The bond between the sisters continued to develop after Astrid, Stina, and Ingegerd left home, got married and had children. Then came the war, and Astrid suggested setting up a “letter circle” in order to maintain a conversation and sense of family cohesion, despite the terrible events unfolding in the wider world. On September 19, 1939, shortly after Germany invaded Poland, Astrid wrote to Stina and Ingegerd to propose her chain-letter idea:
Ideally the letters would be a reasonably continuous stream. And I think we should keep them and put them in a little archive at home at Näs—not because I think the letters will be literary pearls (well, mine will be, of course), but for fun. When we’re old it might be rather amusing to read about our earlier silliness. And if any of our offspring survive the “Untergang des Abendlandes,” they can read a bit about what the world was like in the days when Hitler was furnishing his German “lebensraum.” Like reading about Napoleon.
At the beginning of the war they promised to keep the letter circle going, and as elderly women they called each other every day until Ingegerd’s death in 1997. Astrid would talk to one sister in the morning and the other in the afternoon, and each time they began the conversation with a shared incantation: “Death Death Death . . .” All three had gone another twenty-four hours without bumping into the man with the scythe. Another day could be added to their already long lives.
Astrid’s grandniece Karin Alvtegen witnessed the close, lively bond between the sisters from the driver’s seat of her car when she ferried the sisters from Stockholm to Vimmerby and back again in November 1996, the year before Ingegerd’s death. It proved an exceptionally merry trip. The ladies may have been a little stiff in body and limb, recalled Alvtegen in one of the Astrid Lindgren Society’s newsletters from 2006, but their spirits were undimmed.
The three sisters in the 1930s, and in the 1990s. Still going strong and still close, they were connected no longer by a stream of letters but by daily telephone conversations in which Hanna and Samuel August’s daughters reassured each other that they were still alive. Ingegerd died in 1997, Astrid in January 2002, and Stina in December that same year.
“Over the course of the weekend I realized that better female role models could scarcely be found. And it struck me that not once while I was growing up did I ever hear any of them give an opinion on feminism or the lack of equal rights for women. It was as if the thought had never occurred to them that all people shouldn’t be treated as equals. What they did was simply to make room for themselves, as though it were the most natural thing in the world, and then they were treated accordingly. Instead of dividing the world up into ‘feminine’ and ‘masculine’ at any price, they chose to think ‘humanly.’”
Life and Play
“It goes so dizzyingly fast, and then it’s over,” said Astrid Lindgren, when she was asked to explain in April 1992 what human life was. The person asking was the journalist and critic Åke Lundqvist, who was doing an interview for a series of articles about death in the Dagens Nyheter. To emphasize and illustrate her words, Astrid had made a swift motion with her hand and blown a puff of air, as though extinguishing a candle. Human life was just as fleeting.
One book of the Old Testament that Astrid Lindgren often returned to was Ecclesiastes, which takes a profoundly realistic view of the way in which the world is structured, and how it is perceived by human beings. Famous and much quoted, not least by world-weary authors, are the first lines, which in the New American Standard Bible run as follows: “The words of the Preacher, the son of David, king in Jerusalem. ‘Vanity of vanities,’ says the Preacher, ‘Vanity of vanities! All is vanity.’” In the most-thumbed of the six Bibles that stood on the bookshelf above Astrid Lindgren’s bed—a Swedish translation from 1917—the word used is “fåfäng-lighet,” vanity, in the sense of something without content or purpose.
This was how Astrid Lindgren understood and used the word, using it in several letters to Louise Hartung, including in one dated December 4, 1956: “Now, my little Louise, I want to tell you that for me, deep down, the words of Ecclesiastes hold true: “All is vanity and striving after wind.” And in an undated letter from 1961, she concluded with the words: “Louise, one shouldn’t write letters when one is downhearted and sad, but I’m doing it anyway, because I want you to write and comfort me. Think of something good to say about why we’re alive, if you can come up with anything. I think everything is vanity and striving after wind, but maybe that’s because the sun never shines in this dark country.”
