Another necessary duty, one that weighed almost as heavily, was her mornings spent writing and dealing with various related obligations. There were meetings in Stockholm’s best restaurants with famous children’s book authors from abroad like Erich Kästner and Lisa Tetzner; there were private get-togethers at home in Dalagatan for the publisher’s leading Swedish authors; and there were the annual booksellers’ meetings, where the next season’s publications were presented. Finally there were overseas trips to book fairs, conventions, or seminars, where Astrid represented all the house’s authors, including herself. Something of a balancing act—and perhaps also a conflict of interest? Certainly the question was raised in Sweden, where some authors felt that Astrid Lindgren was taking up too much space, in name and in person, at the country’s largest children’s book publisher. Who was judging and editing her books?
The answer was Astrid Lindgren herself, and no one else. Her successor, Marianne Eriksson, a colleague of Astrid’s for many years, recalled in an interview that she was always “utterly certain about her own manuscripts, and didn’t need any help.” Similarly, Karin Nyman remembers that financial issues regarding her mother’s books while she was employed at the publisher were always negotiated directly with Hans Rabén, and no other editor was ever involved in working on one of her books. Astrid even did her own proofreading. To her colleagues and the many other people who queried this shuttered way of doing business, Astrid Lindgren gave the following response, in the magazine Barnboken in 1985: “Sometimes I’ve heard nasty insinuations that because I also write children’s books, I might have been sitting in my editorial chair and keeping all my dangerous competitors at bay. I wasn’t, not at all! Nobody was more overjoyed than I was when a good manuscript landed on my desk. And having to reject a manuscript, that was—as every editor knows—torture.”
Rabén, Sjö-, and Lindgren
That there was relatively little public criticism of Astrid Lindgren’s problematic dual role was thanks to her dazzlingly skillful handling of her responsibilities as a writer and editor. She maintained a difficult balance. Partly by pitching in and never being above humbler, more routine tasks at the office, like writing back-cover blurbs and marketing text for the catalogue, or drafting advertising copy or sales sheets for booksellers. She liked to use her name to help other, lesser-known authors, and in correspondence with booksellers she was careful to emphasize that the recommendation was “coming from Astrid Lindgren.” She was also unafraid to challenge readers, as we can see from some draft advertising copy that today is held in the Astrid Lindgren archive: “There are two types of people. The ones that love to read and the ones that never dream of picking up a book if they can help it. Which type do you want to be?”
And if the publishing house suddenly found itself in need of a writer, as was the case in 1956, when the photographer Anna Riwkin needed one for a photographic picture book about Japan, Astrid Lindgren leapt into the breach, although she had plenty to keep her busy already.
Eva Meets Noriko-San was the start of a twelve-year collaboration with Riwkin. Their overall project, many years before anyone had started thinking in terms of globalization, encompassed eight picture books from vastly different regions. The photographer usually traveled without her writer, since there was neither the money nor the time for both to go. The books were hastily produced, and Astrid Lindgren struggled with the sense that she was compromising her high standards of quality. As she commented to Ulf Bergström in 1991, in his monograph on Anna Riwkin: “You could say I was forced into working with Anna. You’ve got to do it! the publisher told me. In hindsight I can say that I’m not fond of all the books we did.”
A similarly ad-hoc task came up in 1959, also leading to several successful books, although this time it was Astrid’s own doing. Before anyone else at Rabén and Sjögren, she spotted a potential moneymaker in Harald Wiberg’s atmospheric illustrations for Viktor Rydberg’s classic poem Tomten (The Christmas gnome). In fall 1960 a picture book came out in Swedish featuring Rydberg’s poem. It was simultaneously published in Germany, England, and Denmark in foreign-language editions, for which Astrid Lindgren had turned Rydberg’s poetry into prose that could be more easily translated. In a letter dated December 7, 1960, to Louise Hartung, who she knew would be a fervent advocate of this concentrated shot of Nordic Romanticism, Astrid recounted the story behind the international coeditions:
Here in Sweden we have a well-known poem you probably haven’t read. It was written by a long dead bard, Viktor Rydberg. . . . A Swedish artist has illustrated the poem, and a picture book has come out of it that left the Swedes gasping with delight. It would never have happened if several publishers hadn’t taken part. Once last year, when we had Scandinavian publishers visiting, I ran into the middle of their meeting and said, “One moment, gentlemen!” Then I showed them the pictures and read the poem at the same time, and I said, “Would you help publish this picture book?” And would you believe it—in the course of five minutes I’d sold 20,000 gnomes. But there was one condition. Rydberg’s poem is difficult to translate into other languages in a way that really works, so these publishers insisted I should write a prose text for the images. I’ve done so: a short, not especially brilliant text. Rydberg’s poem contains a few metaphysical meditations, and I’ve scrupulously left those out.
