Prophet from Bsherri

THIS MAN FROM LEBANON-- Barbara Young--Knopf ($2.50).

Kahlil Gibran's mother was the daughter of a Maronite priest.* His father was the son of a wealthy landowner of Lebanon. He was born in Bsherri, a 4,000-year-old village high in the Lebanon Mountains, on Jan. 6, 1883. On Christmas Eve every human being in the village walked through the snow to church, carrying a lighted lantern. At midnight the bells began, and children and old men sang an ancient Galilean chant. They spoke in Aramaic, the language of Jesus. Kahlil said later that on three different occasions he had seen Him.

"We Have Eternity...." He studied at home, learned Arabic, French, English. At eleven he went to Boston with his sister, mother and halfbrother, stayed there for two years. He studied at Beirut and in Paris, wrote poems in Arabic. His first poem, Spirits Rebellious, was burned in the market place of Beirut, and he was exiled from Lebanon and excommunicated from the Maronite Church as "dangerous, revolutionary and poisonous to youth."

When he was 20, Kahlil Gibran returned to Boston. His paintings won him a reputation. His prose poems, written in Arabic and translated by himself, brought him readers who became disciples. By 1910 Gibran was settled in a large fourth-floor studio in Manhattan. Short but powerful, he wore robes, painted allegorical pictures, strongly influenced by William Blake's, in which vague, shapely nudes emerged from misty backgrounds. He spoke in solemnly portentous phrases: "We have eternity. . . ." "The soul is mightier than space...." "Silence is one of the mysteries of love. . . ." He was also a practical Lebanese patriot, who planned reforestation and irrigation projects for his native land.

Gibran preached a diffuse Christianity without creed or ritual. He organized no church, held no services. Small groups of admirers formed in different cities; Lebanese exiles circulated around him; circles of twelve poets each, appointed for life and acknowledging Gibran as master, were organized in New York, Damascus, Beirut. His poetry in Arabic was apparently more striking than his vague, formless lines in English would suggest:

Love one another, but make not a bond of love:

Let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls.

One Sunday afternoon in 1923 his most ambitious work, The Prophet, was read in Manhattan's Church of St. Mark's-in-the-Bouwerie. In the audience was Barbara Young, who then was working in a bookstore in the Brevoort Hotel, has had a poem published in the New York Times almost every week since 1922. She became the most ardent Gibran follower and at his death in 1931, his literary executor. This Man from Lebanon, her memorial volume to the Master, suffers from its hushed reverence before Kahlil Gibran's slightest words and actions.

Best-Seller. The Prophet sold only 1,100 copies in the first year. Then it began to go. Twenty years later its overall sales totaled 300,000. Last year it was Knopf's next best seller (60,000 copies) to John Hersey's A Bell for Adano. Since Gibran's death a committee of 40 Bsherri townspeople has collected his sizable royal ties, devoting them to charity. (One royalty check came back endorsed by all 40.) Unable to pay them because of the war, Knopf has accumulated $20,000 for the committee.

* There are about 400,000 Maronite Christians (about 50,000 in the U.S.). They have a Patriarch who lives in a monastery on Mount Lebanon. Their services are mostly in Syriac, the language in which the Chaldean astrologers spoke to Nebuchadnezzar. Maronites whose priests are trained in Rome but permitted to marry, are members of the Roman Catholic Church, and practice an ancient Catholic rite.

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