Robert Keable
Encyclopedia
Robert Keable was a British novelist, formerly a missionary
and priest in the Church of England
. He resigned his ministry following his experiences in the First World War and caused a scandal with his 1921 novel Simon Called Peter, the tale of a priest's wartime affair with a young nurse. The book sold 600,000 copies in the 1920s alone, was referenced in The Great Gatsby
, and was cited in a double murder investigation. Fêted in the United States, but critically less than well-received, Keable moved to Tahiti
where he continued to write, producing both novels and theological works, until his death at age 40 of a kidney complaint.
Keable was raised in Bedfordshire
and educated at Magdalene College, Cambridge
. He entered a theological college after graduation and was ordained a priest in 1911. He spent the next several years as a missionary in Africa, stationed on Zanzibar
and in Basutoland
, before returning to Europe as an army chaplain during the First World War. There, he met and fell in love with a young nurse, Elizabeth Buck, a development over which he eventually quit the Church of England and left his wife, Sybil. Returning to England after the war, Keable resigned his ministry and began to write novels: his first, 1921's Simon Called Peter
, became a runaway success and launched Keable into a life of literary celebrity. Increasingly disillusioned with the hypocrisies he saw in contemporary British life, he and Buck left Europe for Tahiti in 1922. The couple lived there happily until Buck's death in childbirth in 1924, after which Keable's health began to fade. He nonetheless struck up a later relationship with a Tahitian woman, Ina, with whom he had a son, and continued to publish novels until his death of a kidney condition in 1927.
Keable's most famous publication was his first novel, Simon Called Peter, but he produced a prodigious literary output, spanning theological
tracts through poetry to travel guides. Simon Called Peters sequel, Recompense, was made into a film, and his later novels all attracted substantial attention. His writings generally met with much greater popular than critical approbation, and Simon Called Peter was sufficiently incendiary to be banned. The book nonetheless became a contemporary best-seller.
Much of Keable's fiction contained autobiographical elements, often centring on his attitudes toward and experience of the Christian religious establishment. As well as these fictional explorations he produced a final, non-fiction work, The Great Galilean, outlining the religious views he developed during a lifetime's uneasy relationship to Anglicanism and Catholicism. He came to believe that the historical Jesus
bore little relationship to the Jesus of Christian tradition, and, in The Great Galilean, attempted to reconcile his ambivalence about the orthodoxies of the Church with his enduring belief in an all-loving God. Keable's views earned him many unfavourable reviews and the contempt of the church in which he had practised, but foreshadowed ideas of free love
that became prominent later in the 20th century.
Keable was named after his father, Robert Henry Keable, a successful businessman who in 1904, when his son was 17, was ordained an Anglican priest and became vicar at Pavenham
, Bedfordshire. Robert Keable had a younger brother, Henry, who died of typhoid c.1918. The young Keable attended Whitgift School
in Grimsby, Lincolnshire, where he was nicknamed "Kibbles" and noted for his "fluent and facetious" contributions to the school paper, the Whitgiftian. Influenced by his father's piety he became an active lay preacher and member of the YMCA
as a teenager. Keable's was an austere, Anglican upbringing, the effect of which, his biographer Hugh Cecil has suggested, was to leave the young man industrious, somewhat preacherly in his writing style, and with a devoutness not particularly tied to the specific faith in which he'd been raised.
Keable went up to Magdalene College
, Cambridge, in 1905. His peers there included the future Everest explorer George Mallory
and Arthur Tedder, 1st Baron Tedder
. Though his contemporaries described him as a quiet, devout student who initially associated only with other "religious-minded" men, he later became more sociable and rowed
in the college second eight. He took a first in the History Tripos
, graduating with his BA in 1908 and receiving his MA in 1914. At Magdalene he was a great friend of Arthur Grimble
, the future commissioner of the Gilbert and Ellice Islands
. Grimble's daughter, in a biography of her father, described the undergraduate Keable as devout, "earnest, somewhat introspective" and deeply literary. She records that he spent his university vacations on missionary work. He is known also to have taught in East Africa under YMCA auspices, and to have climbed Mount Kilimanjaro
.
Among the most significant acquaintances Keable made at Cambridge were two brothers among the fellowship, Arthur
and Hugh Benson
. The Bensons were sons of a highly accomplished academic and religious family; their father, Edward White Benson
, was Archbishop of Canterbury
and their mother, Mary Sidgwick Benson
, the sister of the philosopher Henry Sidgwick
, had set up a lesbian household with Lucy Tait (daughter of the previous archbishop of Canterbury) after her husband's death. In the years just before Keable came to Cambridge Hugh Benson (the inspiration for Keable's character "Father Vassall" in Peradventure (1921)) had departed from the Anglicanism of his upbringing in favour of the Roman Catholic church, being ordained a Catholic priest in 1904. According to Keable's contemporaries, the two met when Edouardo Ginistrelli, a neighbour on Keable's staircase, invited them both to lunch: "Keable ... fell under the spell of Fr Benson's winning personality," wrote James I. James, a college acquaintance of Keable's: "Keable's Anglican loyalty remained, but it was a new kind of loyalty. He spoke no more of Protestantism but always of Catholicism... in Chapel he now genuflected and crossed himself. A strange mystic element deep down in his being began to stir... I often suspected that Fr Benson had posed to this clever mind – for Keable was clever – the arguments that had recently brought himself to Catholicism." Benson was also a novelist and, under his influence, the sensory, aesthetic dimension of Keable's own writing (and of his faith) began to develop. Benson sensed in Keable an "inclination to Rome", but Keable elected for the Anglican priesthood, joining the theological college of Westcott House
and serving as canon
at Bradford
after completing his studies.
. His friend Hugh Benson regretted that Keable had not turned to Catholicism, a decision Benson felt would lead Keable to ultimate disenchantment with the Church. In a letter he told Keable:
, a decision perhaps intended to "save him from Rome". He served under Frank Weston
, the Bishop of Zanzibar, a staunch Anglican with whom Keable clashed: Keable objected to Weston's unorthodox methods for training black African priests; Weston, a vehement supporter of these priests, saw prejudice in Keable's views. Weston was to inspire the "Bishop of Moçambique" character in Keable's 1921 novel Peradventure. In Africa, Keable wrote his first two books: 1912's Darkness or Light, a history of the Universities' Mission to Central Africa, and the manuscript for City of the Dawn (published in 1915), a portrait of Zanzibar that "showed genuine religious fervour, as well as a characteristic sentimentality."
Keable returned to the UK in 1914 as a result of illness, precipitated perhaps by the rigour of service upon which Weston insisted in Zanzibar. He was offered a church posting in Sheffield but declined, fearing "the pull of Rome" if left within reach of Catholic influences in Britain. Instead, he made two attempts to enlist for armed service during the First World War; ill health thwarted both, so he returned to Africa for mission work, becoming rector of three parishes (including Leribe
, Basutoland
), under the diocese of the Bishop of Bloemfontein
. He published some ten devotional works and works on missionary practice during this time, including The Loneliness of Christ, and a book of verse titled Songs of the narrow way. The damaging effects of the illness he had suffered were compounded by an assault while in the field: accounts vary, with some friends recalling that Keable received a blow to the head from a "powerful native", and others describing a gunshot wound to the thigh, inflicted by a (probably drunk or deranged) Mosutu. Keable's biographer Cecil has suggested that the whole incident may have been a fabrication of Keable's.
In 1915 Keable married Sybil Armitage at Durban
. The pair had met in Bradford; Sybil was "passionately religious, with a strong social conscience and robust health... a big, handsome (some thought beautiful) woman with auburn hair." She was well suited to the demands of life as a missionary's wife, and inspired the character Edith in Keable's later novel Peradventure, but the pair were temperamentally ill-matched (and described by Keable's biographer Cecil as "sexually incompatible"). They had no children; Hugh Benson suspected that the marriage had been a gesture on Keable's part to render impossible the lingering prospect that he might become a monk.
. Appointed an army chaplain on 26 May 1917, Keable travelled to the Rouen
sector with a Native Labour Contingent of 21,000 men. These men were paid £3 per month to unload supply ships and provide infrastructure support for military operations in Europe. As a chaplain, with the rank of captain, Keable was expected to be at the disposal of the army at large, and ministered to those seeing active infantry service as well as to labourers. Padres were formally required to remain behind the lines, but it is apparent that Keable nonetheless saw something of the realities of the frontline.
