The conversation that follows, about “heightening the feeling of living,” has been sparked by Pelle’s old comb. He removes one tooth every day, keeping count of how much of the glorious summer they have left on Seacrow Island. His dreamy father thinks he’s torturing himself, so he throws Pelle’s comb into the trash: “It’s wrong to dread the days to come. You should enjoy the day you’ve had.” Pelle is astonished by the vehemence of his father’s reaction, and by the grown-ups’ long conversation about “the feeling of living.” Where do you feel it? he asks Malin, who answers, “In you, I think it’s in your legs. When you say you’ve got a lot of wriggle in your legs, that’s the feeling of living!”
The children of Seacrow Island circa 1964, meant to represent the Swedish men and women of tomorrow, feel this restlessness deeply, and they make sure to savor every single moment on the archipelago as if it were their last. They set off on grand adventures on foot and by boat, sometimes ending up in dangerous situations if the weather suddenly changes. These experiences are part of the novel’s underlying Thorild-esque philosophy. “This day, one life” means knowing and acknowledging that death will always exist in life. Nothing lasts forever. This lesson is illustrated brutally when a fox kills Pelle’s rabbit, savages Stina’s lamb, and comes close to finishing off their dog, Boatsman. In one split second, intense joy is transformed into deep, coal-black grief. Pelle and Tjorven are too young to really grasp it, yet the author spares neither them nor the reader. It falls, inevitably, to Malin, the novel’s mother figure, to teach them this Lindgren-esque lesson about the reality of sorrow and the necessity of loneliness: “Life, you see, is sometimes difficult. Even small children, even a little boy like you, will have to go through things that hurt, and you have to go through them all alone.”
We on Seacrow Island, a pleasant dream about an environmentally friendly community of children, adults, and animals living as equals on an island in the sea, became an important factor in Swedish and, to an extent, Scandinavian self-perception in the 1960s. Though gender roles hadn’t yet begun to shift significantly and “environmental awareness” was a foreign concept, when We on Seacrow Island appeared on black-and-white television screens on Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, and Finnish channels—and was simultaneously released in book form in all Nordic languages—the consensus regarding children’s rights was undergoing far-reaching changes, and these were reflected with particular clarity in the social legislation and school reforms of the 1960s.
Lindgren’s careful social criticism based in environmental issues and the balance of power between men and women, and between adults and children, was not limited to the TV show or novel. Over the next ten years, many of Astrid Lindgren’s books, TV programs, and films, set against various historical backdrops, called into question the patriarchy: the system didn’t take sufficient care of nature, it was always itching to declare war, and it continued to oppress women and children. In We on Seacrow Island, and especially in her books about Emil from Lönneberga, which developed during the epochal year of 1968 into a trilogy about antiauthoritarian sons rebelling against their fathers, Astrid Lindgren began the final, great chapter of her life and career as an author, coming into her own as a humanist, critic of civilization, and political activist.
An Uprising in Lönneberga
In a surprising change of scene, Astrid Lindgren turned her attention in May 1963 from the contemporary Stockholm archipelago to Småland at the close of the previous century. She registered the shift in her diary on May 23: “Today I wrote the first words of what may become a book about Emil from Lönneberga.” She had come up with an idea for a collection of stories about a Småland farm boy with so much “wriggle in his legs” that these days he’d be diagnosed with ADHD and handed a bottle of pills.
On a wooden bench on the balcony of her house in Furusund in 1955, Astrid began to keep a rather unusual diary. Every year she summed up the previous summer in pencil on the underside of the bench. On July 3, 1963, she wrote something about We on Seacrow Island, but first: “Summer, beaming like in the good old days! Early summer, at least, was as lovely as a fairy-tale! Been here all June and written Emil in the Soup Tureen. He’s finished now.”
