Forty-eight-year-old Olenius, who was a critic of children’s and young-adult literature on Sveriges Radio, Sweden’s national public radio broadcaster, as well as a librarian, drama teacher, consultant, and editor, didn’t just love Pippi Longstocking—she was also prepared to midwife the birth of a children’s book and literary character unlike any the world had ever seen. Olenius was so determined that in May 1945 she encouraged Astrid to submit the Pippi manuscript to Rabén and Sjögren’s next children’s book competition, for which Olenius herself was one of the four judges. First, however, a few changes had to be made. Astrid listened, got down to work, and slogged away at the corrections Olenius had suggested. On June 2, 1945, she noted in her diary: “It’s such amazing fun being an ‘author.’ At the moment I’m revising Pippi Longstocking, if anything good can be made of that naughty child.”
When, in August and September, the jury was choosing the winner of Rabén and Sjögren’s competition (for books aimed at children aged six to ten), Olenius championed the Pippi manuscript, in which the anarchic girl had become a fraction more civilized. Only Gösta Knutsson, however, author of the best-selling Peter No-Tail books, shared her enthusiasm, and since the jury also included Gärda Chambert, a teacher, and Hans Rabén himself, the vote was tied. In a letter to Hanna and Samuel August dated September 8, Astrid reported the latest news from Elsa Olenius: Pippi would definitely be published but probably wouldn’t win the competition. “I’m still more than happy and satisfied,” she wrote. “On Thursday I’m having lunch with her, so I’ll probably learn a little more then.”
But, as it turned out, Elsa Olenius got her way. It seems she managed to sway Hans Rabén, and on September 14, 1945, the Svenska Dagbladet announced that a winner had been found: “According to the jury, the prize-winning manuscript, Pippi Longstocking, is in a class of its own, possessing an abundance of the qualities that characterize a good children’s book: originality, excitement, and a totally disarming sense of humor.”
When Pippi hit the shelves two months later, after having been rushed headlong through the production process—illustrating, printing, binding, and distributing the book—Elsa Olenius sang its praises on Swedish national radio, also taking the opportunity to plug two other new Astrid Lindgren publications: Kerstin and I and The Main Thing Is You’ve Got Your Health, a play for children, which Olenius had commissioned earlier in the year. Rabén and Sjögren was thus able to quote its own employee’s gushingly positive review of the book in promoting it, even though Olenius had both edited the manuscript and been on the committee that awarded it a prize. Newspaper advertisements for the Christmas season featured a drawing of Pippi above the words: “Elsa Olenius: ‘A bullseye.’”
Astrid Lindgren appreciated her editor’s tireless and invaluable efforts in marketing Pippi Longstocking during this early phase. In a letter to Näs dated November 8, 1945, while she was still waiting for a copy of the printed book, the excited author reported the latest news:
I’ve still seen nothing of Pippi, but surely it’s got to be here soon. On Nov. 17 Elsa Olenius and somebody else are going to have a conversation on the radio, which will be called “Pippi Longstocking and the Rest.” They’re going to review a number of books, like last year. Elsa Olenius told me she’s going to discuss both Pippi and Kerstin and I, and also my little amateur theater piece that Lindfors is publishing [The Main Thing Is You’ve Got Your Health]. So she’s really doing all she can to put my name around.
Opposite: Ingrid Vang Nyman’s brilliant cover for Pippi Longstocking in 1945, celebrating fun and games a few months after six cursed years of war. The celebration continues today: to date, fifty-six million copies of the Pippi books have been sold worldwide, and the stories have been translated into sixty-five languages.
Nepotism or Networking
Was it nepotism, or was it simply networking? Both, and a little something extra. It was Elsa Olenius, with her many hats and her fingers in various cultural pies, who made sure that Pippi Longstocking was read aloud on Swedish radio week after week in early 1946. And it was Olenius who, on March 6, 1946—just three months after the book came out—staged an adaptation of the year’s hottest children’s title at her own theater in Stockholm’s Medborgarhus in Södermalm. Astrid Lindgren had written the script, hastily cobbling it together from selected scenes in the book. It was published later that year by Rabén and Sjögren, allowing hopeful amateurs on school stages across the country to put on their own local production.
