Astrid Lindgren: The Woman Behind Pippi Longstocking
Karin, who had just turned eighteen, was on vacation in Paris. She returned home immediately. Today, when she looks back on her father’s sudden death, she remembers it as an unpleasant surprise, but not a huge shock. Everyone in the Lindgren family was aware of Sture’s fragility, and for several years before it happened Astrid had known where things were headed, believes Karin Nyman: “We were very worried about him, and when he died—somewhat unexpectedly, within just a few days—that worry was lifted. I mean, it was a relief. When I came home from France (Lasse fetched me) the three of us spent several days together in the apartment, which I remember being filled more with lovely conversation and good memories and relief than with tears and sorrow. Astrid grieved afterward for the husband she’d not had much time with, the husband she’d had so much fun with, and a good sex life, I think, but probably for a long while she had associated their life together mainly with disappointment and worry.”
Shortly after the funeral, Astrid took a trip to the Stockholm archipelago, trying to live as normally as possible, although she was constantly thinking of Sture, and even talked to him when she was alone. On July 9 she wrote to Elsa Olenius, who’d been a huge support, both at the hospital and in the days afterward: “It is empty without him here. Because he was around us all the time out here on Furusund, of course, and here there was no reason to worry. But I suppose you’re right—it’s probably best for little Sture to sleep. Oh, I was so glad you were with me at Sabbatsberg! I’m so glad to have you!”
In letters home to Hanna and Samuel August, Astrid forced her mind in other directions, telling them how the vacation was going, and about Lasse, his wife, Inger, and their little son, Mats. All three had come to visit in early July with Karin and their cousin Gunvor, and the girls were a big help when strangers suddenly dropped in. One day Astrid Lindgren’s Dutch publisher knocked on the door with a copy of Pippi Langkous, and Greta Bolin from the Svenska Dagbladet also dropped by to interview Astrid about life and literature. On July 31, 1952, an article appeared in the newspaper about the author’s grief: “Right now Astrid Lindgren needs nature as a healing force, because she has recently lost her husband and life partner. The wound is still so fresh that it scarcely seems more to her than a bad dream. She is not alone, however; she has her sweet daughter Karin and her son Lasse and the best solace of all, her grandson Mats, who is one and a half. ‘The world’s most beautiful grandchild,’ says Astrid Lindgren . . . and she begins to tell the loveliest tale, one that will never be printed, because it’s the tale of a grandchild who steals his grandmother’s grief-stricken heart.”
In November 1952, Astrid wrote home to her mother: “On Sunday evening, after waving goodbye to Gunvor, Karin and I went to Northern Cemetery and lit a candle on Sture’s grave, since it was All Saints Day. There were candles burning on almost all the graves, and they glowed so beautifully in the dark. And you can be sure, Mamma, that I’m looking at ALL the death notices to see how old the deceased person was. It’s as if I want to convince myself that more lives than just Sture’s have been cut short before their time—and goodness me, there are many, many!”
Grief wasn’t usually something Astrid shared with the outside world. Life had to go on. Back in Dalagatan in August, she continued work on the upcoming radio series about Bill Bergson, Master Detective, carried out her part-time job at Rabén and Sjögren, began to take driving lessons, sat in the recording studio as they tackled a new, entertaining series of 20 Questions, and prepared for the publication and launch of her new book. Just before Sture’s death, Astrid had completed the third and final volume about the children of Noisy Village, sixty thousand copies of which would be printed by the end of the year. Keeping up a brisk pace on the treadmill of life was Astrid’s best defense against grief and depressive thinking. So were the walks she took through Northern Cemetery in Stockholm, where she could reassure—if not exactly comfort—herself that other people had died at the age of fifty-three. Christmas 1952 was carefully recorded in the diary: “I usually list all the Christmas presents in this book to aid my memory—on Christmas Eve 1952 Sture got a wreath of Christmas roses on his grave. . . . ‘I want to live at least until you get inducted into the Swedish Academy,’ he used to say, that little optimist. A wreath of Christmas roses, he got for Christmas 1952.”