Like many padres during the First World War, Keable reassessed his approach to his congregation. The men to whom he ministered, he came to believe, cared nothing for the finer points of Anglican theological dispute: from the church they wanted only "entertainment and a barely spiritual form of practical Christianity." Keable argued as much openly, suggesting that the Protestant chaplaincy in France should be amalgamated into the operations of the YMCA, and that only the Roman Catholic padres – who seemed to have quite a different, more immediate relationship with their Celtic and Lancastrian companies – should remain. His public airing of these views attracted censure from the church (and particularly from Frank Weston, who was also serving), but reflected the openness that made him popular with the officers in France. A smoker, he was known to share whisky and sodas in the officers' mess, and – as does the title character in Simon Called Peter – to have become acquainted with a devoutly religious French prostitute.
Another transformative experience of Keable's war was his acquaintance with Elizabeth Buck, known as "Jolie", an 18-year-old nurse from a prominent British family (her ancestors included the Dukes of Rutland) who was driving trucks for the Canadian Lumber Corps when the two met. The pair began a lifelong affair, though Keable did not yet leave his wife. Instead, at the war's close, he returned to Leribe. He remained until 1919, torn by his increasing alienation from the church and his experiences during the war. There he wrote his first novel, Simon Called Peter, in an intensive 20-day spell: "I laid a parson's life bare", he said of his writing, "and didn't care a damn." At last, in 1919, Keable resigned his ministry and left the Anglican church.
, Cambridgeshire, where both began to explore the Roman Catholic Church. Sybil converted and became a devout Catholic, but Keable also read works in contemporary philosophy and the books of Charles Darwin
, and appears briefly to have lost his faith altogether. He wrote, of the history of Christianity, "I can see creative evolution at work. What is behind it, I don't know. But I'm inclined to think that I do not believe it is anything which the old concept of God really covers."
To support the family Keable worked during 1921 as an assistant-master at Dulwich College
, and served the following year at Dunstable Grammar School
. He continued to write: the manuscript for Simon Called Peter had found a publisher, Michael Sadleir at Constable
, who liked its prospects and commissioned from Keable a second novel. He commenced The Mother of All Living, "an intense love-drama set in South Africa", which reflected his new interest in African traditional religion
and featured a Bergsonian
concept of "life-force" as an alternative to theology.
Then Simon Called Peter was published, and met with astonishing success. The book reportedly sold over 600,000 copies during the 1920s, reaching a 66th edition by 1922. A largely autobiographical work, Simon Called Peter is the tale of a priest, Peter Graham, who has an affair in wartime France with a nurse named Julie. The title character almost abandons his faith for love, but experiences a direct revelation of Christ while watching a Catholic mass and is given up by his lover, who sees his sincerity. Its runaway popularity won Keable a level of celebrity: he spent a lot of time in London and took up again with Buck, who was now usually known as "Betty" (she, by her token, called Keable "Bill"). The two met often at Gwen Otter's salon at No. 1 Ralston Street, in Chelsea
, near to where Keable had lodgings; they made many friends, though refrained from fully overt displays of couplehood out of deference to Buck's distressed parents and Keable's wife. At this time, Keable appears to have become, in some measure, a proponent of open relationship
s and free love
. He concluded that Buck had a right to pursue relationships with other men, though there is no firm evidence that she did, and "that a warm and spontaneous sexual nature, far from being in conflict with Christian love, was in fact a manifestation of it."
Keable's developing attitudes and relationship with "Betty" disgusted his wife, Sybil, but as a devout Catholic she refused to divorce. This left Keable unable to marry Buck, and contributed to a growing sense on his part of alienation from English society. At last, in 1922, he managed legally to separate from his wife. He took up the suggestion of former college friend Arthur Grimble, by then a colonial administrator in the Ellis Islands, that he visit the South Pacific, a fashionable destination for 1920s Europeans. To Keable the South Seas appeared to offer escape from the hypocrisies of British society, as well as furnishing a climate better suited to his never-hearty constitution. In 1922 Keable and Buck sailed aboard the Bendigo for the South Pacific via Australia, where Keable undertook a book tour, giving lectures in which he broadcast his new sexual ethics: that unmarried couples in love could have deeply moral relationships, while loveless spouses who stayed together for convention's sake were committing acts of deep immorality. His views scandalised the contemporary press, but Frank Weston noted in correspondence that Keable as a "shipwrecked priest" made quite a useful cautionary tale for novices.
William Ellis, a nineteenth-century Christian missionary sent there to attempt to proselytise them. "Bill and Betty" settled at first in Paul Gauguin
's former home at Punaavia. The house was quite luxurious, overlooking a bay with views of Moorea
island. Buck drove a Dodge
and enjoyed Tahiti's ample supplies of cheap French wine; Keable "brooded on Gauguin's gesture against spiritual suffocation", and eventually moved the household further inland, to a native-style house in the wilder surrounds of Teahuahu, near Papeari
. The couple made friends with the Swedish artist Paul Engdahl. Keable continued to write copiously, adding to his oeuvre the novel Recompense, a sequel to Simon Called Peter. He undertook several book tours of the United States and spent his spare time answering fanmail, swimming, and sailing.
Then, in 1924, Buck fell pregnant. The couple agreed that she should return to England for better healthcare during the birth, and she went there to set up a home with her mother's help. In early November 1924 she gave birth prematurely to a son, Anthony, and a few days later died of poisoning from chloroform
administered against the pain of delivery. The grief-stricken Keable's own health worsened and he was advised to return to Tahiti; the baby, too weak to travel, was left in England with Jack and Rita Elliott, friends of the couple's since the Ralston Street salon days. The Elliotts were eventually to adopt him.
Keable remained in Tahiti, his health worsening. He suffered weight loss, diabetes, high blood pressure and fever, all stemming from a kidney illness. Nonetheless, he completed the novel Numerous Treasure, which he had begun before Buck's death; the bittersweet tale of a Polynesian
woman who shared her name with a cocktail and a brand of cigarettes was a commercial success, and has been considered a valuable portrait of early-century Tahitian life. His health and spirits rallied in the years after Buck's death: he completed a travel book, Tahiti, Isle of Dreams, and a book tour of the United States and Europe. On returning to Tahiti he struck up a relationship with a mixed-race islander named Ina, and made many new friends including the writers Alec Waugh
(elder brother of Evelyn
), who had been inspired to visit Tahiti by Numerous Treasure, Zane Gray, and James Norman Hall
. Waugh described the Keable of this period "reclined among cushions, clad only in a pareo
, while his Tahitian princess, bare-shouldered and bare-footed, her black hair falling to her waist and a white flower behind her ear, glided negligently about the house" – and yet noted that, on suggesting a cup of tea, Keable's voice still took on "the parsonical intonation with which fifteen years earlier he had summoned the parish children to a Sunday school treat."
1927's Lighten Our Darkness (or Ann Decides) was his last important novel. The tale of a Catholic priest restored to faith by a woman's love was, however, poorly received, and the follow-up Madness of Monty, a "kindly, innocuous comedy", went over worse still. Instead, helped by James Norman Hall to overcome his failing eyesight, Keable devoted his attention to The Great Galilean, a non-fictional account of the historical Jesus
and his relationship to the Jesus of religious tradition.
Away from his writing, he and Ina conceived a child: Ina gave birth to a son, named Henry Reheatoa (meaning "glorious warrior"), with whom Keable was delighted and to whom he bequeathed all his Tahitian properties. In November 1927 he initiated formal divorce proceedings against Sybil in an attempt to legitimise this son.
In December 1927 Keable contracted a worsened kidney infection, became septic and delirious, and, on 22 December, died at home. The New York Times obituary identified the illness that killed him as Bright's disease
; the term was used to refer to a number of nephritic
kidney conditions.
Though, according to acquaintances, many of his friends had heard nothing from him since his departure for Tahiti, his will made provision for a scholarship at Magdalene and named the college as his residuary legatee. His literary assets at death were valued at £5,007. Though Keable received a Protestant burial in Papeete, some accounts suggest that in the last weeks of his life he formally converted to Catholicism. Other commentators suggest the pagan sentiments he expressed about the birth of his new son as a riposte to social convention tend to indicate otherwise. Hugh Cecil argues that, at his death, Keable most likely just became "able to reconcile his two ideals, romantic-erotic and religious, and could die peacefully accepting the rituals he loved."
in his final book, The Great Galilean, a theological work. The unorthodoxy of his views was not always well received. A reviewer of his novel Peradventure observed "Peradventure starts as a Church of England tract, becomes what would appear to be a Roman Catholic tract, and before the end is reached the reader is in doubt as to just what sort of tract it is."
