She recorded the extraordinary experiences he told her he had had. Furthermore, however godlike she found him, she was a schoolmistress, and she tried to educate him. On the pretext of their having a nice literary evening together, she would get him to read to her from the classic authors, exactly as Fred Holland Day had done, and for the same reason—to improve his English. Boston was a backwater. New York was where the action was. Clearly, he had another purpose as well: to get away from Haskell.
He also needed to unload Marianna. If he was to become a major artist, how was he going to explain that he lived with this illiterate woman who followed him around the house with a dust rag? And so, in , throwing off the two women who had supported him through his early period, Gibran moved to New York, and to his middle period.
Haskell paid the rent, of course. After a few years in New York, during which he published two more books in Arabic, Gibran made a serious decision: he was going to begin writing in English. When they were apart, he sent her his manuscripts, and she sent back corrections. When they were together—she visited him often sleeping elsewhere —he dictated his work to her.
She probably made substantial changes in his later work as well. Proud of this responsible role in his life, she gave up hoping for more. In , with no objections from Gibran, she married a rich relative. Until he died, she edited all his English-language books. At the opening of the book, we are told that Almustafa, a holy man, has been living in exile, in a city called Orphalese, for twelve years.
A ship is now coming to take him back to the island of his birth. Saddened by his departure, people gather around and ask him for his final words of wisdom—on love, on work, on joy and sorrow, and so forth. He obliges, and his lucubrations on these matters occupy most of the book. Who, these days, would say otherwise? If you look closely, though, you will see that much of the time he is saying something specific; namely, that everything is everything else.
Freedom is slavery; waking is dreaming; belief is doubt; joy is pain; death is life. Such paradoxes, which Gibran had used for years to keep Haskell out of his bed, now became his favorite literary device. They appeal not only by their seeming correction of conventional wisdom but also by their hypnotic power, their negation of rational processes. Also, the book sounds religious, which it is, in a way.
Gibran was familiar with Buddhist and Muslim holy books, and above all with the Bible, in both its Arabic and King James translations. Those paradoxes of his come partly from the Sermon on the Mount. Nor is the spirit of the sixties gone from our world. Reportedly, the book is popular in prisons. And, since the text is in small, detachable sections, you can make it even shorter, by just dipping into it here and there, as some people do with the Bible.
My guess is that plenty of its fans have not read it from cover to cover. That, no doubt, is because it lacks the something-for-everyone quality of its predecessor. Also, it is not a book of advice or consolation. It is a novel of sorts, a collection of seventy-nine statements by people remembering Christ.
Some of the speakers are known to us—Pontius Pilate, Mary Magdalene—but others are inventions: a Lebanese sheepherder, a Greek apothecary. They all speak as if they were being interviewed. Though Gibran thought of himself as an admirer of all religions, he had an obsession with Jesus. He told Haskell that Jesus came to him in dreams.
Thy will be done with us, even as in space. Much of the book transcends such follies, however. Also, however much he imagined himself as Jesus, in this book alone he drops the oracular tone that is so oppressive in the rest of his work. A number of the speakers have complaints about Jesus. I loved him and I shall love him forevermore. If love were in the flesh I would burn it out with hot irons and be at peace. But it is in the soul, unreachable. And now I would speak no more.
Go question another woman more honored than the mother of Judas. Go to the mother of Jesus. While the literary journals paid some attention to Gibran early on, they eventually dropped him. This is no surprise. His leading traits—idealism, vagueness, sentimentality—were exactly what the young writers of the twenties were running away from.
Gibran's body was interred in Bsharri at the Mar Sarkis monastery, which soon became a museum. However, legal problems rose due to the provision in his will that directed royalties from his book sales to his hometown. Unable to reach a consensus on how to distribute the money, the people of Bsharri engaged in a bitter dispute that stretched out for decades, before the Lebanese government stepped in to put the matter to rest.
Meanwhile, the popularity of The Prophet endured. It found a particular resurgence in the counterculture movement of s America, at times reaching sales of 5, copies per week. Often dismissed by critics during his lifetime, Gibran eventually became the third-best-selling poet of all time, behind William Shakespeare and Chinese philosopher Lao-tzu.
Thanks in large part to the diaries kept by Mary Haskell, biographers have been able to uncover extensive details of the writer's life before he became famous.
In , Kahlil Gibran: The Collected Works was published, and in , Kahlil Gibran's The Prophet enjoyed a positive reception upon hitting the big screen as an animated feature. We strive for accuracy and fairness. If you see something that doesn't look right, contact us! Subscribe to the Biography newsletter to receive stories about the people who shaped our world and the stories that shaped their lives.
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