Stuart Millar
He is probably the best-selling poet of all time after William Shakespeare and Lao Tzu. His books have sold more than 10-million copies in English alone. Even now, he is revered as a guru and an inspiration of the New Age movement.
But now, 75 years after the publication of his most famous work, The Prophet, it has emerged that Kahlil Gibran – poet, philosopher, artist – may not have been quite as the legend portrays him. A biography to be published in August has already caused a storm among Gibran’s followers, with claims that he was unable to live up to his own reputation as a saintly icon, but was a troubled romantic, a womaniser and liar who died from alcoholism at the age of 48.
Gibran was born in Lebanon in 1883, but moved to the United States at the age of 12, where he lived as a penniless immigrant in the Boston slums.
By the early 1900s his writing, poetry and painting had given him a reputation as a guru or “master” among a circle of society people impressed by his charisma, talent and exotic orientalism.
But it was the publication of The Prophet in 1923 which catapulted him to wider recognition. It tells the story of the prophet Almustafa, who delivers to the people of Orphalese 26 lessons on topics ranging from prayer and pleasure to clothes and houses.
Despite being criticised as trite, sentimental and lightweight, its ideas became an inspiration for millions – although Gibran did not live to see the book’s success. In the 1960s it was adored by hippies; in the 1970s no fan of Cat Stevens or George Harrison’s Indian mystic phase would have been seen without it.
The book is still cited as an inspiration – the passages on love are reckoned to be second in popularity to the Bible for wedding services. In May, it featured in the Caribbean wedding of the Boyzone heart- throb, Ronan Keating.
But the new biography, Prophet: The Life and Times of Kahlil Gibran, paints a very different picture. Written by Robin Waterfield, an authority on the self-styled guru’s work, it claims there was a huge gap between the man and the myth, which Gibran acknowledged and found impossible to bear.
The popular image projected a knowledgable, ascetic prophet; in reality the “moralising preacher” was insecure, worldly and sexual. Lonely, ambitious and craving acceptance, he invented a fictional past and a series of personae – from suffering romantic and angry young man to his final incarnation as the prophet of New York – to ingratiate himself into literary society.
According to Waterfield, Gibran was telling people it was crucial for him to live his philosophy, not merely write it. His desire was to be a teacher and to “awaken people to consciousness”. But in 1921, as he was writing The Prophet, he confided to a friend: “I am a false alarm.”
Although he wrote movingly on love, Waterfield says he exploited the women he was involved with. His affairs he kept secret from Mary Haskell, the married love of his life, who supported him financially.
Overworked and increasingly unable to bear the tension of living up to his adopted persona, Gibran began drinking heavily. On April 10 1931, he died of cirrhosis of the liver.
Waterfield’s conclusions have already been challenged by a major study of Gibran, by Joe Jenkins and Suheil Bushrui, who deny he was a hypocrite or ever set out to moralise or preach.
But while Waterfield recognises Gibran’s creative genius, he concludes he was also “a consummate liar, abusive to Mary Haskell, arrogant, narcissistic, mock- modest, self-indulgent and weak, with an inability to distinguish fantasy and reality”.