Astrid Lindgren: The Woman Behind Pippi Longstocking

  When Hanna had a brain hemorrhage in spring 1955, entering a long period of illness, Astrid asked Louise Hartung whether she ever thought about her relationship with her mother. Astrid did, and she had come to a clear realization: “I’ve always loved my father more than my mother, but I admired her for her clear head and extraordinary competence.” And when Hanna died in May 1961, Astrid repeated in a letter to Louise that she had never had a “special bond” with her mother.

  This also becomes apparent in Astrid Lindgren’s biographical sketch of her parents, Samuel August from Sevedstorp and Hanna from Hult, based on her parents’ youthful letters to each other, which was first published in the weekly magazine Vi in 1972. There is no coldness or distance in her depiction of the reserved and pious Hanna, but her description of “välmänske” Samuel August glows with empathy, so that this portrait of her parents becomes primarily a declaration of love for her father, and of her gratitude for everything she felt she owed him: “He had a remarkable faith in life, a joy in it, and a sure conviction in the life hereafter, so not even Hanna’s death could break him. He continued to love her and talk about her and praise all her virtues. He even continued to do so at the age of ninety-four as he lay happily and contentedly in bed at the nursing home, his last stop here on earth.”

  Näs would never be the same without Hanna and Samuel August, just as the Lindgren home in Dalagatan had taken on an utterly different shape and structure in the 1950s and the holiday home in Furusund was in constant flux during the 1960s, depending on whether Astrid was there alone or with family. “Solitude seems to be a peculiar fluid, which fills the house with a strange sense of refreshment,” she remarked in a letter to Louise in August 1963, in which she expressed astonishment that solitude could be so invigorating. Yet at the same time she felt guilty about not missing her children or grandchildren at all after they returned home. She would never marry again, that much was clear. As she wrote to her German friend in July 1961, when she was enjoying the summer weather, picking mushrooms, and reading Maurois’s biography of George Sand:

  I totally agree with you that it’s a mystery how people can live in a marriage. You have to be very young, I think, when you get married, but then again there are those fools who keep marrying and marrying and marrying over and over again even at a more advanced age. One thing I do know . . . there’s no man on earth who could tempt me into another marriage. Getting the chance to be alone is a quite extraordinary pleasure, looking after yourself, having your own opinions, acting by yourself, making your own decisions, arranging your own life, sleeping by yourself, thinking for yourself, aaaaah!

  TEN

  The Battle for Fantasy

  ANGELS, PIXIES, DRAGONS, AND WITCHES weren’t welcome in Scandinavian children’s literature in the 1970s. “What is fantasy? Is it talking animals and elves and trolls?” asked the Swedish author Sven Wernström during a seminar at the Nordic Folk Academy (Nordens Folkliga Akademi) in Kungälv at the beginning of the decade, which set a new agenda for children’s and young-adult literature in Scandinavia: “For me, fantasy is something very different from animals and angels, trolls and dragons. Fantasy is being able to imagine something that’s not there. But there are two kinds of things that are ‘not there’: a) things that aren’t there because they’re impossible (such as gods, angels, talking animals); and b) things that aren’t there but are still possible (such as a socialist Sweden or a democratic school).”

  Sven Wernström, who wrote books for children and young people about the Cuban revolution, Jesus as a partisan, and the thousand-year history of the Swedish workers’ movement, became a prominent role model for many authors in Scandinavia around 1970. “All literature is political” was the watchword of the literary left wing, in which socialist children’s books were considered a weapon in the class struggle, elevating children and young people into a Marxist world cleansed of supernatural fantasy creatures.

  Yet on the farm at Näs in eastern Småland, they continued to vote for the Center Party and keep faith in spirits. Hanna and Samuel August’s old kitchen in their red house was regularly visited by a witch, who took Hanna’s worn baker’s peel, covered it with small pieces of chocolate, and stuck it through the kitchen door for the children. The ones who gave in to temptation and grabbed the peel were hauled into the kitchen and squeezed into the firewood box. In a hoarse, horrible voice, the witch told them she was going to take her shears and cut off the beastly children’s beautiful hair. Sometimes the witch ignored the peel and simply chased the boys and girls around the house instead. There was only one spot—under the bed in the guest room—where they could take a breather and comfort their smaller siblings and relatives, who huddled in the dark and cried with fear.

