Still he had a strong emotional attachment to Miss Ziadeh till his death. He dreamt a lot of her and wished very much to end his moments of life close to May. A few years before his death he wrote her:

I wish I were sick in Egypt or in my country so I might be close to the ones I love. Do you know, May, that every morning and every evening I find myself in a home in Cairo with you sitting before me reading the last article I wrote or the one you wrote which has not yet been published.19

The second of these important happenings is the meeting with his one day biographer, Miss Barbara Young. Of her known, she tells us that it was in 1923, after listening to the reading of an exerpt of The Prophet in the Church St. Mark’s In-the-Bowrie in New York, that she decided to let Gibran know about her admiration for him. Cordially in his reply he invited her to come visiting him in his studio and “to talk about poetry and to see the pictures” he had drawn.20 From there on Barbara kept on going regularly to the studio that was located on 51 West 10th Street. Gibran employed her sometimes as his secretary. No remuneration was paid; she was simply fascinated by this slender, mustachioed Lebanese immigrant, five feet four inches tall, with brown eyes fringed by long lashes. While Gibran was still alive, she would go to some distant city, lecturing on our author’s thoughts and paintings. In her biography of Gibran she repeatedly defined her relation as “friendship,” meaning probably Platonic. After Gibran’s death she spread widely his fame, and even wrote a small brochure about him. Yet, in 1944, she published the now famous biography This Man From Lebanon, in which she recorded the personality of the Gibran she knew during his last seven years. Miss Barbara Young traveled on October 1939, to Beirut and visited the various places where Gibran lived, long before she undertook the composition of her book.

Kahlil Gibran closed his eyes peacefully on April 10, 1931, at the age of fourty-eight, in St. Vincent’s hospital in New York. Gibran was not buried in America but his remains were taken, to meet his wish, to Lebanon and laid down in the old deserted monastary of Mar-Sarkis in Wadi Kadisha.

The Lebanese of today, not to exempt the Arabs of the other countries, feel proud of Gibran, because with a sole hand he has elevated the dignity of the immigrants and proved to foreigners the erudition and wisdom of the Middle-East mystics. His fame can best be tested by the reader, if the latter consents to take a short trip to his nearest bookstore and witness the sale of the works of our author.

 

FOOTNOTES

1 Naimy, Mikhail, “A Strange Little Book”, Aramco World, XV, 6, 1964, p. 12.

2 In reading some of Gibran’s commentators we get the impression that Gibran attained the peak of his fame while alive. Unfortunately, these historians wrapped in the emotion of pride, fail to stress bluntly the distinction between the “before” and “after”. (See for instance: Andrew Dib Sherfan, Kahlil Gibran: The Nature of Love, New York: Philosophical Library, 1970, pp. 29-31; and Habib Massoud, Joubran Hayyan wa Mayyitan, Beirut: The Rihani House, 1966, p. 21 sq.). Yet, in the opinion of others, such as Suheil Bushrui and John Munro, Gibran hardly received recognition from academic modern American literature; and when his books were printed none of the leading Journals in the West ever reviewed his books. (Kahlil Gibran: Essays and Introduction, eds., by Suheil Bushrui and John Munro, Beirut: The Rihani House, 1970, p. 1 sq.). This amounts to saying that he truely became world famous after his death only.

3 The Monastery of Mar-Sarkis was the playground of Gibran and his refuge for meditation whenever things did not work out at his home. The young Gibran always had hoped to buy someday the deserted cloister. Incidentally, we are told by his best friend Mikhail Naimy, that “he had begun negotiations to buy the monastery” prior to 1923. But really, he did not succeed paying the full amount requested by the real estate because he became bankrupt after trying unsuccessfully to collect his due from some old lady to whom he had rented a building he had bought in Boston during the depression time.” (Mikhail Naimy, “A Strange Little Book,” Aramco World, XV, 6, 1964, p. 15; see also by the same author, Kahlil Gibran, His Life and His Work, Beirut: Khayats, 1964, p.