In German, Tomten became Tomte Tummetott, in English The Tomten, and in Danish Nissen. How loyal Astrid Lindgren’s prose reworking was to the original poem, which wasn’t actually mentioned in the coeditions at all, is debatable. In big letters on the front page of the Danish edition were the words “A story by Astrid Lindgren,” while the artist had to be satisfied with smaller letters underneath: “With illustrations by Harald Wiberg.”
Astrid Lindgren’s business idea became a huge sales success, especially in the United States, and a year later it was followed up with her Smålandic paraphrase of the nativity story, Christmas in the Stable, titled Jul i stallet in Danish, in exactly the same format and again with illustrations by Harald Wiberg. In 1965 it was followed by a third stab at commercial success, The Tomten and the Fox, based on a classic poem by Karl-Erik Forsslund. Astrid again turned poetry into prose for the coeditions, while the Swedish version kept Forsslund’s original.
Was this a fraction too shrewd? Certainly it was typical of Astrid Lindgren’s excellent business instincts, and the money kept rolling in. With all due respect to the second founder, Carl-Olof Sjögren, the firm should have been called Rabén, Sjö-, and Lindgren.
Less lucrative, but an exciting Scandinavian initiative nonetheless, was Astrid Lindgren’s idea to commission Tove Jansson to illustrate a new translation of J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit in 1959–60. The two great Scandinavian children’s book authors had met only once or twice, but Astrid used all her rhetorical powers to win Jansson over. Boel Westin’s biography of Jansson reproduces her letter of November 1960, in which Astrid tried to convince Jansson to abandon her Moomins and large-format canvases: “God bless you for Toffle!! But who shall comfort Astrid if you don’t agree to the suggestion I’m laying out here? . . . When I read the book I see the illustrations drawn by Tove Jansson, and I say to myself that this will be the children’s book of the century, which will live long after we’re dead and buried.”
Tove Jansson needed only a few days to think it over before she got down to work, and in 1962 Bilbo: A Hobbit’s Adventure, in Britt G. Hall-qvist’s translation, was ready. When Astrid Lindgren saw the finished illustrations and how beautifully they fit into the book, she was pleased, and proud of what they had achieved together: “Dear admirable Tove, if you have a cloak hem, then send it to me so I can kiss it! I’m so delighted by your wonderful little Hobbit that I can’t put it into words. This is exactly the kind of little, wily, moving, kindly person he should be, and he’s never been depicted that way in any other edition.”
Literary critics and Tolkien fans were less enthusiastic, however. “The children’s book of the centu
ry” ran to only one printing, and must be considered one of Astrid Lindgren’s greatest flops as an editor. Yet Jansson’s little hobbit ended up framed on the wall of Astrid Lindgren’s study, where it hung until her death, and today the book has become a cult collector’s item.
Lunch with the Crones
Whenever Hans Rabén was traveling, vacationing, or sick, Astrid had to take charge, and as Samuel August and Hanna learned from a 1950s letter, their daughter thought it was “fun” to sit in the boss’s chair, overseeing everything and taking on all that responsibility. Others had glimpsed this flair for leadership much earlier. Even at the Vimmerby Tidning in the 1920s, the eighteen-year-old journalism trainee was tasked with answering the phone and keeping an eye on local news when the editor in chief had an errand to run. And later, during the war, when Astrid Lindgren was working at the mail censorship office in Stockholm, she became a role model for the others on her shift. So much so that even the highly educated academics who worked there nominated Astrid when they were asked to choose someone to represent the mail inspectors. As she wrote in a letter home to Näs in June 1943:
I can also tell you that I’ve been chosen as chair of our staff association. They thought I was “well liked among the staff and favored by the cage [the head office].” I immediately turned them down gratefully but firmly, because I think it should be a man, for the simple reason that we’ll have a harder time getting our way if a woman has to talk to the bigwigs, ministers, and so on. So yesterday we chose a man as chair. But I’m rather proud of myself, because there are loads of Ph.D.s and university graduates of both sexes on our staff, and like all academics they’re tremendously conceited about their education, so it’s genuinely remarkable that they suggested a woman who only has a secondary school diploma as their chair.
