Word: hammarskjold
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When he died in an African plane crash in 1961, U.N. Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjdld left behind a book that he had been working on secretly for 36 years, a slim volume of 600 poems, prayers and aphorisms dealing with "birth and death, love and pain." Hammarskjold's Markings (TiME, Oct. 23, 1964) was an instantaneous success. "Everybody owns Dag Hammarskjold's Markings," said retired Episcopal Bishop Malcolm Endicott Peabody. "But few have read it. Few of those have understood it." What fascinated the public, though, was far less the book's content than the striking contrast...
...this admiring spiritual biography, Theologian Van Dusen argues that there is no incongruity between diplomat and diarist. After studying Hammarskjold's correspondence and talking with scores of his friends and associates, Presbyterian Van Dusen has been able to relate the entries of Markings to the changing moods of the statesman's life...
...Lonely Boy. In Markings, Hammarskjold poured out the "true colors" that he was never able to display publicly. Van Dusen finds the explanation in a singularly unhappy childhood. Hammarskjold worshiped his gentle, pious Lutheran mother, from whom he received a conventional religious upbringing. He admired, yet feared, and perhaps hated his stern disciplinarian father, who was Sweden's Prime Minister from 1914 to 1917. As he worked his way through the ranks of his country's civil service, the brooding, lonely man often contemplated suicide. "My life," he wrote darkly, "is worse than death...
...Dusen dismisses the familiar rumors that Hammarskjold, a lifelong bachelor, was a homosexual. His inability to establish close relationships with women, argues the author, stemmed from his admitted "extreme physical modesty" and a feeling that the desired "ideal of mutual understanding" was unattainable in marriage. Van Dusen also points out that Hammarskjold was too much of an intellectual prig to have had much luck with women anyway. When a friend once asked him why he was not interested in an attractive Swedish girl, Hammarskjold solemnly replied: "She didn't appreciate T. S. Eliot...
...event that finally brought Hammarskjold inner peace was his sudden, unexpected elevation to U.N. Secretary-General in 1953. An entry in Markings, about the time of his reelection to a second term, shows a strong affirmation of the faith he had abandoned while he was still in his 20s: "Yes to God; yes to Fate; yes to yourself." Between his diplomatic chores, Hammarskjold began translating the writings of Martin Buber into Swedish, and the pages of Markings are increasingly strewn with quotes from the Bible...