Memories of other lives

Walking in and around Stockholm brings back memories that I didn't know I had. All the weird things I did in those many years. Today I went on a walk close to Sigtuna, a lovely historical town north of Stockholm. Suddenly I remembered that I used to go to Sigtuna regularly, on weekend retreats invited as a guest and speaker by Sigtuna Foundation. These were small gatherings of about twenty people: writers, artists, musicians, theologians, and if you wonder what I was doing there, I wonder myself, but I know who had brought me there. There were talks and discussions, nice meals, evening performances and a Sunday morning service with communion that you could decline by putting your arm across your chest – you got a blessing instead. During that time I contributed to the cultural journal of the Swedish church. I had completely forgotten about this part of my career.

Jumping from there, I remembered that I used to attend Ingmarsspelen, which is an open-air amateur performance based on Selma Lagerlöf's novel Jerusalem. At that time, Swedish dailies were happy to get contributions from free lancers, and I was asked to do a feature about a Polish scholar who was receiving Ingmar Prize for the best work on Selma Lagerlöf. It was long before computers and even faxes so I dictated my piece over the phone, with someone in the office in Stockholm typing it up. They sent a photographer to take pictures. The prize-winner was asked to give a lecture from a church pulpit. It was my punch line in my article about the Polish scholar. Selma Lagerlöf's novel The Story of Gösta Berling starts: ”Finally the priest stood in the pulpit”. A couple of years later I won the same prize and had to give the lecture. It was the only time in my life I stood in a church pulpit.

Going further along Selma Lagerlöf path, for many years I attended the annual meetings of the Selma Lagerlöf Society. My old professor pushed me toward Lagerlöf scholarship which I gratefully embraced because then as now you needed to demonstrate other merits than children's literature to get a job, and Lagerlöf had been a favourite. I became a Board member of the Society, eventually Master of Ceremonies, which involved arranging annual membership lunches. The Society's by-laws prescribed that every other year the annual meeting should be in Sunne, Lagerlöf's birthplace where she also lived most time of her life; and alternative years some other place in Sweden connected to her works. Attending meetings was always a nice adventure. My professor did not drive, and at that time driving was for me still a pleasure rather than a burden so I was happy to drive us both. Halfway to Sunne there was a coffee shop where we would stop for mid-morning coffee. I guess we had interesting conversations on the way. When I resigned from the Board due to my move to Cambridge, I received a medal for my service. Another exciting part of my professional life that I have sort of forgotten.

More Lagerlöf: for a while I was on the jury of the Lagerlöf Prize, recognising a lifetime achievement of a Swedish author whose work could be defined as written in the, I quote, ”epic spirit of Selma Lagerlöf”. Imagine the debates over the wording! The chair of the jury, who had no vote, but whose duty was to make sure that the jury was in unanimous agreement, literally locked the door of the meeting room so that we could not leave without making a decision. The meeting, usually taking place backstage at the Royal Drama Theatre, was followed by a fancy dinner, a good incentive to finish quickly, but I remember at least one meeting that went on for hours. Other times, we would get together, one of us would propose a candidate, everybody would support, we wrote a motivation and had plenty of time for preprandials. The members of the jury were among the most intellectually stimulating people I have met.

See where a simple walk in the vicinity of Sigtuna has led me!

Two amazing women

 

Last week we had a very distinguished guest speaker, Juliet Dusinberre, the author of Alice to the Lighthouse, one of the best critical studies of children's literature, written almost thirty years ago. She talked about Beatrix Potter, and this talk very nearly made me change my mind, once again, about the value of biographical information for literary studies. I didn't know much about Beatrix Potter beyond basic facts (I guess, most of them from the movie, Miss Potter), and the letters and diaries that Juliet spoke about were really illuminating. One of our students wrote an excellent blog post about this talk, so I won't repeat it.

What struck me, however, was the similarity of Potter's life and struggle to her contemporary, the Swedish Nobel Prize winner Selma Lagerlöf. Once upon a time I was a Lagerlöf scholar (published a book and several articles), and even then I wasn't interested in her biography, and even then I was wrong because there were many facts in her life that were reflected in her writing and therefore worth knowing. For instance, the loss – or threat of loss – of the childhood home surfaces in all her novels. When she got the Prize – first female writer ever to receive it – she bought back her father's estate, and, much like Potter, kept buying adjacent land and expanding farming. As rich and famous, she still had to challenge her male fellow writers and was often referred to as "fairy tale auntie". Unlike Potter, she wrote novels, but she also wrote one book for children that is, at least internationally, better known than her novels, The Wonderful Adventures of Nils. Among many remarkable things she does in this book, commissioned as a geography textbook, she is a passionate animal rights promoter. Could she be familiar with Beatrix Potter's books? Possibly. Could Potter have read Nils? It was translated into English early. Does it matter? Not really.

