Astrid Lindgren: The Woman Behind Pippi Longstocking Read online

  Astrid Lindgren

  DANISH ARTS FOUNDATION

  Published with assistance from the Danish Arts Foundation.

  Published with assistance from the foundation established in memory of Philip Hamilton McMillan of the Class of 1894, Yale College.

  Photos on pages 165 and 250, Saltkråkan AB. All others, private ownership/Saltkråkan AB.

  English translation copyright © 2018 by Yale University. All rights reserved. Originally published as Denne dag, et liv. Copyright © 2014 by Jens Andersen and Gyldendal, Copenhagen. Published by agreement with Gyldendal Group Agency.

  This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers.

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  Set in Bulmer type by IDS Infotech, Ltd.

  Printed in the United States of America.

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2017940326

  ISBN 978-0-300-22610-2 (hardcover : alk. paper)

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  What the meaning of life isn’t—that I do know. Scraping together money and possessions and things, living a famous person’s life and appearing in the gossip pages of weekly magazines, being so afraid of loneliness and silence that you never get to take a step back and think: what am I doing with my short time on this earth?

  Astrid Lindgren, 1983

  Contents

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ONE

  Fan Letters to the Author

  TWO

  À la garçonne

  THREE

  The Mysteries of Procreation

  FOUR

  Hope Avenue

  FIVE

  Your Children Are Not Your Children

  SIX

  Mothers of All Lands, Unite!

  SEVEN

  Revolution in the Nursery

  EIGHT

  Sorrowbirds and Songbirds

  NINE

  The Poetry of Bright Nights

  TEN

  The Battle for Fantasy

  ELEVEN

  I Have Been Dancing in My Solitude

  ASTRID LINDGREN: SELECTED TITLES

  SOURCES

  INDEX

  Acknowledgments

  IT TAKES TWO TO WRITE A BIOGRAPHY: the person writing it and the person being written about. In fact, there are usually lots of other people involved in the process too, all of whom shape the final work. This includes writers of previous books and articles about the biographer’s subject, which may prove very useful to a later author. In the list of sources at the back of this book, you can find references to all of the books, articles, magazines, and websites about Astrid Lindgren’s work to which I am indebted, accompanied by an index and an overview of Astrid Lindgren’s works published in Danish.

  I owe a huge thank-you to everyone who helped me track down other types of material: first and foremost to Astrid Lindgren’s bibliographer Lena Törnqvist, a tireless source of advice and information. She taught a Dane to navigate Astrid Lindgren’s archive at the National Library of Sweden, which was entered onto UNESCO’s Memory of the World register in 2005. Thanks are also due to Britt Almström, stenographer at the Swedish Riksdag, who helped me decipher some of Astrid Lindgren’s notebooks written in shorthand. Likewise, I’m deeply grateful for the support I received from Anna Eklundh-Jonsson at the Regional State Archives at Vadstena, Bruno Svindborg, research librarian at the National Library of Denmark in Copenhagen, and Elin Algreen-Petersen, senior editor for children’s and young adults’ books at Gyldendal.

  When working on a biography, you’re always reliant on other people’s goodwill, generosity, and willingness to contribute their specialized knowledge and skills. Thanks are due to Tom Alsing, Barbro and Bertil Alvtegen, Urban Andersson, Ida Balslev-Olesen, Malin Billing, David Bugge, Ning de Coninck-Smith, Hélène Dahl, Gallie Eng, Belinda Erichsen, Jens Fellke, Jacob Forsell, Lena Fries-Gedin, Eva Glistrup, Klaus Gottfredsen, Stefan Hilding, Jesper Høgenhaven, Sven Reiner Johansen, Anneli Karlsson, Kerstin Kvint, Jeppe Launbjerg, Kathrine Lilleør, Annika Lindgren, Jørn Lund, Carl Olof Nyman, Nils Nyman, Elsa Trolle Önnerfors, Johan Palmberg, Gunvor Runström, Anja Meier Sandreid, Lisbet Stevens Senderovitz, Margareta Strömstedt, Helle Vogt, and Torben Weinreich.