His last book, The Great Galilean, has been characterised by one biographer as Keable's attempt "to renconcile his love of Jesus with his failure to believe in him as a God." The book sought to distinguish the "historical Jesus" of record from the "traditional Jesus" of church worship. The historical Jesus, Keable said, was so poorly known that there survived too little information for a three-line obituary. Instead, the figure that Christians worshipped was a "traditional Jesus", recorded in the Gospels from an oral tradition that was not really biographical. This "traditional Jesus" became a "literary Jesus", the central figure of the four gospels, and it is on this figure – quite distinct from the actual, historical Jesus – that the contemporary church centred. Keable sought to criticise the attitude in the contemporary church toward "traditional Jesus", given how much of the rest of "traditional" religion Protestantism had discarded. However, Keable was at pains to stress that the "traditional" Jesus should not be seen as an imposture, or something to be discarded. The ahistoricity of the traditional Jesus, he said, should not be a reason to leave the church. Without this traditional Jesus, he predicted, Western civilisation would fade and fall. He was, then, critical of the specific ways in which the contemporary church construed Jesus, in its attempts to conflate the traditional Jesus with historical Jesus, which Keable considered impossible. He blamed these actions of the church for the declining numbers of worshippers, and accused it of draining Christianity of profundity by relying too heavily on rationalism and rigid structure.
Though he believed that the historical Jesus was barely known, Keable nonetheless devoted much attention in The Last Galilean to trying to understand the figure. He emphasised the humanity of historical Jesus, who, he wrote, had shared humanity's ignorance – though had also been blessed with an extraordinarily undistorted mind. He wrote of a Jesus tolerant – even fond – of sinners, and one who, understanding the importance of love and sex to the average man, advocated love as the most important thing, above any church rule or regulation. This Jesus was a great prophet of free love, associated and in harmony with a "spirit of all life".
The Great Galilean was not well received. The New York Times reviewer called it hopelessly muddled, finding Keable's claims about the unknowability of Jesus contrary to his efforts to understand and worship him: "Frankly, we do not know what to make of it. We can only suppose that street preaching at Cambridge, and even climbing Kilimanjaro, are not conducive to logic."
's Robert Elsmere
, a similarly scandalous tale of religious doubt among the clergy published 40 years earlier: H.D.A. Major, editor of the Modern Churchman magazine, made this comparison with respect to Keable's Peradventure, noting "It is slighter, but it has need to be. The twentieth century novel reader is intellectually and morally lighter than the nineteenth." Reporting his death, the Melbourne Argus attributed the best-selling popularity of Keable's novels to the licentiousness of their contents: "they have no literary value". His former college acquaintance James later wrote that "his friends sought to dissuade him from publication. The transition from the beautiful book on The Loneliness of Christ (1914) – of his Central African period – to Simon Called Peter (1921) came as a great shock to all who had known and loved him in earlier days." Where Rosemary Grimble calls Keable's novels "splendidly erotic", a Birmingham News correspondent in Birmingham
, Alabama, accused Keable of "fashioning abnormalities". Other critics called his success "undeserved" and attributed it to prurience on the part of his readers. Reviewers also suggested that the contrast between Keable's ecclesiastical background and the frank, often sexual, content of his novels attracted curiosity in itself. A Time columnist, "J.F.", expressed the fascination of this disconnect overtly, responding to a piece titled "The censorship of thought" that Keable had contributed to a 1922 volume, Nonsenseorship (sic), after Simon Called Peters publication had made him notorious. "Surely, here is a modern personality worth the study of the psychologists," J.F. wrote, noting the romance of Keable's unusual circumstances: "From a quiet English clergyman to the author of a sensational best-seller who has taken up his permanent residence in the South Seas seems a long jump." In person, he said, Keable was the antithesis of his novels' striking directness:
It was for Simon Called Peter, a tale of a wartime romance between an English priest and a Red Cross nurse, that Keable acquired most of his notoriety. As well as its best-selling print editions, the story was adapted as a stage play by Jules Eckert Goodman and Edward Knoblock in 1924. The show enjoyed popular success in Chicago before moving on to New York.
A great deal of media coverage of Simon Called Peter concerned its involvement in a prominent United States court case, over the double murder in New Brunswick
, New Jersey
of Edward Wheeler Hall, a rector, and Elenor Mills, a married member of his congregation, with whom he had been conducting an affair. During their courtship Hall had presented Mills with copies of Simon Called Peter, which also featured a romance between a priest and a woman, and The Mother of All Living. John Sumner, the secretary of the Society for the Suppression of Vice, seized upon this fact and tried to have the books' American publisher arrested. He claimed that Simon Called Peter could be used to corrupt and seduce the innocent: "Published with a title savouring of religion and written by a clergyman, it had an innocent look which admitted it to society where the ordinary licentious novel could not circulate." A magistrate, declining the request to issue an arrest warrant against the publisher, nonetheless agreed that the book was "nasty" and "particularly objectionable because written by a clergyman."
Shortly afterwards, a Boston judge deemed the book obscene
, and fined a librarian (who protested that she had a long queue of patrons waiting to borrow the book) US$100 for circulating it. Keable himself professed surprise at the intensity of the reaction to the book, saying that his missionary and military experiences must have "blunted [his] perceptions as to what the general public felt." In response to the banning in Boston of another of his books, Numerous Treasure, he wrote to his editor George Putnam
that he had in the past month received fanmail from a bookseller, a request for his photograph from a girls' high school library, and "an intimation that I had been adopted as the literary patron of a class at an American university. I feel vaguely that Boston ought to be told."
The net effect of the Simon Called Peter controversy was to make Keable a celebrity. The book became so well known that F. Scott Fitzgerald
, who described the novel as "really immoral", gave it to protagonist Nick Carraway to read in his famous novel The Great Gatsby
, and had the character pronounce "Either it was terrible stuff or the whiskey distorted things, because it didn't make sense to me." The book's sequel, Recompense, was optioned as a film by Warner Brothers, starring Marie Prevost
and Monte Blue
. Keable himself found the screenplay so altered from the original text, he wryly proposed that he write another novel based on it. His first visit to the United States, in autumn 1924, was announced in the New York Times; he took in a production of the Simon Called Peter stage play in New York before returning to Polynesia via New Orleans, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. On his return, the Times printed a very lengthy letter from Keable on the subject of the origins of the cocktail
, headlining it "Robert Keable, in His Tahiti Retreat, Makes a Case for Englishmen, or Their "Greek and Roman Ancestors," as the Inventors."
The same paper had received Keable's second novel, 1922's The Mother of All Living, favourably; reviewer Louise Maundell Fields called it "Not only...better from an artistic point of view [than Simon Called Peter]... its general outlook is both steadier and more mature. [...] the book has in it so much that is well done and worth while that one does not feel inclined to carp at its comparatively few weaknesses." On the whole, other reviews were less favourable. The characters in both Peradventure and Recompense were criticised for lacking depth: reviewers said they served only as vehicles for conveying different theoretical points of view. A later book, 1927's Ann Decides, was dismissed succinctly by the Chicago Daily Tribune as "tosh".
P.W. Wilson, in a New York Times piece on contemporary religious literature two years after Keable had died, called Keable's life "a spiritual tragedy", and described his thinking as fundamentally contradictory:
Keable's distinction between the historical and the traditional Jesus, Wilson argued, was ultimately muddled and internally inconsistent, his verdicts on the illiberality of the contemporary church at odds with his own abiding conviction.
Late in the 20th century Keable received some revisionist attention. Simon Called Peter came back into print, with a recent edition published in 2008. Biographer Hugh Cecil, including Keable in his 1995 anthology of neglected Great War writers, concluded:
Missionary
A missionary is a member of a religious group sent into an area to do evangelism or ministries of service, such as education, literacy, social justice, health care and economic development. The word "mission" originates from 1598 when the Jesuits sent members abroad, derived from the Latin...
and priest in the Church of England
Church of England
The Church of England is the officially established Christian church in England and the Mother Church of the worldwide Anglican Communion. The church considers itself within the tradition of Western Christianity and dates its formal establishment principally to the mission to England by St...