  Life could be scary when Aunt Astrid came to Vimmerby and played the witch in her childhood home, which she had bought, renovated, and furnished so that it resembled down to the last detail the house she, Gunnar, Stina, and Ingegerd had grown up in. Her games lasted a long time and were remarkably realistic, author Karin Alvtegen recalls. One of Gunnar and Gullan’s seven grandchildren, she occasionally ended up in the firewood box, but like all the others she would manage to sneak away when the witch’s back was turned (it always took her an inordinately long time to find the shears on the top shelf).

  “That was where she lived when she came to Näs, and that was where she played at being a witch with us nephews and nieces. I mean, there’s playing and then there’s playing. That was the fun thing about Astrid. We were never quite sure whether she had turned into a real witch, she was so good at it. Grown-ups weren’t, mostly.”

  Astrid had started these games at Furusund in the early 1960s, when she took Karl-Johan and a girl of the same age into the woods to look for trolls and pixies hiding behind the trees. The children would usually sit in a handcart and follow Karl-Johan’s grandma with their eyes while she crept around and tried to catch the woodland spirits. Later, when the children were bigger and there were more of them, she assumed the role of a spirit herself, this time armed not with a baker’s peel but with an eerie Japanese mask—a gift from a distant admirer. She would put it on and give chase, recalls Karin Nyman, adding: “Astrid took for granted, I think, that fear and tension were a necessary element of games. People of all ages will recognize that and agree with it, so it’s not something she could claim to have invented.”

  Astrid Lindgren also liked to frighten her readers. She did so in much the same way as the adults in Nangilima scare their children, with “really eerie, horrifying fairy-tales,” as it says at the end of The Brothers Lionheart. Astrid, Gunnar, Stina, and Ingegerd had often been similarly terrified by their grandma, recalled Astrid in the Dagens Nyheter in September 1959:

  A kindly grandma on the heels of her grandchildren on Furusund in 1968. “Children are balm for the soul,” wrote Astrid Lindgren to Louise Hartung at the beginning of the decade. “You see what the Lord was really thinking when He made people, that they should be good and laugh at life.”

  My father’s mother, who was the gentlest person on earth, told us quite scary things, myths and ghost stories. I remember, for instance, one about Skinny Jack in Rumskulla Church. He was a man who’d crept into the church long ago, disguised as a ghost, to frighten the bell ringer. But then he got locked into the church overnight and fear turned him solid—“his blood froze to ice,” said my grandma. He wasn’t alive, but nor was he dead, so he couldn’t be buried, and they had to leave him standing in a niche. A hundred years later the priest had a maid, the type who wasn’t scared of anything. One night she was flirting in the vicarage with an itinerant tailor, boasting about her fearlessness. He made a wager with her. If she went into the church and carried Skinny Jack out on her back, he’d give her a piece of fabric for a dress. She left and came back into the house and threw Skinny Jack down on the floor. “I didn’t promise to take him back again.” So the terrified tailor made more promises, persuading her to take him back. Just as she had gotten back into t
he church with him he grabbed hold of her—grandma said that bit so that we shuddered—and demanded in a ghostly voice that she carry him out to the bell ringer’s grave. From the grave came a hollow sound: “If God forgives, so will I.” Then Skinny Jack collapsed and turned into a heap of ashes, and afterward he could be buried in consecrated ground. . . . Yes, that’s the kind of story we got, my brother Gunnar and I and our other siblings.

