When I was a kid at Regis High in New York in the late 1950s, a number of us eager types read a book on the recommendation of a Jesuit scholastic or two. Mr. Blue was the 1928 creation of Myles Connolly, a 1918 Boston College grad who went on to make a mark in Hollywood writing screenplays for, among others, Spencer Tracy, Jimmy Durante, and June Allyson. He worked on 40 films in all and was nominated for an Oscar for his work on the wartime tearjerker Music for Millions, but when he died in 1964, his greatest legacy was acknowledged to be Mr. Blue. The book remained in print for most of 60 years. Nothing Connolly published subsequently--he wrote three more parable novels--came close to being as popular.

Besides being brief, at 152 pages, Mr. Blue featured what adolescents are drawn to in a novel: a youthful protagonist who thumbs his nose at the establishment and gets away with it. The book is about a young man--the eponymous Blue himself--who decides to take Christianity seriously as a layman, not as a chore but as a challenge. He chooses poverty. He lives variously in a festively painted packing crate on the roof of a skyscraper (where he flies kites and frees balloons); in mansions, thanks to a surprise inheritance he soon dispenses; in the spartan garret of a Boston lodging house; and in the ward of a city hospital, where he dies. He shovels snow or chops wood, surviving on "backdoor begging" for meals. He speaks of Christ to anyone who will listen and to some who won't.

And he prays passionately, alone in his attic, before a massive cross. Blue intrigues and troubles the narrator, a businessman caught up in workaday life, his feet squarely planted on the ground.

As young Catholics, my high school friends and I were captivated by the idealistic rebel in Mr. Blue. He reminded us of Holden Caulfield and perhaps a bit of Dorothy Day, the only clear American saint of our generation. To our teachers, the book formed a continuum with the robust, paradoxical defense of Christianity laid out by the British author G. K. Chesterton, beginning with his Orthodoxy, published in 1909.

Author Connollyand the Boston College skyline

Myles Connolly’s Mr. Blue -- an excerpt We were tramping out in the Newtons, out around the twin reservoirs which they call lakes. Dusk was sifting out of Boston and giving the massed trees—of which there are plenty in Newton—that stealth and secrecy which is their pretense at night. Boston College, with its solid Gothic tower, stood black against the last smoking flame of the November sunset. We were down in the dark. But no one could mind the dark, even of November, with the Gothic that dominated the hill. Blue caught his breath at the magnificent silhouette. “That gives me courage,” he said, with his face up toward the hill crest. “Of late, I have been melancholy with autumn—a sign of adolescence or old age. But I couldn’t be melancholy with that above me. Not that I care for the Gothic, but for what it represents. Sunsets may flare, and the blackness of hades eclipse the earth, but that will endure.” “An earthquake could toss it into the lakes,” I objected. “And so could the cataclysm at the end of the world. . . . But where that stands there will always be something, though no stone is left upon a stone.” Blue is a mystic, and mystics while they appear crystal-clear are sometimes difficult to understand. He saw my shrugged shoulders. “No great battle for a great cause can ever be forgotten. That up there is no mere group of college buildings; that up there is a battlefield, a sanctuary; that up there is a hearth and home for the Lost Cause that is never lost, the citadel of a strength that shall outlast the hill and rock it stands upon. . . . Once heroes built fortresses against the Mongol and the Saracen; now they must build fortresses against the whole world. . . . “I tell you I know what I am talking about. Once they—the believers, the students, the scholars, the soldiers, the saints—could fight heresies and heretics. Today they have to fight a state of mind.” From Mr. Blue by Myles Connolly. Copyright © 1928 by Macmillan; copyright renewed 1956 by Myles Connolly. Reprinted with the permission of Scribner, a division of Simon & Schuster. Photo of Boston College skyline: Lee Pellegrini. Photo of Myles Connolly: Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences

It is hard to overestimate Chesterton's effect on generations of young Catholic intellectuals-in-the-making. His simple but brilliant method was to raise and demolish, one by one, often through ridicule or humor, the suppositions of pseudoscience and the secular nostrums of the educated classes. In response to the Freudian notion that Gothic spires were phallic symbols, Chesterton sagely agreed; otherwise, he deadpanned, they would surely have been built upside down.

Chesterton threw open doors in a Church that seemed cautious to a fault and not very interested in new ideas. He made orthodoxy exciting, even dangerous. Rather than as a straitjacket that stifled Christian theology, he saw orthodoxy as a glorious balancing act and spoke of its "romance."

In 1924, four years before Mr. Blue, Chesterton published his life of St. Francis of Assisi, another brief book with great staying power. Did Connolly, then 27, read it? I think it more than likely. Central to Chesterton's understanding of Francis is the notion of seeing the world with a God's-eye perspective:

[Francis] sees things go forth from the divine as children going forth from a familiar and accepted home, instead of meeting them as they come out, as most of us do, upon the roads of the world. . . . He who has seen the whole world hanging on a hair of the mercy of God has seen the truth; we might almost say the cold truth. He who has seen the vision of his city upside down has seen it the right way up.