. He resigned his ministry following his experiences in the First World War and caused a scandal with his 1921 novel Simon Called Peter, the tale of a priest's wartime affair with a young nurse. The book sold 600,000 copies in the 1920s alone, was referenced in The Great Gatsby
The Great Gatsby
The Great Gatsby is a novel by the American author F. Scott Fitzgerald. First published in1925, it is set on Long Island's North Shore and in New York City from spring to autumn of 1922....
, and was cited in a double murder investigation. Fêted in the United States, but critically less than well-received, Keable moved to Tahiti
Tahiti
Tahiti is the largest island in the Windward group of French Polynesia, located in the archipelago of the Society Islands in the southern Pacific Ocean. It is the economic, cultural and political centre of French Polynesia. The island was formed from volcanic activity and is high and mountainous...
where he continued to write, producing both novels and theological works, until his death at age 40 of a kidney complaint.
Keable was raised in Bedfordshire
Bedfordshire
Bedfordshire is a ceremonial county of historic origin in England that forms part of the East of England region.It borders Cambridgeshire to the north-east, Northamptonshire to the north, Buckinghamshire to the west and Hertfordshire to the south-east....
and educated at Magdalene College, Cambridge
Magdalene College, Cambridge
Magdalene College is a constituent college of the University of Cambridge, England.The college was founded in 1428 as a Benedictine hostel, in time coming to be known as Buckingham College, before being refounded in 1542 as the College of St Mary Magdalene...
. He entered a theological college after graduation and was ordained a priest in 1911. He spent the next several years as a missionary in Africa, stationed on Zanzibar
Zanzibar
Zanzibar ,Persian: زنگبار, from suffix bār: "coast" and Zangi: "bruin" ; is a semi-autonomous part of Tanzania, in East Africa. It comprises the Zanzibar Archipelago in the Indian Ocean, off the coast of the mainland, and consists of numerous small islands and two large ones: Unguja , and Pemba...
and in Basutoland
Basutoland
Basutoland or officially the Territory of Basutoland, was a British Crown colony established in 1884 after the Cape Colony's inability to control the territory...
, before returning to Europe as an army chaplain during the First World War. There, he met and fell in love with a young nurse, Elizabeth Buck, a development over which he eventually quit the Church of England and left his wife, Sybil. Returning to England after the war, Keable resigned his ministry and began to write novels: his first, 1921's Simon Called Peter
Simon Called Peter
Simon Called Peter is a novel by Robert Keable which was a best-seller in 1921. The title is a reference to Simon Peter the apostle and first Pope of the Catholic Church....
, became a runaway success and launched Keable into a life of literary celebrity. Increasingly disillusioned with the hypocrisies he saw in contemporary British life, he and Buck left Europe for Tahiti in 1922. The couple lived there happily until Buck's death in childbirth in 1924, after which Keable's health began to fade. He nonetheless struck up a later relationship with a Tahitian woman, Ina, with whom he had a son, and continued to publish novels until his death of a kidney condition in 1927.
Keable's most famous publication was his first novel, Simon Called Peter, but he produced a prodigious literary output, spanning theological
Theology
Theology is the systematic and rational study of religion and its influences and of the nature of religious truths, or the learned profession acquired by completing specialized training in religious studies, usually at a university or school of divinity or seminary.-Definition:Augustine of Hippo...
tracts through poetry to travel guides. Simon Called Peters sequel, Recompense, was made into a film, and his later novels all attracted substantial attention. His writings generally met with much greater popular than critical approbation, and Simon Called Peter was sufficiently incendiary to be banned. The book nonetheless became a contemporary best-seller.
Much of Keable's fiction contained autobiographical elements, often centring on his attitudes toward and experience of the Christian religious establishment. As well as these fictional explorations he produced a final, non-fiction work, The Great Galilean, outlining the religious views he developed during a lifetime's uneasy relationship to Anglicanism and Catholicism. He came to believe that the historical Jesus
Historical Jesus
The term historical Jesus refers to scholarly reconstructions of the 1st-century figure Jesus of Nazareth. These reconstructions are based upon historical methods including critical analysis of gospel texts as the primary source for his biography, along with consideration of the historical and...
bore little relationship to the Jesus of Christian tradition, and, in The Great Galilean, attempted to reconcile his ambivalence about the orthodoxies of the Church with his enduring belief in an all-loving God. Keable's views earned him many unfavourable reviews and the contempt of the church in which he had practised, but foreshadowed ideas of free love
Free love
The term free love has been used to describe a social movement that rejects marriage, which is seen as a form of social bondage. The Free Love movement’s initial goal was to separate the state from sexual matters such as marriage, birth control, and adultery...
that became prominent later in the 20th century.
Early life
Pavenham
Pavenham is a small village and civil parish on the River Great Ouse in the Bedford district of Bedfordshire, England, about north-west of Bedford. Village amenities consist of a pub, Village hall, tennis Club, and golf club...
, Bedfordshire. Robert Keable had a younger brother, Henry, who died of typhoid c.1918. The young Keable attended Whitgift School
Whitgift School, Grimsby
Whitgift School is a comprehensive co-educational secondary school on Crosland Road in Grimsby, North East Lincolnshire, England.-Admissions:...
in Grimsby, Lincolnshire, where he was nicknamed "Kibbles" and noted for his "fluent and facetious" contributions to the school paper, the Whitgiftian. Influenced by his father's piety he became an active lay preacher and member of the YMCA
YMCA
The Young Men's Christian Association is a worldwide organization of more than 45 million members from 125 national federations affiliated through the World Alliance of YMCAs...
as a teenager. Keable's was an austere, Anglican upbringing, the effect of which, his biographer Hugh Cecil has suggested, was to leave the young man industrious, somewhat preacherly in his writing style, and with a devoutness not particularly tied to the specific faith in which he'd been raised.
Keable went up to Magdalene College
Magdalene College, Cambridge
Magdalene College is a constituent college of the University of Cambridge, England.The college was founded in 1428 as a Benedictine hostel, in time coming to be known as Buckingham College, before being refounded in 1542 as the College of St Mary Magdalene...
, Cambridge, in 1905. His peers there included the future Everest explorer George Mallory
George Mallory
George Herbert Leigh Mallory was an English mountaineer who took part in the first three British expeditions to Mount Everest in the early 1920s....
and Arthur Tedder, 1st Baron Tedder
Arthur Tedder, 1st Baron Tedder
Marshal of the Royal Air Force Arthur William Tedder, 1st Baron Tedder, GCB was a senior British air force commander. During the First World War, he was a pilot and squadron commander in the Royal Flying Corps and he went on to serve as a senior officer in the Royal Air Force during the inter-war...
. Though his contemporaries described him as a quiet, devout student who initially associated only with other "religious-minded" men, he later became more sociable and rowed
Rowing (sport)
Rowing is a sport in which athletes race against each other on rivers, on lakes or on the ocean, depending upon the type of race and the discipline. The boats are propelled by the reaction forces on the oar blades as they are pushed against the water...
in the college second eight. He took a first in the History Tripos
Tripos
The University of Cambridge, England, divides the different kinds of honours bachelor's degree by Tripos , plural Triposes. The word has an obscure etymology, but may be traced to the three-legged stool candidates once used to sit on when taking oral examinations...
, graduating with his BA in 1908 and receiving his MA in 1914. At Magdalene he was a great friend of Arthur Grimble
Arthur Grimble
Sir Arthur Francis Grimble was a British Civil Servant and writer.After joining the Colonial Office, he became a cadet administrative officer in the Gilberts and became Resident Commissioner of the Gilbert and Ellice Islands colony in 1926.Specialist in the myths and oral traditions of Kiribati...
, the future commissioner of the Gilbert and Ellice Islands
Gilbert and Ellice Islands
The Gilbert and Ellice Islands were a British protectorate from 1892 and colony from 1916 until 1 January 1976, when the islands were divided into two different colonies which became independent nations shortly after...
. Grimble's daughter, in a biography of her father, described the undergraduate Keable as devout, "earnest, somewhat introspective" and deeply literary. She records that he spent his university vacations on missionary work. He is known also to have taught in East Africa under YMCA auspices, and to have climbed Mount Kilimanjaro
Mount Kilimanjaro
Kilimanjaro, with its three volcanic cones, Kibo, Mawenzi, and Shira, is a dormant volcano in Kilimanjaro National Park, Tanzania and the highest mountain in Africa at above sea level .-Geology:...
.
