It is true that Dag Hammarskjöld was given an astonishing apprenticeship in life and early career in terms of both formal education and other opportunities through which he would gain valuable perspectives on the inner workings of international diplomacy. It was a start which prepared him well for the vocation in which he would eventually find his feet. But among the many things that made him extraordinary as a world leader was an energy turned towards things more elusive. His deep and hope-filled capacity to say ‘Yes’ to humanity (he was not naïve; the Congo crisis birthed in him a conviction that ‘there are really evil persons – evil right through – only evil’, p. 510), and his ‘moral stature and incorruptible justice, his integrity and whole-hearted commitment, and his never-failing sense of responsibility vis-à-vis the task’ (p. 51) – to recall a description provided by Hammarskjöld’s governmental colleague and later loyal friend Henrik Klackenberg (Hammarskjöld served as a member of the Swedish cabinet in the early 1950s) – grew not only out of the soil provided by a mother with a deep social conscience and spirituality, but also, as Roger Lipsey notes, by a ‘crushingly honest exploration of what it is to live; to have mind, heart, and body; to be thrown into this world; to decipher experience; to carry burdens and face weaknesses a little wisely; to find something approaching inner peace; to glimpse a larger pattern, and somehow serve the good’ (p. 53).

Anyone familiar with Markings could not but agree that this description is indicative of its author’s quest to live an examined life – ‘we are witnessing a gifted soul deeply engaged in its own education’ (p. 59) – a quest which more than any other single factor made Hammarskjöld lead out of a tributary that too few dare approach, but which Lipsey, appropriately, makes much of throughout this biography. As Hammarskjöld would write in Markings:

The road to self-knowledge does not pass through faith. But only through the insight we gain by pursuing the fleeting light in the depth of our being do we reach the point where we can grasp what faith is. How many have been driven into our darkness by empty talk about faith as something to be rationally comprehended, something ‘true’.

It is little wonder therefore that one of the most recurring themes in Lipsey’s study is loneliness, an indispensable burden (it seems) of a person given to take seriously the long wandering for home that the hungry soul risks, and of a leader given to undertake with unflinching gravity the risky service of humanity – the lonely burden of true leadership – and that while carrying the conviction that ‘the only elevation possible to man lies in the depths of humiliation’ (Hammarskjöld, as cited on p. 502). Little wonder too that while not lacking in resources, Lipsey’s Hammarskjöld is ‘a tormented soul’ (p. 65).

He was not, however, without wonderful friends – his brother, Bo and Greta Beskow, W. H. Auden and John Steinbeck among them. Indeed, one of the persistent refrains throughout Lipsey’s account of Hammarskjöld’s life concerns the abiding value of true friends, particularly at those times when (such as in the midst of the Suez and Congo crises) ‘one’, in Hammarskjöld’s words, ‘happens to be standing in the middle of crossroads along which an abnormally high level of political traffic is pressing’ (p. 488), when hope is clouded in and lost to weariness, and when the music of reconciliation is drowned out by the Machiavellian drums of fear and mistrust. His friends, it seems, provided a sanctuary wherein his humour was most expressive, and where his kindness could be enjoyed without fear of suspicion. They also helped him to keep things in perspective – to ‘remember that there is more to reality than [the] chaos, menace, and slander’ (p. 492) which characterised so much of his day-to-day work as a political celibate (although he was not, by his own admission, a political virgin). As with prayer, his friends too were a gift from the God of hope, the One for whom chaos and human recalcitrance finally represent no obstacle to love reaching its goal – however long it may take, and however hard the arc of history must bend. His relationship with his friends represents too where the road to self-knowledge could be traversed, and where the repeatable journey from death to life passes though the experience of unworthiness, disappointment and incapability into the freedom of inexplicable relief and surprise, and even joy.