The Age of May

“The age of May is the age of the flowering of Lebanese literature outside Lebanon — the age of Zaidan, Sarrouf, Gibran, Rihani, and Mutran. And it is an age that has passed, or nearly so, since nothing remains to Lebanese literature for refuge but its mountains and its shores.”

The writer is the child of his age and his environment, and each influences the other. If it is right to attribute the writer to the age, it is right also to attribute the age to the writer, so that you say the age of Abu Nuwas, the age of al-Jahiz, the age of Voltaire. And you may also say “the age of May,” inasmuch as this woman of letters represented well, in her writing, the era in which she lived, from both the literary and the social sides, just as she herself represented a unique stage among the stages of women's literature in the Arab East.

Signs of alertness and genius showed in the writer from her childhood, as did signs of eccentricity too. Since she was her parents' only child, they directed to her all their care and concentrated upon her all their affection, so that from her earliest years she was exposed to what every only child is exposed to — an oddity of manner whose source is the parents' excessive affection and overabundant attention. She passed her girlhood in a convent of nuns, and the atmosphere of the convent was a powerful factor in spurring her imagination and directing her toward a life of individuality and contemplation. From that time began the forming of the personality of the thinking woman of letters and the dreaming girl, who before long set her early dreams into verse in the French “Sighs of a Dream.”

In the convent school she gave herself to the study of French literature, above all the Romantic literature distinguished by its unbridled imagination and burning emotion — the literature of Chateaubriand, Lamartine, and Musset — which the nuns' schools take care to teach for the religious spirit and tenderness of feeling in it. In the shade of the convent gardens and among the books of the Romantics, May's soul was reared on the love and adoration of nature, and there grew in her that captivating femininity and that delicate sensibility: three qualities which anyone who reads her writings is bound to discern.

Before long she opened her eyes to the literature of the innovators among the Arab writers — the likes of Wali al-Din Yakan, al-Jumayyil, Gibran, al-Rafi'i, and Rihani — and she applied herself to the study of Arabic in Egypt; the eloquence of the Qur'an enchanted her as the writings of Gibran fascinated her. Her writing career began in 1911, when she was still a girl under twenty, with an ample share of learning, mistress of four languages besides music, philosophy, and the rest of the social sciences.

From that time she began to form for herself a style influenced by the modern renewal, having in it the echo of Gibran and the music of prose poetry, the imagination of French or German Romanticism, and the elegance of authentic Arabic; and in it the subjectivity of Mahjar literature, its spirituality, its obscurity, and the phantasms of its imagery:

“And I awoke on the morrow, and it startled me to feel a bruising in my soul, a taste of song in my mouth, and burdens welling up on the page of my conscience as though they were loads of blood; and there was weeping in my heart at what I had witnessed of empty pretension, false play-acting, and sickly sentiment.” (From Darkness and Rays)

She was drawn to tales of misery in the manner of Hugo and Saint-Pierre, so she translated from the German Max Müller's tearful tale “Smiles and Tears,” and she did not shrink from shedding tears in some of her articles, for the literature of tears was then a prevailing fashion.

Yet she has, for all that, a style of manifest personality; when you read it you cannot help seeing the woman's psyche standing out through its folds — the woman with her femininity, her charm, her delicacy of feeling, and her quickness of thought; or it seems to you, as you read her, that you hear a soft, elegant, musical voice addressing you or reciting the words to you with grace and taste. In one of her articles she criticized the language of the ages of decadence used in government correspondence, and digressed, addressing the press censor: “I hear you scolding, Mr. Censor (and it appears that censorship of the press then was worse than it is today), as your pen draws near this sentence of mine, meaning to do it violence. So hear me out, if you please: you are no German soldier, nor am I a French soldier, nor is this page the cathedral of Reims. Be forbearing, then, and strike nothing from it!”