As a play at Medborgarhus, Pippi was an instant success. Such a success, indeed, that in March and April 1946 there wasn’t enough space for all the children who had tickets to see Pippi Longstocking on stage, because to get into Olenius’s children’s theater, all you needed was a valid library card. That was the whole philosophy behind putting on plays in a children’s library, after all: to turn mini-citizens into readers of good literature.
Rumor of an extraordinary piece of theater featuring talented child actors spread across the country—as did the book—and Olenius’s youthful company performed in cities like Göteborg, Eskilstuna, and Norrköping later that year. Meanwhile, there were special performances of Pippi held in the capital, where a somewhat discombobulated ensemble even appeared onstage at Stockholm Concert Hall. Lindgren was present at a number of these shows, but she was chiefly visible as an author during 1946, appearing at various libraries and literary events around the capital and elsewhere. In a letter to her parents in spring 1946, she reported that the Swedish royal family’s three small princesses were now fans of the antiauthoritarian Pippi:
I’m going to Motala for Book Day, where I’ll be plaguing the poor things with Pippi Longstocking. Apparently I’m now terribly famous. The Booksellers’ Association is holding an exhibition at the Gallerie Modern at Dramaten [the Royal Dramatic Theater], and I’m going to do a reading from Pippi on the 20th. The child is turning into a national nuisance. Moreover, Kungsbokhandeln, a new bookshop that’s opened to much fanfare, is hiring either the Concert House or the Borgarskolan [a local school] for Elsa Olenius to stage Pippi with her children’s theater. The Haga princesses themselves have been invited, so they’re really going all out with the publicity.
Pippi Longstocking’s first year as a printed book and a piece of theater was certainly accompanied by plenty of hype. A book day event held in Avesta in December offers an illustrative glimpse. Five of the country’s best-known authors were reading from their new books, and Astrid Lindgren’s special contribution to the festivities was going to be a Sagostund—Fairy-tale hour—for nine hundred schoolchildren in Avesta and Grytnäs. Twice, her readings from Pippi Longstocking Goes Aboard were standing room only at the city’s largest movie theater. The local paper was also present, reporting the next day:
The youth orchestra, under Mr. König’s leadership, opened with music that did an excellent job of setting the fairy-tale tone that would later captivate the young audience. Local teacher Helge Ytterbom welcomed Mrs. Lindgren, and her subsequent reading—with Pippi Longstocking as the main character—was a tremendous experience for the children, who listened with rapt attention. Pippi’s adventures, in the best Robinson Crusoe manner, executed in Mrs. Lindgren’s captivating style, kept the children utterly gripped on that chilly December day, banishing all their troubles in the way that only such wondrously magical medicine can.
It hadn’t been quite that rosy. Astrid evaluated a reading in Dalarna in a letter home on December 7: it had been rather a challenge, with lots of coughing and fidgety children, and she had been obliged to strain her voice “until I went blue in the face, just so I could be heard.”
Such was the atmosphere around the Pippi books in fall 1946. Noisy. In record time, Pippi had crossed over into other media like radio and theater, and Astrid was still planning several other books. It was as though the various incarnations of Pippi were multiplying of their own accord, propagating across different media and genres. Hans Rabén couldn’t believe his eyes. The book, not in
itially his favorite to win the competition, had not only saved the publishing house from bankruptcy but was now steadily replenishing its coffers, once so distressingly empty.
In Hans Rabén’s phone call to Astrid Lindgren in May 1945, when he’d persuaded her to stay at Rabén and Sjögren, he hadn’t been entirely truthful. The publishing house’s finances were nowhere near straightened out, as he’d claimed. In Twenty-Five Years: A Chronicle (En tjugofemårskrönika), Rabén admitted that the management had been reckless to put new books into production in the summer and fall of 1945, but argued that the seriousness of the situation—and a certain youthful desperation—drove them to it: “We were in the same situation as a gambler who keeps on betting, hoping for the big win that’s going to let him sort everything out.”
