting on the wharf, they share nothing more than two unmemorable lunches, which accounts for Ruxton's initial surprise by Sibyl's request that he accompany her to a New Year's Eve celebration. Things soon become clear:

What she wanted, she explained, was a first-hand picture of that bacchanalian American evening in one of New York's most bacchanalian hotels. And if I would shepherd her through that night of tumult she'd expect, in the circumstances, to pay all costs.

On the evening in question ‐ 31 December 1939 ‐ the attorney is gobsmacked when Sibyl appears made-up and dressed-up in a low-cut gown. She's definitely on the prowl, but only for material. "It was more ink than wine we spilled that night," Ruxton reports, noting that his date spent the evening observing others, often removing a fountain pen and pad from her clutch in order to jot down a sentence or two.

The authoress's investment in a New York New Year's Eve pays off when a highly-spirited man commands the attention of a neighbouring table. He's Leo Ortell, a handsome, charismatic, self-absorbed, showy, dimwitted Hollywood actor who just happens to be one of Ruxton's clients. In the recent past, the attorney has had to "untangle him from a couple of petticoats." Sibyl is intrigued, seeing in Ortell the inspiration for her next novel, and so follows the actor west by taking a job in Hollywood. Months pass. Ruxton hears nothing from Sibyl until she reappears in New York for a Book-of-the-Hour Club launch. There she tells Ruxton that she must get closer to Ortell to write her novel, and so is set on marrying the actor. "You mean," says the attorney, "that you want to carry the watch home and take it to pieces and find out just what makes it tick."

The first of many weak points in this novel comes in that marriage. Setting aside his history as a philanderer, Ortell had always maintained that matrimony would hurt his box office appeal. How Sibyl manages to land the actor is unexplained, as is the subsequent revelation that she's fallen in love with her new husband. One of the strengths of the The Devastator is what happens next. In keeping with his past, Ortell quits Sibyl for Dorinda Perraton, a supple bathing beauty and aquatic queen he'd met on the set of his most recent film. But Dorinda proves unstable, causing scenes at the Mocambo Club and at the Trocadaro... and then she leaves him. 

The Mocambo Club in 1941, the year in which it opened.

That a woman gives up on Ortell ‐ and not vice versa ‐ should mean something, but Stringer doesn't make much of it; his focus is in reuniting the actor and his writer wife. Ruxton performs as unenthusiastic go-between in bringing estranged couple together: "no particular credit attaches to the agent who reunites two individuals already hungering for union."

Ruxton invites both to his home, then pretends that he's been called away. Returning two hours later, he finds a reconciled couple given to gush. Before long, Ortell begins going on about Sybil's stalled work in progress: 

"It's a wonderful book, Ruxton... And it's going to top everything Sibyl's already done."

     "What's it about?" I was foolish enough to ask.

     "It's about a two-legged vampire who feeds on the flesh of every friend he ever had. You understand ‐ a character study. He thinks he'd a mental wonder, while all the time masquerading as a moron ‐ just a shop window if you get what I mean."

     I proffered the opinion that it wasn't easy to make morons interesting.

     "But that's where Sibyl's a wonder, maintained her husband. "She turns him inside out and makes him so real you carry away the feeling he must have lived in the next block to you."

     I still wonder why some spirit of perversity should have prompted me to question: "Then who's the model?"

     I caught Sibyl's imploring look, and catching it, was glad Ortell had not seen it.

     She had none," he triumphantly proclaimed. "The bounder came out of her head. But I can't understand why she doesn't get busy and wind things up."

This is going to get good, right? Having fallen in love with Ortell, how can Sibyl finish her novel? Does she even want to finish her novel? If she does, will the reading public recognize what her actor husband doesn't ‐ that Ortell is the moron's model?

Sadly, just as The Devastator looks about to take flight, it takes an unexpected turn, skids about, and comes to a choking halt.

Against character, Ortell decides to join the war effort. Older than the average serviceman, the actor is rejected by the Air Force, the Navy, and the Army, but is somehow accepted in the Marines, becoming a member of the 1st Battalion, otherwise known as Edson's Raiders.

Here I note that the author's son, Hugh Arthur "Barney" Stringer (1919-2002), served as one of the Raiders. In fact, The Devastator is dedicated to the man:

Barney Stringer's all-too-brief obituary is well worth reading, but not The Devastator. In the novel's second half, focus shifts to Ortell's own engagements in the Solomons, where he proves himself a hero and leader of men. The transformation from egoist to self-sacrificing altruist is not convincing. Pages devoted to praising Major General Merritt Austin Edson, Sr, under whom the author's son was then serving, are out of place. Still, what struck this reader as most incongruous where four pages of aphorisms drawn from Sibyl Sencourt's novels.

They're not bad ‐ "Genius seems to be the faculty of having faith in everything, and especially one's self," for example ‐  though one wonders why they go on and on and on. My theory is that, at age seventy, Stringer saw The Devastator as perhaps his last opportunity to set in print pithy notes he'd made but had never used.

I may be wrong.

Either way, would that I had his stamina!

