Astrid Lindgren: The Woman Behind Pippi Longstocking Page 5

  It was neither an old schoolfriend, a local farmhand, nor a traveling salesman who was the father of Astrid’s baby, but the Vimmerby Tidning’s owner and editor in chief: fifty-year-old Reinhold Blomberg, who had remarried after his first wife’s death in 1919 had left him with seven children, several of them close in age to Astrid Ericsson.

  Trained as an agricultural engineer, Blomberg had owned and run a large farm on Gotland for many years. In 1912, however, after a major fire, he gave up the life of a farmer and transferred himself and his money to Småland, buying a carpentry business in Södra Vi before changing his mind and purchasing the Vimmerby Tidning and its associated printing house in 1913. In the same year Blomberg acquired ownership of a house at Storgatan 30, moving in with his six children and his wife, Elvira, who was pregnant again. Several years later, space was also found in the building for the newspaper’s editorial office.

  Throughout the 1920s, both Blomberg and his newspaper proved hugely successful. He invested in property, land, a cement works and acres of forest, but the newspaper remained the focus of his business. In a small community like Vimmerby, an editor in chief found himself playing many lucrative roles, and Blomberg turned out to have a knack for all of them. He became a member of the Writer’s Club and Newspaper Publishers’ Association in Småland and turned his paper into a profitable bulletin board for local-government announcements and advertisements placed by the increasing number of tradespeople in the little market town. He also was politically active, and was selected for the town council several times.

  This enterprising, influential man fell in love with his newspaper’s seventeen-year-old trainee, becoming infatuated with her in a way Astrid Ericsson had never experienced, but must have heard and read about. She didn’t refuse him, and they entered into a romantic relationship which for obvious reasons had to remain secret, and which probably lasted six months—Karin Nyman estimates—before Astrid became pregnant in March 1926. Astrid, who had found it so difficult to fall in love and make the opposite sex fall in love with her, was now being assiduously courted. For her part, Astrid was less smitten than surprised at the overwhelming interest in her “soul and body,” as Reinhold phrased it in a letter. Yet there was something unknown and dangerous about the relationship that attracted her, as she explained in 1991 in a lengthy television interview that was later printed in Stina Dabrowski Meets Seven Women (Stina Dabrowski möter sju kvinnor): “Girls are so silly. Nobody had ever been seriously in love with me before, and he was. So of course I thought it was rather thrilling.”

  And transgressive. Not merely because Astrid Ericsson was sexually inexperienced, but also because Reinhold Blomberg was a married man with a divorce case hanging over his head. Then there was the fact that the Vimmerby Tidning’s editor in chief wasn’t just acquainted with the well-respected Ericssons at Näs but had actually worked closely with them on several occasions. In 1924, for instance, Reinhold Blomberg, Hanna, and Samuel August took charge of organizing Agriculture Day, and the whole town was hurled into frantic activity for three days; and when Samuel August turned fifty the next year, Blomberg made sure to pay him the homage he was due in the newspaper: “It happens from time to time that Mr. Ericsson has an errand to run at our venerable editorial offices, and at those times he usually introduces himself as ‘the rectory farmer.’ As a farmer he merits both honor and respect, for whatever he touches with his hands within his area of expertise seems to succeed, bringing joy and profit. His farm is a model farm, and few parishes can boast his equal as a breeder of livestock.”

  Notes for a Biography

  The precise circumstances of Astrid’s affair with her boss, who at that point was no longer living under the same roof as his wife, Olivia Blomberg, are unclear. Few letters have been preserved from this dramatic year, when Astrid became pregnant in March, moved to Stockholm in September, and gave birth to her son Lars in Copenhagen in December. The identity of her boy’s father never became public knowledge during her lifetime, although her own family, a few members of Reinhold Blomberg’s extensive clan, and the Vimmerby locals did know who it was. Astrid wanted to keep it secret as long as possible, mainly out of consideration for Lars, who was generally known by the diminutive form Lasse.