Among the most significant acquaintances Keable made at Cambridge were two brothers among the fellowship, Arthur
A. C. Benson
Arthur Christopher Benson was an English essayist, poet, and author and the 28th Master of Magdalene College, Cambridge....
and Hugh Benson
Robert Hugh Benson
Robert Hugh Benson was the youngest son of Edward White Benson and his wife, Mary...
. The Bensons were sons of a highly accomplished academic and religious family; their father, Edward White Benson
Edward White Benson
Edward White Benson was Archbishop of Canterbury from 1883 until his death.-Life:Edward White Benson was born in Highgate, Birmingham, the son of a Birmingham chemical manufacturer. He was educated at King Edward's School, Birmingham and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he graduated BA in 1852...
, was Archbishop of Canterbury
Archbishop of Canterbury
The Archbishop of Canterbury is the senior bishop and principal leader of the Church of England, the symbolic head of the worldwide Anglican Communion, and the diocesan bishop of the Diocese of Canterbury. In his role as head of the Anglican Communion, the archbishop leads the third largest group...
and their mother, Mary Sidgwick Benson
Mary Sidgwick Benson
Mary Sidgwick Benson was a Victorian hostess, notable as the wife of Edward Benson, who later became archbishop of Canterbury, and for her later relationship with Lucy Tait, daughter of the previous Archbishop of Canterbury, Archibald Campbell Tait...
, the sister of the philosopher Henry Sidgwick
Henry Sidgwick
Henry Sidgwick was an English utilitarian philosopher and economist. He was one of the founders and first president of the Society for Psychical Research, a member of the Metaphysical Society, and promoted the higher education of women...
, had set up a lesbian household with Lucy Tait (daughter of the previous archbishop of Canterbury) after her husband's death. In the years just before Keable came to Cambridge Hugh Benson (the inspiration for Keable's character "Father Vassall" in Peradventure (1921)) had departed from the Anglicanism of his upbringing in favour of the Roman Catholic church, being ordained a Catholic priest in 1904. According to Keable's contemporaries, the two met when Edouardo Ginistrelli, a neighbour on Keable's staircase, invited them both to lunch: "Keable ... fell under the spell of Fr Benson's winning personality," wrote James I. James, a college acquaintance of Keable's: "Keable's Anglican loyalty remained, but it was a new kind of loyalty. He spoke no more of Protestantism but always of Catholicism... in Chapel he now genuflected and crossed himself. A strange mystic element deep down in his being began to stir... I often suspected that Fr Benson had posed to this clever mind – for Keable was clever – the arguments that had recently brought himself to Catholicism." Benson was also a novelist and, under his influence, the sensory, aesthetic dimension of Keable's own writing (and of his faith) began to develop. Benson sensed in Keable an "inclination to Rome", but Keable elected for the Anglican priesthood, joining the theological college of Westcott House
Westcott House, Cambridge
Westcott House is a Church of England theological college based in Jesus Lane located in the centre of the university city of Cambridge in the United Kingdom.Its main activity is training people for ordained ministry in Anglican churches...
and serving as canon
Canon (priest)
A canon is a priest or minister who is a member of certain bodies of the Christian clergy subject to an ecclesiastical rule ....
at Bradford
Bradford
Bradford lies at the heart of the City of Bradford, a metropolitan borough of West Yorkshire, in Northern England. It is situated in the foothills of the Pennines, west of Leeds, and northwest of Wakefield. Bradford became a municipal borough in 1847, and received its charter as a city in 1897...
after completing his studies.
Priesthood
In 1911 Keable was ordained a priest of the Church of England at RiponRipon
Ripon is a cathedral city, market town and successor parish in the Borough of Harrogate, North Yorkshire, England, located at the confluence of two streams of the River Ure in the form of the Laver and Skell. The city is noted for its main feature the Ripon Cathedral which is architecturally...
. His friend Hugh Benson regretted that Keable had not turned to Catholicism, a decision Benson felt would lead Keable to ultimate disenchantment with the Church. In a letter he told Keable:
African missions
From 1912–1914 Keable was sent overseas with the Universities' Mission to Central AfricaUniversities' Mission to Central Africa
The Universities' Mission to Central Africa was a missionary society established by members of the Anglican Church within the universities of Oxford, Cambridge, Durham, and Dublin. It was firmly in the Anglo-Catholic tradition of the Church, and the first to devolve authority to a bishop in the...
, a decision perhaps intended to "save him from Rome". He served under Frank Weston
Frank Weston
Frank Weston was Anglican Bishop of Zanzibar from 1908 until his death 16 years later.-Biography:...
, the Bishop of Zanzibar, a staunch Anglican with whom Keable clashed: Keable objected to Weston's unorthodox methods for training black African priests; Weston, a vehement supporter of these priests, saw prejudice in Keable's views. Weston was to inspire the "Bishop of Moçambique" character in Keable's 1921 novel Peradventure. In Africa, Keable wrote his first two books: 1912's Darkness or Light, a history of the Universities' Mission to Central Africa, and the manuscript for City of the Dawn (published in 1915), a portrait of Zanzibar that "showed genuine religious fervour, as well as a characteristic sentimentality."
Keable returned to the UK in 1914 as a result of illness, precipitated perhaps by the rigour of service upon which Weston insisted in Zanzibar. He was offered a church posting in Sheffield but declined, fearing "the pull of Rome" if left within reach of Catholic influences in Britain. Instead, he made two attempts to enlist for armed service during the First World War; ill health thwarted both, so he returned to Africa for mission work, becoming rector of three parishes (including Leribe
Leribe
Leribe may refer to:* Hlotse or Leribe, market town in Lesotho founded in 1876* Leribe District, a district in Lesotho...
, Basutoland
Basutoland
Basutoland or officially the Territory of Basutoland, was a British Crown colony established in 1884 after the Cape Colony's inability to control the territory...
), under the diocese of the Bishop of Bloemfontein
Anglican Diocese of the Free State
The Anglican Diocese of the Free State is a diocese in the Anglican Church of Southern Africa.-History:The first service North of the Orange River to be taken by an Anglican clergyman was conducted in 1850 by Robert Gray, the first Bishop of Cape Town. In 1863, Edward Twells was consecrated the...
. He published some ten devotional works and works on missionary practice during this time, including The Loneliness of Christ, and a book of verse titled Songs of the narrow way. The damaging effects of the illness he had suffered were compounded by an assault while in the field: accounts vary, with some friends recalling that Keable received a blow to the head from a "powerful native", and others describing a gunshot wound to the thigh, inflicted by a (probably drunk or deranged) Mosutu. Keable's biographer Cecil has suggested that the whole incident may have been a fabrication of Keable's.
In 1915 Keable married Sybil Armitage at Durban
Durban
Durban is the largest city in the South African province of KwaZulu-Natal and the third largest city in South Africa. It forms part of the eThekwini metropolitan municipality. Durban is famous for being the busiest port in South Africa. It is also seen as one of the major centres of tourism...
. The pair had met in Bradford; Sybil was "passionately religious, with a strong social conscience and robust health... a big, handsome (some thought beautiful) woman with auburn hair." She was well suited to the demands of life as a missionary's wife, and inspired the character Edith in Keable's later novel Peradventure, but the pair were temperamentally ill-matched (and described by Keable's biographer Cecil as "sexually incompatible"). They had no children; Hugh Benson suspected that the marriage had been a gesture on Keable's part to render impossible the lingering prospect that he might become a monk.
First World War
Keable eventually achieved his wish of going to war in 1917, when a South African contingent was mustered for military service in France and Keable volunteered to go with them as chaplain. His experiences there were to form the basis for his first and most successful novel, Simon Called PeterSimon Called Peter
Simon Called Peter is a novel by Robert Keable which was a best-seller in 1921. The title is a reference to Simon Peter the apostle and first Pope of the Catholic Church....
. Appointed an army chaplain on 26 May 1917, Keable travelled to the Rouen
Rouen
Rouen , in northern France on the River Seine, is the capital of the Haute-Normandie region and the historic capital city of Normandy. Once one of the largest and most prosperous cities of medieval Europe , it was the seat of the Exchequer of Normandy in the Middle Ages...
sector with a Native Labour Contingent of 21,000 men. These men were paid £3 per month to unload supply ships and provide infrastructure support for military operations in Europe. As a chaplain, with the rank of captain, Keable was expected to be at the disposal of the army at large, and ministered to those seeing active infantry service as well as to labourers. Padres were formally required to remain behind the lines, but it is apparent that Keable nonetheless saw something of the realities of the frontline.