Every year between Christmas and New Year in the 1950s, Astrid Lindgren took stock of the previous twelve months in the small black or brown notebooks she had once called her “war diary,” which now numbered more than fifteen volumes. As well as listing that year’s haul of gifts and recounting the Lindgren family’s ups and downs over the year, Astrid had also started to take a sharper look at herself and her role as a woman. How would her life work without a man at her side? Could she live alone in Dalagatan once Karin moved out and twenty-five years of family life irretrievably vanished? Such thoughts surfaced every year between Christmas and New Year, including in 1957: “I want to try not to be afraid anymore. . . . It’s fear of everything that’s the real misfortune. So let life bring what it will, and let me be strong enough to accept what it brings.”
Mother and daughter lived together in Dalagatan for six years during the 1950s, before Karin got married and moved in with Carl Olof Nyman. Those final years in her childhood home are clear in Karin Nyman’s memory: “Our lives didn’t change much. Financially not at all, because it was Astrid who earned the money we needed. We could remain in the apartment, she and I. But Astrid’s existence altered gradually, and she developed more of a social life and entertained more than when she had to live with Sture’s expectation that she would stay home, and that he wouldn’t have to socialize. It was nice for her that I kept living at home until I married—we lived as a twosome for several years. She could write as before, of course.”
Mio, My Son
Toward the end of the 1950s, Eva von Zweigbergk and Astrid Lindgren were asked to collaborate on Friendly Criticism (Vänkritik), a book dedicated to Olle Holmberg, a professor of literature, and consisting of a series of conversations between Swedish literary critics and Swedish authors. Each pair chose a single work by their respective authors to discuss; Lindgren and Zweigbergk selected Mio, My Son. Zweigbergk posed the following question: “I’d like to know how Astrid Lindgren, the nimble, quick-witted person we all know from the radio, having grown up with a gaggle of siblings, is capable of depicting childhood loneliness with such great sympathy and insight.”
Lindgren answered honestly—and cautiously. She explained that the lonely children might represent the author’s unconscious longing for the lost paradise of childhood and for closer contact with the natural world. Beyond that she wanted to leave it up to the readers themselves to interpret the book. “What do I know?” she asked.
Mio, My Son is thus a book open to many interpretations. A biographical approach affords a further potential explanation for Astrid Lindgren’s special “insight” into Bosse’s loneliness: Mio, My Son was written on a wave of grief. Underneath the surface narrative, where Bosse dreams of finding his father, lay another emotional drama, in which the author’s loss was reflected in the boy’s loneliness and longing.
No other book in Astrid Lindgren’s oeuvre feels as crushing and claustrophobic as Mio, My Son. From the moment Bosse’s imagination takes hold and he assumes the guise of Prince Mio, venturing with his friend and squire Jum-Jum into the gloomy realm of the dead, where a knight called Sir Kato reigns, the language centers around a handful of particular words: “solitary,” “alone,” “black,” “dark,” “death,” and “sorrow.” These words are repeated over and over with small variations, often within the same passage or extended sentence. The first time Mio sees the lake and enchanted birds outside Sir Kato’s eerie castle, for instance: “I dream sometimes of vast black waters opening before me. But never have I dreamt, never has any human dreamt, of water as black as that I saw before my eyes. It was the bleakest, blackest water in all the world. Around the lake were nothing but tall, black, deso
late cliffs. Birds circled above the dark water, many birds. You couldn’t see them, but you could hear them. And I have never heard anything as sorrowful as their cries.”
If you count the author’s use of the words “black” and “dark,” you’ll find that they appear almost a hundred times over the course of the sixty-odd pages Mio and Jum-Jum spend amid the soul-like cliffs of Outer Land, while words like “solitary” and “alone,” “death” and “sorrow” are repeated altogether more than fifty times. No other words in the novel are used even remotely as often as these, and they all help tighten the novel’s grip on the reader’s throat, intensifying the claustrophobic atmosphere so characteristic of many scenes in Mio, My Son. Yet the sorrowful, evocative language involves more than just repeated words. Another important tool is the invocation recited by Jum-Jum whenever the two boys need a miracle. It’s spoken eight times on the way to their final confrontation with Sir Kato, varied each time, depending on the danger or challenge the young heroes face. One fixed, recurring element in the invocation is the final phrase: “If only we weren’t so small and alone.” These words are repeated eight times in all, becoming a kind of refrain in the novel and underscoring humanity’s insignificance on a cosmic scale. One of the final times Jum-Jum pleads for help is when Sir Kato has captured him and Prince Mio, and they’ve been condemned to rot slowly in prison: “If only death weren’t so heavy, so heavy to bear, and if only we weren’t so small and alone.”
