Astrid Lindgren: The Woman Behind Pippi Longstocking
A Letter to Esse’s Mother
Esse’s real name was John Erik, and, like Lasse, he was born at the Maternity Hospital in Copenhagen. His mother—a young, unmarried teacher from Norrland—had traveled to Denmark to give birth anonymously. The woman came from a deeply religious family, and they would neither accept nor understand her bringing home an “illegitimate” child. This is presumably why Esse’s mother sat down in the summer of 1931 and wrote a letter to Astrid, whose last name was now Lindgren, and who was living with Sture and Lasse in a two-room apartment with a kitchen and bathroom on Vulcanusgatan in Atlas, Stockholm. Bearing in mind their well-appointed household and secure circumstances, Esse’s mother, who had met Lassemamma at Håbets Allé, ventured to ask whether she and her husband might consider adopting Esse.
The offer was kindly but firmly refused in a six-page letter dated August 26, 1931, which Esse’s mother allowed Marie Stevens to read. She took a copy and kept it for posterity, because she thought it was one of the cleverest and loveliest things she had ever read about the nature of children and adults’ way of dealing with them.
Astrid’s letter was a long and earnest attempt to make Esse’s mother see reason and persuade her to take responsibility for her child, no matter the opinions or actions of her family or the locals in her small town. Twenty-three-year-old Lassemamma drew on her own feelings of guilt and desperation, describing several of the eye-opening experiences she’d had as a young mother separated from her child, among other young, more or less unhappy mothers separated from theirs. Most remarkable about the letter, thought Mrs. Stevens, was that Astrid saw the problem first and foremost from the child’s point of view: “I don’t think you really understand what an incredible stressor it is for a young child to be torn up by the roots and replanted like that. I didn’t realize either before I took Lasse home. From the outside it can look painless, and the child apparently adapts to his new circumstances rapidly and cheerfully, but every once in a while short episodes occur that reveal the boundless fear and uncertainty beneath.”
Astrid Lindgren warned Esse’s mother against shunting her child around too much; it would, she said, “damage him for the rest of his life.” Instead, she should screw up all the courage and willpower she could muster and take Esse home to the town of her birth, showing him off with pride. At this point Astrid told the story of her own long battle in Vimmerby, which had been waged on two fronts: in the town, where the scandal and gossip were monumental, and at Näs, where Hanna and Samuel August had taken several years to accept the way things stood—and to accept little Lasse:
I grew up in an ultrarespectable home. My parents are very religious. There has never been a spot on the honor of anyone in our family, nor among any of our relatives. I can still remember, from the time before Lasse was born, my mother’s horror and indignation at young women who had so-called illegitimate children. And then I had one. I thought it would kill my parents. Yet I still took Lasse back with me. First to Stockholm, because I hadn’t got my parents’ permission to bring him home. As soon as I had it, I went to Vimmerby with Lasse.
It seems, then, that the boy hadn’t been welcome at Näs during those first few years. This explains why Astrid never mentioned her trips to Copenhagen in her letters to Hanna and Samuel August in 1927–29, never breathed a word about their grandchild’s state of health or development, and never enclosed any of the photographs Carl Stevens took of Lasse and Esse outside Villa Stevns to send to Lassemamma in Stockholm and Lassepappa in Vimmerby. Even while his parents were engaged, Lars Blomberg was a taboo subject in the correspondence between Astrid and her parents during the years 1927–29. Naturally this changed radically in 1930, when Näs became Lasse’s new home, and for more than a year both Hanna and Samuel August took care of the boy as if he were their own little latecomer.
The bond between Lasse and his grandmother and grandfather, who in 1926–29 had struggled to accept their eldest daughter’s new circumstances, became a strong and happy one when he moved to Näs in the spring of 1930. He would remain there until fall 1931.
