Astrid Lindgren: The Woman Behind Pippi Longstocking

  The exchange of letters between them peaked when The Brothers Lionheart came out in 1973–74, and Astrid Lindgren became intensely busy, partly with interviews and readings both at home and abroad but also because a number of people close to her died. Chief among them was her brother Gunnar, who was only slightly older than she. In their youth he’d been a close confidante, to whom Astrid had poured out her wild, dance-loving heart in letters that were often full of dark humor. Amid her grief over Gunnar’s premature death in 1974, it seemed as if all the world wanted to discuss The Brothers Lionheart with its author.

  Including Sara. Having received a copy of the book through the post, complete with dedication, she threw herself into it before reading a “stupid” review in the newspaper Dagens Nyheter, as she wrote consolingly to Astrid. How could anyone not love a book that was so vividly exciting yet so heartwarming and full of solace? Astrid Lindgren had no answer to that. Instead there was something else in Sara’s letters over the winter of 1973–74 that she wanted to discuss: the news that the now fifteen-year-old girl had fallen in love with one of her teachers. Life and love had gradually become so closely intertwined for Sara that in a December 1973 letter to Astrid she tried to analyze herself, using a separate sheet of paper: “I had wondered for a long time about the reason why I wasn’t really living. I’d got as far in my deliberations as falseness and lost identity. I wanted so much to be myself. But who was I? And I don’t think I know a single person who is themselves.”

  Astrid Lindgren became so fascinated by Sara’s letter that on New Year’s Eve—when she generally shunned society in favor of enjoying time alone with the sounds of Beethoven and Mozart, a good book, and her usual diary entry, in which she reflected on the past twelve months—she instead answered Sara’s letter. Sitting in front of her typewriter during the final hours of the year, she let her thoughts wander back in time, to her youth in Vimmerby, a provincial city: “When I read what you write about yourself, I feel I recognize much of what I brooded about when I was your age.” It was the philosophical beginning of Sara’s analysis, in particular, which focused on the human unwillingness to show one’s true self, that Lindgren wanted to address: “You’re absolutely right about that! No person opens herself fully and completely, even though she longs to be able to. But every single one of us is trapped in our loneliness. All people are lonely, although many have so many people around them that they don’t understand or realize it. Until one day . . . But you’re in love, and that’s a wonderful thing to feel.”

  The other thing that piqued Lindgren’s interest about Sara’s soul-searching Christmas letter was her description of being in love with a teacher. Lindgren carefully avoided wagging a moralizing or warning finger. Instead, she wrote—and repeated in several subsequent letters—that love was the world’s best cure for anxiety and uncertainty: “Love, even if it’s ‘unhappy,’ intensifies one’s feeling for life. That’s indisputable.”

  Sara Ljungcrantz and Astrid Lindgren never met face to face, and they were never closer than in the letters of 1972–74. Sara wrote a single letter in 1976, in which she reported on her rereading of Astrid’s three books about young Kati from Kaptensgatan (1950–53). The trilogy, about a young girl who visits the United States, Italy, and Paris, had given Sara the travel bug as well as a zest for life, but she also wanted to ask the author whether the main character was modeled on her eighteen- or nineteen-year-old self: “Were you really like Kati when you were young?”

  This pertinent question put sixty-eight-year-old Astrid Lindgren in mind of something she had found when she was clearing out some drawers: a few letters and yellowed scraps of paper from the difficult year of 1926, when she’d had to leave home.

  I found a scrap of paper . . . one I wrote when I was about your age, it was in a letter and it read as follows: Life is not so rotten as it seems. But I thought—just like you—that life was rotten to the core. So it may be that the Kati books are a little “lie-ish” if you want them to express what it’s like to be really young. But Kati was a little more grown-up, of course, she wasn’t all that young. All the time I was nineteen or twenty I wanted to kill myself, and I lived with a girl who wanted to even more. . . . But later, bit by bit, I began to adjust, and I thought life was rather pleasant. Now, at my present advanced age, I think it’s tremendously difficult to be happy, considering that the world looks as it does, and my comfort is that I’m not young any longer. God, how cheerful this is becoming. I suddenly realize. I’m sorry! . . . Goodbye to you, Sara. Life is not so rotten as it seems.

