Hammarskjöld: A Life

5. Monastic Enough?

5 Monastic Enough? C onsider two scenes. It is late March, 1953. Dag Hammarskjöld, known to few reporters covering UN affairs, has just been nominated by the Security Council as the next secretarygeneral . A UN press officer calls a hasty press conference to convey the bare essentials of Hammarskjöld’s background for tomorrow’s papers. He runs through various official positions—chairman of the Board of Governors of the Bank of Sweden, state secretary in the Department of Finance, vice-chairman of the Swedish delegation to the United Nations—when, according to an eyewitness, “a voice from the crowd broke in loudly: ‘And a fairy!’”1 The next scene is quieter. At some point in 1954, a society journalist visited Hammarskjöld’s newly furnished apartment on the Upper East Side in New York to research a short illustrated article on his taste. At the time he was still a new man in town and an object of discreet curiosity. It wasn’t remotely Hammarskjöld’s style to publicize his personal life, but in his first year as secretary-general he seems to have been experimenting with communications—what helps, what might be tried, what does no harm. This visit would have been in the harmless category. The journalist discovered that, apart from a few family antiques , his taste ran to austere contemporary Scandinavian furnishings, and the overall color scheme was subdued though with bright woolen carpets here and there. What was there to report? The journalist must have looked disappointed. There is no record of their conversation, but at much the same time a UN photographer showed up to have a look, and she also was disappointed. Hammarskjöld turned to her with a remark that echoes well beyond its immediate context: “Monastic enough for you?”2 Coming upon this life now long after Hammarskjöld’s passing, we have choices to make. We can apply to him the intrusive standards—half Freud, half paparazzi—of today’s culture, as if we have the right to know how he spent his nights. We can turn away from all such considerations as a matter of elementary respect for privacy. Or we can do our best to adopt a third approach, neither voyeuristic nor disembodied, that ad- 96 Hammarskjöld | A Life vances this book’s concern to shed light on Hammarskjöld’s internal composition and lifework. Private and public intersect at some points, as he acknowledged by authorizing his literary executor to publish Markings . It is clear that his recurrent loneliness in the years just prior to his UN service was both a severe personal misery and a powerful inducement to “find himself,” to know what he was about. Loneliness entered into the deep equations he would write as he lived, above all his aspiration to serve selflessly and his engagement with a spiritual dimension that puts personal sufferings in a new perspective. There are two dimensions here, political and personal. Politics first. Eyewitnesses from Hammarskjöld’s era have pointed to two smear campaigns in the course of his tenure as secretary-general. Widely spaced in time and differently sourced, they were equally intended to damage him at a time when homosexuality was closeted. Allegations could harm a public career; facts could ruin one. The tragic fate of Alan Turing, the English mathematician of overwhelming genius, founder of computer science, unfolded at just this time: subject in 1952 to a criminal prosecution in England for homosexuality and given the choice of prison or chemical emasculation, he chose the latter and ended his life two years later. The years between Turing’s suicide in 1954 and the knighting of Elton John, the magical British musician, in 1998 saw vast changes in society and law in Great Britain and many other countries. The reporter’s rude comment at that initial press conference stemmed from the first whisper campaign, launched by the outgoing Norwegian secretary-general Trygve Lie and his loyal lieutenants—this according to Lie’s own, relatively sympathetic biographer. A complex figure with redeeming virtues, Lie can easily seem a rough prelude to Hammarskjöld, but this commandingly stout, politically outspoken individual, serving as secretary-general in the years 1946–53, took the United Nations from early days through chaotic Cold War disputes to the completion of the UN’s vast and beautiful headquarters buildings in Manhattan. This was hardly a small achievement. He did not go gently when the time came. Shunned and ignored by...