In my book Utterly Immoral I look at the story of the writing, publication, and global reception of Robert Keable’s 1920s bestseller Simon Called Peter. I am interested in seeing how new readers react to the book, and so enjoyed a podcast by the Book Fight team Mike Ingram and Tom McAllister recorded back in 2020. You can hear their discussion of Simon Called Peter at https://bookfightpod.com/2020/01/13/episode-309-winter-of-wayback-1921/. (The relevant bits on Simon Called Peter are from 10:40 to 25:30, from 26:30 to 37:00, and 49:30 to 51:45)

The key questions they ask are: ‘Will Keable’s book stand the test of time? Or will its moral conundrums seem kind of laughably quaint to a couple 21^st century readers?’

They begin by pointing out that there are two main moral conundrums facing the eponymous hero. The first is whether he should remain in the Church of England or become a Roman Catholic. Although they recognise that many have faced the same question, they do suggest it is sad that such a seemingly trivial matter can have such a large impact on someone’s life, (asking whether there are really such big differences between the two Churches?).

The second, and perhaps the key moral dilemma of the book, and Robert Keable’s life, was should an engaged priest (or in his case married priest) have an affair? This, Mike and Tom point out, isn’t seen as too big a deal in the 21ct century. As Mike says:

I guess you shouldn’t cheat on your wife during a foreign conflict, but it is possible that he met this woman and really loved her, and that he was married to someone he wasn’t really in to, and I feel a lot of people especially then got married young, and not to people they felt super close with, and maybe he had never experienced real love.

If everyone else had been so reasonable in the 1920s Robert Keable would have led a far less stressful life.

Like all conversations there were a number of times when I wanted to join in and explain things that bemused or annoyed Mike and Tom. One example. Mike discusses how mislead he felt by the Author’s Note at the beginning of his copy of Simon Called Peter which discussed the author’s desire to show what really happened during the war. Mike had assumed this meant Keable was going to write graphically about the horrors of war when in fact the book barely mentioned fighting. The Author’s Note was written specially for the American edition of Simon Called Peter following the damning reviews of the English edition. These reviews suggested the depiction of excessive drinking and womanising behind the front in France during the Great War were false and besmirched the memory of the brave soldiers who went to France.  Keable wanted to use the Author’s Note to point out that the depiction of life in Le Havre during the war was very real.

Overall, I found Mike and Tom’s discussion very entertaining. They knew the book had been banned in Boston and mocked in The Great Gatsby, so they had expected it to be very bawdy and full of ‘lots of salacious sex stuff’. They wonder whether the fact they were in no way shocked was because everyone had ‘become so hardened and desensitised with our Grand Theft Auto and our Playboy magazines and Red Dead Redemption.’ They discuss why people in the 1920s had been so scandalised by the novel and decided it was either ‘the priest thing’, or the fact that women in the book unapologetically discussed sex.

The 1920s army slang confused them. They didn’t know that British infantry in those days were called Tommies, and it took Tom 15 pages to realise that one of the female characters was named Tommy. ‘Why did he name her that? A really frustrating choice.’

You will have to listen to the podcast to find out how many bathtubs full of gin they gave the book, but Mike and Tom were certainly intrigued by Robert Keable, suggesting he was ahead of his time about opening up restrictions on relationships. Hopefully enough other people are interested in him to buy a copy of Utterly Immoral!