If you want to write a harrowing book for children about how difficult and impossible it is to be a human being in our world, you have the right to do so. If you want to write about racial subjugation or class struggle, you have the right to do so. And if you just want to write a poem about a flowery island in the archipelago, you have the right to do that without necessarily having to think: now which words rhyme with waste water and oil spill? In short: freedom! For without freedom, the flowers of poetry will wither wherever they grow.
Astrid Lindgren’s fundamental ideology, including in art, originated in the culturally radical movements of the interwar era, particularly trends within modern pedagogy and child psychology, which explored the notion of “the whole person.” Children’s books should do the same, she felt. Instead of protecting and lecturing children they should be challenging them, thereby including young people among humankind as a whole. Rarely did she put it as clearly as in an interview in the Dagens Nyheter on September 8, 1959, when she stated that children’s book authors should, as a matter of principle, write about whatever they wanted, including issues that were taboo and suppressed:
If it’s done in an artistically defensible way, a story should be able to speak earnestly about death, and children simply have to cope with that. Death and love are the biggest things humanity experiences, and they concern all ages. I don’t want to frighten children out of their wits, but just like adults they need to be shocked by art. You’ve got to shake a soul that’s used to being asleep. Everybody needs to cry and be scared every once in a while.
By making this sort of pronouncement in newspapers and magazines, constantly underscoring the child’s sovereignty and emphasizing children’s literature as a distinct art form, Astrid Lindgren proved colossally significant for the artistic self-confidence of a generation of Swedish children’s book authors, who both before and after the war fought for reasonable fees and access to an authors’ association.
Also of immense symbolic value was Olle Holmberg’s 1954 review of Mio, My Son in the Dagens Nyheter, which brought the children’s book into the realm of high culture. Never before in Swedish literary history had a professor of literature treated a children’s book on an equal artistic footing with books for adults. Well before publication, the author had been laying the groundwork in letters and conversations with the critic. After a lunch in Dalagatan for Holmberg and his wife in September 1954, Astrid had encouraged the professor to prise the review assignment out of Eva von Zweigbergk’s hands. A letter from Astrid to Olle Holmberg and his wife Maj, dated September 16, 1954, makes clear that he had already read the first proofs of Mio, My Son, and during the lunch at Dalagatan he expressed his enthusiasm for the book. Something the writer had hoped for, of course, when she sent him the proofs: “I’m pleased as Punch that Olle says he likes Mio. No fall rain can dampen my happiness about it. . . . Maybe I didn’t say it clearly enough on the phone. I’d a million times rather have a review by Olle than one by E.v.Z., but she might get spiteful and make things awkward.”
In the wake of this historically and culturopolitically important review, Olle Holmberg worked over the following decade to make Astrid Lindgren a member of De Nio—a literary academy founded in 1913 in Stockholm, whose purpose from the start had been to promote literature, peace, and women’s issues. The members of De Nio (“the nine”) were chosen for life; four places were always reserved for women and four for men. In 1963, while Holmberg was chairman of De Nio, Astrid Lindgren was voted in, a decision that had great symbolic significance for Swedish children’s and young-adult literature. Not just anybody could be voted into the gender-balanced society, of which both Ellen Key and Selma Lagerlöf had been members. Among the eight current ones were several faces Astrid knew extremely well. Apart from Holmberg in chair no. 1, in chair no. 2 was the lawyer Eva Andén, who had helped young Astrid Ericsson get to Copenhagen in 1926, and in no. 9 was John Landquist, who in 1946 had tried to kill off Pippi with his hatchet job criticizing the book and its author.
Lindgren took every opportunity and platform at her disposal to use her national profile and position in Swedish cultural life to strike a blow for the usefulness of children’s books and for the importance of reading for future democracies inside and outside Scandinavia. In doing so she wasn’t addressing a literary academy but speaking directly to parents, schoolteachers, trendsetters, and political decision makers, asking the polemical question, “Do we need children’s books?”