All is vanity and striving after wind. These exact words expressed the middle-aged Astrid Lindgren’s fundamental, existential perception of life: something fleeting, transient, unstable, and occasionally meaningless; a big, heavy, static emptiness that echoed throughout the whole of existence. Yet Lindgren rarely dwelt on the thought for long, and her complex philosophy of life hinged on this very tension—as a girl, in middle age, and as an elderly woman, when she no longer felt as sure of her relationship with God as she once had. Over the years she frequently acknowledged the Christian legacy of her childhood home, usually with a sense of distance and humor. In an interview in the Expressen on December 6, 1970, for instance, she explained that as a child she had believed God was an old man in the sky to whom you prayed. To the journalist’s follow-up question—“Do you still believe in God?”—she replied: “No, frankly I don’t. But if my father were alive I’d never dare say that, because it would make him very sad. Perhaps it’s shameful of me to disavow God, since I still thank him so often and pray to him when I’m in despair.”
In the Åke Lundqvist interview, Lindgren remarked that toward the end of her life she had acquired a more inquisitive relationship with God: “I doubt my own doubt. Frequently.” Even though life is striving after wind, she explained, that doesn’t mean it’s nothing but emptiness and meaninglessness. Why not? Because nature has an order, declared Astrid, a method, which indicates that human existence has meaning. The journalist wasn’t about to get an unambiguous confession out of her, however; the old relativist refused to oblige: “How do flowers know they’re supposed to bloom in spring? How do birds know they’re supposed to sing? Scientists believe they can explain the whole of creation and the whole of human history. But I, I ask: how can everything be so methodical and regular? And how can it be that people are so preoccupied with religious thoughts? What is it that makes people that way? So I doubt my own doubt. Frequently.”
Toward the darker, graver end of Astrid Lindgren’s philosophy of life, we find her realization of its brevity and ephemerality, paired with a sense of humankind’s inevitable loneliness. This was a psychological-philosophical viewpoint she never abandoned. She expressed it many times throughout her life, as a young woman in letters to Anne-Marie Fries and as an older woman to the teenaged Sara Ljungcrantz, to whom Astrid once remarked: “Every single one of us is trapped in our loneliness. All people are lonely.” In middle age, in September 1961, she wrote to Louise Hartung in a similar vein: “When all is said and done, every single person is a lone little creature with no hope of leaning on another one.” Astrid Lindgren communicated this pessimistic perspective on the fundamental condition of humanity even in some of her children’s books, and rarely did she do so with more clarity than at the end of We on Seacrow Island, when the grown-up narrator steps forward and sounds, for a brief moment, almost like the Preacher in Ecclesiastes: “In dreams sometimes you rush around, searching. There’s someone you’ve got to find. And you’re in such a tremendous hurry. That’s true of life. You run around in fear, searching more and more anxiously, but you never find who you’re looking for. All is in vain.”
And yet it wasn’t. Or, as Astrid Lindgren wrote in letters to Anne-Marie, Elsa, Louise, Sara, and others: “Life is not so rotten as it seems.” These words were the necessary counterweight to melancholy, sadness, and “the common sorrow,” as she called it. For Astrid, sorrow was bound up with a sense of loneliness, and as a mature, older person she had a virtually ch
ronic need to live out this feeling.
The coherence and wholeness of Astrid Lindgren’s perspective on life hinged on the fact that amid all the nuisances, the disappointments, and the frustrations at striving after wind, there was also time for happiness, time for pleasure, time for poetry, time for love, and time for play. And who better to embody this capacity for presence in the now than children—and the child within adults? As Anders explains at the beginning of Bill Bergson and the White Rose Rescue: “Life was short, and what mattered was playing while you still could.”
This day, one life.