Of the many famous words by Lagerlöf, my favourite is from her diary: "Today I sold twenty sacks of flour and a short story". That could have been Beatrix Potter.

Childhood reading, part 5: World classics

Read the previous posts, 1   2    3   4

For some reason, many classic children's books that our grandparents read were considered harmful by the Soviet educators, such as Little Women, Little Lord Fauntleroy and Daddy-Long-Legs, of which I had only heard or read in other children's books. Perhaps they were considered sentimental. Mark Twain on the other hand was welcome, and we all read The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Prince and the Pauper. Much of the wit of both books was lost on me, both because of my age and because of my cultural ignorance. For instance, when Tom says in Sunday school that the first two apostles' names were David and Goliath, I didn't get it.

I didn't get much of Alice in Wonderland either, especially because the translation I had was extremely poor. When I eventually read the original I realised that all the strange things the characters said were jokes and puns. But it didn't matter. I loved Alice and read it over and over again, and still today I remember some of the poor translation better than the original. I don't know why Alice was acceptable for the Soviet pedagogy when so much other nineteenth-century children's literature wasn't, and fairy tales were considered particularly dangerous.

Selma Lagerlöf's The Wonderful Adventures of Nils was popular already in my grandmother's childhood, but in the early '50s is was published as a retelling, rather a clumsy one as I discovered when I studied the subject academically, with lots of historical and geographical inaccuracies, but as a child I didn't know and didn't care. The miniature perspective was something I was familiar with from Dunno and Thumbelina: the wonderful world of animals was reminiscent of my favourite nature stories, and there was just the right touch of magic. When I moved to Sweden, names and facts from Nils echoed in my explorations.

The book was part of a larger venture, when suddenly lots of foreign classics were translated: Winnie-the-Pooh, The Little Prince, which of course were read by grownups as much as children. Today it is called crossover, then it was just a common acknowledgment that the best children's books are good for everyone. Yet I believe that the status of Western classics contributed to their popularity among adults. Karlsson-on-the-Roof came about the same time, and I have already explained why it was “the best-loved” of Astrid Lindgren's books in Russia.

Some of these translated books were very odd. Again, I have written about Muffin the Mule; but there was also The Adventures of Chunky, by Leila Berg, who actually died just a couple of years ago. If I had known that she was alive when I moved to the UK, I would have contacted her to tell her how passionately I loved her book. But to a child, all authors are by definition dead, so it didn't even occur to me that the author of my childhood favourite could be alive. Why was this book translated? Why this book, of all English books? By all standards, it was obsolete already. I remember I was puzzled that one of Chunky's friends didn't know what a refrigerator was. I was also puzzled that Chunky's parents went to meet the king. Kings didn't fit into a realistic story. Chunky's parents went to meet the king because, as I realise now, they worked on a super-secret military project, but it wasn't spelled out, and for a dislocated reader like myself it didn't say anything. Yet I loved this book for its nice everyday adventures and pranks, and without reference frames, without the background of Swallows and Amazons or Just William, I didn't see its flaws. Maybe they aren't flaws, maybe it is just one of many average books that come and go, but for me it was one of the Great Books, an indispensible book from which I still remember long passages by heart. 

 

Not least, there were books by Gianni Rodari. Some children's literature scholars may know his book The Grammar of Fantasy, but only one of his children's books is translated into English, The Befana's Toy Shop, which in Russian was closer to its original title, The Blue Train, but more imaginative: The Travels of the Blue Arrow. For me, this book had everything I wanted from a good story. There was the miniature perspective of the animated toys and the eternal quest plot. There was the vague boundary between real and magic. There was the misery of poverty. There was the tragedy of parting and the joy of reunion. I wasn't quite happy with the ending because the Blue Arrow crew never found the boy they were looking for, as a true happy ending should be. Maybe it was exactly why I liked this book so much. 

