Rasmussing
In the spring of 1958, Astrid traveled to Florence to receive the Hans Christian Andersen Award, known familiarly as the “Nobel Prize for Children’s Literature,” the greatest international honor that can be bestowed upon a children’s book author. It was due to be presented in the magnificent Palazzo Vecchio, among medieval paintings by Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo and before an audience of people from across the world, including publisher Hans Rabén, who was president of IBBY in 1956–58 and was instrumental in awarding the Andersen medal to his own author. One month earlier, Astrid had written to Hanna and Samuel August to tell them about this prestigious award, but emphasized that they mustn’t spread the news around Vimmerby just yet: “I believe the whole thing is still a secret, so don’t say a word to anyone. But it’s a terribly grand international honor, awarded to the best children’s book published in the previous two years. Not that I think Rasmus is that good, but if they don’t have anyone better there’s nothing else to do but say thanks.”
Astrid Lindgren’s less than wholehearted enthusiasm for Rasmus and the Vagabond may have had something to do with her brisk rate of production in the 1950s, when she seems to have ignored her German friend’s advice: “Only write when you want to, and never because you feel obliged.” Each year throughout that decade brought another Lindgren, featuring new or familiar characters, which would immediately be repackaged into new formats and for other media. It was a lucrative business for everyone involved. Astrid’s term for it was “rasmussing,” because three of her main characters during those years were called Rasmus, and the name also appeared in the Swedish titles of three books: Bill Bergson and the White Rose Rescue (Kalle Blomkvist och Rasmus, 1953), Rasmus and the Vagabond (1956), and Rasmus, Pontus, and Toker (1957).
This convoluted state of affairs was largely due to six-year-old Eskil Dalenius. In 1951, Astrid Lindgren had turned the first two books about Detective Bill Bergson into a radio serial, broadcast every Saturday evening during prime time and featuring the naturally gifted child actor Eskil Dalenius in the role of Rasmus. The boy had an inimitable voice and a real knack for firing off retorts like “Fy bubblan [an expression of disgust coined by Astrid Lindgren], you’re such a dummy,” which passed directly into Swedish slang in the 1950s. Bill Bergson and the White Rose Rescue became an overwhelming success among listeners, and Astrid Lindgren was immediately asked to write a sequel. The director was Elsa Olenius, and the child actors once again came from her theatrical talent factory at Södermalm, where they had also found Eskil Dalenius. After the sequel, Astrid was asked to produce a film script as soon as possible. It could be about anything, but it had to feature Eskil Dalenius in the main role, and his character’s name had to be Rasmus.
The film, premiered in 1955, was titled The Vagabond and Rasmus. Astrid later reworked it into a radio serial and—squeezing a third use out of it—the book Rasmus and the Vagabond. Commercial rasmussing now kicked up into high gear: they needed to hurry, because Eskil Dalenius wasn’t getting any younger. In 1956, Astrid Lindgren agreed to write another film script for Eskil, which was given the title Rasmus, Pontus, and Toker. Like the previous Rasmus stories, it was repurposed first as a radio serial and later as a book. Only after five years’ nonstop rasmussing did the now eleven-year-old Eskil Dalenius finally take a step back.
Rasmus and the Vagabond may not have been “Nobel Prize” material, but it was certainly the best book to come out of all the Rasmus madness in the 1950s. In it, we meet another unhappy, wistful boy, who like Bosse in Mio, My Son, is an orphan who knows nothing about the sense of safety and identity a family can give a child. Blond, spiky-haired Rasmus Oskarsson is growing up in an orphanage, and he’s repeatedly passed over when wealthy, childless parents drop by to pick and choose from among the well-scrubbed, neatly combed children, always emerging with a sweet, even-tempered, curly-headed girl. As Rasmus observes: “If you’re an orphan with straight hair that nobody wants, you might as well be dead.”
At the beginning of the book, we meet the melancholy boy up his favorite tree, where he’s sitting alone in his den and planning to “run off into the world and find somebody who wants me!” His nighttime vanishing act—when he leaves the orphanage, his friend Gunnar, and the superintendent, “the Hawk,” behind—is both hair-raising and poetic. Creeping off in the dead of night, Rasmus leaves not only the orphanage but his childhood, and he’s momentarily gripped by fear of the dark, the future, and a reality he has never properly experienced. “All alone in the world,” says Rasmus, with a lump in his throat, but he finds strength in a verse he remembers from school: “The verse was about a boy who was also out alone in the evening.”
