Utterly Immoral

The title of my book title comes from a book review by F Scott Fitzgerald. He wrote:

There is a recent piece of trash entitled Simon Called Peter which seems to me utterly immoral

Fitzgerald had made this comment in his review of Sherwood Anderson’s Of Many Marriages in The New York Herald in March 1923. By then the ‘recent piece of trash’ would have been known to nearly everyone who read his review since Simon Called Peter sold more copies in America in 1922 than any other novel, (according to an article in The New York Times in 1933).

Calling Simon Called Peter ‘utterly immoral’ was not a throwaway line. Fitzgerald repeated it three months later in an essay on censorship in which he wrote about ‘really immoral books like Simon Called Peter’.

At the time Fitzgerald was making the comments he was writing The Great Gatsby. He began that novel in 1922, wrote steadily through 1923, finished the first draft in April 1924 and eventually published it in in April 1925. He always intended to reference Simon Called Peter in The Great Gatsby. I explain why in the final chapter of my book. What is certain is that the reference was not complimentary. Nick Carraway, the novel’s narrator, says in the second chapter:

I sat down discreetly in the living-room and read a chapter of Simon Called Peter – either it was terrible stuff or the whisky distorted things, because it didn’t make any sense to me.

I have been researching Robert Keable and his writing for many years and have enough material to write two or three volumes about his life and work. However, I decided to try and keep my book down to about 80,000 words and to concentrate on the writing, publication, and reception to Simon Called Peter and to intercut that with a biography of Robert Keable. The full title of my book is: Utterly Immoral. Robert Keable and his sensational novel. The title works as a statement to describe Simon Called Peter, but it also works as question to describe Robert Keable.

Was Robert Keable utterly immoral?

It is quite a charge to call someone utterly immoral, but that was the opinion of some of the people who knew of or wrote about Robert Keable. Doris Trewolla-Hulme, Sybil Keable’s niece, wrote to Hugh Cecil:

When I was a child Uncle Bob was surrounded by an aura of taboo and labelled a cad, the black sheep of the family and never mentioned.

My favourite account of his life comes in a letter written in 1990 by a former resident of Hltose, in Lesotho, to a friend. In it he says:

In 1917 he went overseas as an army Padre: on his return his “high Church faith” seems to have vanished. The tale goes that he organized a Xmas nativity play among the native parishioners at Leribe and is said to have seduced the girl who was acting the Virgin Mary. He was duly defrocked from the church; became a Catholic, was sacked for trouble with a choir mistress and, by this time was making a small fortune from his novels Simon Called Peter, The Mother of all Living etc. He bought an island in the S. Pacific where he had a harem of hula hula girls and died, reportedly of over indulgence in 1927 at the early age of 40.

Now if all that was true then the ‘utterly immoral’ charge would certainly stick. You will need to read my book to see how true this description is and to also decide how immoral he actually was.