In 1947 Lasse passed his exams, and Astrid breathed a sigh of relief after many years of struggling to motivate her son in his studies. As she had written in her account book in the fall of 1937, when Lasse’s problems at school had begun: “Lars will always be a daydreamer who forgets what he’s supposed to do.”
But then Easter came, spring was just around the corner, and it was time to celebrate Lasse’s school exams, which had caused his mother far more anxiety over the years than they had caused him. The day he graduated from Norra Latin—May 13, 1947—Astrid noted in her diary: “Lars, little Lars . . . When the doors opened and I saw my little boy standing in the back row with a cap on his head, singing the school song, it gave me such a start.”
At the party back at Dalagatan afterward, they had to do without Sture, who was on a business trip to Portugal and sent his congratulations by telegram. Otherwise, however, all their Stockholm friends were present, including Esse, Lasse’s old playmate from Håbets Allé. Astrid’s family in Vimmerby couldn’t leave the farm in the middle of spring, but they did receive a letter with a detailed, almost filmic account of the big day: it had revolved around Lasse, but it ended with an intimate and inspiring mother-daughter chat. Just as she had once come up with the name Pippi Longstocking, it was Astrid’s nearly thirteen-year-old daughter who, sitting on the edge of her bed, provided the inspiration for how the tale of Pippi, Tommy, and Annika should end:
When Karin had gone to bed after Lasse’s graduation party and I came in to say goodnight, she cried bitterly and said: “I never want to grow up.” I think she felt it was too much responsibility to be an adult, and have to choose a job and all that sort of thing. “I don’t want you to get old,” she said, crying even more. When I’d chatted with her for a while, she said: “Now I’m talking to you, I’m not so sad—you’ll keep living until I grow up!” And then she cried again, the dear creature. I remember being so afraid throughout my childhood that someone in the family would die. I always prayed to God that we’d all die on the same day.
EIGHT
Sorrowbirds and Songbirds
IF YOU VISIT VIMMERBY TODAY AND take a walk through “Astrid Lindgren’s World,” you’ll find a theme park full of strong, kooky, happy children’s book characters in a nice, warm, safe atmosphere. This image isn’t false, but neither does it represent the whole truth about her work, in which rootlessness, unhappiness, and grief are nearly as pronounced as coziness, zest, and custard-pie comedy.
In fact, Astrid Lindgren’s books are teeming with the lonely and isolated. Some of them are adults, but many are children and teenagers, like Pippi Longstocking, Nils Karlsson the Elf, Kajsa Kavat, Mio, Lillebror and Karlsson, Rasmus and Paradise Oscar, the children of South Meadow, Pelle from Seacrow Island, Emil, Rusky, Birk, Ronia, and many others. They may be fatherless or motherless, abandoned in a house or an apartment, tied to a sickbed, locked in somewhere as punishment, or roaming around outdoors. They may be only children, or children who have siblings and parents but lack the care and affection that family should bring.
The effects of loneliness on the children in Astrid Lindgren’s work are as varied as its causes, but what most of them have in common is a longing for closer contact with other living beings. Usually the people in Astrid Lindgren’s literary universe eventually manage to find one another, either in imagination or in reality. Or perhaps they find themselves, because while Lindgren was convinced that humans are naturally solitary creatures, she also believed we can find strength in acknowledging our own isolation. As children, as teenagers, and as we age, we must all learn to be alone.
This theme, which runs throughout her work, emerges in the final scene of the Pippi Longstocking trilogy, when Tommy and Annika glimpse Pippi through the kitchen window and wonder at her sovereign isolation as she gazes into the candle flame, before she blows it out and the book ends. One year later, several isolated children appeared in the story collection Nils Karlsson the Elf, which heralded a change in Astrid Lindgren’s work. After eight novels, she returned to the kind of short prose she had written around 1940 for various magazines. In a few of the stories in Nils Karlsson the Elf, she also cemented the stylistic breakthrough—the child as first-person narrator—she had introduced to the world in The Children of Noisy Village in 1947: “I’m Lisa. I’m a girl, as you can tell from the name. I’m seven, and I’m turning eight soon. Sometimes Mamma says, ‘You’re Mamma’s big girl—won’t you be a sweetheart and dry the dishes today?’ And sometimes Lasse and Bosse say, ‘We don’t want little girls playing Indians with us. You’re too small.’ So I’m not sure whether I’m big or little. When some people think you’re big and other people think you’re little, then maybe you’re just the right age.”
