Robert Keable
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 kidney disease.
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 began a relationship with a young nurse, Grace Eileen Joly Beresford 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 began 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 Peter's 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.
Early life
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 Croydon, Surrey, 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 after her husband's death. In the years just before Keable came to Cambridge Hugh Benson 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 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.
Priesthood
In 1911 Keable was ordained a priest of the Church of England at Ripon. 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 to 1914 Keable was sent overseas with the Universities' Mission to Central Africa, 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, 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, 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 local Mosutu man. 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 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. 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 Peter. 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, 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 war experience of Keable's was his acquaintance with Grace Eileen Joly Beresford Buck, known as "Jolie", an 18-year-old nurse from a prominent British family 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 intense 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.