Sky Pilot

POSTSCRIPT TO ADVENTURE -- Charles W. Gordon--Farrar & Rinehart ($3).

Hunters, fishermen and lovers of the great outdoors are seldom defensive about their tastes; in fact, they are usually a little patronizing toward persons who do not share them. But in the days of Henry Van Dyke, Theodore Roosevelt, and Novelist Ralph Connor (The Sky Pilot, The Man from Glengarry], an intellectual who liked to fish felt compelled to discover deep political, moral, social and physical values in fishing, and the literature of that period is filled with accounts of wastrels who quit drinking after a period in the woods, of sick men who got back their health stalking deer, of cynics who got back their faith riding canoes down foaming rapids.

Last week this therapeutic outdoor literature received a notable addition in Ralph Connor's posthumous autobiography. Its 430 pages are about equally divided between bright accounts of the good times Ralph Connor enjoyed, and dull philosophizing about the spiritual value of his good times, both to himself and others. Born in 1860, the son of Scotch settlers in upper Quebec, a crusading preacher (his real name was Charles Gordon), Ralph Connor, became a novelist almost by accident. He wrote a story for a Canadian religious magazine, cut it up into three sections, kept adding chapters until it was long enough to be published as a novel, Black Rock. It was an immediate success, and with its successors. The Sky Pilot and The Man from Glengarry, sold about 5,000,000 copies. Connor kept on preaching, became a political figure, was a leading Canadian anti-Fascist until his death last year.

Connor loved fishing, canoeing, talks with political bigwigs, the sound of bagpipes, victorious debates with Baptists (he was a Presbyterian), the city of Edinburgh, football, his work as chaplain of the Canadian forces during the War. But almost everything taught him a lesson; when he could barely lift his arms after paddling a canoe on remote Lake Wanapitei, he found that "you don't forget what you learn through suffering." Only enjoyment that did not tempt him to moralize was listening to bagpipes. Whether he heard them in Edinburgh or in his family parlor, he gave himself up to wholehearted love for "the throbbing of the drones and the wild shriek of the chanter."

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