Writing a children’s book as if it were drawn directly from a child’s mind, foregrounding the child as the book’s only narrator, was neither common nor considered entirely proper. Even in the 1940s, children were still supposed to be seen and not heard, and there were remarkably few precedents in world literature for a child like Lisa from Middle Farm, who describes herself and her surroundings without ever mentioning something a child wouldn’t know, and—equally important—without being interrupted by an adult. Her most important forerunner is Huckleberry Finn (1884), but the first attempts at writing a fictional “child’s voice” were actually made fifty years before Mark Twain’s classic novel, in the Romantic era: in Hans Christian Andersen’s Fairy-Tales Told for Children (1835), lots of boys and girls are given a chance to speak; earlier still, in 1826, Andersen had experimented with this revolutionary perspectival shift in his poem “The Dying Child,” which from start to finish is narrated from the deathbed of a little child, a child soon to be taken up to God, totally alone. After the Romantic period, it was mainly within the genre of memoir that writers used child narrators, and children’s characters and voices had to settle for appearing within a framework prescribed by an adult narrator—as in Laura Fitinghoff’s Children of the Moor (Barnen från frostmofjället, 1907), for example, which is about seven orphaned children and their extraordinary flight from famine, generally considered the first major realistic children’s novel in Sweden.
The Children of Noisy Village was therefore an epochal book, although no Swedish critics in 1947 paid any heed to the small, sensational pronoun that began the book’s first two sentences: “I’m Lisa. I’m a girl, as you can tell from the name.” Voices like Lisa’s deepened the world of childhood significantly, making it more alive and authentic. Via an underage narrator, the grown-up author could venture further into the nature of children, depicting fundamental, universally human emotions like happiness, curiosity, sorrow, and loneliness. This process is clearly apparent in Astrid Lindgren’s work around 1950, when Lisa’s first-person voice spread to another Noisy Village book in 1949 and to Nils Karlsson the Elf the same year. The latter contained nine short stories about contemporary children, all connected by feelings of isolation and the longing for care and attention.
The two short stories in Nils Karlsson the Elf that begin with the words “Now I’m going to tell you” both have girls as narrators, Barbro and Britta-Kajsa, and each is about an isolated child who lacks a friend her own age. Although each narrator has a mother and father who live with her, the message in both stories is that two grown-ups are rarely enough to fill a child’s emotional life, and certainly not if the parents disregard their child’s emotional needs. This important issue preoccupied Astrid Lindgren throughout her life, and in September 1952 she wrote a long opinion piece about the relationship between parents and children in the journal Perspek-tiv, entitled “More Love!” In it she argued that nothing later in life would or could ever replace the love a child didn’t get before the age of ten:
A child that doesn’t feel loved by its parents and can’t find anything else to love and be loved by will grow up to become an unhappy and often loveless person, who may do much harm on the path through life. Nothing is more certain than that the fate of the w
orld is decided in the nursery. There it is decided whether the men and women of tomorrow will become people with healthy souls and good wills or stunted individuals who use every opportunity to make existence a little more difficult and burdensome for their fellow human beings. Even the politicians who will control people’s fates in the world of tomorrow are small children today.
From the beginning of her career as an author, Astrid spent time among her primary readership. Diligent and committed, she took part in events like Book Day all around Sweden, giving readings, signing books, and talking about being an author. Seen here in 1950, she always emphasized that she wrote primarily for her own inner child.