This quotation reveals a strong, independent woman with a keen awareness of power dynamics in the workplace: a thirty-five-year-old who knew how to obtain the maximum possible influence, how to express herself, and, most important, how to thrive among powerful men, not by being rebellious and anarchic like Pippi Longstocking but through pragmatism, loyalty, and the scrupulous execution of her duties. In that sense Astrid Lindgren was the archetypal example of a modern “businesswoman” in the Alva Myrdal mold. One who knew that every woman had to stand up for herself and command respect if women were going to forge a path into society and change the structures of their male-dominated world.
According to Myrdal, the route to women’s liberation wasn’t through hard-hitting, outward-looking struggle but through the forces working behind the front lines and inside each individual woman. It was this kind of transformative force that Lotta Gröning called “collaborative feminism” in her book about Myrdal, arguing that women should gain ground in the workplace by forging alliances and negotiating, not by kicking up a fuss. Astrid Lindgren mastered this art throughout her working life, and it was only after her retirement in 1970 that she began to sound like an activist and started banging her fist on the table so that everybody could hear it.
From the outset of her dual career in the book industry, Astrid Lindgren came into contact with many professionally talented, inspiring, and extraordinarily powerful women. Surrounding herself with the right people was something else she had a nose for. Elsa Olenius was a network in and of herself, and via her web of connections Astrid grew more closely acquainted with Greta Bolin and Eva von Zweigbergk, who in the 1950s were Sweden’s two leading literary critics. They often reviewed Astrid Lindgren’s work, interviewed her, and furthered her cause as best they could through their media-industry connections. Greta Bolin—and Zweigbergk, to a lesser extent—were frequently invited to the Dalagatan meals Astrid Lindgren was fond of calling “crones’ lunches.” These meetings, bringing together different groups of colleagues, good friends, and relatives, were both professional and social in nature. As Karin Nyman recalls: “Her sisters were a group by themselves. Then there was a group consisting of Anne-Marie Fries, Marianne Eriksson from Rabén & Sjögren, and the authors Barbro Lindgren and Maud Reuterswärd. They took turns inviting each other for lunch and felt like close family. Margareta Strömstedt and Astrid often ate lunch together in the years after 1970, either by themselves or with some other ‘crone,’ Margareta’s sister, for example.”
No crones’ lunch was complete without touching on the subject of “korkade karlarna”: stupid men. Even an Alva Myrdal-esque collaborative feminist could get sick of diplomacy and need to vent her frustrations. Louise Hartung was sent a representative example in a long letter dated January 18, 1963, in which Astrid described the New Year’s tiff she’d had with Hans Rabén. The row was about an author who, for fiscal reasons, asked to be paid in the New Year instead of in December. This was a commonly accepted form of creative accounting, but it required Hans Rabén’s approval, and this had been quite impossible to get after the New Year. Astrid had been turned away repeatedly by the boss’s secretary with the message that Dr. Rabén (she never omitted the title) still hadn’t taken a look at the author’s accounts, which the senior children’s book editor had checked and could vouch for:
I don’t know whether I’ve made it clear to you what hurt me so indescribably. It was that I—who after all am the boss’s right-hand woman and hold a very responsible position—should be forced to run around like an idiot asking for permission I wasn’t getting. So I went home. But now I’ve forgotten everything. For the boss it was a question of prestige, of course. He wanted to show that “it doesn’t matter who’s coming and asking for something, I’m the one who decides.” Yes, I know, it’s all ridiculously petty, but in the moment it drives you nuts. And I rarely go nuts. . . . God, men can be stupid, and they’re so especially touchy about their silly prestige you think they must be pulling your leg.
