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Robert Keable (6 March 1887 – 22 December 1927) 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, 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 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. ==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.〔Cecil (1995) p.158〕 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.〔James (2000) p.67〕〔 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))〔Cecil (1995) p.171〕 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.〔Cecil (1995) p.160〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Robert Keable」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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