Reading and literature were one of Astrid and Sture’s shared pleasures. The couple subscribed to the Dagens Nyheter, and on their shelves at Dalagatan and Furusund stood books both classic and modern, including fiction and nonfiction, fairy-tales, poetry, and comedic writing like Sweden’s Falstaff, fakir, and Denmark’s Storm P.
Sture and Astrid’s marriage had always rested contentedly on mutual respect and shared interests. At least, that was what Astrid had believed. After many lonely, unhappy years as a penniless single mother, separated from her child, she had prioritized middle-class security and social stability since the beginning of their relationship at the Automobile Club, when she had signed her letters to Sture, “Your own little stenographer.” Now her husband was demanding a divorce, only a few months after she had written in a letter to her parents at Näs: “Dear Mother and Father! Tomorrow Sture and I will have been married 13 years, just think! And never a cruel word!”
War diary, October 30, 1944: “I write less and less frequently in this book. I have such a lot to think about and I’ve been in a state of nervous tension all fall, so I haven’t got around to writing. Now it looks as though the worst crisis is over, but I’m still not sure it’ll end happily.”
Nor were there any now. Just the crushing news that he was in love with another woman. She later discovered that, for some time, he’d had the keys to an apartment where he went to meet his lover. All the gloom and doom in her diary, which for the past few years had centered mainly around the war and her family life, suddenly hinged on a single thing: Sture’s infidelity and the possible collapse of their marriage. Ironically, Astrid had just finished a manuscript she was planning to enter into a competition for books aimed at girls, which was set in a blissfully happy Swedish nuclear family. “Ah, joy of joys—the family gathered before the fireplace in the living room!” as the book’s sixteen-year-old main character gushes in a letter to her pen friend. In the author’s own life, meanwhile, this rose-tinted image had been torn to shreds. If she got divorced, what would become of her, Lasse, and Karin during peacetime, when Astrid’s job at the censorship office would end and she would lose full-time employment? She certainly couldn’t keep the apartment at Dalagatan, and life as an author—increasingly her dream—would be impossible as a single mother of two.
In early August 1944, when Astrid was back in Stockholm, Karin, Lasse, and their maid, Linnea, remained on vacation, and Sture’s location was unknown, she reached for her diary and tried to make sense of recent world events. But both memory and concentration failed her. She couldn’t maintain a sense of historical perspective; the war had suddenly become a shadow in the background, while the tragedy in her own life filled every corner of the foreground:
Alone at Dalagatan with the bitterness of despair in my heart, Karin at Solö, Lasse at Näs, Linnea on vacation, Sture? Big things have happened, but I’ve been unable to write about them. Not even something as sensational as an assassination attempt on Hitler interests me. And today the newspaper said the Finnish Ryti-Linkomies cabinet has resigned. Yes, that’s right, I think Ryti was the president. But now it’s Mannerheim instead. The new government will try to make peace with Russia, of course. “Turkey breaks with Germany,” the billboards say this evening. So now it seems things can fall apart at any moment. Like they fell apart for me.
One stiflingly hot Sunday in late August 1944, Astrid and the children spent the day at Skansen, an open-air museum, with her brother-in-law Ing-var, Ingegerd’s husband, who was passing through Stockholm. Nothing seemed real, and the hours slipped by as though she were in a daze. Some time earlier, Astrid had written a short letter to Bonniers, asking about the manuscript they’d received four months earlier. The letter was almost apologetic, far from the bold, breezy tone she had adopted in the original cover letter. On September 21, 1944, she finally received the response she had been expecting. The publisher apologized for keeping her waiting, explaining that the manuscript had gone to more readers than usual and justifying their rejection by saying that they already had their children’s book list laid out for the next two years. Behind this flimsy explanation, it later emerged, lay a fundamental disagreement between at least one reader, the editorial department, and the publisher himself, Gerard Bonnier, who ultimately had to put his name to the product. As the father of small children, he believed Pippi Longstocking was too advanced. He recalled the incident many years later at a dinner party, to the literary researcher and author Ulla Lundqvist, who mentioned it in her afterword to Original Pippi in 2007.
Light in the Darkness
Amid all these setbacks, there was one light in the darkness, one that would eventually roar into a bonfire. Elsa Olenius, a children’s librarian, phoned on behalf of the publisher Rabén and Sjögren to inform Mrs. Lindgren that her manuscript entitled “Britt Hagström, Aged 15” had won second prize in the competition she had entered. Her prize was 1,200 kronor, and the publishing house intended to release the book before Christmas. A few days later, Astrid Lindgren stood face to face with Olenius, who worked at the Hornsgatan branch of the City Library in Södermalm. She was head of the department for children’s and young-adult literature, and also ran a children’s theater at the library on Medborgarplatsen. Elsa Olenius looked back on this first meeting in Margareta Strömstedt’s biography in 1977: “Even at our first meeting we had a strong connection, Astrid and I. I could see that she was unhappy about something. When I asked, she suddenly told me quite candidly how things stood. I remember I told my husband about her when I got home that evening.”
Even after Confidences of Britt-Mari, as the book would be called in English, was published in November 1944 and the first positive reviews started appearing in the newspapers, Astrid struggled to feel pleased and proud. Yet she certainly had reason to be. Sweden’s two most influential critics of children’s literature, Eva von Zweigbergk in the Dagens Nyheter and Greta Bolin in the Svenska Dagbladet, both gave it positive reviews. Bolin called the book “dazzlingly funny, full of humor and quick irony, occasionally downright spiritual,” and a week later Zweigbergk followed suit, declaring, “the book has both humor and heart.”
Unlike the previous year, Astrid’s birthday in November 1944 passed unmentioned in the diary. And when the annual Christmas parcel arrived from Vimmerby, containing meat, butter, eggs, sausages, apples, and a roast joint of beef, which were usually received with eager delight, it was opened without the customary fanfare. And the Lindgren family? They were scattered to the four winds:
This dark November Sunday I’m sitting in front of the fireplace in the living room, writing, while Lasse is getting out of bed—at 3.30 p.m.—and Karin is sitting in her room, typing (no, she’s just come in!). Sture’s not home, far from being home. Karin and I went for a walk in Haga Cemetery this morning. Anyway, this is more or less how things stand in the rest of the world: appalling misery among the civilian population in northern Norway, which the Germans have evacuated on account of the Russian advance. Apparently there’s awful hardship in Holland, too, but where isn’t there awful hardship? It’s everywhere, I think.
Short diary entries in December 1944 reveal Astrid’s anxieties about her current situation and the immediate future. Would she be able to play the happy, cheerful wife and mother for the children and Sture’s aging mother on Christmas Eve? She could, of course, and when the family celebration was over and New Year was approaching, the war diary came back out. It was time for her to take stock of the previous year. Astrid leafed back through the pages and read what she had written, picked up her pen, and tried to get to grips with the concept of “happiness”:
Christmas Day, 1944: “I’m painfully aware that these may be the happiest years of my life; nobody can keep having such good fortune in the long run. I’m sure there must be trials in store for me.” That’s what I wrote on Christmas Day last year. I didn’t know how right I was. Trials were in store for me—but I won’t say I’m unhappy. It’s been a hellish six months, this last half of 1944,
and the ground beneath me is shifting. I’m disconsolate, down, disappointed, often in a sad mood—but I’m not really unhappy. There’s still so much to fill my existence. By rights it ought to have been a dreadful Christmas—and I did shed a few tears into the herring salad as I was making it on the 23rd, but I was dead tired so it doesn’t count. If happy is synonymous with doing well, then I suppose I’m still “happy.” But being happy’s not that simple. One thing I’ve learned, at least—if you’re going to be happy, it has to come from within and not from another person.
Sture came to his senses at the beginning of the new year, after Astrid had taken three weeks’ sick leave from the Central Post Office on the grounds of “neurosis with insomnia,” as the doctor called it. We can assume it was also during this period that she began her book about the twins Barbro and Kerstin, which she continued to develop throughout February and March. After a bracing spring cleaning, which was conducted in the best Småland style—dusting the bookcases, washing the floors, cleaning the windows, polishing the parquet flooring, and beating the carpets—the war diary came out again on March 23, 1945. She had accumulated a number of clippings about the collapse of Germany that had to be pasted in, including several articles about Hitler, who for inscrutable reasons wouldn’t surrender, despite his and Germany’s total defeat. Perhaps it was because he was ashamed of the judgment of history, wrote Astrid, before leaping suddenly from the war to the private sphere: “As far as the Lindgren family is concerned, I can say that ‘Home is the sailor, home from the sea / and the hunter home from the hill.’ We’ve spring-cleaned and made everything nice, and sometimes I’m happy and sometimes sad. Happiest when I write. Got a message from Gebers [another publisher] the other day.”
Sture had begged for forgiveness and Astrid had given him an ultimatum, which he accepted. “Here he lies where he longed to be,” goes another line of Robert Louis Stevenson’s poem “Requiem,” which Astrid quoted in English in the diary. Certain things had fallen into place, but not everything. In a long letter dated March 28 to Hanna and Samuel August, who knew nothing about the crisis in their daughter’s marriage, Astrid seemed to be asking for her parents’ understanding that she would be spending more time on fiction writing in the future. In the letter she cited particular sentences from an especially positive review of Confidences of Britt-Mari, and explained her and Sture’s plans for the coming Easter holiday, when Lasse and Karin were going to Vimmerby.
Gullan and Gunnar, who knew significantly more about Astrid and Sture’s marital problems, had invited the children to Näs so that their parents could have a bit of peace and quiet in Stockholm, and a chance to reconnect. In the letter to her parents, Astrid told them that Sture thought they should “have fun” over Easter, which meant going out and enjoying the nightlife Sture was so fond of, and which was part of his job. Astrid would have preferred to stay at home in Dalagatan, relax, read, and keep working on her book about the twin girls, which several publishers were showing interest in. As she also mentioned in her letter, the latest complimentary review of her debut novel had speculated about what the talented author—who was also a busy housewife—might achieve if she had more time. When she called this highly encouraging review “very strange,” it was perhaps because it indirectly exhorted Astrid to do something she had dreamt of but never seriously dared to do: retreat somewhat from the role of housewife and mother and enter an altogether different sphere, one that revolved not around Sture, Lasse, and Karin but around her own desires and needs.
The other day I was sent a copy of a Swedish school magazine with a review of Britt-Mari. It was a very strange review, and it began like this: “For a married woman with older children and an office job to write a book is no mean feat. If she’s also won second prize in a competition for girls’ books, well, that’s deeply impressive. Astrid Lindgren is one such married woman.” And it finished like this: “It is to be sincerely hoped that this merry and good book gets a sequel, and that the writer gives us many more hours of amusement in her next volume.” (So I think it’s really sweet of Gullan to take my children over Easter, so I can produce a few more “hours of amusement”).
It’s undeniable that Astrid occasionally felt trapped in her family, and sometimes isolated in her role as parent and child-rearer. In a letter to Stina in February 1944, a few months before Sture announced he wanted a divorce, Astrid called herself a “capable mother who sits at home and only keeps company with her children.” Sture’s unfaithfulness, his request for a divorce, and the subsequent six-month battle to keep their marriage together and avoid letting ten-year-old Karin’s world collapse had given Astrid a different perspective on her situation. Whatever happened between her and Sture in the future, she needed to maintain her own identity and remember what she had written in her diary at Christmas: “If you’re going to be happy, it has to come from within and not from another person.”
SEVEN
Revolution in the Nursery
ON MAY 5, 1945, THIRTY-SEVEN-YEAR-OLD Astrid Lindgren sent one of her usual monthly letters home to Näs. These were addressed either to Hanna and Samuel August or Gunnar and Gullan but generally read by everyone at the farm. In the letter Astrid outlined her thoughts about becoming an author. She found herself in a strong position: Rabén and Sjögren, which had published Confidences of Britt-Mari in 1944, had been having financial problems, but had just been reorganized and consolidated. The publisher, Hans Rabén, had phoned to tell her so, and he also had said that the firm was looking forward to publishing her next book for girls. Yet Astrid was undecided. The small publisher’s list was too unfocused, offering everything from I Was Quisling’s Prisoner and The ABC of Script to a monograph on headaches, a biography of the Danish poet-priest Kaj Munk, a lexicon of Swedish authors, and a few children’s books. Was it really the right place for her? She doubted it, as she wrote in her letter to Näs, and she was inclined to switch to the better-known publishing house Gebers, which was also trying to woo her: “I’ll have to see how it goes. It might be better with a more established publisher, if I can manage to rustle up another masterpiece.”
In the end, however, she stayed with Rabén and Sjögren, largely because Hans Rabén, a highly cultured man, was able to offer something his competitors couldn’t: a visionary and audacious editor whose commitment and drive were a match for Astrid’s. Her name was Elsa Olenius, and she was the children’s librarian who had sat on the jury that awarded Britt-Mari second prize. Olenius worked regularly with Rabén and Sjögren, contributing ideas and taking on various editorial projects alongside her permanent post at the library on Hornsgatan. Many years later, in a book Rabén and Sjögren released for its anniversary, Astrid Lindgren recalled the help Olenius gave her with her first ever proper manuscript:
She was generous enough to devote two hours to me and my manuscript. . . . Elsa didn’t think Britt-Mari would just launch into pouring her heart out to an unknown pen-friend like that. There had to be an introductory chapter to tempt the reader in. That way we could attract younger readers who were resistant to epistolary novels. Would I go home and write such a chapter, asked Elsa? I did. And I came back with it the next day, which Elsa thought was just me trying to put out the fire. But she accepted the chapter as bait. Afterward we danced a sort of slängpolska in the lobby before we parted. By that time we were friends for life.
Astrid had so much faith in her new friend that, after turning down Gebers and accepting Rabén and Sjögren’s offer, she gave Elsa Olenius the manuscript Bonniers had refused to publish the previous year. Would she be interested in reading a story or two about the world’s strongest girl?
Yes, she would. Olenius, who also taught drama and ran a small children’s theater at the library on Medborgarplatsen, was the first person in the world to see the manuscript’s potential and the literary power of its main character. During those euphoric days in May 1945, when people all across Europe were celebrating the end of six years of war and Astrid, Sture, Lasse, and Karin
surged through Stockholm with the other blue-and-yellow-clad revelers, Elsa Olenius was busy reading Original Pippi. It was sensational, she decided, though certain changes would need to be made. Horse dung in a circus ring and a chamber pot full of urine getting thrown over people to put out a fire? That was too graphic.
Astrid had to share this positive response with her family in Stockholm and Småland at once. Everyone at Näs got to hear about it in her next letter. Then, however, the author was gripped by uncertainty: what would less progressive readers say to Pippi? She wasn’t quite as sure of herself as her editor: “A few days ago I gave my book to Mrs. Olenius to read through, and two days later she called and was overwhelmingly enthusiastic about it. I was so excited to hear what she thought, because if she likes it I don’t think it will be savaged, so you can understand why I’m pleased. I’m invited to lunch with her this week to pick up the manuscript, and then I’ll deliver it to Rabén & Sjögren, since it looks like the publisher is back on its feet.”