The first was Miss Haskell, toward whom he had a spiritual and intellectual love. The second was Emile Michel, a young, beautiful and self-confident French woman, nicknamed Micheline who taught French in Miss Haskell’s school where Gibran met her. The two loves had a great effect upon him, to the point that he always spoke of women in his writings, and like John Stuart Mill he made himself a duty to promulgate the Women’s Liberation from the males’ deceitful customs.14

The departure of Gibran for Paris in 1908 was not merely undertaken for the sake of learning painting, but also Gibran as an Arab who feels grateful to those who bestow gifts upon him, wanted to forget Micheline, for he knew that this love was contrary to his sense of gratefulness toward Miss Haskell. Yet, to his surprise Micheline came unexpectedly to him in Paris. “Gibran forgot the world and he forgot Mary with the world. He opened his arms to Micheline and offered to live with her,”15 not, however, as his wife. He asked her to be his mistress; Micheline refused because she wanted to be married to him. This was the end of a second frustrated love, the first being Hala Daher.

While in the “City of Arts” and “the Heart of the World” as he used to refer to Paris,16 he met and made portraits of many illustrious artists, poets and writers from all over the world. Above all he tied a strong friendship with the distinguished sculptor Auguste Rodin, under whom he studied and who one day said of him that he was the Willian Blake of the Twentieth Century,17 signifying by this the great resemblance in writing, painting and biography between Gibran and Blake. Also, it was in 1908, that Gibran received news from a friend in Lebanon announcing that with the replacement of the old despotic Turkish government by the Young Turks, his exile was revoked. The news made him happy but did not instigate him to sail to his homeland.

Back to Boston in 1910, Gibran began to suffer from remorses. The favors Miss Haskell poured on him had become a burden of resoonsibility on his shoulders. In the midst of indecision, confusion and guilt, Gibran not knowing how to repay back in gratitude to Miss Haskell, he offered to marry her, though the idea in his mind was despicable. But Miss Haskell, guessing the struggle into which his soul was plunged, made clear to him that she preferred his friendship to any burdensome tie of marriage. Gibran felt relieved.

In exchange for the moral and pecuniary support he obtained from Miss Haskell,18 Gibran immortalized her by dedicating to her memory many of his writings, such as The Broken Wings, the poem “The Beauty of Death” in Tears and Laughter, etc.

Around 1912, Gibran moved to New York where he took residence till the end of his life, at 51 West Tenth Street, on the third floor of the famous “Studio Building” exclusively built for painters and writers. Before and after the World War, Gibran’s fame began to grow steadily ever more. He held numerous exhibitions in various galleries of the east coast. On the other hand he produced a vast literature of short essays, novels, poems, stories, aphorisms etc.… all of which dealt with the existential themes of the concrete life. Finally, with the publication of The Prophet in 1923, Gibran’s reputation spread both in the Middle East and in the United States.

If today’s Arabic literature feels at ease with the rules of rhyme and rhythm, it is because Gibran along with some other literary friends, broke away from the stagnant traditional prerequisites of the Arabic verse by proposing as early as 1920 a new poetic form called “prose poem.” This new idea came about, when on April 20, 1920, a new literary circle was formed after a meeting held in Gibran’s studio. This was called Arrabitah, the Pen-Bond. Gibran was elected president among several other poets, all of them Arab immigrants in the U.S. The purpose of Arrabitah was to modernize Arabic literature and to promote this newly conceived idea among the Middle Eastern writers. Arrabitah made the name of Gibran a daily topic of discussion either among the intellectuals in the Arab countries or in the newspapers published in the Middle East.

Before concluding his biography, let me report two important incidents that occured with two other women. One took place in 1912 with the female writer May Ziadeh, a Lebanese of origin whose family had moved to Egypt, while still young of age. May’s home was a gathering place of the Egyptian intelligentsia where often Gibran’s publications were matters of philosophical conversation. We are told that it is May who first introduced herself to Gibran, writting him a letter of admiration. Touched by her candid thoughts, it seems that Gibran fell in love at first sight with his correspondent even though he never met her in flesh and blood. In A Self-Portrait, which is a collection of his letters, we read that Gibran had asked May, when his book The Broken Wings first appeared in Arabic, to send him her impressions about his thoughts expressed on marriage and love. Her reply on May 12, 1912, did not totally approve of Gibran’s philosophy of love. Rather she remained in all her correspondence quite critical of a few of Gibran’s Westernized ideas.