Right up until the day in mid-September 1945 when Pippi Longstocking was named winner of Rabén and Sjögren’s competition, events could have gone very differently for the publisher, and for the first Pippi Longstocking book. The three-year-old company’s financial circumstances were so dire, with so many expensive books left sitting on its warehouse shelves, that in August 1945 the publishers attempted to sell all the submissions they had received for the competition Astrid Lindgren took part in. Bonniers was offered more than two hundred manuscripts sight unseen, but declined. Among the piles of submissions were not only Pippi Longstocking but also another Astrid Lindgren book, entitled The Children of Noisy Village, which she had finished over the summer at Furusund. Astrid didn’t think it was anything special, and in a letter to Hanna and Samuel August she referred to it as “a cheery book, although the text isn’t so dreadfully good.”
Bonniers turned down the offer from Rabén and Sjögren, which meant that the large, wealthy publisher had—without realizing it—rejected Astrid Lindgren and Pippi for the second time in literary history. Before the 1940s were out, Pippi Longstocking had sold about 300,000 copies in Sweden alone, making Rabén and Sjögren the country’s leading publishing house for children’s and young-adult literature. Again, the ever-present Elsa Olenius had a hand in it: in 1946 she whispered into Hans Rabén’s ear that Astrid knew shorthand, could type, spoke several languages, and was in need of a part-time job. Rabén wasn’t slow to take Olenius’s advice. Mrs. Lindgren had, after all, turned Christmas 1945—which his employees and especially Rabén himself had long been dreading—into the most successful in living memory. Twenty-one thousand Pippi Longstocking books changed hands in two weeks. As Rabén wrote in 1967: “We were all in the warehouse until late at night, packing Pippi. I spent Christmas going round Stockholm’s bookshops in a taxi. All Swedish children were going to have Pippi for Christmas that year.”
Colomba and Corinna
The spread of Pippi fever in 1945–46 was the product not only of the initiative of Astrid’s firebrand editor but of the book’s first two pre-Christmas reviews in 1945, which were also the two most important: Eva von Zweigbergk’s in the Dagens Nyheter and Greta Bolin’s in the Svenska Dagbladet. These two respected critics also wrote columns about children’s culture, education, and family life, under the pseudonyms Colomba (Zweigbergk) and Corinna (Bolin). They made frequent calls for innovation in Swedish children’s literature, supported by Elsa Olenius, who had compiled the lists of books for Zweigbergk and Bolin’s pioneering Children and Books, which came out that same year.
Together, Zweigbergk, Bolin, and Olenius made up a powerful trio in Swedish children’s and young-adult literature of the 1940s. They were well aware of how to orchestrate their influence through the daily papers, radio, the publishing industry, and the library system. Astrid Lindgren, the new comet in the authorial heavens, benefited greatly from their efforts. Seeing them operate up close, however, she wasn’t always enthusiastic about what they were doing, as she wrote to Hanna and Samuel August in August 1948: “Yesterday Eva von Zweigbergk phoned me and said that Bonniers was going to publish a new edition of Tales One Never Forgets [Sagor man aldrig glömmer], which Eva v. Zweigbergk edited. There was a story in it she wasn’t very happy with and wanted to change. She wanted ‘Nils Karlsson the Elf’ instead. It was Elsa Olenius who put her up to it, of course. I know, I know.”
In 1945, Pippi Longstocking was hailed by the two critics as a liberating force. The initial celebratory fanfare was sounded by Eva von Zweigbergk on November 28, 1945, in the Dagens Nyheter: “Pippi Longstocking has a major task in store for her, serving as a safety valve for ordinary children in an ordinary world where freedom is sadly rather limited.” A week later, Greta Bolin followed suit in the Svenska Dagbladet, seconding Zweigbergk’s claim that the character of Pippi liberated contemporary children from the pressures of authority and everyday life. Using her own family as an example, Bolin suggested that Pippi could provide a safety valve for grown-ups, too: “The book is quite simply a pyrotechnic display of jokes and horseplay. Our Jonas (aged seven), who heard some fragments, shrieked with laughter, and it’s almost equally funny for adults.”
