In Dag Hammarskjöld’s Vägmärken (1963), published in an English translation by W. H. Auden and Leif Sjöberg as Markings in 1964, there is an unidentified passage quoted on the 26th of December in 1956. The waymark reads as follows:
It merely happens to one man and not to others - - -, but he can take no credit to himself for the gifts and the responsibility assigned to him. - - - destiny is something not to be desired and not to be avoided. - - - it is a mystery not contrary to reason, for it implies that the world, and the course of human history, have meaning.Footnote1
In the most exhaustive study of Markings to date, A Reader’s Guide to Dag Hammarskjöld’s Waymarks (1999) by Bernhard Erling, the author advices the reader that the waymark “comes from a source thus far unknown” but that in its meditation on “persons of destiny” it speaks eloquently to “the agonizing quest for life’s meaning” recorded in Hammarskjöld’s deeply personal, so called white paper.Footnote2 Critics and scholars have long struggled to categorize the surprising and elusive manuscript written by Dag Hammarskjöld, the second Secretary-General of the United Nations, which was found in his New York apartment after his death in 1961 and published posthumously in its extant state. However, identifying this quote, which I will proceed to do here, may guide us to some further insight into the specific literary context that shaped Hammarskjöld’s literary amalgamation that stunned the world.
The avid reader of T. S. Eliot may of course already have identified the essay from which the quote is taken, making what follows superfluous. However, as the quote, to the best of my knowledge, has yet to be formally identified in the critical literature on Hammarskjöld’s Markings it seems advisable to do so here. The source for the quotation, modified by Hammarskjöld, is to be found in T. S. Eliot’s essay “Vergil and the Christian World,” first published in the Sewanee Review in 1953, on the peculiarities of Virgil that destined him to be a writer so “sympathetic to the Christian mind.”Footnote3 The quote chosen by Hammarskjöld is interesting for two reasons. His carefully selected lines of prose confirm the importance of Modernist writers, such as T. S. Eliot, for Hammarskjöld; but the quote may also say something significant about how Hammarskjöld viewed his own peculiar destiny which he continually scrutinized throughout his white paper which is both a personal diary and a meditation on moral leadership and the virtues of the good statesman.
As a member of the Swedish Academy, Dag Hammarskjöld’s interest in the arts and philosophy is well-documented and personal friends included, for example, Barbara Hepworth, John Steinbeck, Saint-John Perse, Djuna Barnes, whose play The Antiphon (1958) Hammarskjöld translated together with Karl Ragnar Gierow, Martin Buber, Bo Beskow, and W. H. Auden, who, together with Leif Sjöberg, translated Markings into English.Footnote4 Hammarskjöld was famously a polyglot, as W. H. Auden remarked in his introduction to Markings,Footnote5 yet English literature was particularly dear to Hammarskjöld, who, for example, counted Joseph Conrad as one of his favorite authors.Footnote6 In interviews throughout his life he repeatedly shared his preferred reading, and T. S. Eliot, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Virginia Woolf, Emily Dickinson, and Thomas Wolfe are among the names that reoccur.Footnote7 As newly appointed Secretary-General of the UN, his reading habits were apparently documented in both the New Yorker as well as by Harvey Breit in the New York Times.Footnote8 His interest in world literature became a crucial part of the mythology of Hammarskjöld as a man “with a taste for high mountains and free verse.”Footnote9 However, there remains much to be said about how his interest in literature influenced his own prose and poetry in Markings which is most often treated as an exclusively mystical and confessional work. Importantly, Markings is at the same time a highly experimental, and by its very nature incomplete, piece of modernist writing, which, one might argue, could be read for its insights into literary form and influence as well as for its religious and spiritual content.
In the original essay, the passage selected by Hammarskjöld follows T. S. Eliot’s discussion of Virgil’s pius Aeneas as a man of destiny, and as a man on whom “the future of the Western World depends.”Footnote10 It is not too surprising that Hammarskjöld, then Secretary-General of the UN, would have lingered over Eliot’s words about a man whose end “is only a new beginning; and the whole point of the pilgrimage is something which will come to pass for future generations.”Footnote11 While his responsibilities were global, rather than Western, Hammarskjöld seems to have found a correspondence between Eliot’s description of the heroic Aeneas and his own task. However, while Aeneas must have been chosen, Eliot cautioned that his election is in some sense inexplicable. In and of itself, being chosen does not matter, it is what you do after, and with, the realization that you have been chosen that matters. According to Eliot, in the Aeneid it is shown to be “a burden and responsibility rather than a reason for self-glorification.”Footnote12 If Nordic reviewers had been more familiar with Eliot’s essay, such a reference may have tempered the controversy which followed the publication of Hammarskjöld’s diary.
In the Nordic countries, and in Sweden in particular, there was much debate as to whether the contents of the diary suggested that Hammarskjöld had seen himself as Christ in a messianic sense. As Martin Marty put it: “Let yourself be stereotyped as a cool, aloof diplomat. Then, upon your death, let friends discover that you had been moonlighting as a mystic. In the process, you will certainly have set the stage for posthumous controversy.”Footnote13 However, as scholars and critics have since concluded there is little that indicates such a self-identification in Markings. Early on it was also refuted by religious scholars such as Hjalmar Sundén and Gustaf Aulén,Footnote14 and by the artist Bo Beskow, Hammarskjöld’s close friend.Footnote15 Furthermore, as W. H. Auden commented, any surprise at Hammarskjöld’s mystical interests was probably due to people not having paid close enough attention to how he lived and what he said when he was alive, for example in his essay “This I Believe,” his contribution to the radio program of Edward R. Murrow in 1953, in which he emphasized the formative influence of the writings of medieval mystics.Footnote16 Rather, Hammarskjöld’s musings are certainly inspired by the moral leadership of Christ, but continually assert that Hammarskjöld is a follower. Moreover, in his aspiration to do good and to formulate his version of virtuous leadership, Hammarskjöld’s position was not dogmatic, nor exclusively Christian. In Markings, it is made clear to the reader that he found guidance and waymarks in a variety of texts from all the world religions, often with an emphasis on the mystical tradition, as well as in secular world literature.