If immortality is written for May's style, the credit for it belongs to this singular personality standing out through the lines; for the reign of emotional brilliance and musical prose has ended, or nearly so, in this scientific age, which wants the story written in the language of life, wants studies written in the analytic language of science or in the language of the press, close to the colloquial, and leaves to poetry alone the attribute of poetic elegance — an age dominated by the literature of the story and the play, of which May has nothing.

For this reason we saw Mikhail Naimy, in his book “The Sieve,” attack some of May's writings, while granting her a rare gift for writing. He regrets the time she wasted in translating Max Müller's tale of German love — in his judgment a story unworthy of attention because of its artificial delicacy and a softness that brings it near to “sentimentalism.” Likewise he blames her for plunging into philosophical subjects that the great philosophers dare not confront, such as her lecture on “The Aim of Life,” which she cast in an elegant style and polished phrase, but in which the idea is bewildered, groping its way: it is “like a statue of marble, but its soul is buried in its stony heart.”

While we believe the writer was right in his criticism, it is fitting that we recall two things. First, that Romantic literature in the manner of Max Müller was the latest fashion in May's day, as I noted above. Second, that scientific writing, which treats philosophical and social subjects with the strict method of science and its precise analysis, was not yet known in an age in which the literature of the word ran riot. May did not go beyond the methods of her age when she took up the subject of “The Aim of Life.” All we hope today is that we have been freed from the fashion of sentimental literature with its artificial delicacy, and have passed beyond the stage of the literature of the word to the literature of meaning, so that there remains among us no one to applaud an article or a lecture from which he has understood nothing but the ring of the words.

In May's age woman began for the first time to stir in her seat and push aside the curtains of her seclusion, attempting emancipation and revolt against tradition. Through May's mouth we hear one girl's complaint against her family, who open her letters, and another girl's complaint against her family, who wish to marry her to a man she does not want; so she strives to win the sympathy of her younger brother, who represents the rising generation, and to wrest from him approval of her position and endorsement of her plan of keeping company with the young man toward whom she inclines.

In May's age there was not in the Egyptian University a single Egyptian girl; there were the French student, the English, the Russian, the Greek, the Italian — and May, of Lebanese origin — girls of every nation except the Egyptian. Today, when the universities of Egypt and Lebanon are crowded with Egyptian and Lebanese girls, we may rightly say that woman has covered, in a brief span, a long stretch on the field of her development.

And yet — despite this — Arabic literature has not presented us with a new May. Why? Have the springs of inspiration and genius dried up in our lands? Not that; but in my opinion, since May's day no girl has been granted what May was granted: two parents who confined to her all their tenderness and care; a circle of the writers of Egypt and Syria surrounding her with every solicitude and encouragement; a broad learning embracing all the branches of knowledge current in her age, tended in this by the great teachers, Eastern and Western, who then resided in Egypt or at the Egyptian University; and a total devotion to study and writing, with no social occupations to distract her from them, and no profession or post or labor she was forced into to earn her bread. She is the only woman of letters who was granted to sit at the table of literature morning and evening, moving the pen without interruption, her hair loosed and lightly clad, drawing inspiration from the muses of poetry and eloquence, with no one to trouble her serenity; and she is the only one who was able to renew the age of Sukayna and of Madame de Rambouillet, and to revive in her house the salons of literature, frequented by the famous writers of Egypt, who had the greatest part in directing her and spurring her to production.

The age of May is the age of the flowering of Lebanese literature outside Lebanon: the age of Zaidan, Sarrouf, Gibran, Rihani, and Mutran. And it is an age that has passed, or nearly so, since nothing remains to the Lebanese writer today for refuge but his mountains and his shores. And I do not know what will become of him now, after this falling back, this return to the homeland. Will his country embrace him with a mother's embrace, and prepare for him the means of activity that were prepared for his forebears in the lands of emigration, which have begun to shut their doors in his face? Or will it leave him to himself, wrestling with fate and hammering at the rock, until the struggle fells him and the flowers of his literature wither while they are still buds unopened and embryos that have never seen the light?