It’s the heedlessness characteristic of too many parents’ interactions with children that the two first-person stories in Nils Karlsson the Elf are about, although the parents in both stories are relegated to the periphery. In “Mirabell” we meet Britta-Kajsa, an only child who lives in a small cabin far out in the woods with her hardworking, poverty-stricken parents in extremely modest circumstances. Her parents don’t have the money to buy her a doll, so Britta-Kajsa simply imagines having one. One day, however, she finds a doll called Mirabell poking out of the soil in the garden, where she had sown some mysterious seeds given to her by a wizard who appeared when her mother and father were at the market. Out of the girl’s profound loneliness, a fairy-tale is born: Mirabell grows and grows until she can be snapped off at the root, like one of the plants Britta-Kajsa’s mother and father are more interested in than they are in her. The doll is both a welcome toy and a manifestation of the girl’s need for closeness, friendship, and affection.
In another short story, “Dearest Sister,” Barbro makes a friend out of the reader by telling us about her secret twin sister Ylva-li: “Don’t tell anybody! Not even Mother and Father know.” Like Britta-Kajsa, Barbro lives an isolated life, but here the primary cause of the girl’s terrible loneliness is a change in the family makeup: “Father likes Mother best, and Mother likes my little brother best, who was born in the spring.”
A child’s loneliness can have many faces and expressions, and Astrid Lindgren was painfully aware of the misery an older child can feel when abruptly sidelined within the family, partly because she had witnessed it firsthand in 1934, upon arriving home at Vulcanusgatan with Karin as a newborn. Lasse’s sadness that day etched itself into her, and in a letter dated February 11, 1944, to her sister Ingegerd, who had been through a similar experience with her newborn son Åke and his older sister Inger, she described the situation and atmosphere:
For all children who have siblings, I think, there will be periods of sorrow. I shall never forget the time when I came back with Karin in my arms and said, “My little Karin,” and Lasse heard it while he was sitting on the toilet at Vulcanusgatan. I sensed I should go to him, and I did, saying, “My little Lasse.” And then when I was sitting in the nursery a while later he came rushing in, kissed me on the hand (the only time he’s done that) and said, “I was just wondering why you weren’t saying ‘My little Lasse!’ and then you came and said it. You’re so sweet!” Every time I think of it I get tears in my eyes, because I understand he was sad, and that he was incredibly relieved when he didn’t have to be sad anymore.
In the story about Barbro from 1949, her mother doesn’t remember to say, “My little Barbro!” so the girl creates not just an imaginary friend who calls her “my dearest sister!” but a special language that belongs to the sisters alone. Barbro spins a whole fairy-tale realm out of her imagination: beneath a rosebush in the back garden, which she names “Salikon,” is the entrance to this parallel world, where her sister Ylva-li lives in a golden castle with her poodles Ruff and Duff and her horses Goldfoot and Silverfoot, which the sisters ride through the “Big Nasty Forest where the Evil Ones live” and the “Meadow where the Good Ones live.” In this fantastical universe, Barbro’s life is rich and meaningful, because here everyone pays attention to her and treats her with affection.
With its glittering metals, muted, beautiful tones, and mysterious language, “Dearest Sister” foreshadows the novel Mio, My Son (1954), which emerged out of an earlier, epic short story, “He Travels through Day and Night,” written in 1950 for the magazine Idun’s Christmas issue. The complete text was repurposed as the first major chapter of Mio, My Son, in which the reader discovers the social and psychological backdrop to the narrator’s imaginative journey. In both the 1950 story and the 1954 novel, the boy is nine years old, named Bo Vilhelm Olsson but nicknamed Bosse, and has spent his childhood with emotionally stunted foster parents. Fleeing into his imagination, he searches for his unknown and sorely missed father.
Like her earlier stories featuring Britta-Kajsa and Barbro, Mio, My Son is about a profoundly lonely, introverted child’s ability to use his mind and the depth of his longing to retreat from sorrow and pain, creating a fantasy world complete with parental figures, brothers, sisters, relatives, and friends, all of whom acknowledge his existence.
Vulnerable children and teenagers interested Astrid Lindgren. In her opinion piece in Perspektiv, “More Love!,” she described an experience during a performance at the theater, where a mother with two children a few rows down was unable to hide her infinite love for her younger son even as she demonstrated a total lack of interest in the older one: “It’s as though he doesn’t exist. He just sits there, looking somehow lost. Isolated, curled in on himself, unable to make contact with the others. Throughout the performance he exchanged not a word with anybody. There’s a wall of loneliness around him. His abandonment is so vast it makes you despair.”
