"Who is the distinguished looking man, with the prematurely white hair, at the head table?” I enquired of my escort, at a literary luncheon in Calgary.

“That’s Arthur Stringer,” he replied.

As Mr. Stringer knew me only by name, I was able to study him to my heart’s content, without being observed? I noticed the kindly, Inimorous lines about his blue-grey eyes, and a mouth forever on the pdint of breaking into a smile even when his eyes were serious.

Since that luncheon, we have become much better acquainted, and 1 can now introduce you to "The Siamese Twins of the Literary World," as a New York reporter called him.

Arthur Stringer was born in Chatham, Ontario, on the River Thames, but instead of setting the Thames on fire, he fell into it at the early age of four, his memory of this exciting event having grown pale beside that of the castor oil that followed it. This same river seems to have been quite a factor in his life-history. It was there that he caught his first fish, at the age of six—a gigantic sun-fish, which he now supposes to have been about four inches long. Of this incident, he said:

“There may be a thrill in the first kiss of love, in the first taste of fame, in the first glimpse of the sea, or in one’s first drive through Paris in the early Spring; but these later thrills are as nothing compared to your first tugging and flapping shiner with a bent pin in his jowl. They are echoes, imitations and nothing more.”

It was on this drowsy, sun-steeped river, too, that he first engaged in piracy, mastered artillery by firing off a cannon made of gas-pipe and two wheels of an abandoned hand-car, raided peaceful orchards and melon patches, and acquired that spirit of careless courage which later permitted him to beard editorial lions in their dens without so much as a skip of the pulse.

Did you ever hear of “The Stringer Wriggle?” If not, you shall:

As the summer days lengthened into June and the river-water grew warm with the sun, young Arthur and his comrades found the schoolroom more and more oppressive. More and more frequently, as the hours dragged by, their glances would steal to the lagging hands of the clock. Then, as the call of the old Swimming Hole became more urgent, they took time by the forelock, as it were. This they did secretly, cautiously, under the watchful eye of the unsuspecting lady-teacher, untying a shoe-lace one moment, undoing a button another, or casting off a main-stay or two and loosening a brace in still another. The result was that, although to the eye of the casual observer, these enterprising youths were all fitly and properly clad, their garments were suspended like the sword of Damocles by a mere thread. On the stroke of four, they were off, (the boys, not the garments), outspeeding the cottontail for the three old buttonwoods. Two minutes later, they were out of their garments and taking their headers.

Now, practice had made young Arthur so perfect in this rite of secret preparation during school hours, that by the time he had reached the first buttonwood one seismic wriggle of his body sufficed to strip him completely and crowned him with the honor of being the first to “take his duck.” This was “The Stringer Wriggle,” which has gone down in history and, indeed, “to many still remains the one distinctive and commendable accomplishment of my career,” added the author, smiling. The marvel to him now is, how he managed to escape the dire catastrophe of being prematurely and ignominiously denuded during those critical moments when he was called to the platform for recitation.

It was during these early and adventurous years that he began his literary activities, most of his manuscripts being used later in the manufacture of box-kites. But he had already learned the permanence of the written word, for during the erection of a pickle-factory, he had inscribed in the fresh cement-work his own name and that of the maiden of his momentary favor, side by side and duly enclosed in a heart. The lady in question was naturally annoyed at this public advertisement of a relationship so personal. A coldness grew up between them: they no longer shared the same raspberry all-day sucker. And year after year, those united names, so touchingly bracketed, served to bring home to the youthful engraver “the solemnity of ever committing to enduring form the acknowledgment of an emotion which cannot identify itself as permanent.” The resultant blight turned him to poetry.

Mr. Stringer attaches great importance to these episodes of his childhood, it being his opinion that the child is indeed father of the man; that “the gun is loaded then, and what you may bring down when you are forty or fifty is determined by what you’ve loaded it with when you were five or ten.”