Rasmus and the Vagabond depicts one of the strongest and warmest friendships between an adult and child in Astrid Lindgren’s oeuvre. It turns out the next day that Rasmus, still barefoot, and wearing the homespun trousers and blue-striped shirt given him by the orphanage, has spent the night in a hayloft with a vagabond without realizing it. In the morning the wanderer introduces himself as “Oscar—paradise vagabond and the Lord’s trickster.” He explains to the frightened boy that God determined long ago that everything should exist on earth, including vagabonds. When Paradise Oscar starts preparing to leave the hayloft, Rasmus makes a decision: “Oscar, I’d like to be a paradise tramp too.” Oscar answers that Rasmus is only a child and ought to stay at home with his father and mother, to which the boy replies succinctly and quietly: “I have no father and mother, but I’m looking for some.”
Astrid Lindgren’s pairing of these two people setting out into the world—the involuntarily solitary orphan and the voluntarily solitary vagabond—is notable because Rasmus and Oscar personify two different perceptions of what it means to be alone in life. These two kinds of isolation—voluntary and involuntary—had begun to haunt Astrid Lindgren. In her letters to Louise, Astrid often expressed the desire to be alone, liberated from her work and other people, while in her diary she wrote about fearing the emptiness around her when Karin left home. As she noted on September 5, 1958, when the day finally came:
Perhaps this was the first day I really felt that “one little piggy stayed at home.” When Karin got married I went to Furusund, where a piggy can be alone for ages without realizing it. Since I got back on Sunday I’ve been with “some people” every day. But today I ate lunch alone with Nordlund [her housekeeper], spoke only about illness, and longed for Karin to be sitting there instead. But I am aware, of course, that it’s only a temporary atmosphere. I’m not sitting here in mourning. But thank God I have an occupation, a calling, a job—how do people cope when they’re alone and don’t have that?
Children of South Meadow
If you asked posterity which Astrid Lindgren book from the 1950s should have won the Nobel Prize for Children’s Literature in 1958, the answer would most likely be Mio, My Son. Few people would suggest the short-story collection South Meadow (1959), although in many ways it’s equally gripping. In tone and mood it was markedly different from her books of previous years: The Children on Troublemaker Street, Karlsson-on-the-Roof, and various iterations of the Rasmus books.
The four tales in this collection are set in the eighteenth century, when poverty was widespread in Sweden. Written in a deliberately old-fashioned fairy-tale style, they confused and affronted many literary critics, who compared the author’s sentimentality to Selma Lagerlöf’s—which they did not mean as a compliment. At Rabén and Sjögren, where for nearly fifteen years they had been counting on one Astrid Lindgren best-seller per annum, they grew uneasy at this abrupt stylistic shift, and indeed South Meadow was not a commercial success. For once, Astrid Lindgren seemed to have miscalculated what stories children—or perhaps the adults purchasing on their behalf—wanted to read. Fellow author Lennart Hellsing, one of the critical voices when the book came out in 1959, considered South Meadow a backward step for Swedish children’s literature, which Astrid Lindgren had helped modernize, rather than simply an un
expected change of tack. As Hellsing wrote in the Aftonbladet in December 1959: “It would be absolutely dreadful if South Meadow found imitators; folk fairy-tales now belong once and for all in a vanished age. This narrative mode belongs to the world of adults.”
Perhaps it was Hellsing’s criticism of Lindgren’s choice of genre that was old-fashioned. Certainly he was unable to see that, in South Meadow, Astrid Lindgren was treating the subject of loneliness in a way that was ahead of its time. The tales describe the kind of fear whose object is unknown, in a language true to children, reflecting their inner experiences. Few writers had accomplished this in children’s literature before, and it would be more than ten years before child-psychological research, aided by fairy-tale studies—especially Bruno Bettelheim’s The Uses of Enchantment of 1976—noted that fairy-tales often depict in symbolic form the conflicts that arise in children at various stages of development. One example might be fear of rejection or abandonment, which the tale would address through plot and language, producing a therapeutic effect in the child’s unconscious mind. Via this elevated form of imaginative play, children can work through things that aren’t always possible for individuals to work through in reality, claimed child psychologists and scholars of fairy-tales in the 1970s. Astrid Lindgren made a similar argument as early as the late 1950s.
