In other letters to Näs, or to her brother Gunnar, who was an agricultural apprentice in Skåne, Astrid described how she and one of her friends would sit on the edge of her bed every evening when they got home, cut off a piece of sausage and a piece of cheese, and bite into “first one then the other by turns. It’s wonderful, but it’s over quickly.” Hanna’s food baskets to her daughter in the big city rapidly became famous among Astrid’s friends, because they were always crammed with food rather than sheets, duvet covers, or other inedible items: “A package from home eventually became a vital necessity. You think of nothing else, then when it finally arrives you become almost childish in your ecstasy.”
Those are the words of someone who has known hunger. And longing. Much had been taken from Astrid Ericsson in her life, and even more disappeared when she kissed Lasse goodbye on December 23 and handed him to Auntie Stevens. The experience cut just as deeply into his foster mother’s heart: Marie Stevens had never seen a mother who’d given birth under such circumstances be so delighted by her child as Lassemamma. Many years later—in 1950, when the boy had grown so big he had a son of his own—his old foster mother in Copenhagen wrote to Astrid Lindgren, “You loved your little son from the first moment.”
Astrid Ericsson returned home to Vimmerby at Christmas 1926 as a happy and cheerful nineteen-year-old. Yet the pervasive feeling of happiness and euphoria she had experienced in the wake of the successful birth came to be replaced by dejection, and a pain and grief that began to feel chronic the following year, as she regularly complained in her letters to Anne-Marie Fries: “I’m not really satisfied with existence. . . . Sometimes I wonder whether I’m going crazy. . . . I don’t really have any idea about anything, because I don’t write to a single person, only to home every now and then.”
As if nothing had happened, Astrid resumed her classes in January 1927 at the Bar-Lock Institute in Hamngatan, which taught typing, bookkeeping, commercial accounting, stenography, and business correspondence. She socialized with the other young women during lunch breaks and spent the evenings with her friends, Sara, Ingar, Märta, Tekla, and Gun. Yet photos from those years often show a sad Astrid Ericsson. As she wrote many years later in her article “Homage to Stockholm” (Hyllning till Stockholm), which was reproduced in the anthology The Meaning of Life (Livets mening): “I came here when I was nineteen, and ugh, I thought Stockholm was horrible! I mean, of course it seemed incredibly beautiful and very grand and sophisticated for someone who came from the countryside like I did. But I wasn’t part of the city. I didn’t belong. I wandered the streets and was completely alone and so jealous of all the people in the crowd who looked like they owned the whole city.”
Nineteen-year-old Astrid Ericsson’s life as a single woman in the big city wasn’t always plagued by sorrow and loss. In a letter to her brother Gunnar dated July 26, 1927, she described Stina’s visit and what the two merry sisters had done together: bumper cars at Gröna Lund, an amusement park; dancing at Blanch’s Café; coffee at Café Söderberg; Skansen, an open-air museum; the National Gallery; and City Hall.
When the older Astrid Lindgren looked back on this first chapter in Stockholm, she called it “my lean bachelor life,” and here the word “lean” should be understood physically as well as psychologically. In the nineteen-and twenty-year-old Astrid’s letters home to her mother and father at Näs, she maintained the façade of a healthy, breezy, and hardworking young girl, but her depressive moods of 1927–28 are apparent in letters to Anne-Marie and, to a certain extent, those to Gunnar. “Every so often I long absolutely convulsively to be a child again, but then other times I think things are getting better every day I’m closer to the grave,” she wrote to her old Vimmerby friend in December 1928. A few weeks earlier, Gunnar had received a pessimistic note from his normally redoubtable sister: “I feel lonely and poor, and lonely, maybe because I am, and poor, because my tangible assets consist of a Danish one-øre coin. I take back the ‘maybe.’ I’m dreading the coming winter.”