Connolly set Mr. Blue in Boston, his hometown, but also in New York, exactly the right venue for Blue and his Roaring Twenties restaging of the St. Francis story. From atop materialistic skyscrapers Blue shouts his challenge to the modern world, much as Francis did to the burgeoning market economy of 13th-century Assisi. And he does so with panache, for Blue is a poet as well as a mystic, a man, like Francis, with a sense of play and a talent for the grand gesture. He loves marching music, delights in color, and thinks of money as something to be spent generously and extravagantly so that he can be without it.

On the narrator's first meeting with Blue, he confesses: "The more I listened to Blue the more I liked him. I liked his looks, to begin with. Anybody would. But besides that there was a certain spectacular quality, one might call it a certain spectacular sanity, beneath all his ideas that was novel and stimulating to me."

Spectacular sanity: the echo of Chesterton is unmistakable. Blue's ideas are infectious; his theology orthodox: The Incarnation is what makes the power and beauty of creation bearable. But for Jesus, Blue says, "I would be crushed beneath the weight of all these worlds." Opposed to such sanity stands the ordinary kind that the narrator can't get beyond: "the attitude," he says, that "was the attitude of everyone everywhere. Blue, I'm afraid, was not marked out for success."

In 1925, F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby appeared, a year after St. Francis of Assisi and three years before Mr. Blue. The novel recounts the story of Jay Gatsby, a mysterious millionaire who takes his place, somewhat brashly, among the aristocracy of eastern Long Island in pursuit of Daisy Buchanan, the love of his impoverished youth.

In the first sentence of his novella, Connolly identifies his hero as J. Blue. Hardly a coincidence for someone as well read as Connolly. Gatsby stands for everything that Blue, three years later, rejects: the pursuit of wealth, status, and acceptance. Gatsby is also, as Blue turns out to be, bigger than life, lavish in style, doomed to die young, a striking figure who fascinates and puzzles his chronicler, the reserved future journalist Nick Carraway.

As Connolly wrote him, J. Blue, a uniquely American personality, was the man whom the ambitious Jay Gatsby might have become had he steered by a higher truth than the sound of money in Daisy's voice. Despite their radically different value systems, these two might have hit it off. The view from Blue's skyscraper would have stirred Gatsby, as would have the lavish style Blue takes up briefly on inheriting a fortune. But Blue's delight in his wealth is in giving it away as fast as possible, hiring servants and then setting them up in their own homes, keeping his fortune in over a hundred checking accounts so he can write checks at any time.

There is a startling echo of Jay Gatsby in Connolly's book. Halfway through Gatsby, Carraway reveals the millionaire's origins as Jay Gatz, the son of a shiftless farmer, who recreated himself as the worldly Jay Gatsby, sprung "from his Platonic conception of himself. He was a son of God, a phrase which, if it means anything, means just that, and he must be about his Father's business, the service of a vast, vulgar, and meretricious beauty."

Contrast that with Blue's apostrophe to the stars from his skyscraper roof: "God is more intimate here. . . . Don't you find Him so? This is height without desolation, isolation without emptiness. . . . I think my heart would break with all the immensity if I did not know that God Himself once stood beneath it, a young man, as small as I. . . . I'm no microcosm. I, too, am a Son of God!"

Blue and Gatsby serve different gods who lead each of them to an early grave. Their deaths, however, could hardly be more different. Worshiping mammon and his memory of Daisy, Gatsby is defeated by both. Daisy refuses to admit that she never loved her husband, Tom, thereby destroying Gatsby's romantic dream. Moreover, her willingness to let Gatsby shoulder responsibility for her reckless driving--which killed Tom's mistress--costs Gatsby his life, at the hands of the victim's aggrieved husband.

J. Blue also dies because of the reckless driving of the rich. And like Gatsby, he dies protecting someone else, pushing a homeless black man out of danger and taking the blow from the speeding limousine himself.

But there the parallel stops. What propels Blue, like Gatsby, is a dream, but a selfless one, founded on the example of Jesus and renewed a millennium later by the man from Assisi. Blue has chosen a way of life that startles and challenges those around him just as thoroughly as Jesus and Francis did in their times.

Fr. John B. Breslin, SJ, is finishing up his term as rector of the Jesuit Community at Le Moyne College and will be heading to Fordham University this fall to teach English literature and work in campus ministry. He also writes articles and reviews on occasion. This article first appeared in Boston College Magazine.

Like Chesterton, Connolly wanted to confound the skeptics, to proclaim a Christianity full of romance and gusto, to launch a challenge to the materialism Jay Gatsby so reflexively embraced. But after Connolly's death, in 1964, his wife suggested that the story was also autobiographical. The young Connolly himself had loved kites, balloons, brass bands, the movies, and the Mass; Mr. Blue was his youthful challenge hurled at the world.

In 1954, when Connolly was in his late fifties and the father of five children, he backed off a bit from the message of Mr. Blue in a foreword to the book's silver anniversary edition: "I also feel that Mr. Blue, like Thoreau, failed to make the deeply important distinction that what is sauce for the bachelor may not be sauce for the married man and father at all." Wiser? Sadder? Perhaps just older. Which is why Jesus always insisted that the kingdom of God belonged by natural right to the young and the poor. The rest of us are allowed in on sufferance.