Arthur Stratton - Life and Career

Life and Career

In the 1930s, Stratton was a young playwright in New York, although without great success.

He was in France on the outbreak of the Second World War and joined the American Field Service as a volunteer. In 1940, as an ambulance driver in France, he was the first foreign volunteer to be decorated by the French Army during the war. The annual Report of the President of Bowdoin referred to the incident:

A Bowdoin graduate in the class of 1935, Mr. Arthur M. Stratton, was the first American to be decorated by the French government with the Croix de Guerre with Palms for bravery under fire... while serving with the American ambulance units on the Western Front.

He was to receive the Croix de guerre twice. In late April 1942, while serving with the Free French Forces in the Eighth Army commanded by Montgomery, he was very severely wounded, more than ten times, while trying to evacuate wounded soldiers from the trap laid by the German Army at Bir Hakeim in the Libyan Desert and was incapacitated from further duty. His act was seen as a feat of exceptional courage and he received his second medal. Free France magazine reported that "A. M. P. Stratton of Brunswick, Maine was wounded in the right leg and left arm while attempting to salvage a partially demolished ambulance." The Columbia alumni news noted that "ARTHUR M. STRATTON, '42AM (Bowdoin)... was wounded at Bir Hacheim and was awarded the Croix de Guerre with Palms by the Free French."

At that time, Stratton was a close friend of the publisher Arnold Gingrich, whose magazine Coronet reported

The first ambulance ran into a storm of lead. The driver, George Tichenor, was killed instantly by a machine gun burst. His best friend, Arthur Stratton, like him a hero of the AFS in France, was in the ambulance behind Tichenor. Stratton's car, too, was struck by a machine gun burst and the steering mechanism destroyed. He hailed a truck and continued the perilous journey under tow. But he had advanced only a few hundred feet when a shell struck the front of his ambulance. Stratton, wounded in 11 places by machine gun fragments, helplessly watched his loaded ambulance destroyed by flames... Nothing is "out of bounds" to a bold AFS man.

In November 1942, Stratton returned to Bowdoin College to recover from his wounds. After his recovery, he was recruited as an agent of the Office of Strategic Services and moved to Turkey, where he taught English at Robert College in İstanbul.

In 1948, he was back in Brunswick as an assistant professor of English at Bowdoin College, based at 234 Maine Street. The same year, he published a novel called Lord Love Us. This was edited for Scribners by Burroughs Mitchell, a contemporary at Bowdoin.

Stratton then worked for the Central Intelligence Agency for some ten years. In the course of this work, he travelled widely, returning to Turkey often and also living in India, Indochina, and Madagascar.

His first major book was One Man's India (1955), while Madagascar was to inspire his second travel book, The Great Red Island (1964), a history of the country presented in the form of a biography weaving back and forth between the past and the present.

Stratton paid his second and last visit to Madagascar in 1958. His editor, Mitchell, later wrote of his travelling "to unlikely places like Madagascar, increasing his odd store of erudition". In 1964, he was living in Athens.

Reviewing his The Great Red Island in 1965, The Times said of him

Every now and then a figure stands out from the interminable ranks of travel writers. Arthur Stratton is such a one. Mr Stratton takes his time, at points too long a time, over bringing off his effects. An accomplished raconteur, rightly sure that he can hold his audience with the compelling magnetism of the Ancient Mariner, he does rather take advantage of his charm. Temptation to put in irrelevant facts (such as Louis XIV dying of gangrene) is not resisted.

In its review of The Great Red Island, The Spectator drew attention to Stratton's description of a south-eastern stretch of the island as "Almost as lovely as the Attic coast" and noted that "Mr Stratton celebrates Madagascar. A New Englander who, as a volunteer with the Free French, first saw the name Madagascar on a can of singe doing duty for corned beef at Bir Hakeim in 1942... Mr Stratton has a baroque turn of style that offers in the first few pages words like 'struthious,' 'rhipidistian', and 'xerophytic'.

His last major work to appear was a biography of the Ottoman architect Mimar Sinan, which when it was published in 1972 he dedicated "Chiefly to the Turks".

In 1973, a donation Stratton made to Bowdoin College was noted in the President's annual report. He died on 3 September 1975. In his memory, Barbara Stratton Bolling and Deborah S. Booker presented a collection of prints to the University of Missouri's Museum of Art and Archaeology, including work from Ethiopia, a lithographic portrait by Edvard Munch of the composer Frederick Delius, and comic art by Honoré Daumier.

In 1945, Stratton's sister Barbara had married Richard Walker Bolling, later a Democratic Congressman from Kansas City, Missouri, and chairman of the United States House Committee on Rules. Barbara Stratton had four children, one with Bolling and three by a previous marriage.