The name Emil arose in the same haphazard way as Pippi Longstocking had, when Karin plucked a name out of thin air and Astrid built a character around it. Now it was Karin’s firstborn, little Karl-Johan, who provided a spark of inspiration by throwing a few nasty tantrums in the summer of 1962. On several occasions it had been impossible to pacify the three-year-old, and something had to be done about it, explained Karl-Johan’s grandmother on Book Day in Klagstorp in 1970: “Then one day I hit upon something, and I screamed even more loudly than he did: ‘Do you know what Emil from Lönneberga did once?’ The name just flew out of me, but Karl-Johan fell silent, because he wanted to find out what Emil from Lönneberga had done. Afterward I used that trick every time, so he had to keep his mouth shut. It hadn’t occurred to me to write a book about Emil, but suddenly I began to mull it over: Who is this Emil, and how is he getting on in Lönneberga, and before I knew what was happening I’d begun writing about him.”
Yet the Emil character had been more years in the making than it might seem. Other lively boys in the author’s past and present contributed to the creation and development of the only character in Lindgren’s oeuvre who could always match Pippi Longstocking’s vitality and popularity. Over the years, Astrid had been eager to use some of Samuel August’s impish stories from his Småland childhood in a literary form more extensive and ambitious than free-standing short stories like “A Småland Matador” and “A Bit about Sammelaugust,” which were published in 1950. The idea became more insistent after her mother’s death in 1961, when Astrid was afraid her father wouldn’t live long without his beloved, indispensable Hanna from Hult.
Her brother Gunnar and his childhood hijinks at Näs, which Astrid had witnessed, also contributed to the character of Emil. One time he had crawled up onto the roof just as Samuel August came round the corner. “Come down from there, Gunnar,” said his father, and the little boy immediately obeyed. Ten minutes later his father walked past again, and Gunnar was sitting high up on the roof, exactly as before. “Didn’t I tell you to come down?” “Yes, but you didn’t say I couldn’t climb up again!”
Certain unforgettable episodes and remarks from Lasse’s childhood in the 1930s and his son Mats’s in the 1950s also fed into the character of Emil. By 1963 Mats was no longer a little boy, but he was still as affectionate as he’d been in the winter he and his grandma had spent together in Dalarna, when he suddenly and spontaneously announced, “The most important thing is that we’re together . . . ever!” In the 1960s five new grandchildren were added to Karin’s and Lasse’s families, always a source of joy, wonder, and inspiration. In fact, Astrid drew inspiration from lots of children around her, as well as from other people’s stories about children, recalls Karin Nyman:
Astrid would pick up on authentic, fragmentary remarks she had heard from children or episodes she had witnessed and give them to one of the children in her books: “Herring on a Sunday, yuck!” said the child of one friend. “I’ve got so much wriggle in my legs” came from Ingegerd’s son Åke, and a boy in another family we knew used to stand on a heap of manure when it rained so he’d grow faster. But apart from that, Mom believed that all her sources of inspiration came from her childhood, her all-important childhood. It wasn’t uncommon for people to want her to meet and see their children: “Oh, you’ll be so inspired by this child,” but she was always very clear that that wasn’t how she got inspiration. I think it’s true that, as Astrid said, Emil was modeled on Samuel August and Gunnar—and maybe her nephew, Åke, a kid who landed his parents in the most hopeless situations when he was small.
It was little Karl-Johan, however, who inspired the name Emil in 1962–63 and provided the most direct impetus for Astrid to begin the three stories that would become the first installment of a whole saga. For this rea
son, Astrid Lindgren chose to dedicate the book to her grandchild. “Till Karl-Johan” was written at the bottom of the first blank page in the initial 100,000-copy print run of the Swedish edition of Emil in the Soup Tureen (simply titled Emil i Lönneberga in Swedish).
Astrid never grew tired of studying and hearing about Karl-Johan, who was thoughtful and imaginative and owned a “mössa” (woolly hat) he sometimes slept with. For some inexplicable reason the boy called his mother “Little Mrs. Nyman,” and one evening in 1963, as Karin and Carl Olof were sitting at the dinner table, the four-year-old suddenly stared at his parents and said, “I know you, but you don’t know me.” He was similarly cryptic when he showed up unannounced with some siblings and cousins on Astrid’s doorstep in Furusund, as she recounted in letters to Anne-Marie Fries, Elsa Olenius, and Louise Hartung: “‘Do you have any food for the little ones?’ asked Karl-Johan in his sweetest voice. And when I said ‘yes,’ he said just as sweetly, ‘That’s good, because they’d like some.’ And they do. Rather often. So I make quite a lot of food for ‘the little ones.’”