She also joked a little about the suicidal thoughts that were on her mind. In one of Astrid’s 1929 letters to Anne-Marie, for instance, when everything looked a little brighter, because she had found new lodgings in Atlasgatan with her friend Gun, she referred to herself as a “soon-to-be-ex-candidate for suicide.” Yet pessimism and melancholy did not release Astrid from their powerful grip. When Anne-Marie confessed in a January 1929 letter that she was again starting to feel alienated from her boyfriend, Astrid, slipping briefly into German, answered that her friend’s problem was both tragic and normal, before outlining her own dark perspective on love and relationships: “It can’t be otherwise between two wretched human beings, at least not in this worst of all possible worlds. It’s as sure as 2x2=4. Es ist eine alte Geschichte doch bleibt sie immer neu [It’s an old story yet always remains new], and is equally unbearable each time.”
In the same letter Astrid inquired whether Anne-Marie had read a book by the French short-story writer Édouard Estaunié called Solitudes, which had just been translated into Swedish. If not, she should take a look at the last story in the collection, “Les Jauffrelin,” about a man who committed suicide because, after many years of living with her, he’d given up trying to understand what was going on in his wife’s head. The story made a deep impression on Astrid, corroborating her dwindling faith in the idea that, through love, men and women could ward off the loneliness to which single people were helplessly bound: “There’s probably no creature born of woman who is anything other than lonely. Suddenly a person comes rushing up to you and says, ‘We’re kindred souls, we understand each other.’ And inside you hear a voice saying with painful clarity, ‘Like Hell we do.’ I mean, your voice might express itself a little more politely. Recently I’ve been bowled over by people who feel so connected, so connected to me. And I feel more alone than ever. There’s certainly a part of me that’s stubbornly, unbearably, bitterly lonely and probably will always be that way.”
Such sadness, pessimism, and fleeting thoughts of suicide came especially to the fore on long Sundays, when Astrid was alone in the deserted city. Ceaseless thoughts of Lasse drove her out onto the streets from the early morning onward, and everything that could ordinarily be repressed or drowned with as many work-related tasks as possible bubbled up from her subconscious. Profound longing and nihilism gnawed at her guts, like the hunger she felt when money was tight and the basket of food from Småland had long since been emptied. She often sought out an isolated bench that stood beneath a large bush outside Engelbrekt Church. Salvation, when Astrid sat alone and abandoned on the bench, came not from the church but from Knut Hamsun’s novel Hunger (Sult), which was Astrid’s bible during those years, as she recalled in the newspaper Expressen in November 1974:
Everything blurred into one intense feeling of joy at the book, and solidarity with the young Hamsun and everyone else who walked around hungry in the cities of the world. Like I did. I mean, all right, I wasn’t starving quite as bitterly as Hamsun in Kristiania [now Oslo], who actually chewed a lump of wood. Here in Stockholm it was just that I almost never felt really full. But that was enough to identify with that crazy young person in Kristiania—and to think he could write such a gripping and frantically amusing book about hunger.
There was something recognizable and reassuring about Hamsun’s depiction of the individual’s struggle against loneliness, and something downright bracing about the novel’s physically palpable description of its impoverished, shabby main character: His clothes became more and more ragged, and even his smallest personal effects had to be pawned, yet he kept his sense of dignity and humor. Despite everything, Astrid wasn’t alone in her solitude in Stockholm. There was Hamsun’s main character, and there were hundreds of unhappy young office girls who had been robbed of their youth by unwanted pregnancy and who now wandered the city, searching for the meaning of life. As Astrid wrote to Anne-Marie on October 3, 1928: “Yes, life is a cursed and meaningless uproar! Sometimes
I think it’s like staring into an abyss, but other times I comfort myself by thinking, ‘life is not as rotten as it seems.’”
Touch-Typing
Efficient, energetic, and socially competent, twenty-year-old Miss Ericsson was able to blend seamlessly into any office environment. She could touch-type, her fingers moving over the keyboard without looking at the letters, and she was reasonably good at stenography and unafraid of correspondence in English and German—all qualifications that would later serve her well as an author, editor, and prolific letter writer within her family and circle of friends.
Astrid Ericsson’s first job, obtained in 1927, involved picking up the phone and saying, “Svenska Bokhandelscentralen, Radio Department!” then listening and apologizing. It was a complaints line for dissatisfied customers who couldn’t get their new radios—the hottest gadget of the age—to work. Her prospective boss at the office on Kungsbroplan made it clear during the interview that he wasn’t eager to employ nineteen-year-olds, since all the previous ones had abandoned their posts, but Astrid Ericsson employed a skill she had always been immensely good at: selling herself. She turned up the charm, humor, and energy, convincing her interviewer that she was reliable despite her youth. “My salary was 150 kronor per month. You don’t get fat off that. Nor can you take many trips to Copenhagen, which was what I most hankered to do. Sometimes, however, I did manage to save and borrow and pawn enough to scrape together the cost of a ticket.”
Astrid Ericsson’s old passport, full of blue and red stamps from the Danish customs authorities during the years 1926–30, tells its own Scandinavian commuter’s story. It documents Lars Blomberg’s mother traveling the long route from Stockholm to Copenhagen and back twelve or fifteen times. Often she would take the night train on Friday evening, buying the cheapest return ticket for fifty kronor, thus having to sleep sitting up all night. That way she could reach Copenhagen’s main station by the next morning, hop on a streetcar to Brønshøj, and be opening the gate at Villa Stevns before noon. It gave her twenty-four intense hours with Lasse before she had to leave Copenhagen early on Sunday evening in order to reach Stockholm in time for work on Monday morning. These weekend visits were so intense, Astrid Lindgren recalled in her notes for Margareta Strömstedt in 1976–77, “that afterward Lasse slept almost round the clock for a whole week.”
Twenty-four or twenty-five hours at the beginning of every second and, later, every third or fifth month for three years doesn’t sound like much, but these scattered weekend trips were like precious droplets in a sea of longing. Astrid couldn’t be a mother to Lasse during those years, but her visits to Copenhagen, and especially the longer ones over Easter and the summer vacation, helped shape the image of “mamma” in the boy’s memory, which Auntie Stevens and Carl did their best to encourage; they were scrupulous when it came to emphasizing that he remember her in their monthly letters to Lassemamma, in which they also reported Lasse’s physical and psychological development. These letters, which Astrid kept at her home in Dalagatan all her life, thoroughly updated her on Lasse’s current state of health, his linguistic and motor development, and the events of his day-to-day life, which involved a lot of playtime with Esse. Astrid welcomed every detail, swiftly passing on the news in letters to others—Gunnar, for example, who in July 1927 received the following summary of life at Håbets Allé: “Auntie Stevens writes that Lasse is ‘extremely humorous,’ he can emphasize his words so amusingly: ‘Hm, I see,’ he says, and ‘tremendously important,’ all things Carl says from school, and which Lasse knows how to weave in at the right place and time.”
During those first three years, when Astrid was cut off from daily contact with Lasse and she met and heard about other young mothers in Stockholm who’d been separated from their children, she developed a critical perspective on the relationship between children and adults that eventually came to form the basis of her approach to writing. One woman who was especially influential in opening Astrid’s eyes to the emotional harm being done to children was her roommate Gun Erikson, whom Astrid had met at the clinic, Gott Hem, in November 1926, as Karin Nyman recalls. The two women lived together for a year and a half, first in a much-too-expensive room on Bragevägen and later in a little apartment with a kitchen and bathroom in a new block on Atlasgatan. They also shared lodgings there in 1929, Astrid having found employment at the Royal Automobile Club, but soon had to move again when Gun lost her job that same year.
Gun’s little daughter, Britt, had been born at Gott Hem, then taken to an orphanage in Småland, and the more Astrid learned about the place—all while listening to Gun’s poor excuses for not going down and spending time with her child—the firmer her decision became: One day she went down to Småland herself to see Gun’s little girl, who was the same age as Lasse. She was shocked by the conditions at the orphanage, witnessing firsthand the callous methods they used to teach the children. The little bag of hard candy Astrid had brought for the girl was immediately confiscated by the director and shared among other children nearby. Some got a piece of candy, but others had to settle for watching the lucky ones, and several reacted by bursting helplessly into tears. When Astrid got a chance to sit alone with Britt, the girl cried in a monotone, unhappily and without saying a word, clutching her tightly. As she later wrote to Auntie Stevens in Copenhagen and explained to Margareta Strömstedt many years afterward, it was “just as if she wanted to say: I’m very scared of being here, but I’m even more scared of telling anybody why I’m scared.”
During her years of separation from Lasse, Astrid Ericsson learned that the parents of small children should remain as close to their youngsters as possible, because those first years were crucially significant in terms of shaping a human life. She saw and heard the evidence around her, both in Stockholm and at Håbets Allé in Copenhagen. Yet she never turned a blind eye to her own mistakes and inadequacies when it came to Lasse; on the contrary. Many of Astrid’s letters to family and friends in the years 1927–31 contain a loving and thoughtful mother’s snapshots of Lasse’s behavioral and reaction patterns in vulnerable situations, where he was forcibly removed from his familiar environment and placed in a new one. Without any excuses or dismissive explanations, the young mother described the heartbreaking moments when the boy’s fear and anxiety became evident. Astrid Ericsson had also harmed her child, despite how fond she was of him, despite always trying to do her best for him—insofar as was possible—and she made no attempt to pretend otherwise.
Lasse’s Troubles
Astrid got a closer look at a deeply unhappy Lars Blomberg at the end of 1929, when she had to rush across to Copenhagen. Auntie Stevens had been taken into hospital with acute heart trouble, and was obliged to give up fostering for a while. The year had otherwise brought Astrid plenty of things to be happy about: a new apartment, a permanent job, a raise, and a boss at the Royal Automobile Club who had informed Miss Ericsson—as Astrid wrote to her family at Näs—that she had a “glittering future” ahead of her. Miss Ericsson and her boss had also begun to see each other outside of work, although the budding romantic relationship wasn’t without its issues, partly because of Lasse and partly because Sture Lindgren was in the process of leaving his wife and child. Astrid had started wondering to herself, and in letters to Anne-Marie, whether she and Lasse could be reunited in Stockholm, living as a family with the kindly, literature-mad Sture, who gave her a selection of Edith Södergran’s wistful poems on her name day, November 27, 1929.
Sture Lindgren, Astrid’s boss at the Royal Automobile Club, developed a romantic interest in young Astrid Ericsson in the winter of 1928–29. He was nine years older and married with a daughter, but was in the process of getting divorced. In November 1929, Sture moved into a little apartment at Vulcanusgatan 12, where he and Astrid got a larger apartment on the top floor after their marriage in the spring of 1931.
At Easter earlier that year, Astrid had been in Copenhagen to visit Lasse. Her relationship with Reinhold Blomberg had improved, and
the atmosphere between them had normalized somewhat after their harsh and bitter confrontation in the spring of 1928, when Astrid once and for all had refused to marry Reinhold and move home to Vimmerby as the editor’s new wife and the mother of his seven children (not including Lasse). Two long letters Marie Stevens sent to “little Lassemamma” on March 28 and June 2, 1928, indicate that for more than a year after Lasse’s birth Astrid still hadn’t excluded the possibility that she might one day marry the boy’s father, but that under no circumstances would she live in Vimmerby, and certainly not as the mother of Reinhold’s many children. Mrs. Stevens expressed to Astrid her admiration for the young single mother’s decision:
We had a letter and money from Lasse’s pappa yesterday, and it was very sorrowful, such a shame for all three that it should end like this, because deep down I would have liked to see them reunited for little Lasse’s sake. And I’m sure life won’t be easy for you—not that I don’t believe you’ve done what you think is best for Lasse. But Lassepappa isn’t young, and that sort of blow goes straight to the heart, and I think he was very fond of you and the boy. It would probably be a difficult task to be his wife in Vimmerby, though you might just find the strength, and yet I admire you for turning him down. So many young people want to be provided for, then end up separating again.
After Astrid broke off their relationship in the spring of 1928, Blomberg had threatened to halve his payments to Mrs. Stevens and take Lasse back to Vimmerby himself on July 1. Mrs. Stevens didn’t think Lassepappa could do that without Lassemamma’s consent, but she knew how tight money was for Lassemamma, so to reassure the agitated mother, she offered to look after Lasse free of charge for a year, should the situation between his parents deteriorate still further. Blomberg, who could be a harsh man, nonetheless had a change of heart over the summer, and by November he was married again—“to a German,” as Mrs. Stevens wrote indignantly. The editor’s new wife bore him another four children in addition to the eight he already had.