The passage from Eliot’s essay on Virgil which Hammarskjöld chose to include in Markings is also one that speaks of the prime importance of facing one’s destiny with humility, encapsulated in the word merely, not self-aggrandizement. It reads in full:
It merely happens to one man and not to others, to have the gifts necessary in some profound crisis, but he can take no credit to himself for the gifts and the responsibility assigned to him. Some men have had a deep conviction of their destiny, and in that conviction have prospered; but when they cease to act as an instrument, and think of themselves as the active source of what they do, their pride is punished by disaster. Aeneas is a man guided by the deepest conviction of destiny, but he is a humble man who knows that this destiny is something not to be desired and not to be avoided. Of what power is he the servant? Not of the gods, who are themselves merely instruments, and sometimes rebellious ones. The concept of destiny leaves us with a mystery, but it is a mystery not contrary to reason, for it implies that the world, and the course of human history, have meaning.Footnote17
Eliot’s words must have been simultaneously reassuring and challenging for Hammarskjöld. In his essay, Eliot phrases a virtuous response to destiny. It is not to be desired and yet not to be avoided. Yet how to confront and undertake a task without some desire to do so? Eliot may here describe an impossibly neutral state, yet it is one that Hammarskjöld similarly sought to uphold throughout his career. His faith in the necessary integrity and virtue of the international civil servant was an ideal on which he reflected upon at length in his lecture at Oxford University on 30 May 1961 “The International Civil Servant in Law and in Fact.”Footnote18 He conceded that upholding such an ideal of neutrality and integrity may prove nearly impossible, yet it was an ideal worth striving for. The alterations to Eliot’s passage made by Hammarskjöld, the elisions which emphasize the lessons Eliot’s observations hold for the reader who is not Aeneas but who might also feel themselves to be chosen or guided by destiny, indicates the humility and selflessness with which Hammarskjöld tried to approach his role as secretary-general.
In conclusion, one cannot overstate the abiding importance of both religious and secular literature to Dag Hammarskjöld and, in turn, the importance of English literature in particular for our understanding of his own writing. Yet, the inclusion of, allusions to, and influence of the writers of Modernism is still an underexplored facet of Hammarskjöld’s prose, poetry, and use of aphorism. As much as Markings is a work well-versed in the language of religious mysticism – an esoteric collage – it is also a piece of writing deeply embedded in modernism and the work of modernist writers Hammarskjöld greatly admired, like T. S. Eliot. Markings remains one of the most extraordinary but still inadequately mapped, and to some extent misunderstood, texts of twentieth-century literature. Further study of the intertextual influences evident in Hammarskjöld’s Markings promises to aid our understanding of this remarkable manuscript as well as its author.
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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. Dag Hammarskjöld, Vägmärken (Stockholm, 1963), 115. As critics of Auden’s translation have noted a more literal translation of the title would have been Waymarks.
2. Bernhard Erling, A Reader’s Guide to Dag Hammarskjöld’s Waymarks (St Peter, 1999), 181.
3. T. S. Eliot, “Vergil and the Christian World,” Sewanee Review, 61.1, 1953, 1–14, 1.
4. Carl F. Hovde, “The Dag Hammarskjöld-John Steinbeck Correspondence,” Development Dialogue, 1–2 1997, 97–129.
5. W. H. Auden, “Foreword” in Markings translated by Leif Sjöberg & W. H. Auden (London, 1964), 9–26.
6. See for example Roger Lipsey, Hammarskjöld: A Life (Ann Arbor, 2013), 61.
7. Anon. “Den nye konsulten,” Dagens Nyheter, Feb 6, 1951, 6–6 and Harvey Breit, ’In and Out of Books,’ New York Times, Apr 26, 1953, n.p.
8. S. Å. “Hammarskjöld har inte brutit med någon flicka för Eliots skull,” Dagens Nyheter, May 2, 1953, 6–6.
9. A. M. Rosenthal, “New U. N. Secretary Cautious on Issues,” New York Times, Apr 10, 1953, 1, 5.
10. T. S. Eliot, “Vergil and the Christian World,” 10.
11. Ibid.
12. Ibid.
13. Martin Marty, “Dag Hammarskjöld’s White Book,” New York Times, Dec 21, 1969, n.p.
14. Hjalmar Sundén, Kristus-meditationer i Dag Hammarskjölds Vägmärken (Stockholm, 1966) and Gustaf Aulén, Dag Hammarskjöld’s White Book: An Analysis of Markings (Philadelphia, 1969).
15. Bo Beskow, Dag Hammarskjöld, Ett Porträtt (Stockholm, 1968).
16. W. H. Auden, “Foreword” in Markings translated by Leif Sjöberg & W. H. Auden (London, 1964), 9–26.
17. T. S. Eliot, “Vergil and the Christian World,” 10–11.
18. Dag Hammarskjöld, The International Civil Servant in Law and in Fact (Uppsala, 2021).