CHARLES CORM; HUMANIST, ENTREPRENEUR, PATRIOT, POET AN INTELLECTUAL BIOGRAPHY Prologue After many long years of doubt and hesitation, I finally made my way to Beirut. For far too long have I entertained the prospects of writing a biography of Charles Corm. But the Corm Archives had for the past fifty years been an anonymous jumble bolted shut in a Beirut sanctum, and for more than thirty years—and for a variety of personal and security reasons—Beirut had been off limits to me. I’ve had plenty trepidations about going back. But Charles Corm and I go a long way. His literary works have haunted my boyhood and my school days in Lebanon, and as an adult his lure had been tugging at my academic and research track for a number of years. Writing his biography weighed heavily. And so, finally, on the evening of Tuesday July 10, 2012, in an “ivory tower” abutting the Jesuit Université Saint-Joseph and Beirut’s National Museum, in the heart of the Ashrafiyé’s Quartier Nazareth, I came at last to meet Charles Corm (1894-1963.) Being in the Corm family compound, in the home of one of Lebanon’s iconic national figures of the early twentieth century, was like moving in the midst of an aged gallery of memories and cultural artifacts. The home itself was replete with musty heirlooms and echoes of times past, redolent with fragrances and ghosts of Charles Corm, his craft, the bustle of his learned salons, the frenzied animation of his creative endeavors, and the energy and enterprise of his business and commercial ventures. Meeting Charles Corm’s descendants, the curators and “keepers” of this monument to Lebanon’s national 1 memory—and meeting most recently his son Hiram on this very day in July—was like being in the presence of Charles Corm himself; the father, the family patriarch, the child- poet, the entrepreneur, and the chief architect of Lebanese nationalism of the early twentieth century. At first glance the physical resemblance between Charles Corm and his children was striking. Likewise, their mannerisms, language, inflections, and above all their general energy and warmth bespoke a familiar familial flair. Yet Hiram’s likeness to his father was uncanny on a plane quite distinct from that of Charles’s other offspring—namely his eldest son David, whom I have known for a number of years now, and his younger daughter, Virginie, whom I have recently come to meet in Beirut. Peering into Hiram Corm’s prying—almost mischievous—eyes was like touching the very soul of Charles Corm. The likeness was as otherworldly as it was real; one soothing, enchanting, and disconcerting at the same time. Hiram’s gaze radiated a familiar sparkle, at once inquisitive, impish, and gentle, gleaming in the same luster of yellowed sixty- year-old photographs of Charles Corm’s own piercing look. In one’s eyes are revealed all the mysteries of one’s being and the gates to one’s very soul, often mused Charles Corm in his literary compositions.1 Even in his early teens, in vernal essays some might judge too clumsy to be deemed serious literature, Corm had already been overtaken by the 1 See for instance Les Miracles de la Madone aux sept douleurs, (Beirut: Éditions de la Revue Phénicienne, 2010), 83-85, and Contes Érotiques; Variations sur le Mode Sentimental, 1912 (Beirut: Éditions de la Revue Phénicienne, 2011), 14. 2 “power of the eye.” At seventeen, in a letter sent to his mother from aboard the RMS Olympic that was carrying him to New York, a clearly homesick Charles Corm wrote, To my beloved mother: to you I send these kisses, bubbling with affection. Unforgettably etched in my heart, I carry with me a most exquisite image of you, the finest and most delicate of medals hanging from my neck. With me I also carry your smile, a light and subtle fragrance, pervading and embalming the depths of my being. Oh, and your eyes! They are alive within me; they are my sweet and comforting night-light, discrete and devoted, burning softly in the sanctum of the shrine that you have raised in love to our family. Yours, with all of my soul, Charles Corm, 1912.2 Reflecting “the sweetness of a smile,” “the splendors of daytime,” “the secrets of nightfall,” and “cascades of starlight,” all of life’s zest, deliriums, and woes rested in the eyes, according to Corm.3 And now, whether a Providential coincidence or a heaven-sent assent to Corm’s poetic supplications, his progeny came to fully incarnate the ardor and enchantment that he saw and held dear in the human eye—most remarkably perhaps, bestowing upon his children his own sprightly, burning, prurient gaze. 2 Charles Corm Archives, postcard from the Atlantic Ocean, Royal Mail Steamer Olympic, July 20, 2012. It should be noted that this vessel was a transatlantic liner, the “flagship” and namesake of the “White Star Line” triumvirate of “Olymipic-class liners,” which included the Titanic and Britannic. On this trip, Charles Corm would go on to set up shop on Broadway Avenue, where he would eventually learn English, and later meet Henry Form and Fiorello LaGuardia, laying the groundwork to his very successful future business ventures, and eventually a triumphal return to New York City in 1939-1940 to represent Lebanon in the New York World’s Fair of Flushing Meadows-Corona Park. 3 Charles Corm, Les Miracles de L Madone aux Sept Douleurs, (Beirut: Éditions de la Revue Phénicienne, 2010,) 85. 