Raising their voices in chorus, Corinna and Colomba praised the radical elements of Pippi’s antics, setting the tone for other reviewers over the following days, weeks, and months. All this critical enthusiasm sent Pippi Longstocking’s Christmas 1945 sales skyrocketing, at a time when gifts increasingly reflected Swedish families’ need to put the war behind them through laughter and merriment. And Pippi Longstocking delivered the goods. Is it possible to imagine a greater contrast with the sinister Nazis, who’d done their best to lay waste to the planet for six awful years? Even the jaunty, colorful jacket featuring Pippi and Mr. Nilsson promised rowdy fun, and inside were Ingrid Vang Nyman’s congenial illustrations: Pippi in wacky clothing, with hair nobody could ever force into a steel helmet. A sense of comic distance emerged between Nyman’s depiction and the depressing images of jackbooted military commanders and soldiers that had dominated the media for five or ten years.
Astrid Lindgren had never dared dream of such success. Since Bonniers’ rejection in 1944, she had fundamentally doubted Pippi. Was the writing too provocative? Were people ready for the world’s strongest child to be a girl? The pattern of children’s reactions had always been unmistakable, but adults either loved it or hated it, like the Rabén and Sjögren jury, explained Astrid in a letter to Näs dated September 29, 1945: “I’m anxious to see what criticism Pippi will get; I’m sure there’ll be a few dressings-down. There was a teacher on the jury and she didn’t appreciate the book at all, because Pippi ‘behaved so oddly,’ as Dr. Strandberg told me when I met him at the publishing house yesterday. But Strandberg likes the book, and said that Pippi was a mixture of Huckleberry Finn and Superman.”
Few Swedish writers of the 1940s had such a natural and unintimidated approach to modern media as Astrid Lindgren, and she was one of the first people in Scandinavia to understand how essential it was to use platforms beyond paper-based ones to tell a good story. In the 1950s and 1960s, long before the term “novelization” came into use, she wrote radio and film scripts that were reworked rapidly into literary best-sellers.
Like Elsa Olenius, the journalist and travel writer Olle Strandberg took on various jobs for Rabén and Sjögren, and he didn’t believe Astrid had any reason to fear criticism. Pippi—like Huckleberry Finn and Superman—was above all that, he thought. This view was largely borne out in the first six months after publication, when Astrid’s little supergirl received nothing but complimentary reviews in the media, but in fall 1946 a few critical voices began to be raised, mainly among parents and educators.
The first of these belonged to a professor at Lund University, sixty-four-year-old John Landquist. An academic heavyweight who lectured in psychology, education, and literature, he was also a literary critic, author, and translator of Sigmund Freud. As a disciple of Freud, Landquist was obliged to adopt a skeptical attitude toward anyone who considered the will to power the most essential human instinct. The philosopher Bertrand Russell had outlined just such a position in On Education, Especially in Early Childhood, the book Astr
id had referenced in her cover letter to Bonniers in 1944, and to which she alluded in the Svenska Dagbladet on January 15, 1946. Pippi Longstocking’s author was being interviewed because she had won one of the paper’s annual literary prizes, and she described the main character’s “almost frightening popularity” among children of her own acquaintance:
“Tell us about Pippi Longstocking” was all I heard wherever I went, and I felt as though this fantastical character must have hit a sore spot in their childish souls. I found the explanation later in Bertrand Russell, who observes in his book On Education, Especially in Early Childhood that the most prominent instinctive trait in childhood is the will to power. Children are tormented by their own weakness compared with older people, and want to be like them. That’s why normal childhood fantasies involve the will to power. According to Russell. I don’t know if it’s true. I just know that all the children I’ve tried Pippi on clearly love hearing about a little girl who’s totally independent of all adults and always does precisely what she wants.
All this talk about the will to power as the primary driving force in a child’s mind was a poor fit with Landquist’s Freudian preconceptions, as became apparent in the August 18, 1946, Aftonbladet, where he hauled Pippi over the coals and criticized the Svenska Dagbladet for having lauded a mediocre writer. Entitled “Inferior and Prize-Winning,” his article diagnosed Pippi as mentally ill and Astrid Lindgren as an “unimaginative dilettante.” The elderly professor of education had read the book aloud to his daughter, and neither father nor daughter had liked the main character one bit. Pippi’s antics were thoroughly nonsensical, indeed downright pathological, complained Landquist: “They don’t make sense in terms of the situation or the mental world of childhood. They are mechanically, unimaginatively cobbled-together nonsense. For that reason they are also unsavory.”