  “I knew what I wanted and didn’t want. I wanted the child but not the child’s father.” Astrid put it that bluntly in the notes she prepared in 1976–77 for Margareta Strömstedt, who had been working on her biography for several years, interviewing her and accompanying her on trips to her childhood home in Småland. Today some of these notes have been preserved in stenographic form in Astrid Lindgren’s archive, and in some of them she seems to be trying to put words in the mouth of her biographer. She also supplied Strömstedt with a brief autobiographical sketch, a rounded and tidily written chapter in itself, which has no title and begins with the words: “When Astrid was eighteen, something happened that precipitated a radical change in her life. She describes it as follows: What happened was that I got pregnant.”

  Astrid Lindgren’s own account of what happened in 1926 has never been published in its entirety, but it was extensively paraphrased and quoted by Strömstedt in her biography Astrid Lindgren: A Life (Astrid Lindgren: En levnadsteckning), which appeared shortly before the author’s seventieth birthday in 1977. Lindgren’s notes formed the basis of the biography’s sensational passages about eighteen-year-old Astrid Ericsson’s pregnancy, Lasse’s birth, and his years living with a foster family in Copenhagen. All of it was utterly new to the public. Thirty years of portraits and interviews had created the impression that Lindgren moved to Stockholm as a young woman to attend school, and there, after a few years, met Sture Lindgren, whom she married and bore two children, Lasse and Karin.

  Yet the truth was otherwise, and after many conversations with the author, Margareta Strömstedt came to believe it was necessary to explore the issue in her biography. The subject herself disagreed, but Strömstedt stuck to her guns. As she explained in an interview with the newspaper Berlingske Tidende in 2006, the difference of opinion developed into a fully fledged dispute: “One day we held important negotiations at Rabén and Sjögren, the publisher, with an editor observing. We agreed that Astrid should write about that chapter of her life in her own words—about the trouble that ‘shook Vimmerby harder than when Gustav Vasa revoked the city charter,’ as she put it, with a lightness that concealed a far deeper pain. A biography of Lindgren had to explore that pain, I thought, as a kind of response to a body of work that was teeming with fatherless boys.”

  Eventually Astrid Lindgren agreed to reflect back on this period of radical change. Even so, she was sparing with the truth. The story about the unwanted pregnancy was described as a “tale of misfortune,” and the father’s identity was left shrouded in darkness. It was a mistake, that was all: “I knew what I wanted and didn’t want. I wanted the child but not the child’s father.”

  In fact, the calculation hadn’t been that easy. Correspondence between Astrid Ericsson and Reinhold Blomberg in the years 1927–29, as well as the monthly letters Lasse’s Copenhagen foster family sent to Astrid over three years, reveals that she was far more conflicted about her relationship with Lasse’s father than she would later admit. Reinhold Blomberg, for his part, remained in love with Astrid, and paid for the couple’s joint visit to see their little boy in Copenhagen in 1927, where they stayed at a hotel, and for a weekend sojourn in Linköping that same year. Only in March 1928 did she definitively break things off, telling him that their paths would henceforth diverge. As early as the summer of 1927, however, when the editor in chief’s divorce case had just been settled and Blomberg promptly began renovating and refurnishing the house in Storgatan, she dropped a heavy hint. On a visit to Stockholm he showed Astrid sketches for the home where he hoped they would live with Lasse and his other children, and Astrid refused to give a firm answer; instead she asked for time to think. It could be—she indicated—six months to a year. Little by little, the fifty-year-old Blomb
erg realized that the battle was lost. Yet he continued doggedly to write lovesick, clichéd letters to his “beloved, beloved enchanting little angel,” expressing hope that Astrid would use her break to “dream and feel your beloved’s closeness in enchanting dreams of betrothal,” as he put it in a letter dated August 23, 1927.

  From the beginning of their relationship, Reinhold’s affections had been possessive and controlling, to Astrid’s dismay. When she moved to Stockholm in September 1926, he reproached her for enrolling in a secretarial course without running the decision by him first, taking it as a sign that Astrid was already thinking of a future without him. He also thought she was going to the theater and the movies too much, and in 1927 he forbade her to go dancing. In the same letter, he even vented his jealousy about her strong bond with her family: “I really know so little about what’s happened between you and your parents as regards our relationship. . . . It hurts and offends me that in this case, too, I have to yield priority to people who should rightly take second place when it comes to humanity’s greatest and most honorable emotion—love.”