 

I liked Rodari's other books as well, the satirical Gelsomino in the Land of Liars and Cippolino the Onion Boy. I didn't care about their political messages: Rodari was a convinced Communist, which explains wy his books were translated in the Soviet Union and sold millions of copies. In Cippolino, some fruits and vegetables are rich and oppress other fruits and vegetables, who finally revolt and establish a better society. It was fine by me, because it was just like other stories about the underprivileged who revolt. What puzzled me was the allocation of roles. I would understand if all fruit were rich and all vegetables poor, but there was no logic in the construction of this world. Gelsomino was a very transparent satire on the Communist regime, a 1984 for kiddies, but again, I didn't care, but enjoyed the wordplay and the absurdity. If the grownups ever saw the satire, they kept it to themselves.

Was I then a tremendously naïve and uncritical reader who didn't understand books beyond the superficial plot? From my clever scholarly perspective today, what attracted me? Did I engage with the characters? Did I share their joys and sorrows? Did I ever ask myself the Important Question: what were these books really about? What did the authors want to say? Neither my parent nor school teachers ever asked such questions, and unless prompted, I don't think a child can ever think of them. Yet these books were obviously important and formative, and I kept re-reading them and remember them as if I read them yesterday. Again, from my scholarly viewpoint, I engaged with the characters emotionally, but never asking myself whether I liked them or wanted to be like them. Possibly, all these characters were far too strange.

Ying Toijer-Nilsson in memoriam

I heard this morning that Ying Toijer-Nilsson had passed away. She wasn't well known internationally, but acknowledged in Scandinavia as one of the best children's literature scholars of the older generation. Her books on gender on death and on religion in children's literature were among the first of their kind. She was also a Selma Lagerlöf scholar and a feminist critic, and she reviewed children's books in a large Swedish morning newspaper. She was a freelancer, but she received an honorary doctorate for her brilliant research.

I met Ying soon after I had moved to Sweden. She had just published a book on children's fantasy, which wasn't a hot topic then, so she was as always ahead of her time. Since I planned to write my PhD on fantasy I was a bit anxious, but saw, when I read the book, that she was doing something completely different from what I was interested in, and that there was room for more than one book on the subject. I was taking a course in children's literature, and a fellow student invited me to her critique group that was reading Ying's book. Ying was invited too. My fellow student explained who I was, and after a while Ying asked me whether I understood what she was saying. I replied in probably not perfect, but quite acceptable Swedish. Ying liked to recall this episode with marvelous self-irony.

Since she wasn't part of the academia, she didn't attend the seminars at the department, but we met at various events, and we also started a habit of having lunch at each other's places every now and then, at least once a year. We talked fantasy and many other things. Ying was a cat person, and from my travels I brought her cats of all kinds for her collection. I didn't know at that time that I also was a cat person, but we talked a lot about cats, particularly literary cats. We also talked about faith. Ying was deeply religious, and I was exploring my own spirituality. She introduced me to C S Lewis's works on Christianity.

Ying did, however, attend at least one seminar where I presented my work in progress and where my supervisor more or less chopped me into small bits and threw them out of the window – she was like that. I went home and wept and swore I would never again put my foot into the department. Ying called the same evening and told me not to mind my supervisor (they were very close friends). “You know she is like that”.

I was elected to the Executive Board of the Selma Lagerlöf Society, of which my supervisor was president and Ying secretary. This involved a couple of board meetings and an annual membership meeting, as well as various Lagerlöf-related events.

Then Ying invited me to join the annual critics' retreat arranged by the Swedish Church in the little town of Sigtuna, north of Stockholm. This was one of the most exciting professional experiences in my life. It was a little group of people from various disciplines, literature, art, music, philosophy, theology, who would get together for three days and talk to each other about some topic of common interest, not necessarily related to religion or faith. For instance, Ying and I did a joint talk on dystopias in children's literature - about fifteen years before it became a trend. I met some wonderfully interesting people there. It also helped me to break away from exclusively children's literature studies, and for many years I reviewed fiction and non-fiction for the cultural journal of the Swedish Church.

Eventually Ying left Lagerlöf Society Board, but went on with Lagerlöf studies, edited several volumes of her correspondence, wrote biographies of people around Lagerlöf; but she also continued with children's literature, and her book reviews were always brilliant. I read some just a few weeks ago.

Ying was important for many of us, younger scholars. She stayed away from academic squabbles, and she had no personal interest in our academic achievements, but she was always supportive, always encouraging, yet never giving praise unless she meant it. And she was always cheerful and full of vigour and humour.

May she rest in peace.