Karl-Johan declared that he would be getting married to his infant sister Malin when he grew up, and the two would have three children named Leif, Mats, and Kadolf. His sister was still too young, but her big brother rehearsed the ceremony after attending a family wedding at a church. One of Carl Olof’s brothers was getting married, and Astrid was babysitting. Initially things went well, thought Grandma. Malin slept most of the time, and Karl-Johan followed the ceremony with interest, right up until the priest intoned in a ringing voice, “Let us pray!” Karl-Johan then shouted in an even louder voice, “Help! Help!,” which distracted several churchgoers, as Astrid reported in a letter to Louise Hartung in February 1963. When they came home from church and were eating dinner, Karl-Johan inquired after his parents with the words: “When are those goddamn people coming home?”
In fall 1963, Grandma read aloud from her first book about “Emil from Lönneberga” for Karl-Johan, left, and his little sister Malin.
But there were many other children among Astrid’s acquaintance and in her memory banks who contributed to the character of Emil: Samuel August, Gunnar, Lasse, Mats, Åke, and, not least, Astrid herself, who was born on Emil’s name day in November 1907 and whose middle name was Emilia. The boy she had always had inside her was eager to leap into action in 1963, providing enough stories for a whole trilogy—the installments came out in 1963, 1966, and 1970—which was rounded off with another three stories in the 1980s, gathered in the book Emil and Ida in Lönneberga. In this book Emil dedicates his enormous collection of carved wooden figurines to future generations, and finally bids farewell to the reader and to his workshop in Katthult. The work as a whole is so coherent and framed with such an elegant device (Alma Svensson writes down Emil’s many escapades over the years) that the fifteen stories can be read like an episodic, picaresque novel à la Don Quixote.
If we look at the first three Emil books, which reflect the spirit of the 1960s, when various popular impetuses toward freedom broke out across the entire Western world, including the civil rights movement, student protests, the flower-power movement, and demonstrations against nuclear power and the Vietnam War, we find that beneath the humorously noisy surface is the sincere and heartfelt urge to say something about the thirst for freedom, civil courage, and “the democratization of the family,” as Astrid Lindgren termed it in a Danish newspaper in 1977.
In one of her books about Astrid Lindgren’s work, literary scholar Vivi Edström wrote that in the role of Emil’s father in the 1971 film adaptation, the Swedish actor Allan Edwall “lacked a certain glint in his eye as he marched out to the woodworking shed, frightening the children with his shouting.” This is debatable. Didn’t Edwall perfectly embody the books’ hollowed-out father figure who resembled the ailing authorities in so many European democracies in 1968–70? The illustrator Björn Berg, himself a son and father, always depicted him as an absurd patriarch at the head of the Svensson family table, and Astrid Lindgren never objected to this interpretation during their ten-year collaboration. In Berg’s expressive drawings, Anton Svensson repeatedly emerges as precisely what he is throughout the Emil saga: a foolish figure the reader both laughs at and pities. But not too much! On the final page of the trilogy in 1970, after Emil’s act of heroism during the snowstorm, while his father stays home in the warmth, feeling sorry for himself, Astrid Lindgren puts words in Anton Svensson’s mouth that underscore how petty he is: “Well, I’m not so sure now he’ll be chairman of the parish council, Emil. . . . Still, we’ll make a decent fellow of him yet. If he’s allowed to live and keep his health, and if God wills it.”
The principal conflict throughout all three books is the power struggle waged between father and son, manifesting both in the father’s fear that his son will soon be taller than he and in the son’s uncontrollable urge to boss his father and mother and all of Katthult around, even Lönneberga as a whole. At last, paradoxically, he ends up doing exactly that—as chairman of the parish council, no less. In all fifteen stories, which span a year and a half in Emil’s life, this power struggle surfaces whenever Emil reveals himself to be cleverer, craftier, braver, more compassionate, and more imaginative than his father, and again and again he ends up being locked inside the little workshop. Yet as he sits alone in the shed, which is somehow both distressing and exhilarating, Emil grows inside. The boy’s world expands as he sits bent over his carvings, and the door to freedom swings open, letting the antiauthoritarian rebel continue to spread horror, goodness, and glee in his straightforward, somewhat thoughtless way.
