Mr. Blue
By Myles Connolly

144 Pages • $11.95

Mr. Blue
By Myles Connolly

About the Author  •  Links about the Author

Myles Connolly’s 1928 novel Mr. Blue is a Roaring Twenties restaging of the story of St. Francis. The concise novel, 128 pages in the Loyola Classics edition, does not offer much excitement in the way of plot or story. Instead, it is all about the charisma, the mystery, and the challenge of a Francis-like character named J. Blue.

The novel is framed as the memoir of an unnamed friend of Mr. Blue’s, a sober and somewhat skeptical man of business, who encounters the protagonist at various times in Boston and New York. Blue is an immensely likable “holy fool.” He loves brass bands, kites, bright colors, parties, and movies. For a time he lives in a packing crate on the roof of a skyscraper in New York and amuses himself by setting colorful balloons adrift over the city. Blue thumbs his nose at the establishment. He wants nothing to do with the conventional wisdom or the usual expectations of how talented young men should conduct their lives.

Above all, Blue is a radical Christian. He embraces poverty. He inherits a fortune and promptly gives it away. He begs for his food and lodging. He hangs out with alcoholics and drifters. He spends many hours in fervent prayer before a large cross in his attic room. He speaks of God constantly to anyone who will listen, and even to some who won’t.

Much of the pleasure of the novel comes from listening to Blue’s exuberant, often paradoxical words about Christ:

“His eyes were glowing in the dark. He threw his hands up toward the stars: ‘My hands, my feet, my poor little brain, my eyes, my ears, all matter more than the whole sweep of these constellations!’ he burst out. ‘God himself, the God to whom this whole universe-specked display is as nothing, God himself had hands like mine and feet like mine, and eyes, and brain, and ears!’”

“Others can be sensible, but not one who knows in his heart how few things really matter. Others can be sober and restrained, but not one who is mad with the loveliness of life and almost blind with its beauty.”

“You are interested in preaching and teaching. I’m not. An amiable good life does more than all the religious newspapers printed.”

Blue speaks in the spirit of G. K. Chesterton, the British Catholic apologist whose cheerfully brilliant defense of the Catholic faith deeply influenced Myles Connolly’s generation of Catholic writers. Like Chesterton, Blue rejects the modern world, with its technology and science and materialism, in favor of an imaginatively rich Catholicism alive with story and beauty and joy.

Mr. Blue is also influenced by the most famous American novel of its era, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby.J. Blue is the antithesis of Jay Gatsby, the mysterious millionaire who loses his moral bearings as he pursues great wealth and status. The worldly Gatsby reinvented himself. His identity, according to narrator Nick Carraway, sprang “from his Platonic conception of himself. He was a son of God.” Contrarily, the otherworldly Blue finds his identity in God. “I think my heart would break with all this immensity if I did not know that God himself once stood beneath it. . . . I’m no microcosm. I, too, am a Son of God!”

Myles Connolly wrote Mr. Blue to challenge the materialism that Jay Gatsby embraced. Connolly wanted to confound skeptics and make comfortable Christians uneasy. Did he succeed? The book found an audience when it was published in the 1920s, but it seemed to especially resonate with young Catholics in the 1950s and ’60s. Now it is popular once again, as a new generation of readers meets Mr. Blue.

As the book’s affable but bemused narrator comments, “He had many of the marks of insanity but somehow he gave you the impression that we were all crazy and he alone was sane.”

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About the Author

Myles Connolly was born in 1897 in Roxbury, Massachusetts, a suburb of Boston. He attended the Boston Latin School and then Boston College, where he edited the college literary magazine, the Stylus.

Connolly graduated from Boston College in 1918 and spent the next few years, after a brief stint in the navy, working as a newspaper reporter for the Boston Post. In 1924, he became the editor of Columbia,the magazine of the Knights of Columbus, the Catholic men’s organization. Four years later, Connolly published his first novel, Mr. Blue.

A year later, Joseph Kennedy, patriarch of the Boston political clan, persuaded Connolly to get involved in the movie business. Kennedy had purchased a studio called Film Booking Offices of America in 1926, and in 1928, with the advent of sound, he merged the company with others. And so was born RKO, one of the dominant studios of the 1930s and 1940s. Connolly spent the rest of his career in Hollywood working as a producer and a screenwriter, often uncredited in the latter capacity.

Connolly’s credits for RKO and other studios during his decades of screenwriting include Till the Clouds Roll By (1946), a biopic of the composer Jerome Kern; State of the Union (1948), a Spencer Tracy/Katharine Hepburn comedy about a political couple; and Music for Millions (1944), featuring child star Margaret O’Brien, for which Connolly received an Academy Award nomination.

Perhaps one of Connolly’s most important collaborations was with the director Frank Capra, remembered primarily for his comedies touched with compassion for the “common man.” Connolly is often credited, even by Capra himself, with encouraging the director to take his work beyond the frothy conventions of the day and inject a level of moral awareness into his work. Their collaboration, with Connolly working either as a story editor or simply as an uncredited adviser, began with the Oscar-winning It Happened One Night (1934), starring Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert, and continued through many other films.

Aside from films, Connolly wrote several works of fiction: The Bump on Brannigan’s Head (1950), Dan England and the Noonday Devil (1951), The Reason for Ann (1953), and Three Who Ventured (1958).

Connolly and his wife, Agnes Bevington, to whom Mr. Blue is dedicated, raised five children.

Connolly died in 1964 after undergoing open-heart surgery. One of his daughters, Ann, told the writer Roy Peter Clark,

In today’s vernacular, my father believed very strongly that you could be a very strong Catholic without being a wimp. People used to love to gravitate to him. He was a wonderful raconteur. He loved to eat and drink and be merry. He was extremely generous with his money to people who were down-and-out. I could remember on Christmas Day how people would be around our Christmas dinner table. There’d be the cop on the beat because my dad would run into him, or some alcoholic. He had very strong principles for himself and for our family. He never pretended to be perfect, but he would say he’d keep trying.

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Links for Myles Connolly

“The Improbable Career of Mr. Blue,” by John Breslin, SJ

“Meeting Mr. Blue” (a book review of the Loyola Press edition), by Rachelle Linner

“Faithing,” by Peter Pearson

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