3 In his eulogy of Charles Corm, Lebanese poet Youssef Ghssoub (1893-1972,) a high- school friend of the author’s, described his sharp bewitching eyes as “garrulous tireless sparkles that one cannot interrupt once they begin talking; so you submit to their magic and you listen. […] Even in illness, his captivating eyes lit up his ashen face and filled his sick-man’s bedroom with a healthy glow.”4 Like his ubiquitous eyes, long after he’d been gone, Charles Corm’s very presence remains, and is undeniable in his children, in the lives they lead, and in the memories that they have kept of him, faithfully preserving his legacy and, as it were, holding down the fort he built. Any father would be envious of the special relationship and the evident affection in which these offspring—now in their sixties and seventies—held, and still hold their father. Something magical takes place when these childlike adults begin speaking of their long-departed parent. Even now, some fifty years after his death, none of them (particularly Virginie, in whose arms he had, literally, breathed his last) can recall that evening of September 1963 without welling up with emotion. I knew from the moment I set foot in the Charles Corm Archives that the history of the man that I set out to write was about to become a personal one indeed; a vicariously written posthumous autobiography, recorded through me, evidently, but dictated by a 4 Youssef Ghsoub, Shaarl Qorm; Sawt Lubnaan al-Madwiyy (Charles Corm; The Resounding Voice of Lebanon,) (Beirut: Charles Corm Archives, ND,) manuscript, 1. See also Al-Hikma (Beirut: The Hikma Institute, Volume 11, Number 9, December 1963,) 451. 4 living gallery of recollections and a rich inventory of untapped private papers pining to get parsed. My subject was to be Charles Corm, modern Lebanon’s national poet. It was also to be the cultural and intellectual history of Corm’s Lebanon through his published literary work, his unpublished manuscripts, his unexplored monographs, sketches (and scribbles on Lucky Strikes cigarette wrappings,) and his public, corporate, and commercial correspondence between 1919 and 1963. But what I suddenly had before me was much more than a rich private archive of untouched primary sources; it was much more than manuscripts and collections of cultural and intellectual testimonials that had once been Charles Corm’s life and his craft’s vessel and carriage. My playground was now a veritable living memory of Charles Corm, and a breathing pulsating palpable likeness of his very being, his demeanor, his mindset, and his temperament. Charles Corm died in 1963, but one can still find him hot-shot, exuberant, spirited, engrossed in his craft, engaged and engaging, coming alive in the persons of David and Hiram Corm, and haunting the home he prematurely (and grudgingly) departed. The Fondation Charles Corm cultural center, an archival trust which Corm’s children are currently preparing to house these private collections, ultimately aiming to turn them into the holdings of a research institute and academic foundation, underpin the essence of this biography. Child-Poet and Business Tycoon 5 The eight-story building currently housing the Charles Corm archives had been the family home since the late 1930s. In 1928, it had begun serving as the corporate headquarters of Charles Corm’s Société Générale Industrielle & Commerciale; the Middle East’s Exclusive Ford Motor Company subsidiary, and the region’s largest franchise of car dealerships, auto part warehouses. and agricultural machinery shops. Indeed the famed Maison Blanche de Beyrouth eventually became the corporate nerve center of one of the Levant’s most successful business ventures of the 1920s and 1930s. At its height, Corm’s Société Générale could boast dozens of Ford showrooms, and a number of Firestone, John Deere, and McCormick International Harvester branches, assembly shops, dealerships and distribution centers stretching from Turkey to Transjordan and Palestine, and from Damascus to Baghdad and Teheran. Some of the dealerships were strewn about in forlorn underdeveloped outposts as far afield as Aleppo, Alexandretta, Amman, and Antioch; others were closer to the nearer metropolises of Beirut, Haifa, Jaffa, Jerusalem, Tripoli and Damascus.