This particular variant of Jum-Jum’s invocation is difficult to imagine in the mouth of a nine-year-old. Even in a fantasy novel, the words are better suited to an adult voice. Perhaps these eight invocations had their own resonance and import for Astrid Lindgren amid the torrent of words and images that flooded onto the page in spring 1954—with astonishingly few corrections in comparison to her other novels.
In 1945, while Sture and Astrid’s marriage was in crisis, she noted in her diary that the initial creative phase of working on a new book was a special place where she always found peace and solid ground: “Sometimes I’m happy and sometimes I’m sad. Most happy when I write.” From the beginning of her career as an author in 1944–45, the writing process provided a counterweight to Astrid Lindgren’s personal worries, her melancholy and fear. As she scribbled down her fiction in shorthand, she felt, as she put it, “inaccessible to all sorrows.” But when it came to working on Mio, My Son in 1954, sorrow was, for once, not shut out from the writing process. On the contrary. From the first twilit scene in Stockholm to the dark dreamscapes of Outer Land, sorrow and the sustained agony of loss and misfortune are the dominant mood in Mio, My Son. Not even at the end of the novel, when the sun finally casts its rays into its murky universe, does the reader escape being reminded of sorrow: “At the top of the highest silver poplar sat Sorrowbird, singing all alone. I don’t know what he was singing about now that all the missing children had come home again. But I thought Sorrowbird probably always had something to sing about.”
The big black bird accompanies Mio throughout most of his journey, reminding us that sorrow is a condition of life, on an equal footing with happiness. No one can avoid it. Astrid Lindgren liked to explain it with the aid of a Chinese proverb, which she would repeat to dejected or anxious friends, for instance Elsa Olenius, whom she comforted in 1959: “You can’t prevent the birds of sorrow flying over your head, but you can prevent them building nests in your hair.”
Presumably Astrid Lindgren did exactly that when buried in Mio, My Son in the spring of 1954: let the birds of sorrow flap around her head as she wrote and wrote, taking care the big black bird didn’t build a nest. Many thoughts, memories, associations, and ideas crossed paths during those two spring months. Yet even then, it didn’t take much to remind her suddenly of Sture. In a letter Astrid wrote to a German friend on Walpurgis Night—Witches’ Night, April 30—in 1954, she described the loss of her husband and her work on the book, which was currently absorbing most of her time and energy:
On exactly this date two years ago I was home [at Näs] for a few days. It had just properly turned spring, and I was sitting on a hill one evening as the sun shone and birds chirped, and we sang: “Life may never again invite you to celebrate.” When I got back to Stockholm, my husband was ill, and he didn’t live much longer. So I think about all that on Walpurgis Night. Incidentally, I’m writing like a madwoman at the moment, perhaps I already told you? In fact I’m doing nothing but writing (and going to the publishing house a few hours a day). It’ll be fun when the time comes to send you the book and hear what you think. But that will be a while yet, of course.
It wasn’t very long, however, before Astrid—alongside her young narrator in Mio, My Son—had struggled through the darkness and emerged into the light. Summer had arrived, and she had finished yet another book, which was due to come out before Christmas. Meanwhile Rabén and Sjögren sent her a check for five thousand kronor as thanks for her extraordinary efforts as an editor over the past year. Astrid intended to use the unexpected windfall to buy a car, although she still didn’t have a license—hence she took the overcrowded boat from Strandvägskajen to Furusund. In front of her stretched a gloriously long summer holiday, with plenty of writing and visits from family and friends, Astrid’s new friend from Germany included.
