Astrid Lindgren: The Woman Behind Pippi Longstocking

  Where are the Social Democratic women in this election campaign, that’s what I’d like to know. I think they’ve been conspicuously silent. Perhaps they share their sisters’ concerns about the threat of nuclear power? Are they as painfully aware as other women that they’re now facing something unlike any other danger they’ve ever feared in their lives? Somewhere inside their femininity, where motherhood is—in the heart, the brain, or the womb or wherever it may be—Social Democratic women are probably sensing an emphatic no! We don’t want to unleash forces that could damage our children, irrevocably and for all time.

  The election on September 19, 1976, wasn’t a huge defeat for the Social Democrats, but the loss of votes was significant enough that they had to cede power to other, nonsocialist parties. Gunnar Sträng’s career as finance minister was over, although he remained in parliament until 1985. Olof Palme returned as prime minister in 1982, around the same time Ingmar Bergman came home to Sweden. And Astrid Lindgren? She never came closer to party politics than in 1976, when many Swedes acquired new respect for Pippi and Emil’s mother, although others saw her as politically naïve, even as something of a traitor. As a Västerbottens Folkblad editorialist wrote a few weeks before the election: “Astrid Lindgren has changed course and come out as a fully fledged reactionary, with a mentality that belongs in the darkest right-wing circles.”

  On the day of the election itself, Astrid Lindgren retreated to Switzerland. The Aftonbladet announced its belief that the wealthy author was using the country as a tax haven. This was rapidly contradicted on the front page of the Expressen, and the Aftonbladet later apologized, also on the front page. So, what did Pomperipossa think about the election results? She expressed satisfaction—without a trace of gloating—in a telephone conversation with a journalist from the Expressen, and on September 23 she published a sympathetic farewell to the outgoing finance minister: “I’m deeply sorry for Gunnar Sträng. He’s an old man with a long political career behind him. I wish he could have finished it with his flag flying high.”

  There was no hint of sympathy in Astrid’s remarks about a few of the Aftonbladet’s journalists, however, who had tried to dig up dirt on the author during the campaign. The final word from Pomperipossa was a lengthy opinion piece entitled “If the Truth Is Going to Out” on October 17 in the Expressen, where she tried to knock it into various journalistic heads that her quarrel with the Social Democrats wasn’t about her own fortune and finances. Nor was it about animosity toward the workers’ movement. And anybody who thought she was wandering around in the triumphant conviction that she had single-handedly toppled the government could think again: “The result of the election has nothing whatsoever to do with me. I just came out and said what people were feeling and thinking, so it should have been possible to respond objectively to it. The Aftonbladet would have helped the Social Democrats much more by doing so, instead of launching a kind of Watergate-inspired inquiry into my affairs.”

  But what, deep down, had made Astrid Lindgren assume the role of plebeian tribune, despite coming under attack? Why, having declared many times that she wasn’t interested in being a celebrity and would rather keep to herself, had the author suddenly gone out on a limb and left herself so exposed? What had induced a world-famous children’s book author to wade into a heated election campaign at a moment in her life when she finally had the chance to devote herself to “sweet solitude”?

  She gave Margareta Strömstedt the answer ten years later in the documentary film Astrid Anna Emilia, in which the nearly eighty-year-old Astrid Lindgren was asked what she might have done if she hadn’t become a writer. Her response was as follows: “I would have been an active little antagonist in the workers’ movement when it was young . . . a people’s champion.”

  It was this more populist form of parliamentarianism, based on firm principles and idealism, that Astrid Lindgren participated in from the mid-1970s onward. It couldn’t be otherwise, or she would be just “a bit of filth.” After three decades battling evil in the world of the imagination, she now turned her hand to fighting for good in the real one.

  ELEVEN

  I Have Been Dancing in My Solitude

  ONE WARM JULY evening in 1980, when the moon hung low above the neighboring island of Yxlan and the big liners and ferries to Åland, Åbo, and Helsingfors passed the old custom house on Furusund on their way into the Baltic, Astrid Lindgren walked out onto her jetty with a small tin. She took something out of it, weighing it in her hand before flinging it far out over the water:

  Farewell, you stupid gallstone!