Like many padres during the First World War, Keable reassessed his approach to his congregation. The men to whom he ministered, he came to believe, cared nothing for the finer points of Anglican theological dispute: from the church they wanted only "entertainment and a barely spiritual form of practical Christianity." Keable argued as much openly, suggesting that the Protestant chaplaincy in France should be amalgamated into the operations of the YMCA, and that only the Roman Catholic padres – who seemed to have quite a different, more immediate relationship with their Celtic and Lancastrian companies – should remain. His public airing of these views attracted censure from the church (and particularly from Frank Weston, who was also serving), but reflected the openness that made him popular with the officers in France. A smoker, he was known to share whisky and sodas in the officers' mess, and – as does the title character in Simon Called Peter – to have become acquainted with a devoutly religious French prostitute.
Another transformative experience of Keable's war was his acquaintance with Elizabeth Buck, known as "Jolie", an 18-year-old nurse from a prominent British family (her ancestors included the Dukes of Rutland) who was driving trucks for the Canadian Lumber Corps when the two met. The pair began a lifelong affair, though Keable did not yet leave his wife. Instead, at the war's close, he returned to Leribe. He remained until 1919, torn by his increasing alienation from the church and his experiences during the war. There he wrote his first novel, Simon Called Peter, in an intensive 20-day spell: "I laid a parson's life bare", he said of his writing, "and didn't care a damn." At last, in 1919, Keable resigned his ministry and left the Anglican church.
Literary career
After leaving the church Keable and Sybil moved back to England, settling at West WrattingWest Wratting
West Wratting is a village and civil parish 10 miles southeast of Cambridge in Cambridgeshire. At above sea level, it can claim to be the highest village in Cambridgeshire, although the Gog Magog Hills are a little higher....
, Cambridgeshire, where both began to explore the Roman Catholic Church. Sybil converted and became a devout Catholic, but Keable also read works in contemporary philosophy and the books of Charles Darwin
Charles Darwin
Charles Robert Darwin FRS was an English naturalist. He established that all species of life have descended over time from common ancestry, and proposed the scientific theory that this branching pattern of evolution resulted from a process that he called natural selection.He published his theory...
, and appears briefly to have lost his faith altogether. He wrote, of the history of Christianity, "I can see creative evolution at work. What is behind it, I don't know. But I'm inclined to think that I do not believe it is anything which the old concept of God really covers."
To support the family Keable worked during 1921 as an assistant-master at Dulwich College
Dulwich College
Dulwich College is an independent school for boys in Dulwich, southeast London, England. The college was founded in 1619 by Edward Alleyn, a successful Elizabethan actor, with the original purpose of educating 12 poor scholars as the foundation of "God's Gift". It currently has about 1,600 boys,...
, and served the following year at Dunstable Grammar School
Dunstable Grammar School
Dunstable Grammar School was a grammar school in the market town of Dunstable, Bedfordshire, England. Opened in 1888, it was closed in 1971.-Foundation:...
. He continued to write: the manuscript for Simon Called Peter had found a publisher, Michael Sadleir at Constable
Constable & Robinson
Constable & Robinson Ltd. is an independent British book publisher of fiction and non-fiction works. Founded in Edinburgh in 1795 by Archibald Constable as Constable & Co. it is probably the oldest independent publisher in the English-speaking world still operating under the name of its...
, who liked its prospects and commissioned from Keable a second novel. He commenced The Mother of All Living, "an intense love-drama set in South Africa", which reflected his new interest in African traditional religion
African Traditional Religion
The traditional religions indigenous to Africa have, for most of their existence, been orally rather than scripturally transmitted. They are generally associated with animism. Most have ethno-based creations stories...
and featured a Bergsonian
Henri Bergson
Henri-Louis Bergson was a major French philosopher, influential especially in the first half of the 20th century. Bergson convinced many thinkers that immediate experience and intuition are more significant than rationalism and science for understanding reality.He was awarded the 1927 Nobel Prize...
concept of "life-force" as an alternative to theology.
Then Simon Called Peter was published, and met with astonishing success. The book reportedly sold over 600,000 copies during the 1920s, reaching a 66th edition by 1922. A largely autobiographical work, Simon Called Peter is the tale of a priest, Peter Graham, who has an affair in wartime France with a nurse named Julie. The title character almost abandons his faith for love, but experiences a direct revelation of Christ while watching a Catholic mass and is given up by his lover, who sees his sincerity. Its runaway popularity won Keable a level of celebrity: he spent a lot of time in London and took up again with Buck, who was now usually known as "Betty" (she, by her token, called Keable "Bill"). The two met often at Gwen Otter's salon at No. 1 Ralston Street, in Chelsea
Chelsea, London
Chelsea is an area of West London, England, bounded to the south by the River Thames, where its frontage runs from Chelsea Bridge along the Chelsea Embankment, Cheyne Walk, Lots Road and Chelsea Harbour. Its eastern boundary was once defined by the River Westbourne, which is now in a pipe above...
, near to where Keable had lodgings; they made many friends, though refrained from fully overt displays of couplehood out of deference to Buck's distressed parents and Keable's wife. At this time, Keable appears to have become, in some measure, a proponent of open relationship
Open relationship
An open relationship is an interpersonal relationship in which the parties want to be together but agree to a form of a non-monogamous relationship. This means that they agree that a romantic or sexual relationship with another person is accepted, permitted, or tolerated...
s and free love
Free love
The term free love has been used to describe a social movement that rejects marriage, which is seen as a form of social bondage. The Free Love movement’s initial goal was to separate the state from sexual matters such as marriage, birth control, and adultery...
. He concluded that Buck had a right to pursue relationships with other men, though there is no firm evidence that she did, and "that a warm and spontaneous sexual nature, far from being in conflict with Christian love, was in fact a manifestation of it."
Keable's developing attitudes and relationship with "Betty" disgusted his wife, Sybil, but as a devout Catholic she refused to divorce. This left Keable unable to marry Buck, and contributed to a growing sense on his part of alienation from English society. At last, in 1922, he managed legally to separate from his wife. He took up the suggestion of former college friend Arthur Grimble, by then a colonial administrator in the Ellis Islands, that he visit the South Pacific, a fashionable destination for 1920s Europeans. To Keable the South Seas appeared to offer escape from the hypocrisies of British society, as well as furnishing a climate better suited to his never-hearty constitution. In 1922 Keable and Buck sailed aboard the Bendigo for the South Pacific via Australia, where Keable undertook a book tour, giving lectures in which he broadcast his new sexual ethics: that unmarried couples in love could have deeply moral relationships, while loveless spouses who stayed together for convention's sake were committing acts of deep immorality. His views scandalised the contemporary press, but Frank Weston noted in correspondence that Keable as a "shipwrecked priest" made quite a useful cautionary tale for novices.
Tahiti
Keable was to remain resident in Tahiti for the rest of his life. He wrote once of his regret that the Tahitians had not succeeded in convertingReligious conversion
Religious conversion is the adoption of a new religion that differs from the convert's previous religion. Changing from one denomination to another within the same religion is usually described as reaffiliation rather than conversion.People convert to a different religion for various reasons,...
William Ellis, a nineteenth-century Christian missionary sent there to attempt to proselytise them. "Bill and Betty" settled at first in Paul Gauguin
Paul Gauguin
Eugène Henri Paul Gauguin was a leading French Post-Impressionist artist. He was an important figure in the Symbolist movement as a painter, sculptor, print-maker, ceramist, and writer...
's former home at Punaavia. The house was quite luxurious, overlooking a bay with views of Moorea
Moorea
Moʻorea is a high island in French Polynesia, part of the Society Islands, 17 km northwest of Tahiti. Its position is . Moʻorea means "yellow lizard" in Tahitian...
island. Buck drove a Dodge
Dodge
Dodge is a United States-based brand of automobiles, minivans, and sport utility vehicles, manufactured and marketed by Chrysler Group LLC in more than 60 different countries and territories worldwide....
and enjoyed Tahiti's ample supplies of cheap French wine; Keable "brooded on Gauguin's gesture against spiritual suffocation", and eventually moved the household further inland, to a native-style house in the wilder surrounds of Teahuahu, near Papeari
Papeari
Papeari is a village on the south coast of Tahiti. It is located in Tahiti-nui district, around 32 miles from Papeete.-History:Papeari is attested in some accounts as Tahiti's oldest village....
