Kahlil Gibran

Bsharri to a Boston tenement

He was born in 1883 in Bsharri, a village on the edge of the cedar forests of northern Lebanon, then a province of the Ottoman empire. The family left under a shadow: his father, a tax collector, was caught up in a scandal over the money he handled, and in 1895 Gibran sailed for America at twelve with his mother, his half-brother and his two sisters. They landed in the immigrant tenements of Boston's South End, and he went to school as the only English-speaking generation in the household.

His drawings were noticed almost at once. In 1896 a settlement-house art teacher, Florence Pierce, passed them on, and within a fortnight the boy had entered the circle of Fred Holland Day — the Boston photographer, publisher and patron who collected unusual talent and put Gibran in front of a camera and in front of books. In 1904 Day's studio gave Gibran his first exhibition of paintings, at twenty-one. It is the moment the rest of his life turns on.

The schoolmistress who paid for everything

Mary Haskell came to that 1904 exhibition. She was a South Carolinian who ran an elite girls' school outside Boston, ten years older than Gibran, and for the next twenty-seven years she was his patron, editor, first reader and closest correspondent. She paid for his training, argued with his English, kept diaries full of him, and after his death in 1931 became a principal heir of his estate.

The arrangement is unusually well documented, because Haskell kept everything. Her papers — the letters Gibran wrote her from 1904 until the end, the diaries, the sketches he sent — sit today in the Minis Family Papers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, filed under the name of the Savannah businessman, Jacob Florance Minis, whom she married in 1926. It is that archive, not the biographies, that fixes the plain fact of the Paris years: throughout his travels in Europe between 1908 and 1911, Haskell paid.

Paris, 1908–1911: what is documented, and what is legend

Gibran arrived in Paris in 1908, twenty-five years old, an immigrant painter from Boston with an allowance and no French reputation to lose. He stayed roughly three years. What he took away is clear enough from the work that follows: the Italian Renaissance masters, the English Pre-Raphaelites, the French Symbolists — the Paris painters of the 1880s and 1890s who preferred dream, myth and allegory to the visible world — and, above all, William Blake, the English poet who engraved and hand-coloured his own prophetic books and whom Gibran read as a brother. Telfair Museums, which holds the largest public collection of his art in the United States, names exactly those influences on his work. He also read Nietzsche's Thus Spake Zarathustra in Paris, a book of aphoristic sermons delivered by a solitary prophet coming down from a mountain. Fifteen years later he would write one.

What is not clear is the Rodin story. Gibran's biographers place him in the orbit of Auguste Rodin, then the most famous sculptor alive and the presiding figure of artistic Paris, and credit Rodin with putting Blake into his hands. That much is repeated by the Kahlil Gibran Collective, the research archive that maintains his papers online, and by the standard modern life of him. What comes attached to it, everywhere — on paperback jackets, on quotation sites, in a thousand introductions — is a sentence in which Rodin calls Gibran the William Blake of the East, or of the twentieth century. No source has ever been produced for it in Rodin's own words. The museums that hold Gibran's art do not use it. It is best read as publicity that outlived its publicist, and it should not be quoted as something Rodin said.

The honest shape of the Paris years is therefore smaller and more interesting than the legend: three years of training and reading, paid for from Massachusetts, that turned a gifted Boston draughtsman into a painter with a private mythology — nude figures rising out of mist, single souls in a landscape of light — and gave him the voice he would use in English. He returned to America in 1911 and settled into the studios in Boston and then New York where he worked for the rest of his life.

The Prophet, 1923

The Prophet is a slim book with a simple frame. A prophet named Almustafa, who has lived twelve years in the city of Orphalese, is about to sail home; the people gather and ask him to speak, and he answers in twenty-six short prose poems — on love, marriage, children, work, joy and sorrow, death — each a page or two long, each illustrated by Gibran himself. Alfred A. Knopf published it in New York in 1923 in an edition of 1,300 copies, which sold out within a month.

It then did something almost no book does: it kept selling, decade after decade, without ever being fashionable. Critics generally ignored it; readers passed it hand to hand. Telfair Museums, cataloguing his art, describes it plainly as one of the top-selling books of the twentieth century — and its most quoted lines, the ones about children not being your children and about the pillars of the temple standing apart, are now read aloud at ceremonies by people who have never opened the book.

The other Gibran: the Arabic modernist

In English, Gibran is a sage. In Arabic he is something else entirely: a founder. He wrote in Arabic first — the novella The Broken Wings, the essays, the stories — and in New York he helped found Arrabitah, the Pen Bond, a league of Arab émigré writers formed to drag Arabic literature out of a thousand years of fixed classical form. Its members pushed Romanticism into Arabic poetry, loosened the metrical rules, and made the prose poem a genre in a language that had not had one.

That is why the two reputations do not match. An English-language reader meets a gift-book mystic; an Arabic-language reader meets one of the writers who made modern Arabic literature possible, described in his own lifetime as the genius of his age. Both readers are looking at the same man. Neither description is wrong, and each is baffling to the other.

1931, and where the work went

Gibran died in 1931, aged forty-eight, of an illness his biographers describe only vaguely. Mary Haskell, as a principal heir, took charge of the estate and shipped his artwork and possessions back to Bsharri, the mountain village he had left at twelve. They are kept there still, in the old monastery that the village runs as the Gibran Museum.

Haskell kept a great deal of the painting herself, and in 1950, by then Mary Haskell Minis of Savannah, she gave nearly a hundred works — drawings, watercolours and oils spanning his whole career, from The Vision of Adam and Eve shown at Fred Holland Day's studio in 1904 to the pictures of his last years — to Telfair Museums in Georgia. It remains the largest public collection of Gibran's visual art in the United States, which is how the painter half of him survived at all: as a gift from the woman who had paid for the training in Paris.