Hammarskjold's 'True Profile'

The popular image of Dag Hammarskjold has-changed more in the three years since his fatal plane crash than that of most statesmen changes in generations; and the cause is a posthumously published "spiritual diary" that he kept for thirty-six years, from the age of twenty until a few weeks before his death. Although Hammarskjold never showed this record to anyone, he decided sometime in the 1950's to leave it behind as "the only true 'profile'" of his personality.

Now, after publication last year in Sweden, Markings is available in a handsome American edition and a handsome translation by W.H. Auden and a collaborator. The book is as much an anthology as an autobiography, as much a collection of original poetry as of thoughts on religion. It may not be, as an overworked Widener librarian deduced, a study of international law; but even those who have read it will find it difficult to classify.

No History

IfMarkings isn't international law, neither is it-as one might expect-history. Auden remarks in a sympathetic foreward on the relative absence of references to politics and international relations. Hammarskjold, while writing Markings, rose from a brilliant economics student to become Secretary-General of the UN; yet he always subordinates external events to the moral doubts and problems that they engendered. Rather than describing, say, the circumstances of the Congo crisis, he prefers to reflect on the loneliness of power and the necessity of winning the right to be obeyed.

When Hammarskjold expounds on such themes, he is at his least interesting. Doubtless what he says is true, but it is also platitudinous; surely no one reading that "there is a profound causal relationship between the height of a man's ambition and the depth of a man's fall" will thrill at the keenness of the insight. The Hammarskjold revealed by observations like this is still the conscientious public servant that we have always seen.

But as his concern with morality carries him into the religious realm, Hammarskjold becomes infinitely more interesting, both as a thinker and as a man, for it soon becomes clear that the former Secretary-General was a throughgoing mystic inclined toward asceticism. Although his outlook will hardly appeal to all readers, those who can accept the tenets of Hammarskjold's faith-they are not accessible to reason-will respond strongly to his observations on selflessness and love.

A Mystic

Those who do not share Hammarskold's philosophy will still find Markingsa rewarding book, but chiefly for the light it casts on the inner life of a prominent and powerful man. Although phrases like "to answer Yes to Someone" and "the co-inherence of all things" may have no real meaning, something they represent sustained Hammarskjold during long years when, always on the brink of physical exhaustion, he labored under tremendous pressures, often without recognition.

Markingsteems with quotations from the Bible (principally from Psalms) and from noted mystics like Meister Eckhart. The heavy use of such material raises the question of whether Hammarskjold's mysticism was acquired through first-hand experience or not. But the question is unanswerable. Only someone like Eckhart could determine the genuineness of Hammarskjold's inspiration; the rest of us can merely view this unsuspected facet of his character with surprise-and perhaps admiration.

Four Poems

In 1959, Hammarskjold began writing haiku, 17-syllable poems based on a Japanese form. Translations by W.H. Auden of some of Hammarskjold's haiku appear below:

Smell of bread. Homely words.

The light faded

In the snow's whirling ashes.

The winter twilight grays

Beyond the pane.

The cage bird's breast is

bleeding.

This accidental

Meeting of possibilities

Calls itself l.

Dead pools in quarries.

On the scrubby heath

Swarms of peacock butterflies. -From "Markings"