. The couple made friends with the Swedish artist Paul Engdahl. Keable continued to write copiously, adding to his oeuvre the novel Recompense, a sequel to Simon Called Peter. He undertook several book tours of the United States and spent his spare time answering fanmail, swimming, and sailing.
Then, in 1924, Buck fell pregnant. The couple agreed that she should return to England for better healthcare during the birth, and she went there to set up a home with her mother's help. In early November 1924 she gave birth prematurely to a son, Anthony, and a few days later died of poisoning from chloroform
Chloroform
Chloroform is an organic compound with formula CHCl3. It is one of the four chloromethanes. The colorless, sweet-smelling, dense liquid is a trihalomethane, and is considered somewhat hazardous...
administered against the pain of delivery. The grief-stricken Keable's own health worsened and he was advised to return to Tahiti; the baby, too weak to travel, was left in England with Jack and Rita Elliott, friends of the couple's since the Ralston Street salon days. The Elliotts were eventually to adopt him.
Keable remained in Tahiti, his health worsening. He suffered weight loss, diabetes, high blood pressure and fever, all stemming from a kidney illness. Nonetheless, he completed the novel Numerous Treasure, which he had begun before Buck's death; the bittersweet tale of a Polynesian
Polynesians
The Polynesian peoples is a grouping of various ethnic groups that speak Polynesian languages, a branch of the Oceanic languages within the Austronesian languages, and inhabit Polynesia. They number approximately 1,500,000 people...
woman who shared her name with a cocktail and a brand of cigarettes was a commercial success, and has been considered a valuable portrait of early-century Tahitian life. His health and spirits rallied in the years after Buck's death: he completed a travel book, Tahiti, Isle of Dreams, and a book tour of the United States and Europe. On returning to Tahiti he struck up a relationship with a mixed-race islander named Ina, and made many new friends including the writers Alec Waugh
Alec Waugh
Alexander Raban Waugh , was a British novelist, the elder brother of the better-known Evelyn Waugh and son of Arthur Waugh, author, literary critic, and publisher...
(elder brother of Evelyn
Evelyn Waugh
Arthur Evelyn St. John Waugh , known as Evelyn Waugh, was an English writer of novels, travel books and biographies. He was also a prolific journalist and reviewer...
), who had been inspired to visit Tahiti by Numerous Treasure, Zane Gray, and James Norman Hall
James Norman Hall
James Norman Hall was an American author best known for the novel Mutiny on the Bounty with co-author Charles Nordhoff.-Biography:Hall was born in Colfax, Iowa, where he attended the local schools...
. Waugh described the Keable of this period "reclined among cushions, clad only in a pareo
Pareo
The pāreu or pareo is the Cook Islands and Tahitian word for a wraparound skirt. Originally it was used only to refer to women's skirts, as men wore a loincloth, called a maro. Nowadays the term is applied to any piece of cloth worn wrapped around the body, worn by males or females...
, while his Tahitian princess, bare-shouldered and bare-footed, her black hair falling to her waist and a white flower behind her ear, glided negligently about the house" – and yet noted that, on suggesting a cup of tea, Keable's voice still took on "the parsonical intonation with which fifteen years earlier he had summoned the parish children to a Sunday school treat."
1927's Lighten Our Darkness (or Ann Decides) was his last important novel. The tale of a Catholic priest restored to faith by a woman's love was, however, poorly received, and the follow-up Madness of Monty, a "kindly, innocuous comedy", went over worse still. Instead, helped by James Norman Hall to overcome his failing eyesight, Keable devoted his attention to The Great Galilean, a non-fictional account of the historical Jesus
Historical Jesus
The term historical Jesus refers to scholarly reconstructions of the 1st-century figure Jesus of Nazareth. These reconstructions are based upon historical methods including critical analysis of gospel texts as the primary source for his biography, along with consideration of the historical and...
and his relationship to the Jesus of religious tradition.
Away from his writing, he and Ina conceived a child: Ina gave birth to a son, named Henry Reheatoa (meaning "glorious warrior"), with whom Keable was delighted and to whom he bequeathed all his Tahitian properties. In November 1927 he initiated formal divorce proceedings against Sybil in an attempt to legitimise this son.
In December 1927 Keable contracted a worsened kidney infection, became septic and delirious, and, on 22 December, died at home. The New York Times obituary identified the illness that killed him as Bright's disease
Bright's disease
Bright's disease is a historical classification of kidney diseases that would be described in modern medicine as acute or chronic nephritis. The term is no longer used, as diseases are now classified according to their more fully understood causes....
; the term was used to refer to a number of nephritic
Nephritis
Nephritis is inflammation of the nephrons in the kidneys. The word "nephritis" was imported from Latin, which took it from Greek: νεφρίτιδα. The word comes from the Greek νεφρός - nephro- meaning "of the kidney" and -itis meaning "inflammation"....
kidney conditions.
Though, according to acquaintances, many of his friends had heard nothing from him since his departure for Tahiti, his will made provision for a scholarship at Magdalene and named the college as his residuary legatee. His literary assets at death were valued at £5,007. Though Keable received a Protestant burial in Papeete, some accounts suggest that in the last weeks of his life he formally converted to Catholicism. Other commentators suggest the pagan sentiments he expressed about the birth of his new son as a riposte to social convention tend to indicate otherwise. Hugh Cecil argues that, at his death, Keable most likely just became "able to reconcile his two ideals, romantic-erotic and religious, and could die peacefully accepting the rituals he loved."
Religious views
The religious views Keable developed after leaving the Church of England influenced his novels; he eventually articulated his own theologyTheology
Theology is the systematic and rational study of religion and its influences and of the nature of religious truths, or the learned profession acquired by completing specialized training in religious studies, usually at a university or school of divinity or seminary.-Definition:Augustine of Hippo...
in his final book, The Great Galilean, a theological work. The unorthodoxy of his views was not always well received. A reviewer of his novel Peradventure observed "Peradventure starts as a Church of England tract, becomes what would appear to be a Roman Catholic tract, and before the end is reached the reader is in doubt as to just what sort of tract it is."
His last book, The Great Galilean, has been characterised by one biographer as Keable's attempt "to renconcile his love of Jesus with his failure to believe in him as a God." The book sought to distinguish the "historical Jesus" of record from the "traditional Jesus" of church worship. The historical Jesus, Keable said, was so poorly known that there survived too little information for a three-line obituary. Instead, the figure that Christians worshipped was a "traditional Jesus", recorded in the Gospels from an oral tradition that was not really biographical. This "traditional Jesus" became a "literary Jesus", the central figure of the four gospels, and it is on this figure – quite distinct from the actual, historical Jesus – that the contemporary church centred. Keable sought to criticise the attitude in the contemporary church toward "traditional Jesus", given how much of the rest of "traditional" religion Protestantism had discarded. However, Keable was at pains to stress that the "traditional" Jesus should not be seen as an imposture, or something to be discarded. The ahistoricity of the traditional Jesus, he said, should not be a reason to leave the church. Without this traditional Jesus, he predicted, Western civilisation would fade and fall. He was, then, critical of the specific ways in which the contemporary church construed Jesus, in its attempts to conflate the traditional Jesus with historical Jesus, which Keable considered impossible. He blamed these actions of the church for the declining numbers of worshippers, and accused it of draining Christianity of profundity by relying too heavily on rationalism and rigid structure.
Though he believed that the historical Jesus was barely known, Keable nonetheless devoted much attention in The Last Galilean to trying to understand the figure. He emphasised the humanity of historical Jesus, who, he wrote, had shared humanity's ignorance – though had also been blessed with an extraordinarily undistorted mind. He wrote of a Jesus tolerant – even fond – of sinners, and one who, understanding the importance of love and sex to the average man, advocated love as the most important thing, above any church rule or regulation. This Jesus was a great prophet of free love, associated and in harmony with a "spirit of all life".
The Great Galilean was not well received. The New York Times reviewer called it hopelessly muddled, finding Keable's claims about the unknowability of Jesus contrary to his efforts to understand and worship him: "Frankly, we do not know what to make of it. We can only suppose that street preaching at Cambridge, and even climbing Kilimanjaro, are not conducive to logic."
Critical reception
Keable's novels won him immense international popularity and intense controversy. His novels were equated with Mrs Humphry WardMary Augusta Ward
Mary Augusta Ward née Arnold; , was a British novelist who wrote under her married name as Mrs Humphry Ward.- Early life:...
