I’ve become mother confessor to the entire population of Sweden. They call at every hour of the day and night, thinking I’m going to solve their problems with their divorce and their troubles with their children and their affairs and their court cases and on and on and on. I’ve lived—and still live, at times—as if in a dark well. I’ve become deeply depressed by it, and it’ll continue until the election on September 19 is over; I can’t even manage to see my children, and everything to do with my books and my films feels like it no longer concerns me; I’m deeply anxious about where my country is headed, I’m worrying myself to death because I can’t believe in our social democracy anymore, oh, I could talk about it forever. On top of that I’ve sunk even lower because of deaths, several deaths. Never have I experienced a spring like this. But in my heart I’m the same Astrid, and I hope you’re the same Rita, for without my friends I can’t live.
Pomperipossa and the Fat Cats
Nineteen seventy-six proved to be a turning point in Astrid Lindgren’s life, and these changes are reflected in her collection of stenographic pads in the National Library in Stockholm. Running an eye down the index for the 660 pads is like lifting the lid off Astrid Lindgren’s skull and peering inside, watching what was flowing through her brain each time a new book was created. From 1976 onward there is less and less fiction, other than the draft of Ronia the Robber’s Daughter. Instead, the number and frequency of political texts increase: letters, talks, manifestos, op-ed pieces, and responses to other articles. They are mainly shorter pieces, with titles like “Sermon of Peace in Frankfurt,” “Animal Husbandry,” “War, Peace, and Nuclear Power,” “Drug Abuse,” “Environmental Destruction,” “A Question for Olof Palme,” and “Letter to Gorbachev.” In type and scale they document the way in which Astrid Lindgren’s social-political engagement overtook her career as a writer—and her life as a retiree—in the second half of the 1970s. At the age of sixty-eight, Astrid Lindgren wrote to Anne-Marie Fries on July 20, 1976, as the Swedish election was coming to a climax. Astrid had decided to help overturn the Social Democratic government, the party she had voted for since the early 1930s.
When I’m not brooding about the fundamental nature of existence and death and that sort of thing, it’s only politics that’s whirling around in my head—it’s lucky the election’s on Sept. 19 and not later, or I’d be sent completely round the bend. I get more and more upset the more I really see and understand what the sossarna [the Social Democrats] are doing. We really do have a fateful election in store for us.
Astrid Lindgren’s showdown with the sossarna began on March 10, 1976, when the Expressen published a new Lindgren story quirkily titled “Pomperipossa in Monismanien.” According to the editor in chief, Bo Strömstedt, husband to Margareta Strömstedt and thus one of Astrid’s closest friends, the author called him up one day and announced: “You’re talking to Astrid Lindgren, former Social Democrat. I’ve written a story about Pomperipossa, who pays 102 percent in tax. Will you print it?” The cultured editor did indeed want to print it—his antisocialist paper was Sweden’s largest—thereby writing both political and literary history. As Strömstedt observed in a later article printed in the book Not a Bit of Filth (Ingen liten lort): “She was thirty-eight when she debuted as a writer. She was sixty-nine when she debuted as a political journalist. And she continued as such.”
“Pomperipossa in Monismanien” was about the Social Democrats’ tax policies in Sweden in 1976. The main character, an independent, commercially successful author, Pomperipossa, is instructed to pay a 102 percent tax rate by the government of Monismanien, and discovers that she might as well give up being an author. In the future she’ll have to live off welfare and go begging in the streets for money to buy a crowbar, so she can break into the national coffers and steal her money back. A tax rate of 102 percent—which Astrid Lindgren had in fact been asked to pay—was obviously an absurdity, the unfortunate result of a glitch in the recently rejigged Swedish tax system that hit hardworking self-employed people particularly hard. As the story points out, they weren’t entitled to the same exemptions as the rich and didn’t have such direct access to creative accountants. The whole mess arose from increasingly complicated tax legislation, and the true villains of the tale were therefore not the wealthy and affluent but the once socially responsible Social Democrats, who in Pomperipossa’s youth had done away with poverty and transformed Sweden into a welfare state based on freedom and equality: “What’s gotten into them? thought Pomperipossa in her dark nook. Are these really the wise men I so admired? The men I thought so much of? What are they trying to create—a society as wrong as possible? Oh, you pure, blossoming Social Democrats of my youth, what have they done with you? she thought (for now she was beginning to wax lyrical), how long shall your good name be abused to protect a high-handed, bureaucratic, unjust nanny state?”
