A mystifying bestseller
Penelope Lively
KAHLIL GIBRAN: HIS LIFE AND WORK by Jean Gibran and Kahlil Gibran Canongate, f17.50, pp. 456 Are you familiar with The Prophet, Kahlil Gibran's best known work? If not, you may be startled to learn that it is one of the top bestsellers of all time. Published in 1926, its sale had apparently passed four million by the early Seventies. This review- er, nothing if not assiduous, was planning a quick foray to the British Library to correct her ignorance when the thought struck that the work is probably still in print. A phone call to my local bookseller was illuminat- ing. Indeed it is — live, well and selling nicely here in north Oxfordshire. 'People give it to each other for confirmation pre- sents,' said my friend in the bookshop. `And they copy bits out for calligraphy
practice, that sort of thing.'
A bestseller is always of interest if only because of what it may reveal about popu- lar taste, but this one is a real facer. The Prophet is a long prose poem in which a vaguely presented seer figure appears to the inhabitants of an equally undefined city and holds forth to them in biblically inspired language larded with aphorisms on such matters as Love, Marriage, Children, Crime and Punishments, Laws, Good and Evil. The language veers betwen pretentious and plain incomprehensible; the sentiments are nebulous. In fact, the piece seems to me entirely meretricious, but it would appear to have given satisfac- tion to millions.
A close examination of my newly acquired copy (Penguin/Arcana, £3.99 Philosophy/Religion/Mythology — quite so) gave rise to an unworthy suspicion. Could it be the illustrations? For the illus- trations — Gibran's own — are something else. Nude figures of both sexes droop around against backgrounds of cloud;
sometimes they are draped about one another. Nude, but not exactly nubile not a hint of pubic hair, breasts that are no more than discreet swellings. The whole effect is distinctly creepy — a kind of sub- eroticism that puts me in mind not of Blake, with whom Gibran apparently liked to be compared, but the coyly pornograph- ic sketches with which Charles Kingsley illustrated his letters to his wife. If this is the confirmation present of today, then confirmation is not what it was when I met up with it.
Gibran was an artist before he turned his hand to writing. His family were Syrian Maronite Christians who emigrated to Boston in 1895 when the boy Kahlil was 12. There, they lived in an immigrant ghetto in conditions of extreme poverty, from which Kahlil was rescued by his nascent artistic talent. He was taken up as a youth by bohemian Back Bay society, principally the photographer Fred Day, who specialised in shadowy atmospheric studies and whose own portraits of the young Gibran show his moody, romantic looks in youth. He appears even then to have had a mesmeric effect on those he fell in with, and indeed from then on he was never to lack a coterie of admiring patrons and mentors, usually women and principally a teacher called Mary Haskell with whom he conducted a passionate but evidently platonic relation- ship for the rest of his life.
This biography is by Gibran's nephew and his wife, who draw heavily on the diaries and letters of Mary Haskell and another of Gibran's inamoratas, Josephine Peabody. Far too heavily, indeed, for the result is that most of the book is a meticu- lously annotated chronicle of the emotional state of those concerned, which is of limit- ed interest to the reader who knows little of Gibran and would like to learn more about what seems to be a remarkable liter- ary and artistic success which deserves dis- cussion and analysis. But the authors steer well clear of any serious attempt at literary assessment or even much comment on his work. Gibran wrote more in Arabic than in English throughout his life, and this body of work was allegedly of seminal impor- tance in its influence on Arabic 20th- century literature, but all we learn here of its nature is the assurance in Salma Khadra Jayyusi's foreword that his example had a radical effect on freeing Arab writing from the restraints of a rigid classicism. You want at once to know more about this, just as you want to know more about the ex- patriate Syrian community of which Gibran was a leading light, and about his own curi- ous cultural ambiguity which, again, the authors offer without ever investigating. As a biography this is exhaustive but un- tethered, telling you both far too much and far too little, begging most of the intriguing questions posed by the career of this odd and evidently charismatic figure who was equally productive as a graphic artist and as a writer in two languages.
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