Astrid Lindgren had plenty of examples of the power and usefulness of books in the hands of a child from when Lasse and Karin were young, and later from spending time with other children. When, in February 1960, she once again took her grandchild Mats on a winter vacation to Dalarna, she realized that literature could close a protective ring around a child, creating a parent-free zone. As Astrid wrote to Louise Hartung on March 6, 1960, from Långbersgården in Tällberg: “Mats reads a lot, and when he reads he hears nothing—you have to shout pretty loudly to get any reaction whatsoever. I said to him, ‘You don’t listen to what people say to you when you’re reading.’ To which he answered, ‘No, and that’s a good thing. When Mamma’s angry it’s better if I just sit and read.’ I’m so very glad that children find ways to cope with die verdammten Erwachsenen [the goddamn grown-ups].”
Astrid Lindgren never lost faith in the conviction that children’s ability to create new worlds in their imaginations would eventually come to save civilization. She mentioned this in her famous acceptance speech in 1978, when she received the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade. The first time Astrid Lindgren got the international media talking about her humanitarian message, however, was in 1958, when she was awarded the Hans Christian Andersen Medal in Florence, and warned against letting books lose ground against modern media like film and TV, whose influence, she believed, made children passive, or was perhaps even degenerative:
There is no medium that can replace the book as fertile soil for the imagination. Contemporary children watch films, listen to the radio, watch television, read comics—all this can be amusing, certainly, but it doesn’t have much to do with imagination. A child alone with a book creates his or her own images somewhere in the secret places of the soul, which surpass everything else. These kinds of images are necessary for humanity. The day children’s imaginations are no longer capable of creating them will be the day humanity grows poor.
Seacrow Island by Helicopter
In the years 1962–64, with books like Karlsson Flies Again, Emil in the Soup Tureen, and We on Seacrow Island, Astrid Lindgren took her writing to new heights. Quite literally: in September 1962 she took a long and noisy flight that even Karlsson with his propeller would have envied. Louise got a full report in a letter dated October 4: “The other day I flew in a helicopter to Furusund. I’m writing a script for a film set on the archipelago, and the production company transported me by helicopter to the islands at the far end to see where the film will be set. Afterward they dropped me off at the jetty in Furusund. I absolutely loved flying by helicopter. You feel like a bird, hovering over the treetops and the archipelago, and the red foliage on all the trees was fantastically beautiful from above.”
While the producer Olle Nordemar and the director Olle Hellbom puzzled over choosing an island, finding a friendly St. Bernard, and picking seven of the eight thousand children who had shown up to the casting call, Astrid Lindgren began a new and challenging writing process. It would end up spanning eight months, forcing her to deviate from her normal working rhythm of books and film scripts: this was a TV series consisting of thirteen twenty-eight-minute episodes, and shooting for the six-hour-long epic would begin before its author had even come close to finishing. Astrid had to write some of the later episodes first, so that the crew could film the spectacular Christmas episode before icy winter conditions made it impossible for the boat from Stockholm to reach the island’s jetty. Instead, they set down the equipment and passengers on the edge of the ice, a hundred yards from so
lid ground.
This stressful phase of writing—when “the film boys” Nordemar and Hellbom kept asking for instant changes or additions—alongside her usual editing work, became an unforgettable year in Astrid Lindgren’s artistic life. In Berlin, Louise could follow along via her friend’s many letters:
November 6, 1962: I’m working on my Seacrow Island film. It’s a big job, and it’s going very slowly—I never have enough time to settle down to work on it.
February 2, 1963: The work is fun. I’ve begun to thrive on this fantasy island, Seacrow Island, and with the people there. They’re really pleasant to be around, I think, but what they’ll become once a director’s gotten his hands on them I don’t know—might lead to some nasty surprises. At the moment I’m busy with Christmas on Seacrow Island. A little child puts out a bowl of porridge for the gnomes, and when night falls over the houses and all the lights are out, a fox comes and sticks his snout in the porridge. If it turns out the way I imagine it, it’ll be really charming, but it probably won’t. I should probably be writing a book—at least then nobody will come along and change anything.