Life can be over in a single day, and a single day can feel like a lifetime. In its essence, Astrid Lindgren’s philosophy was about getting the most and best you could out of your brief time on earth. But how? In 1967 the women’s magazine Femina inquired how Astrid Lindgren could still seem so “ageless,” as the journalist put it, at the age of sixty. She replied:
I just live. . . . I always think the now is so exciting and rich in content that I don’t really have time to brood about what will happen next. I take each day’s knocks as they come. I think you should treat every day as if it’s the only one you’ve got. “This day, one life.” But now and again I feel there’s still so much I want, and I realize I won’t manage all of it. . . . I think, really, that life is a swiftly fleeting absurdity, and afterward comes the great silence. But the short span you’re here on earth you have to fill with things.
Birthday and Philanthropy
In 1997, fourteen days after her ninetieth birthday, Astrid Lindgren wrote a thank-you note to an old friend and colleague from the mail censorship office during the war: Lennart Kjellberg, a professor of Slavic languages. Rather than talk about the almost surreal birthday celebration and the fourteen sacks of mail hauled down from the post office at the corner of Dalagatan and Odengatan, Astrid wanted to discuss the old days at the office. Yet that, too, felt unreal. “Everything is so long ago now,” she concluded.
There had been an avalanche of interview requests from newspapers, TV stations, and radio channels across the world to mark the occasion. Two veteran reporters from Sveriges Radio were offered an audience, and it was a qualified success, as Karin Nyman recalls. There were several misunderstandings during the interview, and when Astrid was asked whether she’d had any particular linguistic-pedagogical purpose with her children’s books, her curt response was: “No, I couldn’t give a crap about that.” Those proved to be the national heroine’s last words on Sveriges Radio.
The grotesquely inordinate volume of letters she received on her birthday seemed almost to frighten Astrid Lindgren, who had always found birthdays a chore, though she would take part in the celebrations—within limits. Letters poured in from all corners of the world, and as in previous years, remembers Karin Nyman, Astrid was genuinely astonished by her fame and the unstinting adulation she received. In 1997, for instance, she was named Swede of the Year Abroad: “As I sat and read the day’s letters aloud, which were all about the crucial significance her books had had for people, my mother looked at me and said, ‘But don’t you think that’s odd?’ ‘Yeah,’ I said, because I did think so, and then I picked up the next letter. When she found out she had been named Swede of the Year Abroad, she laughed for two days at the absurdity of it, given how ‘ancient, half-deaf, and completely nutty’ she thought she was.”
On top of these many letters of praise, Astrid Lindgren received numerous begging letters and requests for financial help from private individuals and organizations in Sweden and abroad during the final twenty-five years of her life. The elderly Astrid Lindgren tried to stay matter-of-fact about them, but it wasn’t easy. She had so much empathy and sympathy for other people, like her character Mardie, who spontaneously gives her expensive golden heart to poverty-stricken Mia on Christmas Eve, since Mia’s only Christmas present is a ham donated to the family by the local charity: “It’s sad, thinks Mardie, and also strange, that Father Christmas comes to some families while others only get a visit from the poor-relief people. The ham is lovely, of course, but surely Mia could have gotten something else too, a proper Christmas present. Is there anything she could give Mia, Mardie wonders?”
Astrid Lindgren’s philanthropy was on such a large scale that she wasn’t aware of the full scope, and neither Kerstin Kvint—Astrid Lindgren’s private secretary—nor Karin Nyman is willing to hazard a guess as to how many millions of kronor she gave away to charitable causes or people in need over the years. After her death, Lena Törnqvist, her bibliographer, systematized the papers left to the author’s archive at the National Library, which included hundreds of thank-you letters regarding donations and financial aid. She believes the total sum is somewhere in the ballpark of ten million Swedish kronor, adjusted for inflation—more than a million dollars.
Lena Törnqvist can attest to the fact that Astrid Lindgren not only answered many letters and calls for help but also reacted spontaneously to the events, wars, natural disasters, and famines she saw on TV or heard about on the radio. Money would instantly be sent to the Red Cross or Save the Children, and a series of thank-you letters in the archive document the large sums she donated. In the 1970s these sums would often come to ten thousand kronor or more. “A huge amount of money in those days, which always prompted a personal letter of thanks from the chairman himself,” remarks Lena Törnqvist.