In the final story of the saga, the spirit of youthful rebellion Emil represents is elevated beyond its immediate context. Once again he defies his father, risking his young life for the sake of another person. In a crippling snowstorm, Emil rescues his ideal father figure—farmhand Alfred—from dying of blood poisoning. Alfred, Emil, and Lukas, a horse, are on the verge of death when the boy heroically squares up to the natural forces raging around him. “You find the strength when you have to,” he shouts, the same article of faith that got Astrid Lindgren through the worst periods in her life.
It’s this reminder of humanity’s moral courage and Emil’s love for the man he wishes were his father that hold the book’s exuberant humor and its many hilarious scenes together, raising the Emil stories to the level of classic world literature for children. The work’s greatest stroke of genius is its humanistic undercurrent. This quiet, urgent echo in the wake of the laughter reminds us who we are, and what we as human beings must always remember: to do unto others as we would have them do unto us.
In Memory of Samuel August
Astrid Lindgren’s father never got to read the final Emil book. On July 28, 1969, when the summer and its bright nights were drawing to a close, Samuel August Ericsson died. He was ninety-four. Ten days later, Astrid Lindgren made an entry in pencil underneath a bench on her balcony in Furusund, where she kept an alternative diary year by year: “Heatwave all summer. Insanely dry. A summer of despair, Lasse deeply depressed, sick, no job. Father died July 28. Not long before that, the first people set foot on the moon. Have written Pippi songs. Busy with Karlsson.”
The third volume of stories about Emil came out in 1970, titled Emil and His Clever Pig. The little jack of all trades from Katthult was still full of beans and shenanigans, but the primary source behind the character was gone forever. As with his great-grandchild Karl-Johan in 1963, the book paid tribute to him on its first blank page: “In memory of Samuel August.” He’d followed Emil’s exploits with avid interest, and fizzed with ideas, remembered Lindgren, speaking on Book Day in Klagstorp in the fall of 1970:
In his final years my father identified so much with Emil that I almost thought he believed he really existed. A while before he died, I told him about Emil’s successful transactions at the auction in Backhorva, and it amused my father vastly because he was so good at dealmaking himself. He thought Emil should go t
o a few more auctions, and he asked me every time we saw each other whether Emil had been to a new one. He also wanted me to write a book about what happened when Emil really did become chairman of the parish council. My father was a church warden for many years, happy and kind and generous, a real “välmänske,” a friend to all the world.
“Välmänske” was a Småland word, explains Karin Nyman, which her mother used to refer to people who spread positivity and created a good atmosphere without making a show of it—people who did nice things for others, who pitched in and helped out when needed, often spontaneously and on instinct, like when Emil gave his teacher a big kiss on the lips in front of the whole class before explaining to the blushing and bewildered woman what he was doing: “‘I think I did it out of goodness,’ said Emil, and it’s since become something of a phrase in Lönneberga. ‘“I think I did it out of goodness,” said the Katthult boy when he kissed his teacher,’ they used to say, and perhaps still say today, for all I know.”
Father and daughter, 1969.
Samuel August Ericsson had been just such a välmänske, but now he was gone. Within a decade, Astrid, Gunnar, Stina, and Ingegerd had lost both parents, two strong personalities who had laid down firm but liberating guidelines for their four children and always managed to set a good example. Not least as a happily married couple, in an age when the concept of love was in transition, and more and more families were dissolving in unhappy divorces. As Astrid Lindgren said in an interview in the Expressen on December 6, 1970: “They meant so much to each other that in a way we kids ended up in the background. My father loved my mother madly, and told her every day how exceptional she was. . . . When she died I was sure he would completely lose the will to live. But he kept thinking it was wonderful to be alive, and waited confidently to die. Hanna was in Heaven, and he would meet her again. That was for sure, and there was no more to be said about it.”