Louise the Songbird
Their friendship sprang up in the fall of 1953. In late September, Astrid Lindgren and Elsa Olenius embarked on an extended journey around Europe, the primary purpose of which was to visit an international children’s literature conference in Zurich, where authors, publishers, librarians, teachers, journalists, and people in radio—250 participants in all, from twenty-seven nations—had convened to set up IBBY (the International Board of Books for Young People). On the final day of the conference, Erich Kästner gave an unforgettable speech, which was later quoted in the magazine Svensk Bokhandel. In the same issue, Astrid Lindgren “interviewed” herself:
“And did Mrs. Lindgren meet many nice people?”
“Yes, a whole lot of them. Erich Kästner was there, and Lisa Tetzner, and from England came Pamela Travers, the Mary Poppins woman, you know. And we mustn’t forget Jella Lepman, head of the International Youth Library in Munich, which was built with American money. It was Jella Lepman who took the initiative in this kind of international cooperation, which one may venture to hope will promote good books for young people. Yes, there’s something happening on that front, and that’s a good thing. After all—as Erich Kästner so rightly said in his admirable concluding speech: ‘Die Zukunft der Jugend wird so aussehen wie morgen und übermorgen ihre Literatur’ [The future of youth will look like their literature does tomorrow and the day after tomorrow].”
Kästner’s perspective on the future of young people and contemporary literature for children stuck with Astrid on her way home from the conference, as she left Elsa and traveled alone to Hamburg, Bremen, and Berlin to promote her books, which had been translated into German. A small up-and-coming publisher in the form of married couple Friedrich and Heidi Oetinger had acquired the German-language rights to Pippi Langstrumpf in 1949, after five larger publishers had kindly but firmly turned them down. Now the Oetingers were poised to take Pippi’s mother out to dinners and banquets in Hamburg and Bremen, where there were readings and Astrid Lindgren spoke about the importance of laughter and smiles in the postwar period. Her trip then took her to Berlin, where she had been invited by the city’s Hauptjugendamt—which, according to the interview in Svensk Bokhandel, corresponded to the Swedish Barnavårdsnämnd, or Child Welfare Authority. It was a branch of the Berlin administration dedicated to finding creative ways to help children from broken homes grow up reasonably normal and happy:
Louise Hartung (1905—65) had Goethe in her blood, and couldn’t imagine life without Faust. She explained as much in a letter to Astrid, even putting Pippi up on the same pedestal, because the two loners fitted together so well. Hartung, a powerful figure at the Hauptjugendamt, had replaced all the children’s librari
ans in Berlin and decreed that Pippi Langstrumpf should be on every reading group’s program each Monday.
“So Mrs. Lindgren was invited as a kind of mental vitamin injection?”
“Hmmm, that might be putting it too strongly. I think the Hauptjugendamt had got the idea that a little Longstocking wouldn’t hurt German children, and wanted to convince booksellers of that. They’d invited all the children’s booksellers in the whole western sector to a meeting at the ‘Haus der Jugend’ in Berlin-Dahlem. And we sat comfortably on a green lawn in the sunshine and had a lovely time. I read a little story from one of my books, and Ursula Herking, Germany’s most distinguished female cabaret star, read from Pippi Longstocking, Kajsa Kavat, and Kati in America, and all the booksellers were so sweet and encouraging. But booksellers mostly are, don’t you think? And afterward the energetic ladies from the Hauptjugendamt took the opportunity to appeal for the booksellers’ help making the books more popular among children.”
One of the energetic ladies from the Hauptjugendamt in Berlin was Louise Hartung. A few months earlier she had written to Astrid and offered her the use of her two-room apartment in Rudolfstädter Strasse in Wilmersdorf while the Swedish author was in town. In early October 1953, Astrid waded boldly into the complex world of German prepositions and came up with a polite thank-you note: “Liebe Frau Hartung, vielen Dank für Ihr freundliches Schreiben und für die Einladung. Natürlich will ich so fürchterlich gern nach (oder zu?) Berlin kommen.” [Dear Frau Hartung, Many thanks for your friendly note and for the invitation. Of course I’d be delighted to come to Berlin.]