  Astrid instinctively resisted Reinhold’s attempts to control her when they saw each other in Linköping and Stockholm, or when they took those three or four trips together to see their son in 1927–28. Her deliberately superficial letters frustrated the demanding romantic in Vimmerby, who had laid out a plan for their future and refused to be held at arm’s length. “You write so briefly about yourself. Don’t you understand that I want to know much, much more about you?”

  Both Astrid’s mother Hanna and the older Astrid Lindgren wondered what she saw in Reinhold, apart from the fact that he was the first man in her life and the father of her child. In the notes the aging author prepared for Margareta Strömstedt in 1976–77, she made no attempt to hide the pleasure she took in the role of seductive temptress. With Reinhold, she felt for the first time the special power a woman can exercise over a man, the kind of power many of the books she read were about:

  Hanna occasionally asked, sorrowfully and with unconcealed astonishment: “How could you?” She felt that if I had to be pregnant, it ought to have been with a different father. And, truthfully, I felt the same. I couldn’t give myself or Hanna an answer to the question, “How could you?” But when have young, inexperienced, naïve little dimwits ever been able to answer such a question? How was it put in Sigurd’s short story about Lena Gadabout? I read about her when I was very young. She wasn’t at all pretty, the author assured us, “but was nonetheless much sought-after on the market of desire,” and when I read that I thought, with a certain jealousy, “Oh, if only I could be like that!” And it turns out I could. I just didn’t reckon with the result.

  It wasn’t merely self-awareness and guilt that lay behind Astrid Lindgren’s use of the quotation “much sought-after on the market of desire,” but also pent-up bitterness: Blomberg, as a much older and more experienced man, would have been fully aware of the risk he and especially she were running by not using contraception. He also knew very well the shame in store for a young woman who gave birth to a child outside of wedlock in 1920s Sweden. Astrid, according to Karin Nyman, placed far too much trust in her boss’s reassurances that if they just did this or that, then nothing would happen. Nyman adds that the young Astrid Lindgren, having grown up on a farm in a rural community surrounded by cows and horses, was obviously aware of the mysteries of procreation. How to protect herself against constant reproduction, on the other hand, was a riddle.

  Contraception and Puritanism

  In our enlightened age, we might wonder why a bright, well-read young woman like Astrid Ericsson knew nothing about contraception. As she later expressed it in an angry letter to the aging Reinhold Blomberg, dated February 22, 1943, looking back on their affair with bitterness: “I didn’t know a scrap about contraceptive methods, so I never realized how dreadfully irresponsibly you behaved toward me.”

  The reason for her ignorance originated in the puritanism that in the 1920s continued to dominate sexual politics in Sweden, which lagged far behind developments in the rest of Scandinavia. According to Swedish law, selling contraceptive devices was permitted but advertising condoms and diaphragms was not. This law had been prompted by a 1910 speech in which the socialist politician Hinke Bergegren encouraged working women at the Folkets Hus in Stockholm to use contraception: “Better love without children than children without love.” The speech was met with bourgeois indignation. Bergegren spent time in jail for his revolutionary campaign, and at lightning speed a law was passed—it remained in effect until the beginning of the 1930s—that forbade any form of advertising or public discussion of contraception, even though you could buy it if you knew where to find it.

  Swedish women thus knew very little about how to avoid pregnancy, especially in rural areas, as the journalist Ester Blenda Nordström illuminated in 1914 in her exposé A Maid among Maids (En piga bland pigor). A journalist from the big city, Nordström went undercover as a maid on a farm in Södermanland for a month, documenting the sixteen- or seventeen-hour workdays of these low-paid girls and the difficulties they experienced with the sexual demands of men. Like many of her peers, Astrid had devoured the book as a young girl, and in the early summer of 1925 she noted that, according to the Vimmerby Tidning, the book was going to be performed as a piece of outdoor theater, which would be toured all around Småland.