  A special thank-you goes to Saltkråkan AB for its practical and technical support, not least with many of the illustrations in the book, to Kjell-Åke Hansson and the staff at Kulturkvarteret Astrid Lindgrens Näs in Vimmerby, a cultural center dedicated to Astrid Lindgren, and to Jakob Nylin Nilsson at Vimmerby Library. Thank you to the Danish Astrid Lindgren translator Kina Bodenhoff, to Jenny Thor at the Gyldendal Group Agency, and to my editors, Vibeke Majnlund and Johannes Riis.

  Finally, I’m grateful to the National Arts Foundation, the Gangsted Foundation, and the Danish-Swedish Arts Foundation for financial support, and to my indefatigable first reader, Jette Glargaard. And last but not least, thanks are due to Karin Nyman—Astrid Lindgren’s daughter—who thought writing this book was a good idea. Without her interest, insight, and active cooperation in the form of a long series of conversations and correspondence over the past year and a half, it would not have been possible.

  Jens Andersen

  Copenhagen, August 2014

  Astrid Lindgren

  ONE

  Fan Letters to the Author

  BUSINESS THRIVED AT THE POST OFFICE on the corner of Dalagatan and Odengatan over the course of the 1970s, and it was all due to one elderly woman. She looked like any other old lady you might see on the street, in the park, at the produce market, or at the tearoom in the area of Stockholm known as Vasastan. Every day for many years, a handful of letters was dropped through the slot at this old lady’s house, and on her milestone birthdays in 1977, 1987, and 1997, the postman had to ring the bell at 46 Dalagatan to deliver sacksful of parcels and letters postmarked from across the world. Once the many notes had been read and answered, they were carried up to the attic in cardboard boxes that contained not only cheerful cards and colorful children’s drawings but also gilt-edged greetings from statesmen and royals, as well as more ordinary letters from people who just wanted an autograph, or were requesting financial help or moral support for some sort of political cause.

  The vast majority of letters addressed to Astrid Lindgren over the years, however, were first and foremost expressions of spontaneous enthusiasm and admiration, although their authors often took the opportunity to slip in a question or two. Not all of them were quite so innocent as the one posed by a Swedish kindergarten class, who wanted to know whether horses could really eat ice cream, or Kristina from Jäfälla’s question about how Pippi Longstocking’s dad in the television series was able to send a message in a bottle while stuck in jail. There was also a huge number of more self-aware, grown-up queries among the piles of mail: a tinsmith from Kalmar by the name of Karlsson requested permission to call his firm Karlsson on the Roof, a forester in Jämtland wondered whether the nature-loving writer might be interested in a few hectares of pine woodland, and a man in prison for murdering his wife asked whether Lindgren would like to write his life story.

  More than a few of the seventy-five
thousand letters received by the popular, well-known author right up till her death in January 2002, letters that today are held in the Astrid Lindgren archive at Sweden’s National Library in Stockholm, were highly personal in nature. When it came to Pippi and Emil’s mother, people evidently paid little attention to the boundary between public and private. As she grew older, Astrid Lindgren came to be perceived as Scandinavia’s “kloka gumma”—a nearly mythical kind of wise woman or healer, a spiritual adviser to whom you could open your heart and pour out your troubles. One woman, for instance, wrote asking “Astrid” to mediate a bitter dispute with her neighbors, while another inquired how best to cope with her burdensome old mother. A third female letter writer deluged the prosperous children’s book author with begging letters: seventy-two in total, each containing new and detailed requests for financial help with such issues as buying new glasses, fixing the car, paying contractor’s bills, and settling gambling debts. An Austrian man who had been wanting a new house for years wrote from abroad to ask whether Pippi’s mother might give him a large sum of money in dollars to build his dream home, Villa Villekulla. For forty years, one Danish father used to send long Christmas letters, reporting all sorts of family news and enclosing a few of his children’s home-baked treats. Meanwhile, the Stockholm suburb of Hässelby was the source of a veritable bombardment of letters proposing marriage: they came from an older man who threw in the towel only when the widowed Mrs. Lindgren’s publisher intervened and threatened the importunate suitor with a restraining order.

