Last week I went to see the Chichester version of the musical South Pacific, currently playing at Sadler’s Wells. It was a fantastic performance which I hugely enjoyed. Afterwards  I realised there were some clear similarities between the plot of South Pacific and Robert Keable’s life. Watching the play made me think about the reaction of his family and friends to his behaviour in Tahiti.

South Pacific

South Pacific is centred on a love affair between Nellie Forbush – a US nurse from Little Rock, and a Frenchman, Emile de Becque – a plantation owner. Nellie has fallen in love with Emile – who wouldn’t when he is played by Julian Ovenden and sings Some Enchanted Evening so magnificently – and is wondering whether to marry him. Over the course of the first half Nellie learns more and more about Emile. She forgives him for killing a man – a bully – back when he was young. She can accept his politics – he believes in universal freedom. However, she is horrified to discover that he was once married to a Polynesian woman and that two adorable young half-Polynesian children are his. Her deep-seated racist beliefs force her to run away from him.

The second main story line concerns Lieutenant Cable. He has been sent to the island to take part in a secret spy mission. Before the mission he is persuaded to visit a near-by island, Bali Ha’I, and falls in love with Bloody Mary’s daughter Liat. When Bloody Mary suggests that Cable should marry Liat and that she will have his babies, Cable, aware of his family’s prejudices, runs away from her. He sings the powerful song You've got to be CarefullyTaught which includes the lines:

You've got to be taught, to be afraid
Of people whose eyes are oddly made
And people whose skin is a different shade

And:

You've got to be taught before it's too late
Before you are six or seven or eight
To hate all the people your relatives hate

Robert Keable

In my book I tell the story of the life of Robert Keable. During the last two years of his life, living in Tahiti, he met and fell in love with a Polynesian princess – Ina Salmon. She moved in to his house to live with him, and together they had a son – Henry.

I have called my book Utterly Immoral, partly because that is how F Scott Fitzgerald described Keable’s novel Simon Called Peter, but also because I wanted to question the extent to which Keable himself was considered immoral.

Reaction

It seems clear to me that Rodgers and Hammerstein wanted to present Nellie and Lieutenant Cable as typical Americans, taught to hold racist beliefs from an early age. Nellie, the immature and incurably greem, cockeyed optimist, had been bought up to believe interracial marriage was unacceptable. Cable was only too aware, coming from a wealthy family and with a Princeton education that his family and friends would never allow him to marry a Polynesian woman. The musical came out in 1949 at a time when there was segregation throughout America. Although the message of the musical is that racism is wrong (and Nellie does come to see this) the backdrop to the story is that the majority of white Americans at that time held those views.

The world was no different twenty years earlier when Keable met and fell in love with Ina Salmon.  Certainly, back in England, many of Keable’s family and friends would have been shocked and horrified if they knew he had had a child with Ina. Indeed, the truth only really came out after he had died.

Keable’s greatest crime

Keable became an international celebrity in the 1920s, feted by many for his frankness and willingness to take a pop at the hypocrisy prevalent in society. But his behaviour was deemed unacceptable by many of his family and acquaintances and one of the reasons he fled to Tahiti was to escape criticism.

What, I wonder, was considered, by society in the 1920s, his greatest crime? Murder? Adultery? Behaviour unbecoming of a priest? Having a child with Ina Salmon?

Keable didn’t actually murder anyone, but a former friend did think he had. The friend wrote:

I once heard… that he had left the Mission and was serving in the Diocese of Basutoland, where it was said that he killed a white man who was ill-treating a Native. This, though probably an exaggerated tale, I can well believe, for he was always on the side of the ‘under-dog’

The friend did not seem to be overly upset about the possible crime, since Keable, like Emile, would have murdered a bully.

Keable did commit adultery, sleeping with Jolie during the war, when married to Sybil. But in the patriarchal society of the day this was not seen as too unacceptable, even in the knowledge that he was a priest at the time, and certainly his new friends (made after Simon Called Peter was published) did not condemn him.

Keable drank too much and committed adultery before he left the priesthood but his fellow Church of England priests seemed most concerned that he would become a Roman Catholic. He was ostracised by the Church but made many new friends who did not care what he had done as a priest.

The one story that was covered up was Keable’s relationship with Ina Salmon. After his death his new friends, away from Tahiti,  did everything they could to keep the story of the relationship secret. There was no mention of Ina or of their new son in any of his obituaries and attempts by Ina to come to England were rebuffed.

I have often wondered what would have become of Keable if he had lived to a ripe old age, instead of dying aged 40. I fear he would have faced the same prejudices as those experienced by Nellie and Cable in South Pacific. Like Nellie he could live the island life for as long as he wanted but it is doubtful that he would have been welcomed home in England.