Mary Haskell the Guardian She-Angel IV

IV

Mary Haskell the Guardian She-Angel

“She would correct secretly Gibran’s manuscripts and return them to him by mail.”

The occasion of the first International Conference on Kahlil Gibran at the University of Maryland in December 1999 brought together speakers to discuss Gibran’s life. At one session, speakers praised Mary Haskell for her relentless encouragement for him to write in English and for the financial, moral and emotional support she offered Gibran. Whilst looking around the conference room, I noticed a tearful young lady.

Professor Suheil Bushrui, the president of the conference, also saw her and whispered to me: “She is Mary Haskell’s relative.” I approached her after the session. I introduced myself as a connoisseur of Gibran’s writings and also of Mary Haskell’s history. She pointed to the necklace she had around her neck, saying: “This is from her.” It was a beautiful necklace inlaid with finesse.

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I asked her, “What is your kinship to her?” She replied, “she was my mother’s aunt, my maternal grandfather’s sister.” I did not want to continue the conversation in the room, so I invited her into the university salon.

This was the first time anyone met a relative of Mary Haskell. Up until that day, no one had ever spoken or written about any of Mary Haskell’s family members. I showered the young lady with questions, after I expressed my interest in knowing and following the various stages of Gibran’s life as well as Mary Haskell’s. We discussed everything from the school in Boston at 314 Marlborough Street to the Telfair Academy Museums in Savannah, Georgia. Mary Haskell deposited her private collection of Gibran’s paintings to the latter. We also discussed her house in Savannah, located at 24 Gaston Street, where she lived after her marriage to Jacob Florance Minis. I also told this young lady about the day I spent reviewing –among other things– Mary Haskell’s original letters to Gibran and his to her at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

The young lady said that she felt comfortable while talking to me and that it was the first time she wanted to speak about her mother’s aunt in all sincerity. Indeed, she stated, she had never met anyone who already knew so much about Mary Haskell. This young woman’s name was Elizabeth Davis, born in 1956. Her grandfather, the father of her mother Mary, was Mary Haskell’s brother, John Haskell. Her

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mother named her Elizabeth after her aunt Mary Elizabeth Haskell. The first three letters of her name M.E.H., appear on some of Gibran’s paintings and on some of his Arabic books, which he dedicated to her.

She told me she read The Prophet when she was fifteen, and she liked Gibran before she knew about his relationship with her mother’s aunt. On her eighteenth birthday, her mother gave her the Beloved Prophet, The Love Letters of Kahlil Gibran and Mary Haskell, and Her Private Journal (edited and arranged by Virginia Hilu, Knopf Edition, New York, 1972). When she told her mother that she knew Gibran through his book The Prophet, her mother revealed to her the relationship between her aunt, Mary Haskell, and Gibran. Elizabeth did not previously know about this relationship, and she then began to discover the world of Gibran and Mary, her mother’s aunt. She showered her mother with questions the latter answered for the most part with few exceptions.

Quoting her mother, Elizabeth told me how Mary Haskell kept her relationship with Gibran a secret after she got married to Jacob Florance Minis on May 7, 1926. She left Boston – where her school was and where she had spent years with Gibran to travel to Savannah – to live with her much older husband. When she used to travel with her husband to New York, she used to steal short interludes of time to spend with Gibran, while Minis tended to business in offices around Manhattan. She also

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used to review Gibran’s latest manuscripts secretly and return them to him by mail. In October 1930, she reviewed the manuscript of his last book, The Earth Gods, at night, in her salon, after her husband had gone to sleep. When she returned the corrected manuscript to Gibran in early November, he sent it to the publisher and signed with him at the end of the month a contract to publish his next book, The Garden of the Prophet. When she received the printed version of The Earth Gods on March 31, 1931, she read it and, on the morning of April 6, 1931, she sent Gibran a letter, which he received at noon on Wednesday, April 8. That was the last thing he ever read before his health deteriorated on Thursday evening, as he went into a coma on Friday morning and died in Room 316 on the third floor of St. Vincent’s Hospital, a few metres away from his hermitage on 51 West 10th Street, at 10:55 p.m. on the evening of Friday, April 10, 1931.

In conclusion, Elizabeth said: “On my wedding day, the most precious of all gifts was this necklace my mother gave me. She had received it from her aunt. I am proud to wear the necklace that once belonged to the great Mary Haskell.”

