Diary of a Political Artist
BLOOMFIELD, LINCOLN P.
Diary of a Political Artist MARKINGS By Dag Hammarskjold Knopf. 219 pp. $4.95. Reviewed by LINCOLN P. BLOOMFIELD Professor of Political Science and Director of Arms Control Project, MIT;...
...No one stopped to answer him...
...of surpassing poignancy: "Dumb, my naked body/Endures the stoning, dumb/When slit up and the live/Heart is plucked out...
...must not deflect us from the new meanings he gave to the quest for a better ordered international polity...
...The man to remember is not the nocturnal diarist but the daytime international civil servant who functioned with unmatched virtuosity in the absence of a real international community...
...Indeed, as a writer he was capable of articulating thoughts of high spiritual beauty: "God does not die on the day when we cease to believe in a personal deity, but we die on the day when our lives cease to be illumined by the steady radiance, renewed daily, of a wonder, the source of which is beyond all reason...
...Our image of Hammarskjold must not be one of a random miracle of politics that casts up a freak never to be duplicated...
...Death will find you...
...This feverish self-consciousness has as counterpoint a powerful strain of mysticism, one that seems to carry self-abnegation in the name of religious aspiration to the point where we have to ask if he was man or saint—or man trying to become saint...
...Foreign Policy" Given a little encouragement, this astonishing book could fatally divert historians from their task of accurately locating Dag Hammarskjold in the political landscape of our age...
...The entries for many of his last years begin with "Night is drawing nigh...
...And from living memory we know each detail along his own personal and professional road to Calvary, with its barely figurative Gethsemane, its shatteringly literal Golgotha...
...It ought to be that of the best of rational, cultivated men, who by definition is no less artist than artisan...
...The unusual thing is that in this case the man was eloquent, sensitive, and deeply religious...
...You fancy you can be responsible to God...
...his efforts to live for his God...
...And throughout there is a preoccupation with death, combining a supreme fatalism with something a psychiatrist would doubtless diagnose as a death-wish: "It may be that death is to be your ultimate gift to life...
...Do not seek death...
...and instead of ordering his private diary burned, he left it to be published (and translated, superbly, by Leif Sjöberg and W. H. Auden from the Swedish...
...When we think of the man— lonely to the point of neurosis already—we can only hope that he was able to meet this nihilistic assault with a spiritual fanaticism of his own: "Pray that your loneliness may spur you into finding something to live for, great enough to die for...
...Strains of intense religiosity ran through Hammarskjold's inner life, like Ariadne's thread, along paths of conventional worship into extraordinary spiritual byways...
...the expectation of death is his constant companion...
...As a political artist Dag Hammarskjold colored his canvases in the grays of the real-life political spectrum, not in black and white...
...We can rejoice that he was equipped to translate into an art form his political and administrative mortification, as it were, and the inner loneliness that obviously went with it, in that last dark year of his life...
...Thus it was confirmed that his thesis was incontrovertible...
...Inexhaustibly inventive, he stood for the highest form of political responsibility in a world constantly threatened by the fanaticisms of the Left and the Right...
...Another theme is rejection—even mortification—of the flesh...
...In the end the question is not whether Dag Hammarskjold was saint or mystic, aberrant or artistic genius...
...The UN, its integrity, its promise, its most faithful servant—all these were to be gutted with the utmost political ferocity as the leadership of the Soviet Union acted on its historic willingness to destroy both men and institutions in the name of an idea held by fanatics...
...And God is the thirsty one...
...The draught is God's...
...But seek the road which makes death a fulfillment...
...For this diary of innermost thoughts does reveal that beneath the statesman's carapace there was, not surprisingly, a man...
...Even before publication there were scandalized whispers concerning his alleged self-identification with Christ...
...From his diary we know of his battles with weakness...
...Yet the real martyrdom of Dag Hammarskjold came not in a plunging airplane, but in the form of savage assault on the man, his office, and the ideals of impartial international service for which he stood...
...the question is how all this relates to the political forces that move us, and what these diarist's fragments can add to our knowledge of the policies of one of the most inventive and constructive political animals of our time...
...To enter into his own mystique may be to lose for ourselves the point of his story which was his life, not his death...
...For the vital point of his life, so far as the rest of us are concerned, is in the wholly non-mystical notions of the professional peacekeeper...
...can you carry responsibility for God...
...But the one thing we must not do is fall into a deterministic trap that sees Hammarskjold's tragic end in the night over Ndola as foreordained rather than, as it surely was, the actuarial hazard of the briefcase diplomat...
...of superb irony: "The madman shouted in the market place...
...That this attack did not succeed is as much a tribute to Hammarskjold's fortitude and integrity as to the good sense of most other countries...
...On Hammarskjold's death Walter Lippman wrote: "The present world is not ready for the kind of man Hammarskjold was the embodiment of the noblest Western political achievement...
...But in the light of history we cannot avoid making the connection between his art and his politics...
...Superficial resemblances to a Christ, an Oedipus, or a Narcissus—all present in his diary (and all present in the unchronicled psyches of how many other men...
...Other national governments, not excluding our own, would make his life as Secretary General difficult when he displeased...
...His ability to write an exquisite haiku was complemented by his capacity to invent new languages of multilateral diplomacy that permitted the job to be done by obscuring its sharp edges...
...But it must be said at once that the Hammarskjold diary is not only entirely non-political, but totally devoid of explicit references to the external world...
...But when his evenhanded administration of the UN Congo operation had the practical effect of spoiling the Soviet game in Central Africa and closing up, at least temporarily, Moscow's promising beachhead there, the Communists moved in for slaughter...
...author, "The United Nations and U.S...
...Surely the most obvious one of all connects his apparent sense of identification with the martyred Christ with his own near-martyrdom...
...Your body must become familiar with its death—in all its possible forms and degrees—as a self-evident, imminent, and emotionally neutral step on the way towards the goal you have found worthy of your life...
...or "I am the vessel...
...his temptations...
...He described his own place and contribution— and the contingent hazards of his vocation—when he wrote elsewhere, hoping for the understanding of future generations: "Working at the edge of the development of human society is to work on the brink of the unknown...
...Thus one can analyze and interpret and parse the life of Dag Hammarskjold according to his quality as a poet, an aphorist, a philosopher, and a mystic—as he apparently intended that we do— without reference to his real-life role...
...When it became Dag Hammarskjold's turn, he characteristically sublimated his sense of affront in a touching dedication to his own version of the Jerusalem "multitudes"—in this case the poor, numerous, underprivileged small nations who formed his favored constituency thenceforth...
...He who has surrendered himself to it knows that the Way ends on the Cross...
...In the normal order of things the highly personal character of this diary would serve simply as the setting for Hammarskjold's record of his political life as Secretary General of the UN from 1953-61...
...We sense behind his words an almost pathological introspection, magnified by pervasive self-doubtings...
...The hints of messianism cannot be overlooked: "Longing—among other things, for the Cross...
...now reviewers will doubtless produce frissons about his cabalistic references to sex...
...A Trygve Lie was bluff enough, "normal" enough, to invoke healthy indignation when in 1950 the Soviets made him into their version of an Orwellian "unperson" for daring to respond with truth and courage to Communism's Korean aggression...
Vol. 47 • November 1964 • No. 23
