The Lonely One

DAG HAMMARSKJOeLD: A SPIRITUAL PORTRAIT by Sven Stolpe. 127 pages. Scribner. $3.95.

Dag Hammarskjoeld was a man almost nobody knew. His diary, Markings, published three years after his death (TIME, Oct. 23, 1964), surprised even his close associates, for it showed that the brilliant economist, banker, and Secretary-General of the U.N. was a mystical man, unfathomed during his lifetime, constantly tortured by self-doubt and despair.

But it was no surprise to Sven Stolpe, one of Sweden's most distinguished writers and chancellor of the Swedish Catholic Academy. As a close friend of Hammarskjoeld's since early youth, Stolpe was aware that at one time Hammarskjoeld considered studying theology instead of economics, and over the years, through conversations and correspondence, he came to understand Hammarskjoeld's increasing preoccupation with mysticism as well as his gnawing unhappiness. In this admiring and compassionate, but still searching volume, Author Stolpe strives to find the roots of what made his old friend the kind of man he was. The roots are perhaps too tangled for anyone to sort out sufficiently, but Stolpe does lead the reader along one path that provides some interesting clues.

Stolpe supports the view of others close to him that Hammarskjoeld, gifted with a fine mind and prodigious energies, was tormented by a profound and inviolable loneliness. Stolpe believes that this alienation from people around him can be traced to Hammarskjoeld's childhood.

Hammarskjoeld's father, Hjalmar, Sweden's Prime Minister from 1914 to 1917, was one of his nation's most hated men. Vilified by socialists and liberals, accused of being pro-German, nicknamed "Hungerskjoeld" during Sweden's food shortage, Hjalmar left office a bitter man, aloof, isolated, cold.

Dag's mother, on the other hand, was "warm and gushing." Dag was her fourth son, and because she had yearned all along for a daughter, she dressed young Dag for a long time in girl's clothes. Says Stolpe: "One may, without wishing to touch upon a delicate theme, guess at some connection between, on the one hand, Dag's attitude to his devotedly loved, exacting mother and his stern, reserved demigod of a father and, on the other, the fact that throughout his life he remained not only unmarried but so far as is known without any realistic contact with the opposite sex."

Though he describes Hammarskjoeld as being thoroughly masculine, Stolpe adds: "Yet I sometimes felt that for all his polite talk at parties he never visually discriminated between a shapely woman and, say, a sofa or a chair." Stolpe is convinced that Hammarskjoeld remained a celibate all his life, and that his failure to establish an emotionally realistic relationship with women forced his gradual retreat into his inner world.

Toward the end, Stolpe believes, Hammarskjoeld had become a fully realized mystic and had begun to turn inside and to look realistically at the problems of loneliness--of the lonely body, too, as he showed in a wryly touching little verse:

Because it never found a mate

Men called

The unicorn abnormal.

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