Books: The Invisible Man

MARKINGS by Dag Hammarskjöld. 221 pages. Knopf. $4.95.

The man seemed detached and imperturbable as he sat at the Security Council’s high table, mediating between East and West. He often exasperated the committed men of both sides. But he became a kind of special saint for the uncommitted, the uncertain, the uneasy, who only hoped for the best without knowing just what the best was, who believed that sheer good will could somehow resolve all the world’s conflicts. His very immobility was reassuring; at times he seemed the still point of the turning world. Not even Dag Hammarskjöld’s close friends knew that this dispassionate diplomat was a tormented man who poured out his emotions in highly impassioned poems, aphorisms, haiku and prayers, dealing, as he put it, with “birth and death, love and pain—the reality behind the dance under the daylight lamps of social responsibility.”

The manuscript of Markings was discovered in Hammarskjöld’s Manhattan home shortly after his death. With it was an undated letter in which Hammarskjöld called the writings “a sort of white book concerning my negotiations with myself—and with God.” Skillfully translated by W. H. Auden, with the help of a Swedish linguist, Markings is in turn earnest, pedestrian, paradoxical and noble. The first entry was written when Hammarskjöld was a college student of 20; the last, a few days before his plane crashed in Northern Rhodesia in 1961.

Imitation of Christ. The son of a former Swedish Prime Minister and a brilliant economist in his own right, Hammarskjöld was a meteoric success as a banker even before he entered international politics. Yet Markings shows that every step of the way he was dogged by agonizing self-doubts and despair. “Time goes by,” he noted, “reputation increases, ability declines.” “The little urchin makes a couple of feeble hops on one leg without falling down,” he wrote, “and is filled with admiration at his dexterity, doubly so, because there are onlookers. Do we ever grow up?” He was unsparingly self-critical: “If you don’t speak ill of others more often than you do, this certainly isn’t from any lack of desire. But you know that malice only gives you elbowroom when dispensed in carefully measured doses.”

He dwelt on death and suicide: “There is only one path out of the steamy dense jungle where the battle is fought over glory and power and advantage. And that is—to accept death.” And he luridly describes several suicides he witnessed (or imagined?), such as the beautiful girl who drowned herself and was washed ashore on a river bank, “beyond all human nakedness in the inaccessible solitude of death—her white firm breasts are lifted to the sunlight—a heroic torso of marble-blond stone in the soft grass.”

Speck of Dirt. But in the early 1950s, it appears that Hammarskjöld found faith in God. “Didst Thou give me this inescapable loneliness,” he wrote, “so that it would be easier for me to give Thee all?” Inspired by the medieval mystics, he strove to pattern his life after Christ’s, an ambition that some Swedish critics of Markings chose to interpret as blasphemy or egomania; yet if Markings makes anything clear, it is that Hammarskjöld was a truly humble man: “How far from both muscular heroism and from the soulfully tragic spirit of unselfishness, which unctuously adds its little offering to the spongecake at a kaffeeklatsch, is the plain and simple fact that a man has given himself completely to something he finds worth living for.”

In his years that he served as Secretary-General, Hammarskjöld drove himself mercilessly to become “pure of heart” in the service of others: “On a really clean tablecloth, the smallest speck of dirt annoys the eye. At high altitudes, a moment’s self-indulgence may mean death.” Yet he remained ever and exquisitely aware of the ambiguities of even the best-intentioned human behavior and never became self-righteous about his own projects: “The ‘great’ commitment all too easily obscures the ‘little’ one. But without the humility and warmth which you have to develop in your relations to the few with whom you are personally involved, you will never be able to do anything for the many.” One entry explains his approach to international conflicts: “Jesus sat at meat with publicans and sinners: he consorted with harlots. Did he do this to obtain their votes? Or did he think that, perhaps, he could convert them by such ‘appeasements’? Or was his humanity rich and deep enough to make contact, even in them, with that in human nature which is common to all men, indestructible, and upon which the future has to be built?”

The Call. There is one wry poem, surely written, at least in his head, during one of the U.N.’s interminable debates, which suggests Hammarskjöld was sometimes less than happy about his job as man in the middle.

Words without import

Are lobbed to and fro Between us.

Forgotten intrigues

With their spider’s web

Snare our hands.

Choked by its clown’s mask

And quite dry, my mind

Is crumbling.

But if he was humble, he was occasionally so with the passion of a man who felt himself called by destiny. He wrote: “Your responsibility is indeed terrifying. If you fail, it is God, thanks to your having betrayed Him, who will fail mankind. You fancy you can be responsible to God: can you carry the responsibility for God?”

Elected Calling. Hammarskjöld was clearly a poet who might have achieved eminence in that calling as he had in others he chose to follow.

Too tired for company, You seek a solitude You are too tired to fill is a haiku that the Japanese masters might be proud of. But he believed that “in our era, the road to holiness necessarily passes through the world of action.”

The total impression is of a complex, sensitive and enormously literate mind, all the more fascinating since it belonged to a man in the highest of political offices, where he made his inner humility a palpable power in the balance of nations. “I am the vessel,” he wrote. “The draught is God’s. And God is the thirsty one.”