“Children can’t be alone in the world, they have to be with someone.” Thus writes Lindgren at the beginning of South Meadow. The book capped a decade filled with great sorrow, fear of loneliness, and frustration with her enormous and ever-increasing workload. It had taken her a long time to get over the loss of Sture; then one day the pleasure she took in her grandchild, Mats, was suddenly overshadowed by Lasse and Inger’s divorce. Like so many of the children she wrote about, the boy was stuck in the middle between his mother and father, left feeling as abandoned and alone as if he had no parents at all. At least, that was Astrid’s interpretation, as she confided to her diary on Christmas Day 1957: “No sorrows hit you as hard as the ones that hit children.”
Mats ended up spending a lot of time with his grandmother at the end of the 1950s. Astrid brought him to stay with her as often as she could, at Dalagatan, Furusund, and Långbersgården in Tällberg near Siljan, the lake where she had begun to spend her winter holidays, often inviting family down too. In March 1959, she and her now eight-year-old grandson went to stay at Siljan by themselves—Astrid not neglecting to bring her pencils and stenographic pads, because in the mornings she worked on her new book. As she lay in bed and wrote, Mats and the other children at the boardinghouse would play on the snowy hills, which offered a view far over Siljan and toward a cluster of lakeside houses known as Sunnanäng (South meadow).
The tales in South Meadow take the subject of “childhood loneliness” as far as it will go. The four stories are about either orphaned, sick, extremely vulnerable, or isolated children with familiar Swedish names like Mattias, Anna, Malin, Stina, Maria, and Nils. Coming from another age, they were in that sense the forerunners of all lonely children in 1950s Sweden, including the brood of boys and girls Astrid Lindgren had depicted in her previous books: Bertil, Göran, Britta-Kajsa, and Barbro in Nils Karlsson the Elf, Kajsa, Eva, and Märit in Kajsa Kavat, Bosse in Mio, My Son, Lillebror and Karlsson in Karlsson-on-the-Roof, and, not least, Rasmus in Rasmus and the Vagabond. All have recognizably the same core, but the crucial difference is that the children in South Meadow are destitute. Each has had almost everything in life taken from him or her, yet is left with humanity’s greatest source of riches: the imagination to rise above the meaninglessness and malevolence of existence and into a paradise of community and joy. As Malin, who has lost her parents and ended up in the poorhouse among the parish’s other rejects, expresses the spark of hope that nobody can take from those with imagination: “With faith and longing, it shall be done!”
NINE
The Poetry of Bright Nights
WHILE MORNINGS AT HOME IN DALAGATAN were blissfully peaceful—a time when the author could lie in bed and write her new book until the housekeeper turned up, the telephone began to ring, and the mail was dropped through the slot—the peace was shattered shortly before one o’clock, when the editor disappeared through the publishing-house doors at Tegnérgatan 28 and climbed the stairs in small, swift bounds. She usually had a packed schedule ahead of her, and was frequently interrupted by journalists and photographers. In spring 1953, it was the Vecko-Journalen that came to visit her office:
You see a genuine female editorial desk, which is practically sagging beneath the weight of manuscripts for children’s books, suggestions for children’s books, and finished children’s books stacked high. Amid all the mess is a much-worn Royal and a Dala horse that has also seen better days. “I usually sit here between one and five, but today I’m going to the radio station at four o’clock for a recording” . . . (here the telephone gives a muffled ring somewhere among the piles of manuscripts) . . . “No, thank you, I don’t want to advertise any skin cream, that definitely wouldn’t be a good ad . . . not with my skin, I can assure you” . . . (puts the phone down) . . . “And after the radio station I’m nipping down to the Oscar Theater to see Bill Bergson, Master Detective on his latest adventures.”