  Fan letters make up most of the archive, illustrating the colossal significance Lindgren’s work—whether in print, on film, or on television—has always had. From the moment the landmark Pippi books were published in the 1940s, the stream of letters steadily increased, and around 1960 they became something of a burden for the hardworking author and busy editor. Lindgren wrote her books in the mornings and during holidays, spending her afternoons at the publishing house where she worked and her evenings reading other people’s books and manuscripts. It was only in the 1970s, however, once Lindgren had retired from her editing job, that the stream of letters turned into more of an avalanche, and from the early 1980s onward she had to employ secretarial help to organize her extensive correspondence with her fans. Three events were responsible for this development: the publication of The Brothers Lionheart (1973), the so-called Pomperipossa case (1976), when Lindgren caused a stir by protesting the amount of tax she had to pay, and her receipt of the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade (1978) during a period of disarmament, when Lindgren, a pacifist, used her acceptance speech to declare that the struggle for lasting world peace began in the nursery—through the way in which future generations were brought up.

  Karin Nyman, daughter of Astrid and Sture Lindgren, born in Stockholm in May 1934, was a witness for more than fifty years to the growing cult around her mother’s writing and personality. She recounts that men and women of all ages not only wrote but phoned Lindgren, or even knocked on her front door on Dalagatan, often for no other reason than to shake her hand and express their gratitude for all the happiness and comfort they had found in the imaginary world of her books. Many of them were young people from other countries, Nyman explains, who were writing to Astrid to ask for help: “There were unhappy children and young people in Germany who wanted to move to the Sweden they had read about in her books, Noisy Village or Seacrow Island. It created a problem for Astrid, because although she always wanted to sort things out as best she could for people in trouble, there wasn’t much she could do for them.”

  Most often what lay behind those long, desperate letters from teenagers was a dysfunctional homelife, a lack of affection, and an overwhelming emotional distance between them and their parents. In 1974, for instance, one unhappy German teenager wrote to ask for Lindgren’s help: inspired by her books, the young girl had taught herself Swedish. She described how her father tyrannized his family and had even brought his lover to live in their home. Astrid found it difficult to forget about that letter, and couldn’t help referencing it in one she wrote to a Swedish teenager, who she felt would benefit from hearing about the problems and challenges facing someone of her own age in another country. The sixty-six-year-old Lindgren wrote: “Evidently there’s no one in the entire country of Germany she can turn to. She doesn’t even want to live. She doesn’t know what she wants, so she tries one thing after another, getting tired of them very quickly. . . . The girl must have some serious psychological problems, I think, but I can’t quite pin it down, and in any case I can’t help her. . . . God, how much misery there is.”

  Others of the thirty thousand to thirty-five thousand letters in the archive that came from children and young people—from fifty countries—inquired about potential sequels to particular books, wondered how people wrote books in the first place, or asked “Aunt Astrid” to help the letter writer jump the queue for a theatrical audition or casting call. The dream of becoming a star in the next Astrid Lindgren film adaptation was a major theme in one special letter dropped through the front door at Dalagatan in the spring of 1971. It had been sent from a town in Småland by twelve-year-old Sara Ljungcrantz, and at the top of the first page, expressively written in several different kinds of handwriting and with a barrage of exclamation marks, were the words: “Will you make me H A P P Y?”

  This question proved to be the start of a long exchange of letters throughout the 1970s between the elderly, world-famous author, on the verge of entering the twilight of her career, and a rootless and pensive Swedish girl who felt like an outsider in most situations and couldn’t figure out how to be a young adult. At the beginning of their correspondence, which is reproduced in the book I’m Putting Your Letters under the Mattress, it’s clear that Lindgren wanted to help twelve-year-old Sara Ljungcrantz, but also that the sixty-three-year-old writer needed to get to know the temperamental girl. She hadn’t much cared for Sara’s first letter: anything but unassuming, it announced her wish to be screen-tested, following up with a diatribe against the child actors in the latest Pippi film and a scathing critique of Björn Berg’s illustrations in the new Emil of Lönneberga book. The girl didn’t appear to have low self-esteem, but deep down that’s exactly what she was trying to convey.

  Astrid Lindgren’s first answer to Sara was therefore brief and rather chilly. In fact, it was a bit of a dressing-down, and reading it made the girl so upset that she flushed it down the toilet. The author of some of Sara’s favorite books reminded her of the dangers of envying others, taking it a step further by asking whether Sara realized why she had so few friends, was usually by herself, and felt so lonely all the time.

  It was precisely this idea of loneliness—which in Scandinavian culture is a taboo-laden and negatively charged word, hard to describe even though we all know the feeling and experience of being alone in many different ways over the course of our lives—that became a connecting thread throughout the following years’ correspondence between the lonely teenager and the lonely writer. By the 1970s, Astrid Lindgren could look back at a life during which—as a child, young woman, single mother, wife, widow, and artist—she had thought a lot about being left to herself and thrown onto her own company. At times she had feared that loneliness, at others longed for it desperately. And although she always set clear boundaries to limit what the public knew about the woman behind the author, keeping to her Småland family motto “Vi sä’r inget utåt” (We don’t talk to the outside world), in her private life Lindgren often spoke with surprising candor about loneliness when asked. An example of this can be found in an interview with a Swedish newspaper in the 1950s, when the journalist wanted to know how Lindgren was coping with the sudden loss of her husband in 1952. She answered: “First of all I want to be with my children. Then I want to be with my friends. And finally I want to be with myself. Just myself. If they’ve never learned to be alone, people develop only weak and fragile defenses against the ways life decides to hurt them. It’s almost the most
important thing of all.”

  Astrid Lindgren’s conviction that people should be able to cope with being alone at any age was also a central theme in her carefully worded advice to Sara, who was having a lot of trouble dealing with family members, friends, schoolteachers, and psychologists, yet didn’t much enjoy her own company either. After reading Sara’s first four or five letters, as Lindgren gradually began to recognize something of herself in the young girl’s feeling that she was—as she put it—“lonely and forgotten and pissed on,” the aging writer started to lift the veil on her own difficult youth: “Oh, I wish so much that you could be allowed to be happy and didn’t have so many tears on your cheeks. But it’s good that you can feel and worry about other people, and think caring thoughts—I feel closer to you because of it. The most difficult periods in a person’s life, I think, are their early youth and old age. I remember my youth as dreadfully melancholic and difficult.”

  Two teenagers separated by half a century. In her correspondence with Sara Ljungcrantz, top, in the 1970s, Astrid Lindgren saw an echo of herself as a young, awkward girl living in Vimmerby at the beginning of the 1920s.

  Sara hid all of Astrid’s letters under the mattress. Her long letters never talked down to their young recipient but focused on the girl’s problems and the conflicts in her life, offering solidarity and reflecting the awkward, out-of-place young woman Astrid herself had been in the days when her last name was Ericsson: an intelligent teenager growing up in a remote, rural town in the 1920s, deeply melancholic, rebellious, wistful, and confused about her identity. This extended reprise of her own youth climaxed in the spring of 1972, when Sara dashed off a highly dramatic letter about her brief stay at a psychiatric clinic for young people, where she had been taken after a panic attack and repeated clashes with her family. Never before had Sara felt so “ugly, stupid, silly and lazy,” she wrote. Astrid Lindgren responded immediately, beginning her sympathetic letter with the consoling words, “Sara, my Sara,” which, like the title of the novel Mio, My Son (Mio, min Mio in the original Swedish), could be directed to any child sitting alone on a bench in an empty park, both literally and metaphorically: “‘Ugly, stupid, silly, lazy’ you called yourself in your letter. I can tell with certainty from your letters that you’re not stupid and you’re not silly, though of course I can’t comment on the rest. But when you’re thirteen you always think you’re ugly. At that age I was convinced I was the ugliest girl in the world, and that nobody would ever fall in love with me—but as time went on I discovered things weren’t as bad as I thought.”