Many other idealistic organizations received regular support from Astrid Lindgren: BRIS (Children’s rights in society); Stockholms Stadsmission (help for the homeless and addicts), SOS Children’s Villages, Amnesty International, the Salvation Army, the World Wildlife Fund, Greenpeace, Svenska Afghanistankommittén (the Swedish committee for Afghanistan), and a range of similar institutions.
Refugee children had always been close to Astrid’s heart, and in 1996–97 she got involved in an asylum case relating to two Kurdish families with ten children, who after sixteen months staying in a church in Swedish Lapland had been roughly evicted and sent “home” to Turkey. The elder sister in one of the families, seventeen-year-old Rojda Sincari, had previously written to Astrid Lindgren and asked for help. The girl said that she had read Astrid Lindgren’s books in Kurdish, and that her teachers in Åsele called her Ronia. Astrid’s response to the Swedish authorities’ treatment of the two families was to financially guarantee Rojda’s and her cousin Jinda’s education, which meant that the girls could return to Scandinavia in 1997. Today Rojda is a dentist and doctor living in Sweden. As Kerstin Kvint explains: “That donation alone came to around half a million. It was probably the biggest single sum Astrid gave to a private individual she didn’t already know, but Astrid had a genuine, unfeigned goodness in her. She really wanted to help vulnerable people.”
For this reason she also gave money to handicapped children who needed rehabilitation, bought a horse for a girl from a socially disadvantaged background, and paid the hospital bills for an eastern European girl receiving treatment in Sweden because she couldn’t get suitable medical care in her home country. Back home in Vimmerby, Astrid contributed 250,000 kronor to help save a beautiful eighteenth-century building in the town center, which was on the verge of being torn down and replaced with a shopping mall. Then there were all the individual people she helped over the years with large or small amounts of cash. As early as the 1950s, poor families she heard about through friends and acquaintances would often receive a financial helping hand, while other people in varying degrees of distress could find help in Dalagatan if they spoke earnestly enough, and if they didn’t just write but actually called and cried on the phone line. As Karin Nyman explains: “She gave to individuals, of course, if they asked for money, but rather haphazardly and without a system. A young man came and asked to borrow 80,000 kronor to buy an apartment for himself and his girlfriend. He got it without much justification and never paid it back, of course. A single mother in Dalarna needed 50,000 to keep a roof over her children’s heads. Astrid’s method of dealing with these various pleas was neit
her especially considered nor wise. But I know the way she looked at it was this: here’s someone who badly needs money, turning to someone who clearly has a lot. But obviously not everybody who came and asked got some.”
What was the deeper purpose underlying Astrid Lindgren’s philanthropy? She rarely wanted any publicity for it, unless it served to spur those in power into action, as was the case with the two deported Kurdish families. Was it a form of indulgence, or symptomatic of the desperate instinct to care for others that Astrid herself called “abnormal”? Hardly. The true answer lies in a handwritten philosophical meditation among the author’s papers at the National Library, which was subsequently printed in the book The Meaning of Life:
“Life really is strange,” said the young daughter.
“Yes,” said her mother, “and it should be strange.”
“Why?” asked the daughter. “What is the meaning of life? Really?”
Her mother thought it over.
“I don’t know. Honestly! But Marcus Aurelius, if you know who that was, put it like this: Don’t live as though you had a thousand years ahead of you! Death hangs over your head. For as long as you live, for as long as you can—be good!”
Ah, Well
Astrid Lindgren eventually came to be as old as the grandfather in Noisy Village, who has the paper read aloud to him on his birthday and promises the children that war will never come to North Farm, Middle Farm, and South Farm. God will protect Noisy Village. Then he sighs, “ah, well,” which means he’s thinking of the days when he was young. Astrid did the same when she was past ninety, yet in her final years she never thought about what happened after Lasse’s death: those memories had abruptly disappeared.