{"id":122060,"date":"2018-03-01T13:00:20","date_gmt":"2018-03-01T18:00:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=122060"},"modified":"2018-03-06T17:34:53","modified_gmt":"2018-03-06T22:34:53","slug":"astrid-lindgren-gutsy-creator-pippi-longstocking","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/03\/01\/astrid-lindgren-gutsy-creator-pippi-longstocking\/","title":{"rendered":"Astrid Lindgren, the Gutsy Creator of Pippi Longstocking"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Original art by\u00a0Ellis Rosen.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

In Jens Andersen\u2019s biography<\/a>, published this week in English by Yale University Press, Astrid Lindgren, the famed Swedish author of the Pippi Longstocking<\/em> series, is a Walden<\/em>-loving modern mind taken with loneliness. Lindgren, as\u00a0Andersen notes, believed\u00a0that we ought to learn to be solo artists at every stage of life. \u201cIf they\u2019ve never learned to be alone, people develop only weak and fragile defenses against the ways life decides to hurt them,\u201d she said. \u201cIt\u2019s almost the most important thing of all.\u201d Even love can barely renegotiate the fact of everyone\u2019s self-containment, when it can at all. Lindgren writes in a letter to her best friend, \u201cSuddenly, a person comes rushing up to you and says, \u2018We\u2019re kindred souls, we understand each other.\u2019 And inside you hear a voice saying with painful clarity, \u2018Like hell we do.\u2019 \u201d<\/p>\n

Lindgren was the eldest, dance-crazy daughter of farmers in a small town in southern Sweden. By 1924, at sixteen, she was dressing in slacks, jackets, ties, and caps and scissoring her blonde hair to boy length like the radical bachelorette in Victor Margueritte\u2019s La gar\u00e7onne<\/em> (a mode Scandinavian male columnists scorned as the \u201cApache cut\u201d). Her instinct for storytelling\u2014so evident to her teachers\u2014landed young Lindgren a gig as a trainee journalist at a local paper. There, the tomboy geared into temptress. She was not yet eighteen when her romance with the fifty-year-old married editor in chief resulted in pregnancy. \u201cI didn\u2019t know a scrap about contraceptive methods, so I never realized how dreadfully irresponsibly you behaved toward me,\u201d Lindgren wrote to him later. Elsewhere she explained, \u201cI wanted the baby but not the father.\u201d As her belly swelled, her hometown swirled with gossip, so Lindgren left for Stockholm. \u201cI threw myself out!\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

She lodged at a boardinghouse, took classes in stenography and typing, and met with a female lawyer, who helped Lindgren arrange to have her baby in Copenhagen (at a private maternity center that would issue a birth certificate without the father\u2019s name). The son was placed in a happy foster home until Lindgren was able to recoup him\u00a0three years later.<\/p>\n

By 1941, Lindgren was married to the office manager of the Royal Automobile Club, another former boss, and had a seven-year-old daughter named Karin as well. That winter, when her daughter\u00a0was laid up with pneumonia, Lindgren\u00a0started telling her stories about \u201cthe strongest girl in the world.\u201d Karin called her \u201cPippi.\u201d Pippilotta Delicatessa Windowshade Mackrelmint Ephraim\u2019s Daughter Longstocking would be just one among the gutsy loners in Lindgren\u2019s oeuvre, but she is the character who has stuck to our ribs worldwide. The first of the three Pippi books was published in 1945 to nearly universal praise for liberating the child\u2019s psyche. (Though one important reviewer, an alarmed Freudian, trashed the character as \u201cpsychotic.\u201d)<\/p>\n

Pippi is a freckly Swede, aged nine. She has Herculean strength (enough to lift a horse), carrot-colored hair, and an anarchic spirit. She plaits her hair into pigtails like handlebars and lets her spirit rip, and that is her prerogative. Pippi\u2019s mother died when she was in infancy and her father, a ship captain, is not there. She lives by herself with a pet monkey. She cooks messily and cleans messily and does not attend school or observe a bedtime. Policemen tried to put her into foster care once, but she pulled them into a game of tag, and when two other men attempted to burglarize her house, she made them dance with her. The girl drinks coffee. She has, on occasion, gobbled poisonous fungi. \u201cDon\u2019t you worry about me,\u201d Pippi says. \u201cI\u2019ll always come out on top.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t know how many interpretations of Pippi Longstocking I have been offered over the years,\u201d Lindgren recounted at a Library of Congress talk in 1982. She swore she hadn\u2019t meant<\/em> anything by a kid who was not dependent, mannerly, or shrinking, but Pippi, Andersen points out, was an early baby grrrl, born to a mother-author who went against the grain of the reigning seen-and-not-heard school. Lindgren was switched on to avant-garde interwar and postbellum ideas about raising children and writing for them. The family\u2019s flat looked out on a park, which was, as Andersen puts it, a \u201cpsychological laboratory.\u201d Lindgren, watching the interactions between adults and children, was shocked by how the former \u201cbrowbeat\u201d and \u201ctrampled on\u201d the latter. As a mother of two, she said, \u201cI took their side against myself.\u201d As an author, she eschewed sermonizing, engaged the child\u2019s internal world and used their voice, something Hans Christian Andersen\u2014the subject of another biography by Jens Andersen<\/a>\u2014did first, about a century earlier, when Romanticism blew across Europe after the Napoleonic Wars.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Lindgren in 1960.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

Pippi Longstocking was not dear to me. In fact, I barely knew her, and not at all in book form. Sometimes, I would catch Astrid Lindgren\u2019s Pippi Longstocking<\/em> when the animated series aired on Cartoon Network in the late nineties. Pippi survived that adaptation true to text: she was obviously from the same tribe as Anne of Green Gables or Eliza in Nickelodeon\u2019s The Wild Thornberrys<\/em>. (Those girls also wore fiery hair in ropes and got around in practical boots.) Pippi shared DNA with Louisa May Alcott\u2019s Jo March, Beverly Cleary\u2019s Ramona Quimby, and Roald Dahl\u2019s Matilda Wormwood\u2014but she seemed like Mark Twain\u2019s Huckleberry Finn or James Barrie\u2019s Peter Pan most of all. In the original English-language edition, printed in 1950, Pippi, who is embossed in lingonberry on a milk-white cover, wears a nightgown and brandishes a rapier with one hand as she draws a pistol with the other. \u201cI\u2019m going to be a pirate when I grow up,\u201d she announces in the last pages. It isn\u2019t unfathomable to think that she could become Lisbeth Salander, the fierce young hacker from Stieg Larsson\u2019s Millennium series, who dyed her Titian mane black. And yet, Pippi is a dove for whom violence is not an option.<\/p>\n

Lindgren experienced World War II from the capital of a neutral country. She had started to journal in 1939, at the war\u2019s outbreak, and her wartime diaries, published in English<\/a> in 2016, blend normal household news with disturbing clips about the conflict. She had a secret job, self-described as \u201cdirty,\u201d as a reader in the censorship department of the Central Post Office, and sometimes, overwhelmed, heart-sorry, Lindgren rehashed the\u00a0content from the thousands of letters in the pages of her diary. \u201cBut the Lindgren family\u2019s doing great!\u201d she noted blackly one day. They were safe and pretty well-off, dining or lunching on lobster, p\u00e2t\u00e9, purple cabbage, and eggs. \u201cI don\u2019t think the Germans are even bothering to deny that Jews are being exterminated,\u201d she wrote in the spring of 1944. In the midst of this, she was putting Pippi<\/em> down in the shorthand she had learned in the twenties.<\/p>\n

In the first cover letter to a major publisher Lindgren introduced her protagonist as \u201ca little \u00dc<\/em>bermensch.<\/em>\u201d It was \u201can inflammatory, adult, Nazified word,\u201d as Andersen points out, and Lindgren\u2019s impulse was to parody Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini as overgrown bullies. The publisher rejected torch-bearing Pippi<\/em> as \u201ctoo advanced.\u201d It was a smaller publishing house that snapped Pippi<\/em> up, <\/em>though not before they put through Lindgren\u2019s debut book, Confessions of Britt-Marie<\/em>, which also centered on an opinionated young lady. (Lindgren would later\u00a0work at her publishing house as a\u00a0part-time children\u2019s-book editor.) Pippi<\/em> was an instant success. In a joking tone, somewhere between discomfort with the celebrity and an I told you so, Lindgren later referred to Longstocking as a \u201cnational nuisance.\u201d<\/p>\n

In her native Sweden, Lindgren came to border on spiritual advisor. She was a feminist (though she never called herself such); an advocate for animals, workers, and the environment; and, come 1952, a solitary widow who would decline to remarry. Still, she always attempted to answer the piles of mail from children, parents, royals, and diplomats. She passed in 2002.<\/p>\n

Lindgren\u2019s own daughter was anxious about growing up\u2014she developed an awareness that she\u2019d need to learn to support herself, that she\u2019d have to watch her mother slowly but surely age out of this world. Those fears became the subjects of her prayers at night, and Lindgren worked them into the conclusion of the Pippi<\/em> trilogy. At the end of the third book, the heroine is sitting alone at her kitchen table; she looks fixedly at a candle flame, the same orange-red as her hair. Eventually, she blows it out. Pippi isn\u2019t afraid of anything, not even the dark.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Chantel Tattoli is a freelance journalist. She\u2019s contributed to\u00a0the\u00a0<\/em>New York Times Magazine,\u00a0<\/em>VanityFair.com<\/a>, the\u00a0<\/em>Los Angeles Review of Books, and\u00a0<\/em>Orion\u00a0and\u00a0is at work on a cultural biography of Copenhagen\u2019s statue of the Little Mermaid.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

Ellis Rosen<\/a>, who contributed original art to this piece, is\u00a0a cartoonist and illustrator living in Brooklyn, New York. His work has appeared in\u00a0<\/em>The New Yorker,<\/em>\u00a0The Paris Review Daily,\u00a0and\u00a0<\/em>The Millions.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  In Jens Andersen\u2019s biography, published this week in English by Yale University Press, Astrid Lindgren, the famed Swedish author of the Pippi Longstocking series, is a Walden-loving modern mind taken with loneliness. Lindgren, as\u00a0Andersen notes, believed\u00a0that we ought to learn to be solo artists at every stage of life. \u201cIf they\u2019ve never learned to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":873,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[419],"tags":[2993,4220,8735,33131,21267,33134,3065,33132,33133,33130,27401],"class_list":["post-122060","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arts-culture","tag-astrid-lindgren","tag-hans-christian-andersen","tag-huckleberry-finn","tag-jens-andersen","tag-jo-march","tag-matilda-wormwood","tag-peter-pan","tag-pippilotta-delicatessa-windowshade-mackrelmint-ephraimsdaughter-longstocking","tag-ramona-quimby","tag-victor-margueritte","tag-world-war-2"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nAstrid Lindgren, the Gutsy Creator of Pippi Longstocking<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"At sixteen 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