A. J. Gordon

They spoke in his praise, they sang his hymns,

they prayed to be made like unto him in Christian character and work.

—The Boston Globe,

February 11, 1895

In July 1896, eight years after he graduated with distinction from Harvard, Ernest Barron Gordon marked another, more treasured milestone: the release of a memoir about his father, A.J. Gordon—known throughout the world as an author, educator, preacher, poet, philanthropist, and spiritual leader.

Ernest Gordon was ideally suited to write such a book.

To be sure, he had the great advantage of a lifelong, near view of his father. But he was also a gifted writer. During his days at Harvard, he won academic laurels in history, and authored a Bowdoin Prize-winning essay.

These were exceptional honors. But Ernest Gordon must have been more deeply gratified to see his memoir win critical acclaim. His father was taken far too soon, at age fifty-eight. That this new book found an audience, and was widely reviewed, meant that something of his father’s work would go on.

These reviews began with The Outlook magazine, whose contributors later included Theodore Roosevelt. “An admirable life of an admirable man,” the magazine said, and Ernest Gordon was an author who’d “inherited his father’s spirit;” the book “is full of filial love for all that his father stood for.” A second review, in much the same vein, appeared in The Literary World—close to the notice for a book featuring President Grover Cleveland.

The Literary World, created as “A Fortnightly Review of Current Literature,” praised Ernest Gordon for writing “a loving portrait of [a] beautiful, gifted, and highly graced character…Dr. Gordon’s face, which shines forth from the frontispiece, bespeaks the man. A rare man he was, in many ways.”

The New York Examiner, for its part, said that “in the field of literature, there is nothing that can compare with a good biography,” and The Examiner heralded this new life of A.J. Gordon as “one of the best biographies that have been written during the last twenty-five years.” The review closed by saying Ernest Gordon’s “powers of description are extraordinary,” as shown in the opening chapter. And last, the picture of “the quiet New England hamlet” where A.J. Gordon was raised was itself “a masterpiece of delicate art.”

* * *

Long years ago, William Shakespeare vividly described what it was like to see one’s father “in his habit, as he lived.”

Ernest Gordon’s book bestowed that kind of gift.

In one passage, he spoke of his father reading aloud, “with rich intonation, High Tide on the Coast of Lincolnshire to his sick child, while the butterflies came in the windows and the leaves rippled in the breeze.” Another portrait spoke of Gordon, “standing, watch in hand, in the perspective of the long bridge over the Pemigewasset, timing his little sons as they raced to the other side after their evening’s bath in the river.” Then too, in later years, he loved to climb a hill path, a “St. Christopher of the mountainside…his eldest grandson astride his shoulders.”

Ernest Gordon’s memoir was a copious and grateful return for seasons he’d known with his father. In time, other biographies would come. That was very much in the nature of things. But only he could write, as an elder son, of scenes that caught the touch of life—

[Father] possessed—oh, rare delight of youngsters!—an almost Helvetic skill in wood-carving. To recount the various amusing and play-provoking things which his deft fingers whittled out would be to give an inventory of the contents of a well-stocked toy-shop. Miniature farming tools, houses, barns, churches, animals, were released one by one from the enveloping thraldom of a pine block by his emancipating penknife, as Ariel was released from the riven oak.

Besides this, he would make watering-carts out of tomato cans mounted on wheels, transparencies for campaign purposes out of old soap-boxes, and “keroogians,” an invention of his own—bits of glass of various lengths strung on strings, and arranged in the order of the notes of the scale—on which he would play long “kinder symphonies.”

Given moments like these, it is little wonder Ernest Gordon wrote a memoir of the father he’d lost too soon. Throughout his book, he painted a wide and eloquent canvas, bestowing great care to help readers see things he had seen: the many sides of A.J. Gordon’s life, character, and legacy.