's Robert Elsmere
Robert Elsmere
Robert Elsmere is a novel by Mrs. Humphrey Ward published in 1888. It was immediately successful, quickly selling over a million copies and gaining the admiration of Henry James...
, a similarly scandalous tale of religious doubt among the clergy published 40 years earlier: H.D.A. Major, editor of the Modern Churchman magazine, made this comparison with respect to Keable's Peradventure, noting "It is slighter, but it has need to be. The twentieth century novel reader is intellectually and morally lighter than the nineteenth." Reporting his death, the Melbourne Argus attributed the best-selling popularity of Keable's novels to the licentiousness of their contents: "they have no literary value". His former college acquaintance James later wrote that "his friends sought to dissuade him from publication. The transition from the beautiful book on The Loneliness of Christ (1914) – of his Central African period – to Simon Called Peter (1921) came as a great shock to all who had known and loved him in earlier days." Where Rosemary Grimble calls Keable's novels "splendidly erotic", a Birmingham News correspondent in Birmingham
Birmingham, Alabama
Birmingham is the largest city in Alabama. The city is the county seat of Jefferson County. According to the 2010 United States Census, Birmingham had a population of 212,237. The Birmingham-Hoover Metropolitan Area, in estimate by the U.S...
, Alabama, accused Keable of "fashioning abnormalities". Other critics called his success "undeserved" and attributed it to prurience on the part of his readers. Reviewers also suggested that the contrast between Keable's ecclesiastical background and the frank, often sexual, content of his novels attracted curiosity in itself. A Time columnist, "J.F.", expressed the fascination of this disconnect overtly, responding to a piece titled "The censorship of thought" that Keable had contributed to a 1922 volume, Nonsenseorship (sic), after Simon Called Peters publication had made him notorious. "Surely, here is a modern personality worth the study of the psychologists," J.F. wrote, noting the romance of Keable's unusual circumstances: "From a quiet English clergyman to the author of a sensational best-seller who has taken up his permanent residence in the South Seas seems a long jump." In person, he said, Keable was the antithesis of his novels' striking directness:
He does not impress one as a radical gentleman. There is nothing to suggest the resigned clergyman, author of books marked by their sex frankness and melodrama. In fact, his scholarly bearing and gentleness mark him rather as the country curate, who should be acting as a character in a novel by May SinclairMay SinclairMay Sinclair was the pseudonym of Mary Amelia St. Clair , a popular British writer who wrote about two dozen novels, short stories and poetry. She was an active suffragist, and member of the Woman Writers' Suffrage League...
and passing out crumpets to maiden ladies in a decorous drawing-room instead of writing of Tahitian damsels as he has done in his new novel, Numerous Treasure.
It was for Simon Called Peter, a tale of a wartime romance between an English priest and a Red Cross nurse, that Keable acquired most of his notoriety. As well as its best-selling print editions, the story was adapted as a stage play by Jules Eckert Goodman and Edward Knoblock in 1924. The show enjoyed popular success in Chicago before moving on to New York.
A great deal of media coverage of Simon Called Peter concerned its involvement in a prominent United States court case, over the double murder in New Brunswick
New Brunswick
New Brunswick is one of Canada's three Maritime provinces and is the only province in the federation that is constitutionally bilingual . The provincial capital is Fredericton and Saint John is the most populous city. Greater Moncton is the largest Census Metropolitan Area...
, New Jersey
New Jersey
New Jersey is a state in the Northeastern and Middle Atlantic regions of the United States. , its population was 8,791,894. It is bordered on the north and east by the state of New York, on the southeast and south by the Atlantic Ocean, on the west by Pennsylvania and on the southwest by Delaware...
of Edward Wheeler Hall, a rector, and Elenor Mills, a married member of his congregation, with whom he had been conducting an affair. During their courtship Hall had presented Mills with copies of Simon Called Peter, which also featured a romance between a priest and a woman, and The Mother of All Living. John Sumner, the secretary of the Society for the Suppression of Vice, seized upon this fact and tried to have the books' American publisher arrested. He claimed that Simon Called Peter could be used to corrupt and seduce the innocent: "Published with a title savouring of religion and written by a clergyman, it had an innocent look which admitted it to society where the ordinary licentious novel could not circulate." A magistrate, declining the request to issue an arrest warrant against the publisher, nonetheless agreed that the book was "nasty" and "particularly objectionable because written by a clergyman."
Shortly afterwards, a Boston judge deemed the book obscene
Obscenity
An obscenity is any statement or act which strongly offends the prevalent morality of the time, is a profanity, or is otherwise taboo, indecent, abhorrent, or disgusting, or is especially inauspicious...
, and fined a librarian (who protested that she had a long queue of patrons waiting to borrow the book) US$100 for circulating it. Keable himself professed surprise at the intensity of the reaction to the book, saying that his missionary and military experiences must have "blunted [his] perceptions as to what the general public felt." In response to the banning in Boston of another of his books, Numerous Treasure, he wrote to his editor George Putnam
George P. Putnam
George Palmer Putnam was an American publisher, author and explorer. Known for his marriage to and being the widower of Amelia Earhart, he had also achieved fame as one of the most successful promoters in the United States during the 1930s.-Early life:Born in Rye, New York, he was the son of John...
that he had in the past month received fanmail from a bookseller, a request for his photograph from a girls' high school library, and "an intimation that I had been adopted as the literary patron of a class at an American university. I feel vaguely that Boston ought to be told."
The net effect of the Simon Called Peter controversy was to make Keable a celebrity. The book became so well known that F. Scott Fitzgerald
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was an American author of novels and short stories, whose works are the paradigm writings of the Jazz Age, a term he coined himself. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest American writers of the 20th century. Fitzgerald is considered a member of the "Lost...
, who described the novel as "really immoral", gave it to protagonist Nick Carraway to read in his famous novel The Great Gatsby
The Great Gatsby
The Great Gatsby is a novel by the American author F. Scott Fitzgerald. First published in1925, it is set on Long Island's North Shore and in New York City from spring to autumn of 1922....
, and had the character pronounce "Either it was terrible stuff or the whiskey distorted things, because it didn't make sense to me." The book's sequel, Recompense, was optioned as a film by Warner Brothers, starring Marie Prevost
Marie Prevost
Marie Prevost was a Canadian-born actress of the early days of cinema. During her twenty year career, she made 121 silent and talking pictures.-Early life:...
and Monte Blue
Monte Blue
Monte Blue was a movie actor who began his career as a romantic leading man in the silent film era, and later progressed to character roles....
. Keable himself found the screenplay so altered from the original text, he wryly proposed that he write another novel based on it. His first visit to the United States, in autumn 1924, was announced in the New York Times; he took in a production of the Simon Called Peter stage play in New York before returning to Polynesia via New Orleans, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. On his return, the Times printed a very lengthy letter from Keable on the subject of the origins of the cocktail
Cocktail
A cocktail is an alcoholic mixed drink that contains two or more ingredients—at least one of the ingredients must be a spirit.Cocktails were originally a mixture of spirits, sugar, water, and bitters. The word has come to mean almost any mixed drink that contains alcohol...
, headlining it "Robert Keable, in His Tahiti Retreat, Makes a Case for Englishmen, or Their "Greek and Roman Ancestors," as the Inventors."
The same paper had received Keable's second novel, 1922's The Mother of All Living, favourably; reviewer Louise Maundell Fields called it "Not only...better from an artistic point of view [than Simon Called Peter]... its general outlook is both steadier and more mature. [...] the book has in it so much that is well done and worth while that one does not feel inclined to carp at its comparatively few weaknesses." On the whole, other reviews were less favourable. The characters in both Peradventure and Recompense were criticised for lacking depth: reviewers said they served only as vehicles for conveying different theoretical points of view. A later book, 1927's Ann Decides, was dismissed succinctly by the Chicago Daily Tribune as "tosh".
P.W. Wilson, in a New York Times piece on contemporary religious literature two years after Keable had died, called Keable's life "a spiritual tragedy", and described his thinking as fundamentally contradictory:
"His mind, like rock, reveals by strata the volcanic and other experiences to which it has been subjected."
Keable's distinction between the historical and the traditional Jesus, Wilson argued, was ultimately muddled and internally inconsistent, his verdicts on the illiberality of the contemporary church at odds with his own abiding conviction.
Late in the 20th century Keable received some revisionist attention. Simon Called Peter came back into print, with a recent edition published in 2008. Biographer Hugh Cecil, including Keable in his 1995 anthology of neglected Great War writers, concluded: