Astrid Lindgren: The Woman Behind Pippi Longstocking
Pippi Psychosis
Now that Astrid Lindgren had Jens Sigsgaard to promote her books overseas, the immensely busy author and editor had a little more time to keep an eye on things in Sweden. She was in constant demand. Both Noisy Village and Bill Bergson were triumphs, and Pippi fever looked to be chronic. It culminated during the week around Children’s Day in Stockholm in late August 1949, when thousands of children and parents packed the large park at Humlegården. Everybody wanted a share of the magic, hoping to catch a glimpse of the most idolized child of the age and her horse, monkey, and house.
On the opening day, August 21, there were tumultuous scenes across the park. Children and parents crowded around the large mock-up of Villa Villekulla: partly to get a ride on Pippi’s horse, partly to enter the competition for best Pippi outfit, and partly to grab some of the glittering golden coins that, as the program announced, came “tumbling down” from the sky twice a day. There were lines miles long for the park’s mini-train, the Pippi Express, which puffed around Humlegården. On its first day it carried such prominent passengers as Carl Gustaf, the “Little Prince” of Sweden, and his older sister Christina.
“Pippi Longstocking Psychosis,” read one of the capital’s newspapers the next day, while the provincial papers came out with even more dramatic headlines: “Stockholm Children Storm Pippi—Crowds, Tears, and Fainting Fits.”
The organizers of Children’s Day were making huge profits, thanks to the skillful branding of Pippi Longstocking’s universe. Astrid Lindgren wrote the program booklet, Pippi Longstocking in Humlegården, which was presented as a picture book about Pippi: The day before Child Welfare Day, Pippi goes into the big city to build a copy of her house, but first she has to clear the venerable old park of roughnecks and troublemakers. Ingrid Vang Nyman did the illustrations for the booklet, each copy of which included a raffle ticket. She also designed the multicolored posters featuring three Pippi motifs, which were pasted all around Stockholm to attract the public. The money rolled in, filling more and more pockets. Pippi had become big business.
Christmas 1948 saw the premiere of a new short play about Pippi at the Oscar Theater in Stockholm, for which Astrid Lindgren had written the script. “A jaunty two-act piece in six tableaus, it is sure to become a fixture of the Christmas program for many years to come,” said the hopeful theater manager Karl Kinch. Grown-up actor Viveca Serlachius played Pippi, ballet master John Ivar Deckner choreographed the exotic dances from Kurrekurredutt Island, and Per-Martin Hamberg, whom Astrid knew from her days at the censorship office and from the radio show 20 Questions, composed the music, which was released the following year as a collection entitled Sing with Pippi Longstocking. In advance publicity, Astrid Lindgren made the following comment, which seems to indicate that the author was growing tired of all the fuss about Pippi: “Children like to fight, somersault, and throw pies, and I think they’ll get plenty of that here. A new Pippi book? No, there’ll never be any more. Three is enough.”
But the world’s strongest girl wasn’t so easily held back. Demand was simply too high. More and more investors were knocking on Astrid’s door, and first in line was film producer and media mogul Anders Sandrew, who assumed that securing the film rights as quickly and cheaply as possible would be a mere formality. But Sandrew, a farmer’s son from Uppland—who also owned the Oscar Theater, where Pippi had played to full houses at Christmas 1948—soon learned that Småland farmers’ daughters could be equally hard-nosed negotiators. In May 1949, Hanna and Samuel August received a letter that illustrated their daughter’s flair for business:
As Gullan may have told you, I’ve finally sold Sandrew the film rights to Pippi. He started off as a little greengrocer, but now he’s a big cheese in the film and theater industry. He’s known all over the city and is terrifically rich. But he wanted to haggle over the price. So we had a scuffle or two. Eventually he invited me over for lunch one Sunday in his exceedingly beautiful home, and I thought we were going to discuss the film script with the director, but it was just him and me, and it was all so he’d have a chance to haggle about the price. He drove me home and stood in my doorway at least a quarter of an hour while he kept haggling. But at last I got what I asked for—6,000 kronor.
Sandrew Productions mass-produced films in 1940s and 1950s Sweden, pumping out at least one a month, and Pippi was ready to premiere by Christmas 1949. Astrid Lindgren hadn’t been involved with the script, which merrily embroidered the Pippi stories, partly to make room for various celebrities from the world of Scandinavian showbiz. The jazz musician Svend Asmussen, for instance, accepted a role as a musical mailman who plays a new instrument each time he appears onscreen with his mailbag. Astrid managed to put on a brave face at the premiere, recalls Karin Nyman, who sat in the front row beside her mother, but inside she was cringing. In a letter home to Näs on December 21, she wrote, “I’m colossally disappointed in the Pippi film, although the critics were undeservedly easy on it.”
One of the critical critics was Eva von Zweigbergk. Astrid wrote her a long letter the day after the premiere, December 10, beginning by thanking her for what Zweigbergk had written in the paper, then listing everything else she could have criticized:
If I could’ve undone the film yesterday by paying back all the money I got for the rights, I wouldn’t have hesitated for a moment. I sat groaning in my seat, and just before the end I slunk off, terrified somebody was going to come up to me and ask me what I thought. And I asked myself: what in Heaven’s name will Eva Zweigbergk have to say about this? . . . I’m deeply grateful for what you wrote about Pippi at the beginning of the review. It’s a great support for me, when I see what that film lot have done to my poor child. . . . The Pippi film I dreamt of, a film that should have been full of warmth and cheeriness and sunshine, is not what we’ve got, but in its slashed form it may still be palatable for young, uncritical children.
Astrid Lindgren promised herself that in the future she would protect her work better, just as Jens Sigsgaard had advised. Pippi Longstocking was proof that a creature of the imagination could, like the shadow in Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy-tale, detach itself from the page and give its creator the slip. Since early 1946, Pippi had been constantly popping up in new guises and commercial packaging. No longer merely a picture book and a coloring book, a play and a film, she appeared as a magazine serial, a paper doll, a gramophone record, and even in advertisements for a savings bank and a pharmaceutical firm that was relaunching a vitamin pill for children. All with Astrid Lindgren’s approval and—not infrequently—her cooperation. As she wrote to Hanna and Samuel August on February 1, 1947: “Next week I shall be doing a gramophone recording of Pippi—it’ll be the episode with the burglars. Next there’s bound to be Pippi dolls and Pippi jigsaw puzzles.”
A Star in Big Shoes
While Pippi was taking on a life of her own as a Swedish brand, Astrid Lindgren had plenty to do herself. Her meteoric rise as an author had made her one of Sweden’s best-known and most popular voices on the radio: in 1948 she became one-third of the permanent panel on the country’s most popular radio program, 20 Questions. The concept of the program seemed tailor-made to her sharp intelligence, her sense of humor, and—not least—her flair for oral communication. At a time when there was only one radio channel serving approximately two million radio licenses, Astrid Lindgren was as well known in Sweden around 1950 as Pippi Longstocking, increasingly appearing in magazines among other famous faces—always with a sly smile, and ready with an answer as swift and funny as on the radio. In one magazine in 1949, for instance, the children’s book author was asked the following complex questions: “What would you find it difficult to live without? What would you find it difficult to live with?” To the first question Astrid answered: “Children and nature,” and to the second, “Shoes that are too small.”
In the spring of 1949, the Vecko-Journalen visited Astrid in Dalagatan to put a body and face to the popular radio voice: “Slender as a reed,
with slim legs in American nylon stockings, brought home from her travels to the USA.” Later that year, a journalist from a provincial paper traveled to the city to interview—or so he thought—a ruddy-cheeked fairy-tale aunt from Småland, but rapidly had to revise his opinion: “She looks like the efficient businesswoman she is, reasonably tall, slim, blonde, quick to laugh. What strikes you when you speak to her is that she’s incredibly genuine. She never considers for a moment putting on airs. She’s quite eager and curious, but you’re warmed by her purely personal interest in things you thought would be trifles to a popular celebrity. She has no false modesty: She is aware of her importance and her utterly unique position as the only children’s book author of major significance in the 1940s.”
That the forty-one-year-old author and editor took life at a furious pace the Vecko-Journalen did not doubt. In previous years, they were told, Astrid Lindgren had not merely traveled up and down Sweden with her books but had also been on several long trips abroad, sometimes accompanying her husband on vacations and business trips to England, Italy, Finland, and Denmark, but also under her own steam, having visited the United States in 1948. Readers of the Vecko-Journalen learned nothing about the specific details of this overseas trip, however. It was somewhat complicated, because the journey had been financed by the Bonniers-owned publishing house Åhland and Åkerlund. The company had offered Astrid Lindgren an all-expenses-paid trip to the United States because—yet again—it was trying to steal Sweden’s best-selling author from the competition.
Bonniers was struggling to accept its past blunders with Pippi and its “defeat” by a tiny publishing house on the edge of bankruptcy. Throughout 1946–50 it made various sneaky attempts to lure Astrid Lindgren away from Rabén and Sjögren and into its luxurious stable of authors at Sveavägen. In January 1946, two months after the publication of the first Pippi book, Astrid wrote home to Näs: “Yesterday I got a letter from Åhland & Åkerlund asking whether I would consider writing fairy-tales or stories for their Christmas magazines, which gave me a certain sense of triumph, seeing as Åhland & Åkerlund is owned by Bonniers, and Bonniers once rejected Pippi. Yes, yes, it’s a very small triumph, but even so.”
In 1947 Astrid Lindgren was offered a well-paid full-time job at Åhland and Åkerlund, where she would be responsible for everything to do with short stories. She mentioned it in a letter to her parents in May 1947, adding: “I don’t want a full-time job. I much prefer hiding at the office and writing the rest of the time, so I turned them down—to their great astonishment.”
She was, however, very tempted by the publisher’s offer of a free trip to the United States in 1948, although she didn’t like the thought of leaving Lasse and Karin and Sture for a whole month. The rather unusual offer, which involved sending Astrid over in her capacity as a journalist, was made in fall 1947 during a meeting between Astrid Lindgren and the editor in chief at the fashion magazine Damernas Värld. On behalf of Albert Bonnier Jr., she was supposed to ask whether Mrs. Lindgren would like to go to America and write something for Damernas Värld about “negro children.” At first Astrid thought she had misheard, as she later wrote to Hanna and Samuel August: “I don’t know what interest ‘Damerna’ can have in negro children, of all things. I was a little taken aback, so I haven’t given them an answer yet. But a free trip to America wouldn’t be the worst idea. Evidently Pippi is giving the gentlemen at Bonniers no peace—I’m getting one offer after another.”
Six months later, on February 22, 1948, she told her father, mother, and Gunnar and Gullan at Näs that Albert Bonnier himself had been out fishing for her—at that she had taken the bait: “I’ve signed a contract with Åhland & Åkerlund for the America trip. I’ve booked a plane ticket for April 14, returning home on May 12. Albert Bonnier wrote a letter with the contract, writing that he signed the contract ‘with a light heart’ and that he believes in success ‘for us both.’ I, on the other hand, am not so certain, but I don’t think I can let a chance like this pass me by, because it’s an extremely good contract.”
Astrid Lindgren ended up leaving for the United States on Bonnier’s dime, and managed—with great difficulty—to write the agreed number of articles for Damernas Värld. She wasn’t proud of the commissioned work, and in a letter to her parents dated December 10, 1948, she made it clear that as an editor she would never have accepted such hastily scribbled travel reportage “with a light sociological touch,” as a reviewer later called it when the articles were collected and published, like the first Kati book, in 1950: “I’ve delivered a little part of my American articles to Abbe [Albert] Bonnier, and would you believe he thinks they’re good. Personally I think they’re so silly I get quite ill at the mere thought of them.”
Astrid felt so guilty about these commissioned pieces that she refused point-blank when Albert Bonnier called her in 1950—for the last time—and asked whether she wanted to go to Egypt. At Bonnier’s expense, naturally.
My Harsh Love
It was a busy and financially lucrative year for the Lindgren family. Not just because of Astrid’s overwhelming success, but also because Sture’s job at “M,” the Swedish Motorists’ Association, had kicked into high gear after the end of the war. People wanted to go out again, crossing countryside and borders, and increasingly they owned their own cars. When Sture Lindgren turned fifty in October 1948, his name appeared in newspapers across Sweden. Despite the period of war and crisis, he’d managed to turn M into Scandinavia’s largest motoring organization, and according to press coverage on his birthday, the key to his success lay not simply in his insight into the international challenges of motoring and tourism but also in his extensive network, oratorical gifts, and remarkable memory. “Lindgren keeps the entirety of M in his head,” wrote Motor. What the magazine neglected to mention was that the director’s head also had room for books: he loved to read, and followed his wife’s career closely. He even helped out with proofreading and comments such as “Pippi Longstocking isn’t a book—it’s an invention.”
The books Astrid signed for Sture in the 1940s testify to her gratitude: “To my prophetic Sture, for his unflagging interest in Pippi. With a kiss on the forehead, from Astrid” and “To Sture (the prophet) from his adoring wife.” Those were her inscriptions in the first two Pippi books. In her 1949 collection of stories Nils Karlsson the Elf, however, her tone was a little more serious, and edged with an exclamation mark: “To Sture, my harsh love!”
Astrid accompanied Sture on many of his trips abroad, including to Italy in 1949. On the way home the couple stopped at Berchtesgaden and saw Hitler’s “Eagle’s Nest.” Her family at home in Näs got a detailed account: “The building, high above the earth, must have been absolutely magnificent when it was in one piece. And the view over the German and Austrian Alps was incredible. Now only ruins remain, and nobody does anything about them. Presumably they’re meant to stay there as evidence of what happens to tyrants.”
Nils Karlsson the Elf was a sharply different Astrid Lindgren book, stirring a darker, more melancholy layer of the human mind. In depicting lonely children like Bertil, Göran, Gunnar, Gunilla, Britta-Kajsa, Lena, Lise-Lotta, Barbro, and Peter, she thematized longing in a way only fleetingly glimpsed in her earlier work, most clearly in the moving conclusion of the Pippi trilogy in 1948. Tommy and Annika, getting ready for bed, suddenly catch sight of the glow from Villa Villekulla’s kitchen through the trees in the dark garden: “Pippi sat at the table, her head resting in her hands. With a dreamy expression in her eyes, she stared at a small candle flickering before her. ‘She . . . she looks so lonely,’ said Annika, and her voice trembled a little. ‘Oh, Tommy, I wish it were morning, so we could go and see her right now.’ . . . ‘If she just glances up we can wave to her,’ said Tommy. But Pippi stared straight ahead with dreamy eyes. Then she blew the candle out.”
There was a minor mode to Astrid Lindgren’s nature that the Swedish public of the 1940s knew nothing about, a gravity and thoughtfulness drowned out
by her delighted studio audience’s laughter and applause when they recorded 20 Questions and ignored in her magazine interviews, which exclusively foregrounded the lively, happy children’s book author. Behind the forty-year-old writer’s jaunty, fearless façade was a well of melancholy and anxiety deeper than anyone suspected, and it had more than a little to do with her “harsh love,” Sture. After their marital crisis in 1944–45, they tried to reconnect, but the demands of everyday life took their toll, especially on Sture. On top of long days at the office, he was frequently busy with trips, conventions and banquets, dinners and meetings, many of them at the Strand Hotel in Nybrokajen near his office, where they ate—and drank—until late into the night. Sture struggled with his weight and high blood pressure. As Astrid observed in her war diary in 1946: “I’m occasionally worried about Sture’s health—and not without reason.”
His poor state of health was inextricably bound up with his unwillingness to confront his alcohol problem. As Karin Nyman recalls: “My father drank too much. He tried to abstain completely, but not long after that he died. He never got blind drunk or drank until his personality changed, nor did he lose his job, but it was probably only a question of time.”
This internal schism in the Lindgren family—between material prosperity and Sture’s lack of willpower when it came to tackling his issues—was tough on Astrid. Sometimes, when she was alone, she would take out her diary and try to describe and explain her feelings of depression. On March 8, 1947, she came so close to the heart of the problem that, in the middle of a long passage, she decided to write one sentence in shorthand, one that encapsulated her concerns about her marriage—and about Sture. She didn’t want to risk Lasse or Karin accidentally reading it if they happened to be flicking through the diary. After this sentence, Astrid switched back into normal writing: “Now and then Sture has real problems with his heart—and he doesn’t look after himself at all, which can be a trial sometimes. I don’t like this winter. It’s not as it should be, and sometimes I wonder whether any season will ever be as it should again.”