The most essential part of Astrid Lindgren’s job as an editor—she headed Rabén and Sjögren’s department for children’s and young-adult literature from 1946 to 1970—was assessing manuscripts by Swedish writers, the hardened as well as the hopeful, and reading foreign books for potential purchase, translation, illustration, and, like all their other publications, packaging in an attractive jacket. This didn’t mean, however, that she spent all day reading or talking on the phone behind a closed office door; she was in constant motion every afternoon, contacting all sorts of people both inside and outside the publishing house: authors, editors, consultants, translators, illustrators, proofreaders, printers, and booksellers.
Private conversations with publisher Hans Rabén usually took place in the morning, when he called Astrid at home to ask for advice and to chat about the tasks that lay ahead that day. She would read all the Swedish manuscripts and foreign books in the evening, once she was back at Dalagatan.
This exacting schedule as an author and editor was rigidly compartmentalized, hour by hour, throughout the day. As Astrid wrote in a letter to Louise Hartung in June 1959, when the busy woman down in Berlin asked how the busy woman up in Stockholm was doing, and what she was currently working on: “Writing constantly in the mornings, going to the publisher, going home and working, sleeping, waking, writing, going out and back, etc., in an unbroken circle.”
Astrid Lindgren’s role at Rabén and Sjögren was one of great power and influence. In 1949 the firm’s offices had moved from a gloomy suite on Oxtorgsgatan to nicer, brighter surroundings in Vasastan, near Tegnérlunden Park. Together with Hans Rabén, Astrid helped shape two and a half decades of Swedish publishing and literary history, a period that is now considered a second golden age in children’s and young-adult books. It was an era that coincided with postwar economic growth in Sweden, when a series of social reforms in the 1950s had a positive impact on children’s culture, encouraging a rising birthrate, higher living standards, and greater purchasing power. This meant there were more and more children’s books on the shelves of Swedish libraries.
For Rabén and Sjögren, this was a period of constant expansion, based primarily on its numerous competitions in the 1940s, which had attracted new authors to the publisher—Astrid Lindgren chief among them. This was reflected in the number of publications per year, recalled two of Astrid’s closest colleagues during that period—Kerstin Kvint and Marianne Eriksson—in their book Dearest Astrid (Allrakäraste Astrid). In the mid-1950s they were publishing forty titles per year, rising to sixty in the following decade and around seventy by the time Astrid Lindgren and Hans Rabén retired in 1970.
As we have seen, Astrid read the majority of the manuscripts at home in Dalagatan, having neither the
time nor the necessary peace and quiet to do so at the publishing house. There, on the other hand, Astrid could practice all the office skills she had acquired over the course of her career, including letter writing. A significant amount of her daily correspondence was directed at illustrators, translators, and the consultants who functioned as an editorial second opinion. This permanent out-of-house staff included, among others, Stina and Ingegerd. Stina, especially, took on numerous translation jobs for Rabén and Sjögren over the twenty-five years her older sister was the senior children’s book editor, while Anne-Marie Fries was drawn into the ranks of consultants and freelance editors, which also included Elsa Olenius. As Astrid wrote to Näs on February 27, 1947, the year after she had been employed by Hans Rabén: “Stina and I are translating for Rabén & Sjögren, and Anne-Marie is proofreading. ‘Just set to, just keep at it,’ I tell them.”
And keep at it they did. In the spring of 1955, even the youngest literary scion of the family tree—and her partner—were co-opted into working for the publisher. As her contented mother wrote in a letter to Hanna and Samuel August: “Karin and Carl Olof are currently translating a French book for Rabén & Sjögren. Soon I’ll probably have all my relatives busy in the publisher’s service.”
Her numerous and often extensive letters to other authors have become part of Astrid Lindgren’s mythology as a senior editor. She rarely put off a task, had a flair for constructive criticism, and helped many unfinished books and stymied authors to progress by suggesting changes and offering encouragement. The most difficult letters to write were rejections to aspiring authors. Astrid took a lot of care with these, having once been coldly rebuffed herself. As she remarked to Louise Hartung in the summer of 1960: “I’ve just written a three-meter-long letter to a poor dear who hasn’t quite got the command of language that she ought. . . . There’s nothing worse than robbing people of hope.”