She asked to be excused and went to her room. When she returned, she was holding two large pictures of Mary Haskell with all her family members. Pointing to the pictures, she said: “This is Mary, and next to her is her brother, my maternal grandfather John, who died years ago. And just two weeks ago,

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his wife, my grandmother Audrey, died at the age of 104. Her funeral was held in Los Angeles and it was the occasion for me to meet a Lebanese producer who was writing the script of a film on Gibran and Mary Haskell’s biographies. She told me about this conference, so I came with her to attend it.”

Did you come with her? You mean she is… here?

A few minutes later, Elizabeth introduced me to her new friend, the Lebanese producer, Sola Saad. In the quick conversation I had with Sola, she told me she was writing the script of a feature film about Gibran, based on the letters he exchanged with Mary and on the forty-seven notebooks of Mary’s journal about her relationship with Gibran.

While I was speaking with Sola Saad, a young lady joined us, and Elizabeth introduced her as “My friend, Tania Sammons who is in charge of the Telfair Museums in Savannah. She is currently writing her PhD thesis about Mary Haskell.” Having visited the Telfair Academy Museums in Savannah in 1992, I was familiar with the collection of Gibran’s works there, so I enjoyed speaking to Tania about insights on Mary Haskell. She explained the following.

Mary corresponded with many men among her contemporaries and kept journals of this correspondence. These correspondences and journals, however, were not as rich and frequent as the ones she had with Gibran. She was an emancipated and rebellious

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woman compared to other women of her generation at the turn of the century. Born in Columbia, South Carolina, in 1873, she was ten years older than Gibran.

Haskell established and led movements for the liberation of women from male restrictions prevailing at the time in the American South. She was among the first southern women to wear pants, and she also organized mountain camps in remote rural areas as well as nature walks in rugged areas. Mary was so daring that she proudly displayed Gibran’s paintings, despite the nakedness in them, in her school in Boston. Haskell kept her relationship with Gibran secret after her marriage to Jacob Florance Minis, who died on September 3, 1936 – just five years after Gibran’s death.

In 1954, when she started to feel that her health was deteriorating and her memory was betraying her, she donated her private collection of eighty-three drawings by Gibran to the Telfair Museums before entering a stage of confined mental illness in 1959. She was then admitted to a nursing home, where she spent five years until her death on October 9, 1964.

Tania sighed and continued, “We have drawings we know nothing about, and we need an expert on Gibran to visit us, and explain to us the circumstances that led to these drawings. Some of these paintings have no titles and others no dates.”

At the end of a day saturated with more knowledge about Mary Haskell, I met a fascinating

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physician at dinner, who also was attending the conference. Elizabeth introduced him as: “Doctor Joseph Cilona from Chicago, who treats his patients psychologically through readings from Gibran.” I was interested in what he was saying, and he started to tell me how his parents wanted him to study medicine and how he joined the University of Boston, though unconvinced of what he was doing, and then shifted towards psychiatry. On his graduation day, a friend of his offered him The Prophet by Gibran. He read it that night and felt a profound change in his life. He had been afraid of facing society after his graduation, but after reading The Prophet, he felt society was too small for his ambitions. He started to see the world from another perspective with greater simplicity and a clearer philosophy. “Gibran cured my sense of loss,” he said with confidence. “Since I started to treat my patients, I treat them with readings from The Prophet, I invite them to read it or I read chapters to them. I can see the difference in them and the relief they feel when they hear the thoughts of Almustafa. When I signed a contract with the Department of Health, I started to treat young men and women by simplifying chapters from The Prophet and giving them these chapters to understand and be cured. Instead of a fifteen-minute session, I sometimes spent thirty minutes curing them with Gibran’s thoughts. For those who wanted more, I read paragraphs from Gibran and Mary Haskell’s love letters, which enchanted the patients and gave them a feeling of relief. Mary Haskell was an extraordinary woman.”

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One day, one place, four meetings – Elizabeth Davis, Sola Saad, Tania Sammons, and Joseph Cilona spoke of one woman, Mary Haskell. Were it not for this woman’s letters and journal, there would be many aspects of Gibran’s personality and milestones of his literature and personality that would have remained unknown to us.

University of Maryland, College Park – 1999

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