This rather unusual op-ed had an impact Astrid Lindgren could scarcely have dreamt of when she called her friend at the Expressen six months before the election. It proved to be a milestone in Swedish history. After forty-four unbroken years in power, in September 1976 the Social Democrats had to submit to a nonsocialist coalition led by Thorbjörn Fälldin. It has since become part of Swedish political lore that Astrid Lindgren was one of the contributing factors to this systemic shift. After the election, when the author was presented with this claim by the media, she liked to respond with a story set in London during the Blitz, when a large building collapsed and the emergency services were looking for survivors. Suddenly they heard crazed laughter coming from the ruins, and found an old woman sitting in the remains of her bathroom. When they asked what was so funny, she replied, “Ha, ha, ha—I pulled the chain and the whole thing came down around my ears!”
At this point it’s worth noting that Astrid Lindgren—ha, ha, ha—pulled the chain fourteen or fifteen times in the run-up to the election on September 19, each time hard and each time in the Expressen, where prime column space was at her disposal. Her purpose, like that of the newspaper, was to put the boot into Olof Palme’s Social Democratic government, even though Astrid still felt herself to be a Social Democrat at heart.
Sträng’s Blunders
It was finance minister Gunnar Sträng who ended up getting saddled with the Pomperipossa problem. Sträng had been a minister for twenty-one years and was considered the Grand Old Man of the administration, so naturally it fell to him to explain the 102 percent tax rate, which for ordinary citizens symbolized the explosive surge in taxation in Sweden during the 1960s and 1970s. He should simply have apologized and adjusted the legislation without further ado, but in advance of the vote, having not lost an election for thirty years, the experienced politician committed one tactical blunder after the next.
The same day as the story came out in the Expressen, he brushed off Pomperipossa/Lindgren with a chauvinistic remark about her limited talent for arithmetic and ignorance of issues of taxation. Sträng’s rudeness proved the spark that made the political activist inside Astrid Lingdren flare up. Within twenty-four hours she had responded on the radio, and as always over the airwaves she was quick and crystal clear. With a deft flick of the wrist, she turned the minister’s arrogance against him: “Gunnar Sträng has always been good at telling fairy-tales, but he’s never learned much arithmetic. We ought to switch jobs, he and I.”
Four days later—March 15, 1976—Astrid fired another salvo in what had already become a national debate. From her base camp at the Expressen, she sent an open letter to the finance minister: “Dear Gunnar Emanuel Sträng, Do you know what life is like for small tradespeople up and down the country right now?”
Her tone was sarcastic, ironic, derisive in places, but never malicious. A new and for many Swedes completely unknown side of the jovial, sweet-natured, cheery Astrid Lindgren was coming to light. The children’s book author had shed her artist’s cloak and found her voice as a political agitator, taking up the cudgels on behalf of the people—in the people’s own langua
ge—against “the head honcho” (Gunnar Sträng) and his administration, who had to understand that they represented the nation: “This isn’t about Pomperipossas earning millions, it’s about countless small craftsmen and tobacconists and hairdressers and florists and farmers and lots of other independent workers you’re taxing until the blood squeezes out from under their nails.”
New, clever articles by Astrid Lindgren followed in the Expressen in March and April, including a response to an opinion piece by Social Democrat Nancy Eriksson, which painted Gunnar Sträng—who was one year older than sixty-eight-year-old Astrid Lindgren (and sixty-eight-year-old Nancy Eriksson)—as a little boy. Even the headline took on a feminist tone that verged on the insolent: “Astrid, 68, answers Nancy, 68, and also, sort of, little Gunnar.” Yet Sträng was reaping what he’d sown. Farther down Astrid’s response to Nancy Eriksson, she mentioned perhaps his biggest blunder of the spring: comparing her to the populist politician Mogens Glistrup. Glistrup had set up the Progress Party, a protest party based around its leader’s anarchistic, antisocial ideas about tax, which would later earn him a lengthy spell in prison. What was Sträng thinking? Much could be said about Astrid Lindgren, but she was neither antisocial nor suspected of tax evasion.