I admire Arthur Stringer's industry.

I always have.

Trivia: In The Silver Poppy, plagiarist Cordelia Vaughan is likened to a vampire for the way she exploits others. The same description is used twice in The Devastator, one of which is quoted above. The earlier occurs when Ruxton questions Sibyl's decision to marry the model of her novel: "'I'm not exactly a vampire," she protested, "I think I can give Leo something that he needs.'"

Object: Cheap wartime paper bound in blue boards. My copy was purchased last year from a bookseller in Chatham, the Ontario town in which Arthur Stringer was born. Price: US$21.59. It's inscribed, signed, and dated by the author.

The rear dust jacket lists thirteen recent Bobbs-Merril titles, the most famous being The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand.

Access: Library and Archives Canada has a copy, as does the Toronto Public Library, the London Public Library, the Chatham-Kent Public Library, the Vancouver Public Library, and eleven of our universities.

Only one copy is currently listed for sale online. Price: US$23.00 (w/ US$30.00 shipping!). A library discard, sans dust jacket, it is not recommended. Give it a pass. You can do better.

Related posts:

A Literary Vampire Alights upon an Impoverished Poet

The Very Best Reads of a Very Strange Year

Nothing Tops Sugar-Puss on Dorchester Street

Recently arrived titles at Montreal's The Word Bookstore. Palmer's epic and the others depicted can be purchased through the store's website.

New copies of Sugar-Puss on Dorchester Street and other books in the Ricochet series* can be purchased through Véhicule Press.

* Full disclosure: I'm Series Editor.

Related posts:

'THE NEONS GO UP ON MONTREAL'
Sugar-Puss Returns!

Arthur Stringer Unshackled (then bowdlerized)

The Wife Traders: A Tale of the North
Arthur Stringer

Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1936

319 pages

Tooloona: A Novel of the North

Arthur Stringer

London: Methuen, 1936

248 pages

There's a good chance that anyone who's read more than a couple of Arthur Stringer books has been here before. I don't mean Iviut Inlet, the Inuit community in which The Wife Traders is set, I refer instead to the novel's premise. Like A Lady Quite Lost (1931), Man Lost (1934), and Intruders in Eden (1942), it involves a privileged American who, having suffered a crisis, seeks sanctuary and spiritual cleansing in the most remote regions of Canada.* This time out, that man is Owen Winslow, who flees his Park Avenue apartment and expansive Long Island house for a cramped cabin in Ungava.

Richard Stendal, not Owen Winslow, is the novel's main character. He's been pursuing Celina, the beautiful, leggy wife Winslow abandoned. Though Celina appreciates Stendal's assistance in these trying times, referring to him as her "knight," she remains faithful to her husband. Stendal likes to think Winslow is dead, while Celina is certain that he's alive.

Turns out Celina right.

By chance, the missing man's image is captured – if only fleetingly – in a film of an Inuit walrus hunt in Ungava. When screened, months later at a meeting of Explorers' Club, one of the men in attendance recognizes Winslow in the footage.**

Celina asks Stendal to travel to Ungava, find her husband, and convince him to return to New York.

It seems a rather large request, but then Stendal has been so very helpful in the wake of Winslow's disappearance, right?

The Wife Traders begins with Stendal's arrival at Iviut Inlet, at which the walrus hunt had taken place. There he finds the errant husband shacked up, quite literally, with a young Inuit woman by the name of Tooloona. Winslow considers her his wife.

Now, given Stendal's thing for Celina, one might think that he'd let matters lie and report the bigamy upon his return to New York. If so, one would be mistaken. Instead, Stendal does all he can to break up the couple, going so far as to bribe Ootah, the local shaman, into telling Tooloona that she must leave Winslow.

Stendal's motivation isn't spelled out until quite late in the novel, though I imagine more thoughtful readers than myself might spot it early on. From the start, Stendal sees Tooloona as primitive, a savage, an animal. Even after she saves his life, he compares her to a "faithful dog." Yet, inwardly, he struggles with his growing physical attraction to Winslow's new mate:  

He failed to remember the day or the occasion when he first grudgingly admitted that her body was a beautiful one, that there was something arresting in even the triangulated face with dark tangle of lashes along the smooth cheek, too pale to be called a daffodil-yellow and too dark to be compared to a gardenia. But he had not been compelled to revise his earlier estimate of her. Nothing was gained, he knew by contending that she was an undersized and flat-faced barbarian who exuded the odor of fish oil. It was the white man's duty to be loyal to his white race.

And there you have it.

A bold statement is made on the dust jacket of the American edition:

I've not seen the jacket for Methuen's first British edition, but don't imagine it makes a similar claim. The editor's red pen is found throughout, beginning with the title. The Wife Traders – problematic at best – is replaced with Tooloona. Other changes are much less apparent. Now and then a sentence is struck, and there are occasional word substitutions, like "wonton" for "bitch." The twentieth chapter sees the longest single cut – nearly two pages – in which Winslow criticizes Stendal's assessment of the Inuit as smelly.

The most eye-popping sentence in The Wife Traders does not feature in Tooloona. Anyone curious will find it on page 83, at the very end of Winslow's inept defence of the Inuit woman:  

"I'll concede that she has her own ars erotica. That's imposed upon her, I suppose, by her environment. She has to be warmer-blooded, in a country like this, just as she has to wear warmer clothing. You can write it down to Nature's plan for keeping the race going. Where the soil is thin there must be no mistake about planting the seed. I'm not a medical man enough to know how true it is that the Innuit vulva is more prominent and prehensile than the white woman's."

The Wife Traders is a well-intentioned book, but doesn't transcend the time in which it was written.

Or does it?

The Inuit are seen through the eyes of Stendal, Winslow, and Celina (yes, she eventually shows up). Stendal is a white supremacist. Winslow appreciates Inuit culture, but only when it doesn't cross his own beliefs. Interestingly, it's late-to-arrive Celina who has the greater recognition and appreciation of the Inuit – Tooloona above all. Though Winslow likes to think that he understands the Inuit of Iviut Inlet, his fragile ego leads to tragedy.

Someone is killed.

It wasn't the character I wanted dead.

* Stringer's 1927 novel The White Hands, in which a pair of Jazz Age sisters are sent off North Ontario, provides a bit of a twist on the premise.

** I can't help but note that in Helen Dickson Reynolds' truly strange He Will Return (1959), abandoned wife Constance Owen-Jones discovers her husband is still alive through a newsreel street shot. 

The Critics Rave:

Trash – and not "good trash" –  but none the less will appeal to the vast majority of those who demand nothing but "escape" from their reading. The story of a New Yorker who escapes civilization by joining a tribe of Eskimos in the Far North, "buying" a mate, and evading the claims of wife and home; succeeds in making so-called civilized ideals sufficient excuse for immorality.

– Kirkus, 15 June 1936

Trivia: Iviut Inlet is found nowhere outside Stringer's imagination. It later appears in his 1940 novel The Ghost Plane.

Objects: I have three editions of the novel, the earliest being the Bobbs-Merrill first edition. Bound in green boards, it has stood the test of time. In black boards, Tooloona, the first (and only) British edition, has shown itself a touch more fragile.

To these eyes, the most interesting in my collection is the third. Published in 1955 by Harlequin, it marks the last time Stringer has seen print. As far as I've been able to determine, it's faithful to the Bobbs-Merrill text. Both front and back covers would not make the grade today.

"What secret made him choose the arms of a dark savage instead of the elegance of a penthouse?"

Oh, I don't know. Might it have something to do with being more attracted to women than interior decoration?

Odd that Harlequin describes Tooloona as a "dark savage." Stringer doesn't. 

Access: The Wife Traders was first published in 1936 by Bobbs-Merrill and McClelland and Stewart. Tooloona followed later that same year. And then, of course, we have the 1955 Harlequin paperback.

Used copies of The Wife Traders begin at US$6.50 (the Harlequin paperback in "Good-Very Good" condition). As of this writing, only two are listed online. Get them while you can! The Bobbs-Merrill appears more common. Asking prices range between US$17.00 and US$85.00. Copies with dust jackets begin at US$30.00.

No copies of Tooloona are listed for sale online.

Library and Archives Canada, the Toronto Public Library, the London Public Library, Memorial University, the University of New Brunswick, Mount Alison University, Acadia University, Dalhousie University, the University of Toronto, McMaster University, Guelph University, the University of Saskatchewan, the University of Alberta, Simon Fraser University, the University of British Columbia, and the University of Victoria hold one edition or other of The Wife Traders.

No Canadian library has a copy of Tooloona.

Note: I was inspired to read The Wife Traders by the 1936 Club week. 

Links to reviews of other 1936 titles can be found through here. I've only ever reviewed one other title from that year: Arthur Meighen's The Greatest Englishman of History.

Related post:

But Why Would You Want Him To?:

The Very Strange Story of a Delusional Abandoned Wife

Remembering Fraser Sutherland

I'm honoured to have been asked by the Globe & Mail to write an obituary of poet, critic, journalist, biographer, and lexicographer Fraser Sutherland. It'll be appearing in print this coming week. For now, you can read the obituary online through this link (note: it's behind a paywall).

Fraser was the first person I interviewed for A Gentleman of Pleasure, my biography of his friend John Glassco. He as unfailingly generous and encouraging. In this way, my relationship with the man was anything but unique.

One of the last times I saw Fraser was at the Montreal launch of The Heart Accepts It All, a selection of Glassco's letters I edited for Véhicule Press. He'd made the effort of travelling from his home in Toronto.

Carmine Starnino, Fraser Sutherland, and Mark Abley
at the launch of The Heart Accepts It All.
The Word, 14 August 2013

Fraser always expressed an interest in my work, particular the discoveries made while working on this long exploration of forgotten and neglected Canadian literature. My final visit to 39 Helena Avenue, the house he'd shared with his wife Alison, was to pick up some old Canadian pulp novels he'd wanted me to have.

I will never forget his kindness.

RIP, Fraser.

Update:

The Globe & Mail, 14 April 2021