Astrid Lindgren got embroiled in a second power struggle with leading male figures in the book industry at the end of the 1950s, when she felt that Gyldendal, a prestigious Danish publishing house, was damaging Danish children’s literature by chronically underpaying its authors. In 1958 the house wanted to reissue her Noisy Village books, but was told that the author absolutely could not agree to the 5 percent royalty Gyldendal was offering. She stuck firmly to 7.5 percent, which was the industry standard. The Danish publisher responded that it couldn’t go any higher, despite being as generous as possible in its calculations, because it would have to raise the price to four kroner per book. Danish parents wouldn’t pay that much, even for a book by Astrid Lindgren, claimed Jokum Smith, head of the publishing house. At this, the already irate Swedish author erupted. Was it really the case that Gyldendal was pursuing a cultural policy that entailed squeezing writers as much as possible? Astrid Lindgren’s protest was sent on Rabén and Sjögren letterhead on April 22, 1958:
I don’t want to be difficult, so I accept the terms you suggest. Yet I can’t help asking: was Gyldendal not intending to spearhead a new movement in Danish children’s and young-adult literature, lifting it out of the decline your librarians complain so bitterly about? . . . You will never put out any good Danish manuscripts with that sort of royalty. A decent writer ought to write no more than one book a year, and he will earn—as a rule—1,000 kroner from it, so you can easily work out what that means. If he has any brains he’d rather take a job in a butcher’s or a ladies’ hairdresser’s, or he’ll start churning out books on an assembly line to get a reasonable income. Trust me, Denmark will never have a strong culture of children’s literature if you don’t get people used to the idea that even children’s books cost money. . . . With a policy like that, you’ll always end up with cheap stuff. . . . Sorry, sorry I’m saying all this, I don’t mean any harm. Quite the contrary. But as I said, I accept the terms you suggest, and I gratefully look forward to receiving the gold.
Gut Feelings
That Astrid Lindgren spent nearly twenty-five remarkably friction-free years as a senior editor at Sweden’s largest children’s book publisher, all the while producing b
ooks of her own, is due in no small part to her cultural-political efforts on behalf of all children’s literature and children’s book authors. Her letter to Gyldendal was an example of this, and it was rooted in her unshakeable view of children’s books as both a product and an art form. She consistently avoided ossifying her opinions about children’s literature into rules, dogmas, and objectives, as Gurli Linder had done in 1916, for instance, with her book Our Children’s Free Reading (Våra barns fria läsning), Greta Bolin and Eva von Zweigbergk had done in Children and Books (Barn och böcker) in 1945, and Astrid’s fellow author Lennart Hellsing did to some extent in 1963 with his collection of articles Thoughts on Children’s Literature (Tankar om barnlitteraturen).
Even after retirement, Astrid Lindgren was often asked: what is a good children’s book? Her standard response was always cautious, defensive, and—some might say—close to saying nothing at all: “It must be good. I can assure you I’ve racked my brains over this for ages, but I can’t come up with any other answer: it must be good.”
Astrid Lindgren’s answer makes sense given the multiplicity and variety of children’s and young-adult literature she nurtured and championed. How could anybody believe it was possible to restrict literature to a formula? As a consequence, children’s books at Rabén and Sjögren tended to have much in common with Astrid Lindgren’s work, but this still left a broad field. After all, Lindgren wrote for both sexes and various ages, as well as in many genres and formats: humorous novels, crime novels, fairy-tales, fables, books for girls, fantasy, comedies, and dramas. Her work was also a model example of the way in which books could be repurposed for other media, such as film, theater, radio, and television. For a younger children’s book writer it was hard not to be inspired, impressed, and left slightly in awe of the way Astrid Lindgren orchestrated her role as an author. The artistic and commercial dynamo’s broad spectrum of literary work reflected a visionary artist’s resistance to being pigeonholed, and this fundamental desire for artistic freedom and diversity in art saturated her perspective on the children’s book industry. As the recently retired Lindgren said in an open letter to authors and publishers in the magazine Barn och kultur in 1970: