As coincidences go, it couldn’t have surprised me more. I was in the US, visiting my daughter’s family in Albuquerque, New Mexico, when a major exhibition of Rabindranath Tagore’s paintings opened in New York to mark the 150th anniversary of his birth. And one day, as I browsed through my daughter’s personal library, I came across a first edition copy of Tagore’s Personality, published by Macmillan of New York in March 1917. I didn’t know it existed. She probably had forgotten about it.
I asked my daughter, Mousumi, an associate professor in the Physics and Astronomy Department of the University of New Mexico (UNM), how she got hold of the book. First edition Tagores aren’t easy to come by, and first edition Personality, a lesser known book of essays, is even rarer. She said she bought it years earlier from a used-book store in Boston, where she once lived as a student.
Hardbound in blue linen, with the title, the author’s name, and his initials (RT) stamped in gold, the220-page book, divided in six chapters – What is Art, The World of Personality, The Second Birth, My School, Meditation, and Woman – is in excellent condition and includes six illustrations showing Tagore at Santa Barbara, California; at the San Diego Exposition; with W W Pearson at Riverside, California; at Colorado Springs, Colorado; and at Salt Lake City, Utah.
The Boston provenance of the copy evoked my curiosity, since the book was printed at the once famous Norwood Press, now a historic Massachusetts landmark. Even more interesting was a round, perforated seal on its title page that said: “Advance Copy for Review. Not for Sale.” Could it have been sent by the publishers to a Boston magazine or newspaper, which then passed it on to a reviewer, who held on to his copy until, years afterwards, possibly after his death, his family sold off his library to a Boston used-book store?
A name, J Edgar Park, was scribbled on the flyleaf in pencil. I was intrigued. Could he have been the reviewer? I made some enquiries, which gave me reason to assume he probably was. I found that, about the time Tagore’s book came out, there lived in the Boston area a Reverend J Edgar Park, who was for 19 years the minister of the Second Church of West Newton, became one of the most popular preachers in New England, and made a name for himself as a writer of books and articles on religious topics. In the 1920s, Reverend Park was professor of Theory of Worship at Boston University’s School of Theology and in 1936 he was the Lyman Beecher lecturer on Preaching at Yale Divinity School.
Given this background, it’s not far-fetched to believe that a newspaper or magazine would think of a person like Reverend Park to review a book by Tagore, whose reputation in the West at the time was that of a philosopher-sage from the East. If that actually was the case, my daughter’s first edition copy of Personality acquires an added value.
What was even more interesting was a folded, a yellowed newspaper clipping, probably from The Times of London, I found stuck inside the book. It was a report of a “long conversation” that an Italian student had with Tagore in Milan on the subject of “People and Nation.” No date is marked on the clipping but there’s enough evidence on its reverse to make a guess: probably 20 February 1925, the year of Tagore’s first visit to Italy. I’ve no idea who’d have made the clipping and kept it if not Reverend Park himself, who must have found in Tagore’s observations echoes of his own spiritual beliefs.
“After centuries of power and prosperity,” the report quotes Tagore as saying, “you, in Europe, have come to this point, and you do not know what to do. You see no prospect of peace. Class is arrayed against class, man against woman, because you have lost your faith in the foundations, in all that is great in the human world, and you have been piling up power into a triumphal column, which your foundations cannot support. Science has given you power, but not the foundations, which might give you happiness, so that the soul of the people is smothered by the nation.”
By the way, this was not the only Tagore trail I picked up during my recent visit to the US. I learnt that a UNM professor of physics, Dr Daniel Finley, calls his laptop “Tagore,” and when I happened to meet him at his house one day, he took me to his bedroom and fished out from one of his bookshelves copies of Tagore’s Gardener, Sheaves, and Gitanjali. “Tagore is a favourite poet, and my wife and I often read him in the morning,” Dr Finley said.