  Other pioneers fought for Swedish women’s rights during those years, including Norwegian-born Elise Ottesen-Jensen, also known as Ottar, who traveled around Sweden advocating for sexual hygiene and protesting the double standard of the contraception law. In her suitcase Ottar carried samples of diaphragms, informational posters, brochures, and her own pamphlet from 1926, Unwanted Children: A Word to Women (Ovälkomna barn: Ett ord till kvinnorna). Ottar’s campaign, promoting a freer and less fear-bound sexual life for women, continued well into the 1930s, when feminism in Sweden became an integral part of the Social Democratic movement. Her language lived on long after her: “I dream of the day when all children who are born are welcome, where all men and women are equal, and sexuality is an expression of intimacy, tenderness, and pleasure.”

  Astrid Ericsson paid a high price for her affair with Blomberg. She lost her job and any prospect of a career as a journalist on a larger paper than the Vimmerby Tidning. In the late summer of 1926, as the pregnancy became progressively harder to hide, she had to leave her childhood home and the town of her birth for Stockholm, where she had lived for two months in spring 1925 while attending Henrik Blomberg’s school of art. In her notes for Margareta Strömstedt fifty years later, Astrid Lindgren described saying goodbye to Vimmerby as a joyous escape: “Never have so many gossiped so much about so little, at least not in Vimmerby. Being the object of the gossip felt almost like being in a snake pit, so I decided to leave the snake pit as soon as possible. It wasn’t—as many people thought—that I was thrown out of the house in good-old traditional fashion. Far from it! I threw myself out. Ten wild horses couldn’t have held me back.”

  She rented a room at a boardinghouse and began a course in stenography and typing. One day she read about a Stockholm-based woman, a lawyer, who helped unmarried, pregnant girls in unfortunate circumstances. Astrid tracked down the lawyer, who arranged for her to travel to Copenhagen in November 1926 and give birth at the Rigshospital, the only place in Scandinavia where a woman wasn’t required to give her own and the father’s name in connection with the birth; other hospitals usually passed on this information to the national register or other authorities.

  Strömstedt’s 1977 biography explained the necessity of this clandestine arrangement by arguing that eighteen-year-old Astrid knew she didn’t want anything more to do with the father of her child. In her notes for the biographer, sixty-nine-year-old Lindgren supplemented this by adding the following: “Something that had a certain significance for me at that time.” The cryptic phrase hardly made Strömstedt any the wiser about what had actually happened and why, an
d the sentence didn’t find its way into the biography. Strömstedt did, however, describe the Stockholm lawyer’s surprise that Astrid had no one to help her with her problem. She repeatedly inquired about Astrid’s isolation: “‘Don’t you have anybody you can talk to?’ ‘No,’ I answered, staring at her with my most innocent eyes. She couldn’t know, of course, how things were: ‘We don’t talk to the outside world!’”

  In fact, Astrid Ericsson wasn’t entirely alone in the fall of 1926. Despite having scandalized her family at Näs, she received help from her parents—when they could, and when she let them. What went unsaid in the Strömstedt papers was that, in the months leading up to the birth in Denmark, Astrid was also in regular contact with the child’s father. Since her arrival in Stockholm at the end of August, she and Reinhold had been trying to find a private maternity home where Astrid could give birth to the child as discreetly as possible before handing it over to a Swedish foster mother for an indefinite period. Although Blomberg assumed they would soon be married, they had to wait—and Astrid’s pregnancy and delivery had to be kept under wraps—because of the pending divorce case. Blomberg was separated, but on paper he was still married to his wife, Olivia, who had no intention of letting him get off lightly—or cheaply.

  At the beginning of her stay in Stockholm, Astrid had assumed they would find a private clinic near the capital, but soon she and Reinhold changed their minds, deciding to choose a town in the provinces where the risk of being recognized was lower. It was only at the eleventh hour that she ended up in another place entirely, in another country.

  Domestic Disputes

  The many acts of this drama can be followed both in and between the lines of the extensive, detailed records of Reinhold and Olivia Blomberg’s divorce case, which was heard by the Sevede Häradsrätt, the local district court, in 1926–27. Sessions were held at the town hall in Vimmerby and documented in large leather-bound books that today can be found at the Regional State Archives in Vadstena. The case was rooted in the couple’s disagreement about a man’s right to dispose of his wife’s money. As the articulate Olivia Blomberg summarized the problem in court: “My husband suffers from an unhealthy desire for my financial assets. In everything, even down to the smallest detail, my husband has tried to pester and torment me because of my modest private fortune.”