Into his fifty years, Arthur Stringer has crowded a century of activity. After studying at the Universities of Toronto and Oxford, and travelling awhile, he settled in New York to work and “see life.” Here he sold his first three stories, for eight dollars apiece. From New York, he returned to Ontario and bought a fruit farm on the shores of Lake Erie, later removing his family to the Alberta foothills where he had bought a wheat farm. (Out of the Western experiences were created The Prairie Wife, The Prairie Mother, and The Prairie Child.) He also tried to grow Burleigh tobacco at one time, which nobody seemed to enjoy smoking, Sewell Ford writing to inform the grower that he had enriched the pharmacopoeia of America with "an entirely new anaesthetic.”

Absurd as it may sound, when Mr. Stringer is engaged in the writing game, he simply has to be engaged in something else. Just now, when he occupies a huge, stuccoed New Jersey manor-house, on a hillside forty-five minutes from Broadway, he indulges a passion for cabinet-making, planing and sawing and pounding and fitting, only to find his lawn-benches, bookshelves, rustic tables, bird-houses, or what have you, disappearing like the tents of the Arabs, spirited away by his Better Half.

His versatility as an author is equally extraordinary. Besides being the author of a classical tragedy, half a dozen volumes of poetry, and a book of Shakespeare studies, he is also guilty of The Gun Runner, The Wire Tappers, The Under Groove, and The Hand of Peril. As a New York reporter put it:

“His next output may be something in blank verse, or a movie like The Iron Claw, or a red-blooded story of the Far North, or a novel dissecting the emotions of New York’s Upper Ten. You can’t say what it’s going to be. But you’re safe in banking it will at least be something wrung warm from life, from life restlessly sought and actually known.”

As a matter of fact, his next output will be A Woman at Dusk and Other Poems, (October, 1928) and The Blonde Woman, (April, 1929)

CHECK-LIST OF FIRST EDITIONS

Watchers of Twilight. First volume of poetry. Published 1894.
Pauline and Other Poems. Published 1895.
Epigrams. A Collection of Quatrains. Published 1896.
A Study in King Lear. A Critical Essay. Published 1897.
The Loom of Destiny. A Book of Child Stories. Published 1899.
Lonely O’Malley. A Story of Boy Life. Published 1901.
Hephaestus and Other Poems. Published 1902.
The Silver Poppy. First novel. Published 1903.
The Wire Tappers. First Criminal Adventure Novel. Published 1906.
Phantom Wires. Sequel to above. Published 1907.
The Under Groove. Underworld Adventure Novel. Published 1907.
The Woman in the Rain, and Other Poems. Collected Verse. Published 1907.
Sappho in Leucadia. A Poetic Drama. Published 1907.
Irish Poems. Published 1911.
Open Water. A Volume of Free Verse. Published 1912.
The Gun Runner. An Adventure Novel. Published 1912.
The Shadow. A Detective Story. Published 1913. Republished, as Never Fail Blake, 1923.
Prairie Trilogy:
The Prairie Wife
The Prairie Mother Published 1916, 1919, 1921
The Prairie Child
The Hand of Peril. An Adventure Novel. Published 1916.
The Poor of Bread. An Adventure Novel. Published 1917.
The House of Intrigue. An Adventure Novel. Published 1918.
The Man Who Couldn’t Sleep. An Adventure Novel. Published 1919.
The Wine of Life. A novel of New York Stage Life and Bohemia. Published 1920.
Twin Tales. Published 1921.
In Bad with Sinbad. Published 1923.
Manhandled. (With Russel Holman.) Published 1923.
A Story Without a Name. (With Russel Holman.) Published 1924.
Empty Hands. Published 1924.
Power. Published 1925.
White Hands. Published 1927.
The Wolf Woman. Published 1928.
A Woman at Push and Other Poems. Published 1928.
The Blonde Woman. To be published April, 1929. (Starts as a serial in The Pictorial Review, November, 1928.)