  TWO

  À la garçonne

  “FROM FIFTEEN TO TWENTY-FIVE, YOU live about four different lives,” declared Astrid Lindgren in a German TV broadcast from the 1960s, which was about the successive stages of a woman’s life. With the same natural charisma that had made the children’s book author a star on Swedish radio at the end of the forties, she described the overwhelming feeling of being four different women within the space of ten years: “So, starting with the first one—what was I like when I was fifteen? I was aware I was grown-up, and I wasn’t happy about it.”

  This insecure, occasionally unhappy, lonely fifteen-year-old, who found comfort and meaning in the world of books, transformed at the age of sixteen or seventeen into an extroverted, progressive girl who lived and breathed the spirit of the age: “I underwent a rapid and colossal change, turning from one day to the next into a proper jazz gal. This was around the time jazz had its breakthrough in the roaring twenties, you see. I cut my hair short, to the utter horror of my parents, who were farmers, and partial to convention.”

  It was in 1924 that Astrid Lindgren (née Ericsson)—not yet seventeen—plunged into a youthful revolution that caused a sensation in Vimmerby. The town had a movie house, a theater, an evangelical bookshop, and a folk-dancing troupe called the Smålanders, but as a dance-crazy young woman, Astrid longed to move to the rhythm of her own era. Summer offered the chance to dance outdoors, while in winter the Stadshotell hosted “soirees with dancing” on Saturdays. Evenings usually began with a lengthy concert, during which the two sexes sat demurely and expectantly in their separate rows, but from nine o’clock till one in the morning there was dancing to the latest hits, “featuring special decorations and magical lighting,” as the Stads-hotell advertised on the front page of the local newspaper Vimmerby Tidning in 1924–25.

  Meanwhile, Astrid’s best friend, Anne-Marie Ingeström (later Fries), was still wearing long, feminine dresses that both hid and highlighted her burgeoning womanly form. A beautiful girl, the daughter of a bank manager, she was nicknamed Madicken and had grown up in a white villa at the middle-class end of Prästgårdsallén. She liked to show off her long dark hair, especially in photographs, where she fully embodied the image of traditional female sensuality. Astrid, by contrast, had begun to dress in masculine clothing. Long trousers, jackets, and ties had crept into her wardrobe, as well as hats and caps she drew down tightly over her close-cropped head, which—as she later observed in an interview—contained little in the way of down-to-earth, sensible thoughts. Instead, it swarmed with fragmentary quotations from Nietzsche, Dickens, Schopenhauer, Dostoyevsky, and Edith Södergran, as well as notions gleaned from the movies about how Greta Garbo and contemporary femmes fatales looked and acted: “There were around 3,500 inhabitants of Vimmerby, and I was the first person in town to cut my hair short. Sometimes people I met on the street would come over and ask me to take my hat off and show them my shorn head. It was around the same time that Victor Margueritte, a French writer, published his book La Garçonne, a very shocking book that became a worldwide success. It seemed every girl right across the world tried to be like La Garçonne—I did, anyway.”

  Victor Margueritte’s novel, which sold more than a million copies around the globe in the 1920s, became a cult book for many young women who dreamt of rebelling against outdated gender roles and Victorian propriety. Monique Lerbier—the main character in the novel—is a walki
ng and talking thorn in the side of bourgeois society. She cuts her long hair like a boy’s, wears jackets and ties, smokes and drinks in public—usually the preserve of men—dances wildly, and gives birth to a child out of wedlock. She’s a self-confident, self-made woman who chooses freedom above family, opting for a life she herself colors and shapes.

  “La Garçonne” rapidly became an international phenomenon in the world of fashion, shocking men with its androgynous look. All of a sudden, major cities across the world were teeming with short-haired women clad in men’s clothes or shapeless dresses and cloche hats. The point of this dual-gendered wardrobe was impossible to mistake. The modern young woman of the 1920s didn’t want to be like her mother and grandmother. She rejected corsets and long, heavy gowns in favor of a more functional style of dress that allowed her to move more freely. Like the La Garçonne haircut, these clothes were intended to make women resemble the gender with which they were increasingly drawing level.

  As a curious, eager reader and a culturally interested young woman who used newspapers, magazines, books, films, and music as a window onto the big wide world, Astrid Ericsson was aware of the fuss these new women’s fashions had stirred up outside Småland’s borders. In Scandinavian newspapers and weeklies, a number of male columnists saw it as their calling to dissuade women from cutting their hair short. The “shingle bob,” as the La Garçonne style was also known, was referred to in explicitly racist terms, including the “Apache cut” and “Hottentot hair,” and behind these bogeymen lay fears about women’s new role. Would the man of the future lose the standing he had held since time immemorial? Not entirely. The majority of these young La Garçonne–inspired women dreamt of security and family, a husband and children. What was new, however, was that they also wanted to work outside the home, they sought companionship with men, and—not least—they wanted control over their own bodies and sexuality.

  How well and how naturally this new, boyish look and the associated lifestyle suited Astrid Ericsson is clear from various photographs taken at Anne-Marie’s seventeenth birthday in August 1924, in which four youths—Sonja, Märta, Greta, and Astrid—are gathered around the birthday girl. The four disguised friends playfully arranged themselves in two different tableaus, pretending to be rival suitors kneeling before a fair maiden. Compared to the three other “young men” in the pictures, there is something magnificently coherent about Astrid Ericsson’s appearance. She’s not playing a role; she’s herself: a tomboy. Astrid, who had always played with other children regardless of gender, had never wanted to be anything other than a girl, despite her lack of confidence during her teenage years. As she explained in the newspaper Göteborgs-Posten in 1983: “Perhaps because we never drew a distinction in our games at home in Näs”—the Vimmerby farm where she grew up—“girls and boys played together equally wildly.”

  On August 28, 1924, Anne-Marie Ingeström, seated, turned seventeen, and her best friends Sonja, Märta, Greta, and Astrid, right, dressed up as young men hovering around the graceful Madicken.

  Young Astrid from Näs puts on a fashionable expression, presenting herself as a self-aware, freedom-loving woman in the Edith Södergran mold.

  The same “tomboy” aura is strikingly present in other photographs of Astrid Lindgren taken in the 1920s and early 1930s. In them we see a slender woman between twenty and twenty-five, clad in long trousers, and sometimes in a waistcoat and bow tie. A woman smoking cigarettes almost ostentatiously, her challenging posture underscored in many images by a small, subtle, knowing smile. It’s as if the young woman in the photographs exists in a zone of untouchability and independence, illustrating some of the strong, self-aware lines from the young Astrid Lindgren’s favorite poet, Edith Södergran, in “Vierge moderne,” a poem about a modern virgin:

  I am no woman. I am neuter.

  I am a child, a page and a bold decision,

  I am a laughing streak of scarlet sun . . .

  I am a net for all voracious fish,

  I am a toast to every woman’s honor,

  I am a step toward accident and undoing,

  I am a leap into freedom and the self . . .

  Echoes of this can be found in the masculine, dynamic main characters in Astrid Lindgren’s books for young girls, Confidences of Britt-Mari (1944), Kerstin and I (1945), and especially in the three books about freedom-hungry Kati. The orphaned twenty-year-old who narrates the three books travels to America in the first installment, and while in God’s own country she can’t help comparing herself and her gender with Columbus and generations of masculine conquerors, becoming indignant at what she sees. Opposition, outspokenness, and protest when necessary serve as a natural, indivisible part of Kati’s femininity: “Of course, men are a wild and adventurous and magnificent race! Why are we women never allowed to discover new parts of the world? It’s really rather lousy being a woman.”

  What Mother Would Say

  If Astrid Ericsson’s rebellion in Vimmerby in 1924 provoked a certain scandal, it was in no small part because she was the daughter of tenant farmers living at the rectory. The position gave the Ericsson family distinct precedence over ordinary farmers and townsfolk. Samuel August Ericsson (1875–1969) was a church warden and respected farmer with a broad knowledge of agriculture, animals, and people, and he held various local offices over the years. So did his hardworking, intelligent wife, Hanna Ericsson (1879–1961). As well as efficiently running a large household at Näs, including four children, grandparents, and an extensive staff of helpers on the fields and farm, Hanna was involved in Vimmerby’s organizations for poor relief, child welfare, and public health. She was also famous in the town and its surroundings for her poultry keeping, regularly winning first prize at markets and cattle shows. A pious, deeply religious woman, Hanna was the ever-vigilant moral guardian of Astrid Lindgren’s childhood home, where the four children had to attend Sunday school, and churchgoing was mandatory.

  On the day in 1924 when Astrid had her hair cut like the heroine of Victor Margueritte’s novel, she phoned home to Näs hoping Samuel August would pick up, because he, unlike Hanna, would take a milder (albeit scarcely more understanding) view of his daughter’s actions. Her father listened, answered in a heavy voice, and added that it probably wouldn’t be a good idea for her to come home right away. Yet Astrid Ericsson stood by her decision: making a show of rebellion was, after all, the point. A while later, Astrid agreed to cut the hair of a younger relative who asked her to do so at a family get-together. In an interview on the CD Astrids röst (Astrid’s voice), the elderly Lindgren describes what happened, explaining that she used the opportunity to begin spreading the spirit of rebellion among her relatives, and that her grandmother Lovisa told the two girls she quite liked Astrid’s short hair.

  Nonetheless, Astrid Lindgren never forgot the reception she got at her childhood home on the day she came back with her new haircut. You could have heard a pin drop when she walked into the kitchen at Näs and sat down on a chair: “Nobody said a word; they just moved around me in silence.” Hanna’s reaction on that occasion, along with any comment she might have made, is unknown, but there can be little doubt that she made it clear to Astrid later—once they were alone—what her feelings were. Scenes of rebellion and instances of willful self-expression among the four Ericsson children were rare, and when one of them did get carried away, it was always Hanna who reacted. The disciplinary aspect of child-rearing was not Samuel August’s strength. As Astrid Lindgren recounted: “I do remember one time when I opposed my mother. I was very little, three or four years old, when I decided one day that she was stupid and that I was going to leave home, to the outdoor privy. I couldn’t have been away long, but when I came back my siblings had been given hard candy. I thought that was so unfair I kicked at my mother in a rage. But then I was taken into the dining room and given a spanking.”

  That was what childhood in Näs was like for Astrid, Gunnar, Stina, and Ingegerd. None of them doubted their mother’s love
for them, but while Samuel August liked to hug his children, Hanna was reticent and sparing with her affection. It was Hanna, too, who called them to account when they forgot the time after a long summer’s evening dancing to accordion music among the fluorescent birches in the park, or losing themselves in thought on benches by the water tower. Afterward they’d hurry back home down Prästgårdsallén, and, as they cautiously opened the door, the big question was what their mother would say.

  Samuel August and Hanna Ericsson with their four children. From left to right: Ingegerd (born 1916) on her father’s lap, Astrid (1907), Stina (1911), and Gunnar (1906), holding his mother’s hand.

  “She was the one who brought us up. I can’t remember Samuel August ever getting involved,” wrote Astrid Lindgren in the 1970s, in a beautiful and tender essay about her parents, Samuel August from Sevedstorp and Hanna from Hult. In it she wrote about her mother’s spiritual side, which lent her, like Samuel August, a gift for language that was inherited by all their children. As Astrid Lindgren commented in an interview with the newspaper Aftonbladet in 1967: “Mother wrote poems when she had the time. She wrote them in an album. She was the most intelligent of the two of them, and she was stricter than Father. Father was very, very fond of children.”