  You’ve hurt me long enough.

  It’s time to say goodbye now,

  Frankly, it’s been rough.

  If only you’d behaved yourself

  Not acted like a beast,

  Then maybe I’d have let you stay—

  We could have lived in peace.

  Now you’re at the hospital,

  Swirling down some drain.

  I bet that you’re regretting now

  Causing all that pain.

  You treated me so badly,

  Though I was always kind!

  Farewell, you stupid gallstone!

  You’re being left behind!

  Astrid had written this poem on a scrap of paper the day before her operation at Sabbatsberg Hospital, and while the rest of Sweden was sitting down to herring, schnapps, and new potatoes with dill, celebrating midsummer, she was having something removed from her body, an object that had developed into what the seventy-two-year-old author believed must be Scandinavia’s largest gallstone. It had been tormenting her since the New Year, as had various articles about nuclear power she needed to finish. They were supposed to be done before the important referendum in March—one year after the accident on Three Mile Island near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, which all opponents of nuclear power, including Astrid Lindgren, had warned about.

  The gallstone also disrupted work on Ronia the Robber’s Daughter, which had come to her as a blurry vision in 1979, like so many previous books. Would she ever finish it? After The Brothers Lionheart and the Pomperipossa debate, Astrid Lindgren doubted it, given how much else she had to occupy her time. In a letter to Rita Törnqvist-Verschuur on June 20, 1977, she wrote: “What I’ll write next I don’t know. I don’t even know if there’ll be another book; one fine day the gunpowder will run out, that’s what I’m afraid of.”

  After her extraparliamentary battle with Palme’s government in 1976, she had been approached by an overwhelming number of organizations, committees, and popular movements trying to get the author on board with their political causes. In an age when everything was politicized, Pippi and Emil’s mother had become a highly sought-after brand.

  But what did her other children have to say about this development, which didn’t exactly make for a smooth and peaceful retirement? Weren’t they worried about the constant pressure? Not really, recalls Karin Nyman: “I didn’t feel I needed to be worried. Astrid was so strong. The only sign that she thought it was all getting too much was when she moaned, ‘Why is everybody flinging themselves at me?’ And when it came to all the inquiries about whether she would support this or that, I’d just tell her, quite insensitively, ‘But you can just say no.’ And she would answer, ‘You don’t know how long it takes to say no.’ Everything she did was done with such great commitment and drive that it never occurred to me to try and prevent something so unavoidable. I was more upset by all the enmity and rejection she was shown during the Pomperipossa era—I wasn’t used to that, of course.”

  Her role as people’s champion didn’t get any easier when, in October 1978, Astrid Lindgren was awarded the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade. She gave an acceptance speech whose clear message—“Niemals Gewalt!” (Never violence!)—resonated powerfully during a period of diplomacy and disarmament. The speech’s humanistic content and the way Astrid Lindgren delivered it speak to how determined she was to stand up and make a political difference wherever possible
and appropriate.

  The prestigious prize, which had been given to Albert Schweitzer, Martin Buber, and Hermann Hesse, among others, was due to be awarded at St. Paul’s Church in Frankfurt as part of a grand ceremony, but when the organizers read her speech in advance, they returned it with the message that she should simply accept the prize and make her thanks “kurz und gut” (short and sweet). Astrid Lindgren immediately replied that if she wasn’t allowed to give the speech in full, she would call in sick, and someone from the Swedish embassy could attend instead to give a “kurz und gut” thanks. This made the organizers in Frankfurt back down. Despite their concerns—in the front row sat various members of the political nobility, including Minister President Holger Börner—Astrid Lindgren was allowed to give her Bertrand Russell–inspired speech. She argued that the fate of the world was decided in nurseries, and that all talk of disarmament was a waste of time if society didn’t begin to tackle the “domestic tyrants” within families:

  Literary depictions of cruel childhoods are teeming with these domestic tyrants, who frighten their children into obedience and submission and more or less ruin their lives. Luckily they’re not the only kind. Thankfully there have always been parents who bring up their children with love rather than violence. But it’s probably only in our century that parents have more generally begun to regard children as equals, allowing them the right to let their personalities develop freely in a familial democracy without oppression and without violence. So how can we not despair to hear these sudden calls for a return to the old, authoritarian system?

  The speech caused a sensation, and in subsequent years Astrid Lindgren’s name took on an almost Mother Teresa–esque aura abroad. Pleas for help and support streamed in from across the world, but even earlier in the year—in June 1978—Astrid had complained in a letter to Anne-Marie Fries:

  Otherwise I spend all my time fending people off. People wanting me to call the government and stop them deporting a mentally handicapped, sick, thirteen-year-old Turk. People who want me to make sure old people who are only a little confused don’t get forcibly committed to a psychiatric hospital. People who want me to renounce Jesus and support Heimholungswerk Jesu Christi [a religious movement now known as Universal Life]. Soon I’m going to be talking like that little Vimmerby boy when Margareta Strömstedt asked him his opinion on Pippi Longstocking: “All sorts of idiots are coming over here and asking me!”

  The Flat Rock

  More than ever, Furusund had become Astrid Lindgren’s refuge. A place where she could always find peace and quiet, where she wouldn’t be disturbed by the mail addressed to Dalagatan, by the ringing telephone and knocks on the door. Out here among the rocky islands, whose inhabitants respected the author’s wish to be alone, she was always able to spiritually recuperate and enjoy the care and sustenance of nature. It never failed her. As she said in the Svenska Dagbladet in August 1989: “If I want to be comforted, I go out into nature. It’s the greatest comfort life has to offer.” And to the journalist’s rather cheeky question “What sort of playmates do you have on Furusund?” she answered honestly, “Playmates! I don’t want any playmates. Out here I keep myself to myself. I don’t have time to socialize.”

  On Furusund, like Ronia the robber’s daughter, Astrid gorged herself on spring and summer like a wild bee on honey. It was the closest she could get to her happy childhood in Småland, where the area around Näs—despite written protests to the local authority in 1974 from Vimmerby’s Selma Lagerlöf—had been transformed from ancient, open farmland to a modern, asphalted, residential district. But on Furusund, at the tip of the Stockholm archipelago, beside the narrow channel of water leading back to the capital, life continued in its customary, unbroken way. There she had direct, unfettered access to water, woods, and a starry sky. As Astrid Lindgren wrote in a letter to Anne-Marie Fries in fall 1965, when, for the first time in twenty-one years, she wasn’t publishing a new book in time for Christmas and was instead enjoying being away from the constant pressure: “I’ve been alone in Furusund, and it’s been so beautiful it could make you swoon, with still blue water and blue skies and red and yellow trees and starry evenings and sunsets so mournful and autumnally beautiful it’s nearly unbearable. But I’ve been dancing in my solitude for sheer delight at being totally alone. Solitude is a good thing, at least in small doses.”

  Stenhällen (The flat rock) was the name of Astrid Lindgren’s red wooden house, a hundred yards from Furusund’s old custom house and pilot station, and from the jetty where the ferries from Stockholm moored continually from midsummer to August. A house, a flat rock, and a little garden, on an island among thirty thousand other islands a good hour’s sail or drive from the capital, in a part of the Stockholm archipelago called Roslagen, about which Swedish balladeer Evert Taube wrote and sang.

  Sture’s parents had bought Stenhällen in 1940 as their permanent residence, after having lived in other houses on the island, and they borrowed half the purchase price of ten thousand kronor from Hanna and Samuel August. By that point Furusund was no longer the fashionable spa and health resort it had been at the turn of the century, when royalty, prosperous Stockholmers, and prominent artists like Carl Larsson and Anders Zorn spent time on the island. In the 1930s it was largely run down, and disrepair had left its mark on the remaining hotels and villas, which had romantic-sounding names like Romanov, Bellevue, Bellini, and Isola Bella. Strindberg had once spent a few summers there, too, after his Parisian “Inferno crisis” in the 1890s. He rediscovered the pleasure of writing, but his marriage to Harriet Bosse remained unhappy.

  In the latter half of the 1930s, however, when Astrid and Sture vacationed on Furusund with Lasse and Karin, the Lindgrens were a contented family. They kept up this tradition even in the final years of the war, after Sture’s father died, when Furusund was overrun with people from the Baltic states who were fleeing the Russians in anything that would float. When Sture’s mother died, Stenhällen was inherited by her son, and gradually it came to be used only by Astrid and Karin—and Lasse, of course, when he came to visit with his wife, Inger, and little Mats.

  With children, sons- and daughters-in-law, and several small grandchildren descending on Stenhällen and the small annex in the corner of the plot, it was initially difficult for Astrid to get enough peace to write during the summer. “Being up to my ears in children and grandchildren,” as she ironically but affectionately called being a grandmother, wasn’t something she wanted to avoid, exactly, but having them around all day long was destructive to the literary ideas she tried to get down on stenographic pads in the mornings. Thus, in 1960, Astrid bought a nearby plot of waterside land, where there was a smaller holiday home. She called it Sunnanäng (South meadow), and in 1964 she acquired the 150-year-old Stentorp (Stone cottage) on the neighboring plot, providing Lasse and his new wife, Marianne, and Karin and Carl Olof with a permanent summer cottage each. Every year throughout the 1960s and 1970s—from midsummer to the beginning of August—Furusund became a lively gathering place for old and young members of the Lindgren-Nyman clan.

  Yet Astrid Lindgren preferred Furusund once Lasse’s and Karin’s families had returned to the city, or when she was there alone, outside tourist season. She didn’t have to say anything and almost didn’t have to hear anything—except the seagulls’ cries, the rustling of sycamore leaves, the splashing of waves, the creaking of the boat down by the jetty, the rain against the windowpanes on the veranda, the smack of sailing ropes in the wind, and the gravel crunching beneath the wheels of the mail van bringing news from the outside world, from which she had happily retreated for a while.

  In a symbolic sense, Furusund was to Astrid Lindgren what Walden Pond had been for Henry David Thoreau in the 1840s, when he set out on a spiritual journey of discovery, intending to conduct a personal social experiment. For two years, two months, and two days, the author lived in the woods around Concord, near Boston. He built a cabin out of materials from the forest and tried to live as simply and
independently as possible, far away from the materialistic urban culture he’d fled. Thoreau later described this difficult balancing act in his essayistic memoir Walden; or, Life in the Woods. An autobiographical mixture of philosophy and poetry, it was mentioned several times by Astrid Lindgren as one of the books she read over and over again, and which she kept on the bookshelf above her bed in Stockholm until the day she died. More than almost any other book, she felt, Walden had a soothing effect on the reader, especially those trapped in cities and yearning for nature. On December 13, 1947, for instance, Astrid was home alone in Dalagatan, reading and drawing inspiration from Thoreau’s meditations on being an independent and solitary living being: “I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude. We are for the most part more lonely when we go abroad among men than when we stay in our chambers. A man thinking or working is always alone, let him be where he will.”

  The whole “brood of snakes” as Astrid Lindgren darkly but humorously called her lively family, with its many children, gathered on the jetty at Furusund in the early 1970s. Top, from left: Karl-Johan, Marianne, Lasse, Carl Olof, and Karin. Middle: Annika and Malin. Bottom: Anders, Olle, Astrid, and Nisse.

  Sture was on a business trip, Lasse out with some friends, Karin at the movies, and Astrid, who had just turned forty a couple of weeks earlier, was enjoying the company of a veteran loner and his reflections on simple living and the interconnectedness of nature and humankind. As she wrote in her diary on that memorable day:

  I’m sitting here alone this evening. . . . I’ve read Frans G. Bengtsson’s introductory biography of Thoreau in my newly acquired Walden; or, Life in the Woods. I cried at Thoreau’s words about himself: “My greatest skill has been to want but little. For joy I could embrace the earth. I shall delight to be buried in it. And then to think of those among men who will know that I love them, though I tell them not.” . . . Sometimes I get an urge like that. To become a philosopher, renounce all the trivialities of life and “want but little.” Live a bit of the forest life, possibly, at Walden. I might just manage it, if I get the chance.