  It wasn’t unlike Astrid to surprise her loyal public with a book whose form or content they wouldn’t see coming. If by doing so she could annoy literary critics of the type who liked to dictate what children’s literature should be, then so much the better. Astrid Lindgren wasn’t much for political correctness, and even before the battle for fantasy in Scandinavian children’s literature properly took hold, she made her opinion clear. In an essay in the magazine Barn och kultur in 1970, Astrid Lindgren gleefully made fun of the social-realist style of books by Sven Wernström and others, hinting that she too could whip up a socially minded children’s book if need be:

  Take 1 piece of divorced mother, a plumber if possible, although a nuclear physicist is also fine—the main thing is she doesn’t “sew” and isn’t “sweet,” blend the plumbing mother with two parts sewage and two parts air pollution, a few spoonsful of starvation, and several parts parental oppression and fear of teachers, carefully arrange the whole thing layer by layer with a few handfuls of racial conflict, a few handfuls of gender discrimination, and a pinch of Vietnam, sprinkle liberally with sex and drugs until you get a good, strong stew that would give Zacharias Topelius a dreadful start if he tasted it. . . . No sensible person believes that good children’s books come out of sitting down and writing from a recipe.

  Yet this was precisely what many younger Scandinavian authors were busy doing, with stout encouragement from equally young academics at universities, where books for children and young people had become objects of study. At Copenhagen University, older writers were flayed alive for “doggedly continuing to write about individual problems,” as the issue was phrased in one of 1970s Scandinavia’s trendiest scholarly publications: Children, Literature, Society (Børn, litteratur, samfund), a collection of writings by such left-leaning firebrands as Pil Dahlerup, Søren Vinterberg, and Ove Kreisberg. Unlike Astrid Lindgren, they had nothing against defining what a good children’s book should be in the year 1972: “A good children’s book is a book that uses the situation of children to ask questions, and that gives socialist answers.”

  Emil and Ikea

  Back on the Swedish side of Øresund, three literary historians—Eva Adolfsson, Ulf Eriksson, and Birgitta Holm—were attacking Astrid Lindgren’s work. In the journal Ord och Bild, Emil from Lönneberga was labelled a future “agrarian-capitalist,” while the books about Pippi, the children of Noisy Village, Nils Karlsson the Elf, Mio, Mardie, Lillebror and Karlsson-on-the-Roof were characterized as a series of broken promises of “liberation from the performance ideology of our society.”

  Around the same time as the Marxists at Ord och Bild were recasting the ungovernable, unpredictable boy from feudal Småland as a capitalist, a certain Ingvar Kamprad from Agunnaryd in southern Småland had just begun exporting chipboard furniture. Unlike the hundreds of thousands of Scandinavian children and adults who loved Astrid Lindgren (and who were gradually becoming dependent on Kamprad’s furniture), the three literary scholars were most displeased with Emil’s reflection of developments in the Scandinavian welfare state: “When Emil is ‘better’ than his father, he foreshadows a new age. With his authoritarian attitude and conservative small-time farmer’s stinginess, Emil’s father represents patriarchal and economic systems that have outlived their use. Emil’s desire for expansion and his financial talents alter the picture. New, fresh winds from this rising agrarian-capitalism hint at a new and even more treacherously oppressive society.”

  Astrid Lindgren was wise enough not to get drawn further into this intense literary-political debate during the first half of the 1970s, when both Danes and Swedes took more than a few ideological potshots at her work. Some of those she brought on herself, partly with the provocative essay in Barn och kultur and partly with the fantasy novel The Brothers Lionheart, which was published in 1973 and in the eyes of many Wernström proselytes read like something written by a witch on a broomstick. Some even claimed that Astrid Lindgren was encouraging children and teenagers to commit suicide rather than to rebel, or that she was promoting the notion of reincarnation and spreading esoteric ideas.

  Astrid knew perfectly well that The Brothers Lionheart would challenge the prevailing spirit of the age. Six months before the book came out, at Easter 1973, Rabén and Sjögren released some publicity material put together by Astrid Lindgren. It was intended mainly for booksellers, but it also reached the press, as well as various foreign publishers who were going to translate and publish the book. The author explained a little about her forthcoming novel, hinting that it probably wouldn’t be appropriate for readers of all ages. It is difficult to imagine more effective bait, and over the following months expectations ramped up throughout every link in the book industry chain:

  I’ve called it a tale from the age of campfires and adventures, but perhaps that doesn’t tell you very much. It’s not a historical book, in case anybody thought it was. Richard the Lionheart plays no part in it. No, no. It’s about two brothers who quite prosaically have the last name Lion, and who quite prosaically—at the beginning of the story—live in a wooden hut somewhere in Poverty Sweden. Not Welfare Sweden. In a little town where their mother makes a living as a seamstress. Yes, it begins a little melodramatically! The two boys are ten and thirteen. How they end up becoming the Brothers Lionheart at Knights Farm in Cherry Valley in Nangijala, that I won’t tell you. I don’t want to reveal too much. All I’ll say is that the book will be exciting, so exciting that you maybe shouldn’t give it to a child below the age of seven. Though, of course, I’ve tried it on a hardboiled little four-year-old grandchild. And he fell asleep. Possibly in self-defense. But his nine-year-old brother smiled contentedly when things began to get sinister. I can say the following about the book: first it’s sad, then it gets wonderful for a while, and then it gets sinister. And then—then comes the ending! And that’s the bit I’m going to write now.

  The last part was no lie. The final chapters of The Brothers Lionheart had been following Astrid like a shadow since the New Year, getting longer and longer, from Dalagatan at the start of the year to Furusund and then to Tällberg in Dalarna, where as usual she had spent the winter with some of her grandchildren—making sure to bring her stenographic pads. After Easter and the press release, progress continued at a sluggish pace. In her correspondence with Astrid Lindgren, teenaged Sara Ljungcrantz witnessed the author battling with her material. Never before had an ending been such a challenge. On May 4, 1973, Sara received the following message: “I’m missing two chapters from my book, two difficult chapters. Cross your fingers for me!”

  The fourteen-year-old did, but still her older pen pal was having trouble. She wasn’t at all satisfied with what she was getting down onto her writing pads. Ahead of her was a deadline—and a package holiday to Crete with her children and grandchildren. By June 12 the deadline was imminent, and Sara got another message, including an oath in English: “One chapter left, so help me God! But a tough one. And it must be finished by the 20th, because on the 21st I’m traveling to Crete.”

  First, however, the manuscript featuring the final chapter took a trip to Vimmerby, where Astrid’s school class was having its fifty-year reunion. She spent the night at her childhood home, waking before the birds and immediately settling down to write, first in bed and later at Samuel August’s desk. The pages accompanied her to Crete, too, although the rest of the book had already been copied out and delivered. In June, Elsa Olenius received a letter from Astrid, who had just read through the nearly finished manuscript and come away dissatisfied: “I delivered Lionheart yesterday, except for the ‘su
blime conclusion,’ which I’ll have to write in Crete, if that’s possible. I thought the book was bad when I read it, and it upset me.”

  Even on the Greek island, Astrid was unable to finish the book, and on her return in early July, when she visited her sister Ingegerd and her husband Ingvar in Fagersta, she was still carrying the troublesome ending in her bag. Elsa was sent the latest news on progress: “In the little room where I sleep, I rewrote the ending of Lionheart during a few hours in the early morning. But it’s still not properly finished even now. I’ve got to rewrite it one more time.”

  Not until July 31 were the finishing touches made, and Astrid could no longer tinker with the ending. In a letter to Sara, she expressed enormous relief. Now things simply had to take their course: “The book, as you know, has been sent for typesetting and will probably come out in November.”

  Freedom Cannot Die

  With The Brothers Lionheart, Astrid Lindgren continued to forge her own apolitical path through children’s literature, although the novel was hardly without “social consciousness” or “social criticism.” The dynamic between popular resistance and oppressive power structures simply played out along metaphorical back alleys, which was presumably the reason why many Marxist critics read the book as the Devil reads the Bible, stubbornly insisting that there was nothing political about it. Looking more closely, however, it’s clear that there are numerous phrases in The Brothers Lionheart that match the revolutionary rhetoric of the 1970s, particularly in the descriptions of Thorn Rose Valley’s uprising against the dictator, Tengil: “What he doesn’t understand, Tengil, is that he can never cow people who are fighting for their freedom, and who stick together like we do.”