It had been infinitely liberating, Astrid wrote in the letter to Esse’s mother, to confront the inhabitants of Vimmerby while holding Lasse’s hand. Among them was Reinhold Blomberg, who had remarried and had several small children. It felt tremendously satisfying for Astrid to walk around the shops that first day, staring down hypocrisy and intolerance with Lasse, who loudly referred to her as Mamma. No one in the little town had forgotten the editor’s divorce case, or Astrid Ericsson’s sudden disappearance in 1926:
You should have seen how people stared when I showed up with Lasse. We walked openly around the town together when I had an errand to run, and he called me Mamma loud and clear, so there was no doubt as to who he was. You mustn’t think that all the staring and whispering remotely upset me. We were hugely confident, both Lasse and I. And it didn’t take long before people stopped gawping and whispering, and little by little I was met with something that actually looked a lot like respect. For you see, the best way to make people stop talking is to show them that their suspicions are correct. . . . Mark my words: There’s no shame in having a child. It’s a joy and an honor, and deep down everyone knows that perfectly well.
Of course, that was easy enough for a newly married housewife living in a modern apartment in Stockholm to say. Still, the words came from the heart. We don’t know what Esse’s mother thought of the letter, but the boy never went to Norrland, remaining instead with his foster mother at Håbets Allé until he was eighteen, when he moved to Sweden. There he got back in touch with Lasse and the Lindgren family, as Karin Nyman recalls.
For sixteen months, Lasse lived with his grandmother and grandfather in Småland, and if his mother is to be believed—and her account is supported by Lars Lindgren’s own recollections later in life—his “Noisy Village–esque” existence at Näs was almost as happy as his mother’s had been. He lived in close and reassuring contact with a big family of siblings, parents, grandparents, boys, and girls. Lasse often went into Vimmerby with his grandmother and grandfather, or Aunt Stina, Aunt Ingegerd, or Uncle Gunnar, and while in town he was occasionally seen by his father, who thought little Lasse resembled the young girl he’d once been so in love with. Astrid and Reinhold were still on speaking terms; indeed, their connection was so close that in 1930–31 they exchanged friendly letters in which she teased him for having fathered almost nothing but boys. She also mentioned this to Auntie Stevens in a Christmas letter dated December 16, 1931: “Lasse’s father in Vimmerby has had another boy; I don’t think I told you that before. I wrote to him (we still write from time to time, which our respective spouses are aware of) that he ought to have some girls for a change. Lasse and his new father are better friends than I ever dared hope. Lasse loves and admires my husband, who for his part is rather proud of Lasse and thinks he’s a splendid boy.”
Astrid Ericsson and Sture Lindgren got married at Näs on April 4, 1931, shortly after Sture’s divorce was finalized. In a letter to Astrid a few weeks earlier, he enclosed a short item from the legal column of the newspaper Sydsvenska Dagbladet, which announced that the Royal Skåne County Court had, as Sture put it, “given them a wedding present.” What he meant was that he had been excused from paying thirty kronor a month to his ex-wife in alimony, which was the amount she had demanded.
Astrid Lindgren began the new decade on an optimistic note, marrying Sture on April 4, 1931. The wedding took place not in Vimmerby Church but at Hanna and Samuel August’s house at Näs, where the parish priest was their closest neighbor. There was no big party and no big wedding photograph, but Astrid kept the happy couple from the top of the wedding cake in a desk drawer for the rest of her life. A few days after the event, when she explained to Lasse that he now had two fathers, one in Vimmerby and one in Stockholm—adding that they were two of the finest he could wish for and were both very fond of him—Lasse gazed up at his mother and said in Swedish: “I’ve got three. Carl is my pappa
too.”
FIVE
Your Children Are Not Your Children
ON THE FIFTH FLOOR AT VULCANUSGATAN 12, Astrid and Sture tried to keep a handle on their household expenditure with The Housewife’s Practical Account Book (Husmoderns praktiska kassabok). This was a small brown pamphlet with a front cover in the functional style of the day and an old-fashioned back cover with the words: “Seven rules to be kept by people who don’t understand thriftiness.” Inside there was plenty of space for numbers and columns organizing household expenses, but other kinds of documentation also found their way onto the pages, including unruly children’s drawings in crayon and diary-like entries by the grown-ups, side by side with plucky attempts to keep accounts.
There was plenty to keep an inexperienced young housewife busy, and plenty to spend money on. Under “Miscellaneous” in 1931–32 one can find entries such as: mending shoes (1.35); polishing knives (1.75); vacuum cleaner (20.00); sailboat for Lasse (1.35); J. P. Jacobsen’s complete works (10.00); needlework box (4.50); tickets to Uncle Tom’s Cabin (2.35); and “Stupidity” (8.50), whatever that might mean. There was also a clipping, in English, from the Dagens Nyheter tucked between two pages:
Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.
You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of to-morrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.
These prophetic-sounding lines, from the Lebanese poet Kahlil Gibran’s 1923 book The Prophet, had prompted Astrid to reach for the scissors. She couldn’t agree more. Children were only borrowed, so you had to give them all the love and respect you were capable of mustering, every single day. In her efforts to be a good mother, she had begun to jot down observations about Lasse, using the back pages of the account book to record when her son was behaving strangely, saying funny things, or asking one of the questions that often developed into something resembling dialogue in a Marx Brothers movie:
Lars: Is Grandma your mother?
Mamma: Yes!
Lars: And you’re my mother?
Mamma: Yes!
Lars: Tell me, is Grandma my boy?
The four-year-old boy got his own room overlooking the back garden when he went to live with his mother and new father after his long, happy stay at Näs, while Sture and Astrid slept in the living room overlooking Vulcanusgatan. Marrying her boss meant that Astrid had to give up her job at the Royal Automobile Club, but with all the care and attention Lasse needed it was natural that his mother should stay home as much as possible.
In early September 1931 Lasse was brought to Stockholm by Hanna and Samuel August, who had hair-raising stories to tell about Lasse’s second summer in Småland. One day the lad had toppled off a high wagonload and gotten a concussion, then another day he’d nearly been run over by a car on the road. Yet Hanna also had more cheerful stories about her grandchild, who came out with so many quips that everyone at Näs agreed he took after his mother. One day he’d been out in the privy for a very long time. “Come on, Lasse!” shouted Hanna, to which the boy replied: “Aw, Grandma, I was just about to go and you’ve messed up the pressure!”
Lasse had grown over the summer—intellectually, too—and was scarcely a child any longer, Astrid felt. He spoke almost like an adult, considering his age, and this was one of the reasons why she decided to record her son’s development on the blank pages at the back of The Housewife’s Practical Account Book. Her notes soon turned into a fleeting series of moments and episodes strung together like a necklace, significantly shorter than the stories a certain Alma Svensson wrote many years later in blue exercise books at Lönneberga. They were the kind of childhood scenes that could so easily vanish into the fog of memory; Astrid called them Larsiana in the account book. She began her notes with the words: “I know how much fun it would have been to have a bit more material from my childhood. That’s the reason I’m writing down some of Lasse’s little oddities from memory.”
Fall 1931 offered many opportunities to reach for her pen and paper, but most weren’t the heartening kind. Lasse’s first visit to kindergarten, for example, was not a success. He embroidered a mushroom on a piece of cardboard, but he wasn’t remotely interested in sitting with the other children and learning a nursery rhyme by heart. His reaction when they got home was intense, but Astrid felt it was healthy: “Last night Lasse wanted to be alone when he got undressed. When I went in to see how he was doing, he said, ‘It’s so nice to be alone!’ Previously he’d said to me that he thought it was nice to sit together in his room and only turn on the pink lamp, but ‘it’s actually even nicer to be alone and switch the light on.’ I’m glad he needs alone time. He’s beginning to grow up.”
Sometimes weeks and months went by between Astrid’s notes, which encompassed everything from her son’s morning routine and visits to the dentist to his language skills, motor function, habits, and daydreams. When he grew up, Astrid learned, Lasse was going to build a perpetual-motion machine, or perhaps they would conquer the North Pole: “Mamma, we’re going to do so many exciting things together. I just hope we have time!”
It was a new, reborn Lasse who went to live with Astrid and Sture on Vulcanusgatan in the fall of 1931, after nearly a year and a half at Näs. He now had to adapt once more to new circumstances, a new family, and new playmates.
On August 8, 1933, Astrid Lindgren was working as the Royal Automobile Club’s racing secretary when it held its annual Summer Grand Prix for Automobiles, a twenty-mile loop near Norra Vram in Skåne. Europe’s best racing drivers and car manufacturers, including Maserati, Ford, and Mercedes, took part, but it was the Italian marquis Antonio Brivio in his Alfa Romeo who won, with an average speed of nearly eighty miles per hour.
More to the point, would they have the money? The household accounts paint an all-too-clear picture: the Lindgren family had to scrimp and save throughout the 1930s, although thrift didn’t come naturally to Sture. It would be years before he was named director of the Swedish Motorists’ Association (Motormännens Riksförbund, “M”), and his salary as a department head didn’t cover the Lindgrens’ basic expenses, especially not after Karin was born in 1934. This meant that Astrid had to take on freelance work and office temping jobs while a nanny looked after the children at home. One piece of regular, well-paid work was the Royal Automobile Club’s annual travel guide and road atlas, and on several occasions she also functioned as the racing secretary at the club’s popular grand prix. On June 20, 1933, the organization’s official magazine, Svensk Motortidning, ran a lengthy article entitled “Vacations for Motorists,” written by Astrid Lindgren. It was an excerpt from that year’s travel guide, which suggested three alternative routes through the Scandinavian countryside. The style was colloquial, good humored, and bursting with images and movement: “Ok, so you’ve finally got some time off and you’re looking to explore the fatherland? Excellent. Over the course of a few weeks’ vacation you should be able to see plenty. Mind if I suggest a pleasant little ten- or eleven-day drive through Sweden and Norway? All right then, here goes. First we head down to the automobile club and find ourselves a permit to take the car across the border.”
For her exuberant article, the writer had chosen a round trip that went from Stockholm to Dalarna, then northwest to Trondheim, due south to Oslo, and back to the Swedish capital via Värmland. She predicted that most busy motorists would probably whiz past Gustaf Fröding’s birthplace in Karlstad, although it would be worth taking their time: “If, like me, you’re fond of poor old unfashionable Fröding, we
can take a peek at his childhood home along the way. But if you’re a fan of asphalt poetry and machine culture and the magic of speed and all the other stuff that’s tip and top and slick nowadays, then I’ll just say ‘whoa’ in Kristinehamn and ‘hello baby’ in Örebro, and I won’t have time to say ‘take a pit stop here,’ because we’re already in Västerås.”
Futuristic Santa
In 1933 the name Astrid Lindgren also appeared in the newspaper Stockholms-Tidningen and the magazine Landsbygdens jul (Christmas in the countryside). It was her politically active brother Gunnar—who knew the editor of the new magazine through the youth wing of the Farmers’ Union, the S.L.U.—who had put in a good word for his little sister. Astrid needed the money, and she needed to write about something other than cars and the Swedish road network. One day a letter dropped through the mailbox from Mr. Dahnberg, the editor, who was prepared to pay thirty-five kronor for a short story by “the well-known writer Astrid Lindgren.” This exaggeration came courtesy of Gunnar’s playful sense of humor, but it also reminded Astrid of her former teacher Mr. Tengström, who had once talked up “Vimmerby’s Selma Lagerlöf” so much that she’d sworn she would never become a writer. Astrid kept her word for many years, and an autobiographical text from 1955, preserved among the author’s papers at the National Library of Sweden, reveals that she was proud of having resisted for so long: “While the children were little I stayed at home, took care of my duties around the house, played with my children and told them masses of fairy-tales and stories. Occasionally, when I was really short of money, I wrote down a silly little tale or two that I sold to a magazine, but on the whole I kept my promise not to become a writer.”