It was this wall of loneliness that Astrid Lindgren wanted to breach on behalf of all vulnerable, isolated children when she wrote Mio, My Son over two spring months in 1954. In it, the reader meets a boy who is “curled in on himself and unable to make contact with others.” With the aid of his fertile imagi-nation Bosse tells us the story of Prince Mio, who finds his father, the King, and proves his worth through valiant deeds. In reality, however, the orphaned boy is sitting alone on a bench in a dark, deserted Stockholm park, staring at the lights from the surrounding apartments, where children with proper mothers and fathers sit at proper dining tables and have fun together. At the house of Bosse’s best (and only) friend, Benka, for instance: “In the houses all around there were lights everywhere. I could see there were lights in Benka’s window too. He’d be sitting indoors now, eating pea soup and pancakes with his mother and father. I imagined children sitting with their fathers and mothers everywhere there was light. It was just me sitting out in the dark. Alone.”
Sture’s Death
The word ensam, which in Swedish can mean lonely, alone, single, and solitary, crept into Astrid Lindgren’s diary around 1950, and would appear there many times over the decades, as her life changed repeatedly and she reflected deeply on her own family and the family as an institution. When a family member moves or disappears, it always alters something in the atmosphere of the home. As Astrid wrote in her diary at Easter 1950: “A family is a curious constellation. Each time a member breaks away or vanishes, the family unit is utterly changed. Sture + Astrid + Lars + Karin is something very different from Sture + Astrid + Karin. I hope to God it never becomes Astrid + Karin. Let it be Sture and Astrid, in the end, with the other two happy wherever they are. Perhaps one day it’ll be Astrid + nobody. Right now I feel like anything could happen. Life is such a fragile thing, and happiness so hard to maintain.”
In the Expressen on December 12, 1992, Astrid reflected on her marriage: “I really, really liked him. He had a wonderful sense of humor and was kind, but I was never in love with him. I’ve never experienced grand passion in the way most people seem to have done, although I don’t feel it’s something I’ve missed out on. . . . Sture was only 53 years old, I was 45, and I took it with equanimity. I’ve always been able to manage on my own.”
There were still no signs of change in Sture’s alcoholism. It’s clear from Astrid Lindgren’s admonitory words
to the young Sara Ljungcrantz in their correspondence during the 1970s that it had been a problem for many years: “I know such an enormous amount about alcohol. . . . Take good care of the clear, sensible, logical brain you have, and don’t soil it with spirits.”
Her fear of one day being alone, which Astrid never mentioned to her parents in her letters home to Näs but increasingly discussed in her diaries after her marital crisis in 1944, became a reality one June day in 1952, when Sture suddenly began to vomit blood. Though rushed into medical care, he died two days later at Sabbatsberg Hospital. The cause of death was a ruptured vein in his esophagus, resulting from cirrhosis of the liver. When Astrid got back home on June 16 after two traumatic days at the hospital, she sat down with her diary and reviewed the final hours of her life with Sture:
I lay on an ottoman by his side, holding his hand. Eventually I fell asleep, but I woke when, in my sleep, I heard his breathing change—it had been strong, but it grew slower and slower, and just after eleven o’clock in the evening the end came. Stina had been with me earlier, but she had gone home shortly before then, so I was alone with Sture when he passed away. I wrote some lines on a piece of notepaper as I sat by my unconscious boy’s side. This is what I wrote:
June 15, 1952: “While strolling out an afternoon in June.” That’s what my darling used to sing. And that’s what he’s doing now—strolling out an afternoon in June. He’s dying before my eyes. “Birds were singing everywhere,” he also sang. Well, now they’re singing in the trees outside Sabbatsberg. And my darling is dying. He can’t hear me anymore, see me anymore. Or I would have thanked him for his goodness and kindness—it’s a sweet person who’s passing away this June evening. He was a child to me, and I loved him deeply. I’ve always held his hand, but where he’s going now I can’t follow and hold his hand. God, please help him find the way! I would so dearly like to hold his hand always!