MARKETING

by ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 19, 1964

Dag Hammarskjold never ran true to form. As a public figure he was both in and above the fray; a Secretary General he nobly mediated the frequently ignoble pursuits of power politics; he dead at his calling and was to diplomacy what Camus was to literature- a moral man where morality is least expected and just as often least honored. His Markings, a diary extending over three decades, is a rare and revelatory work, an almost painfully personal portrait in the mode of Aurelius and Pascal and, to a degree, of Lawrence's The Hint. Its concerns are philosophical, theological, phychoplogical; its theme the struggle between self-aggrandizement and self-surrender. Contradiction was at the heart of the man; temperamentally a solitary, professionally ""news."" He had a strangely parcissistic notion of freedom and a supremely stoical sense of duty. he despaired often -- lonely in youth, even lonelier later his thoughts on death in general and suicide in particular are notable. He suffered- to use the clinical lingo- from Adlerian inferiority, the cause of which is morely conjectural, though some sort of sexual malaise is occasionally- and vaguely- suggested. What Hammarskjold presents- often with acute aphoristic sensitivity- is a record of travail, a search for salvation, and salvation on rather high Christian terms. Still he opts for the secular: ""In our age, the road to sanctity necessarily passes through the world of action."" It is in keeping that the world of action becomes, for him, the Thorny Way. In part prose, in part poetry- All splendidly translated, annotated and introduced by Auden and his colleague-Markings is a publishing event and very probably the seed-bed for a legend.

Pub Date: Oct. 19, 1964

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1964

Categories: NONFICTION