March 26, 1963: The winter episode on Seacrow Island has been recorded, with the boat at the edge of the ice and everything. How it’ll turn out, I don’t know. I just know I’m working really hard, and that all the episodes, i.e., the scripts, must be finished by May 10. Voj, voj.
The Finno-Swedish exclamation “voj, voj” (roughly “oh dear, oh dear”) illustrated Astrid’s discomfort with the tight production schedule, which involved many different people, an infinite assortment of technical equipment, and such unpredictable factors as the weather. Her skepticism proved unfounded, however. A fabulous script, a number of good performances by the actors, a professional film crew, and, not least, the weather—everything came together to create one of the national public broadcaster Sveriges Television’s most successful series ever, We on Seacrow Island. A film in thirteen chapters, it brought the nation together every Saturday evening at seven o’clock from mid-January to mid-April 1964, and it was generally perceived as an homage to Swedishness and the Swedish archipelago. Viewers were charmed by its nostalgia and idyllic summer-holiday-at-the-seaside atmosphere. The series earned gigantic ratings and won widespread artistic recognition. Maria Johansson as Tjorven became Sweden’s biggest TV personality, while Torsten Lilliecrona, in the role of butter-fingered father and author Melker, won an award for best male actor. In 1964, We on Seacrow Island was selected as Best TV Program of the Year.
Sweden wasn’t allowed to keep the TV series to itself: its neighbors wanted to watch too. The consensus was that the TV series—to use one of Tjorven’s oaths—was “pretty infernally good.” Even in flat, archipelago-deficient Denmark, children and adults could identify with the sense of community in We on Seacrow Island. This pan-Scandinavian enthusiasm pleased the author. She would happily confess that she felt Swedish to her marrow, but usually remembered to add that nationalism was alien to her. Nature in Sweden should be perceived beneath a Scandinavian sky, and in the light of Scandinavian fairy-tale traditions, as she explained in the Dagens Nyheter in September 1959:
There’s something in me that loves Swedishness. There are so many wonderful, enchanting fairy-tales in the world, but I have my roots in Swedish nature. I would never be able to live abroad. I’d miss the earth, I’d miss the scent of Sweden. Scandinavian folk tales are essential, with all their folk wisdom and nature, like shadows among the elves, nixes, wood spirits, and brownies. All people from Sweden, Norway, and Finland have something in common: the poetry of bright nights. In the background there will be a path through a pine forest, a thrush’s song, a sunset.
Nordemar and Hellbom selected the small island of Norröra for filming, three nautical miles east of Furusund. Astrid Lindgren borrowed the name Seacrow Island (Saltkråkan) from the family sailboat, which she had bought from Hans Rabén, and which was moored at Furusund beside the family’s skiff Syltkrukan. After Lasse was given his speedboat, Mio, in the 1960s, the family had a veritable fleet, which was used frequently in the summer months when the children and their growing families stayed at the other two Furusund houses Astrid had acquired.
The atmosphere in the Lindgren household during the bright nights of the early 1960s, as well as old gossip and tall tales absorbed over twenty-five summers on the archipelago, became woven into We on Seacrow Island, which was subsequently reworked into the longest novel Astrid Lindgren ever wrote: 360 pages spanning one year, summer to summer. The omnipotent narrator weaves in and out of the thoughts, dreams, and longings of all the island’s inhabitants. Even the animals on the island are ascribed human feelings and comprehension.
The thirteen episodes in the TV series and chapters in the novel are built on the schism between urban and rural life, with which Astrid Lindgren lived her whole adult life. On the one hand there was her stressful, burdensome everyday life in “Ninevet,” as she was fond of calling Sweden’s capital in letters to family and friends. It was an expression that stemmed from Samuel August, and referred to the Middle Eastern metropolis God laid to waste in the Old Testament because of the populace’s ungodly behavior. On the other there were the peaceful vacations and old-fashioned rhythm of working she adopted on Furusund, beneath the open sky, close to nature, near woods, fields, and sea.
The Summer with Malin
The restorative effect nature always had on city-dwelling Astrid Lindgren was also felt—in both body and soul—by the Melkerson family in We on Seacrow Island. When the four children and their single father arrive at the farthest jetty on the archipelago route, they’re a little alarmed by the damp weather, the apparently deserted island, and the ramshackle cabin their naïve artist father has rented for a year. It doesn’t look much like a summer idyll, but it soon proves a paradise that has a permanent effect on all five Melkersons. Nineteen-year-old Malin, who assumes the role of mother to her three younger brothers and clumsy father, finds the love of her life on Seacrow Island. The two older boys meet their ideal playmates, the youngest, Pelle, gains a beloved pet, and Melker finds the most inspiring place to work any writer could imagine. What kind of literary work is he constantly tinkering with in Snedkergården? The reader never learns. Perhaps a novel about living happily on a small island in the archipelago, a motherless family coming back to life, and people and animals interacting with each other naturally and freely? That’s what Astrid Lindgren imagined, anyway: a kind of robinsonade about big-city folk arriving on an island that turns out to be populated by all sorts of people at various stages of life, with a clear balance of temperaments, character types, and genders.
This fantasy island in the Stockholm archipelago was the closest Astrid Lindgren ever came to depicting a matriarchy. An hour’s sail from the patriarchy on the mainland, among remote prehistoric cliffs, strong, dynamic women like Märta, Tjorven, Stina, Teddy, Freddy, and Malin blossomed among soft, sensitive men like Nisse, Björn, Peter, Melker, Pelle, Johan, and Niklas. Tjorven’s big sisters, the twins Teddy and Freddy, are described in the novel as tomboys, and referred to several times as “amazons.” Typical of the gender and power balance in the book is a lengthy passage in which Seacrow Island’s vibrant core, seven-year-old Tjorven, is stranded on a rock with Pelle, a city-bred boy of the same age. Hardly have they reached land before Tjorven assigns Pelle a supporting part as Man Friday, while she herself—bypassing democratic discussion—assumes the role of Robinson Crusoe in a pinafore: “She had decided to be a Robinson with an altogether normal, cozy household, one who ate wild strawberries for dessert. She could see them growing thickly in the grass outside. If Friday had been an ordinary person, he could have taken Teddy’s old fishing rod, which stood outside the shack, and gone down to the lake to catch a few perch.”
But Pelle, fond of animals and protective of the environment, feels sorry for the fish and the live bait. Thus the pattern continues throughout the novel: with a few gruff exceptions, the male characters frequently reveal their feminine si
des, often regarding environmental issues. The novel indirectly raises this particular topic when Snedkergården unexpectedly finds itself in danger of being bought and modernized by a destructive capitalist, who arrives in a large, polluting speedboat. Astrid Lindgren’s interest in environmental issues is evident in an interview she gave while working on the script in 1963. In it she described the stressful process of writing, playfully adding that she had to get a move on “before the environment is destroyed by plastic boats and other so-called technological advances.”
That Astrid Lindgren was ahead of the curve of various paradigm shifts in the mentality of 1960s Scandinavia is clear from the atmosphere of freedom, tolerance, and respect that surrounds all the children on the island. All the people on Seacrow Island—no matter their age or gender—are allowed to be themselves, to feel, think, and, to a large extent, do what they want. Much of what takes place on the island over the course of two summers and a Christmas vacation is governed by this principle. In addition to the straightforward narrative, the novel includes various undated entries from Malin’s diary. July 18 is the only date specified, but it’s an important day, when Melker Melkerson repeats to his family the following words of wisdom: “This day, one life.” The same words, a quotation from the eighteenth-century Swedish poet Thomas Thorild, had made such a deep impression on seventeen-year-old Astrid Lindgren in Ellen Key’s home in 1925. At the breakfast table, Melker explains to his children what the words mean: “It means you should live today as if that’s all you’ve got. That you should pay attention to every single moment and feel that you’re really living.”