Among the many Swedes who waded into the Pomperipossa discussion, there were naturally some who supported the finance minister and defended his insinuations about Glistrup. For a children’s book author with astronomic sales figures and a dizzyingly high income to fling herself so passionately into a debate about tax legislation, she must have some sort of financial ulterior motive. This was precisely the argument Astrid tried to combat in her response to Nancy Eriksson and Gunnar Sträng on April 8 in the Expressen: “I might even succeed in convincing you [Nancy] that I’m not having this Pomperipossa debate for my own sake. I’ve got something to tell you: I’m afraid of money, I don’t want money, I don’t want lots of things and possessions, I don’t want the power money can give, because it corrupts almost as much as political power. But I don’t think anybody, whoever that might be, should have to go out and steal so they can scrape together the money to pay their tax bill.”
For the majority of the Swedish populace, the sound of Pomperipossa/Lindgren’s voice was hugely liberating, and the beginnings of a genuinely popular movement directed against more than just the Social Democrats’ tax policies seemed to be in the offing. Letters poured into the editorial offices of the Expressen and through the mail slot at Dalagatan. Astrid Lindgren thanked her readers for all their positive messages in another article, in which she also took the opportunity to take to task a male journalist who had asked whether there were any women writing to Mrs. Lindgren about tax policy: “Have I heard from any women? Ha! If only he knew how many smart, clear-sighted, indignant, funny, and fierce women I’ve encountered, both in letters and on the phone. When it comes to the women of Monismanien, the words of the folklorist hold true: ‘Women are tough and strong as donkeys, and bake good bread with many currants, but if they’re baited they’ll immediately go on the attack.’ Precisely! So duck, boys at the Chancellery! The women are cocking their pistols. The attack will come in September! Trust Pomperipossa.”
And in the Chancellery, where the prime minister’s office was located, there was profound unease about this development in the duel between the finance minister and the author. Couldn’t Sträng handle her? As Henrik Berggren explains in his biography of Olof Palme, the prime minister had originally wanted the election campaign to be about employment, industrial democracy, and family policy, before Astrid Lindgren suddenly sprang out of nowhere and threw a wrench in the works. It didn’t help that a number of countries overseas, usually so admiring of Sweden and its welfare model, got wind of the story about the children’s book author—a grandmother—waging war against a government that had been in power for half a century. Global publications like Time, Newsweek, and Reader’s Digest published articles with headlines like “Sweden’s Surrealistic Socialism” and “Utopia’s Dark Side.” Among the foreign horror stories was that of Ingmar Bergman, who in January 1976 was arrested by plainclothes police officers in the middle of rehearsals for The Dance of Death, accused of fiddling his taxes. Bergman was cleared by spring, but as a result he decided to leave his homeland in April 1976.
“The People’s Home”—the Social Democrats’ Edenic concept—was coming under heavy fire from both inside and outside Sweden. International Workers’ Day was approaching, and again Gunnar Sträng misjudged popular sentiment regarding the Pomperipossa affair. On May 1 he used his speeches at Helsingborg and Malmö to trivialize Lindgren’s and Bergman’s significance for the election: “Those who believe that the currently topical names Astrid Lindgren and Ingmar Bergman can be used as weapons against Social Democracy in the election are mistaken. These ‘circumstances’ have no significance for the campaign.”
How wrong he was! Yet on one point in his Mayday comments about the Pomperipossa business, Sträng was right: “We have a vociferous opposition.” Caricaturists were having a field day. The most popular motif was to put a slender Astrid Lindgren, clad as Pippi Longstocking, her braids sticking out anarchically, juggling a stubborn, round-as-a-ball finance minister. Sträng didn’t get much chance to regain his balance: Four times between May 11 and June 2, Astrid Lindgren published fresh articles in the Expressen, including new polemics and deft answers to readers’ letters, in which her fundamental message was repeated again and again: “The Social Democrats have let me down, and everybody else who dreamt of living in a just and fair People’s Home.” Around the same time, the magazine Veckans Affärer published a major interview with Astrid Lindgren, in which she responded to questions about her motivations and reasons for waging this campaign in the Expressen:
Why are you—or, indeed, have you been—a Social Democrat?
I’ll be a democrat for as long as I live. But, as I see it, those currently in power are no longer defending democracy, and might as well be called the Social Bureaucratic Party.
Can you be a Social Democrat without socialism being your goal?
Socialism carried to its logical conclusion requires a dictatorship, and I’m not fond of dictatorships.
Do you feel you’re being punished?
No, I don’t feel I’m being punished. It’s just infuriating when Sträng compares me to Glistrup. If I’m Glistrup, then Sträng’s the archangel Gabriel, a strident shi—no, what am I saying . . . a shining white creature of light and rare purity. And I don’t think he is! Although he does have many good sides.
Democracy for Dummies
Summer came, and it was time for Astrid to take a break in the archipelago, gathering her strength after a turbulent spring in the big city. In August, however, she picked up where she had left off: with an open letter, “To a Social Democrat,” which hit the front page of the Expressen on August 31, 1976. Three weeks before the date of the election. It was a long and emotional appeal to all the professed Social Democrats who planned to vote for the party again, stirring them to mutiny with the words: “Democracy means taking turns in power.” The letter was signed by “Astrid Lindgren, former Social Democrat—now just a democrat.” It took up a whole spread in the tabloid, the leftover space on the two pages adorned with a portrait of Pippi Longstocking in Ingrid Vang Nyman’s classic depiction. Astrid Lindgren’s art had now become unequivocally political, and in column after column she castigated the Social Democrats’ moral decay and hunger for power. Every speechwriter in parliament must have envied the writer her linguistic skill. This was democratic criticism for dummies: “If it’s true that politics is the art of stopping people having a say in issues that concern them, then nobody has mastered the art better than the Swedish Social Democrats and their administration. They decide everything for us, where and how we live, what we eat, how our children should be raised, what we think, everything!”
What had happened to freedom, that core value of Social Democracy? asked Astrid Lindgren. If Social Democrat
brothers and sisters across the country didn’t change their minds and vote Palme’s government out of the Chancellery on September 19, Sweden would be ruled by a single-party power unrivaled in any European country west of the Iron Curtain.
These were strong words in a public debate that was already influencing voters, and it has since been said that Olof Palme blanched when he read the open letter in the Expressen, while the Social Democrats’ party secretary, Sten Andersson, simply shook his head in resignation.
“Pomperipossa has struck another blow in the middle of the election campaign’s final push,” echoed the media around September 1. The tone of the election had taken on a sharper edge, as always when a campaign comes down to the wire, and there was plenty of harsh criticism directed at Astrid Lindgren. Was she acting under orders from Strömstedt, the editor in chief, and the political strategists at the Expressen? The Örebro-Kuriren was one of several papers to view the author’s motives and credibility with suspicion: “Why is Astrid Lindgren writing this letter now? She has previously said she doesn’t want to participate further in the tax debate.” And in many other newspapers up and down the country, the lapsed Social Democrat attracted critical headlines like “Author of Fairy-Tales Despises Voters” (Västerbottens Folkblad), while fellow author—and Social Democrat—Max Lundgren wrote a feature for the newspapers Arbetet and Aftonbladet entitled “You’re Childish, Astrid!” in which he questioned Lindgren’s judgment: “You’ve turned into a reactionary, Astrid! All that’s left of your childish charm is the childishness. . . . Your words, Astrid, reflect terribly on you, not as a writer but as someone who believes they know the truth about us here in Sweden. Think how much you’ve underestimated people!”
Instead of responding to her colleague, Astrid Lindgren posed another question, three days before the election: Had anybody glimpsed any women involved in the Social Democrats’ campaign, which would soon be over and had centered mainly on nuclear power, to which the Social Democrats were favorably disposed? Once again, she hit the venerable old party where it hurt: