by Tove Jansson
As soon as the Christmas tree was in the studio everything took on a fresh significance, and was charged with a holiness that had nothing to do with Art. Christmas began in earnest.
Mummy and I went to the icy rocks behind the Russian Church and scratched around for some moss. We built the Land of the Nativity with the desert and Bethlehem in clay, with new streets and houses each time, we filled the whole of the studio window, we made lakes with pieces of mirror and placed the shepherds and gave them new lambs and new legs because the old ones had broken up in the moss and we placed the sand carefully so that the clay could be used later. Then we took out the manger with the thatched roof which they had got in Paris in nineteen hundred and ten. Daddy was very moved and had to have a snorter.
Mary was always right in the front, but Joseph had to be at the back with the cattle because he had been damaged by water and, besides, in perspective he was smaller.
Last of all came the Baby Jesus, who was made of wax and had real curly hair which they had made in Paris before I was born. When he was in place we had to be quite quiet for a long while.
Once Poppolino got out and devoured the Baby Jesus. He climbed up Daddy’s Statue of Liberty, sat on the hilt of the sword, and ate up Jesus.
There was nothing we could do, and we didn’t dare to look at each other. Mummy made a new Baby Jesus of clay and painted it. We thought that it turned out too red and too fat round the middle, but no one said anything.
Christmas always rustled. It rustled every time, mysteriously, with silver paper and gold paper and tissue paper and a rich abundance of shiny paper decorating and hiding everything and giving a feeling of reckless extravagance.
There were stars and rosettes everywhere, even on the vegetable dishes and on the expensive shop-bought sausages which we used to have before we began to have real ham.
One could wake up at night to the reassuring sound of Mummy wrapping up presents. One night she painted the tiles of the stove with little blue landscapes and bunches of flowers on every tile all the way to the top.
She made gingerbread biscuits shaped like goats with the pastry-cutter and gave the Lucy-pussies, small flat pastry scrolls, curly legs and a raisin in the middle of the tummy. When they came here from Sweden the pussies had only four legs but every year they got more and more until they had a wild and curly ornamentation all over.
Mummy weighed sweets and nuts on a letter-balance so that everyone would get exactly the same amount. During the year everything is measured roughly, but at Christmas everything has to be absolutely fair. That’s why it’s such a strenuous time.
In Sweden people stuff their own sausages and make candles and carry small baskets to the poor for several months and all mothers sew presents at night. On Christmas Eve they all become Lucias, with a great wreath with lots of candles in it on their heads.
The first time Daddy saw a Lucia he was very scared, but when he realised it was only Mummy he began to laugh. Then he wanted her to be a Lucia every Christmas Eve because it was such fun.
I lay on my bunk and heard Lucia starting to climb the steps, and it wasn’t easy for her. The whole thing was as beautiful as being in heaven and she had modelled a pig in marzipan as they do in Sweden. Then she sang a little and climbed up the steps to Daddy’s bunk. Mummy only sings once a year because her vocal cords are crossed.
There were hundreds of candles on the balustrade round our bunks waiting to be lit just before the Story of the Nativity. Then they flutter in all directions round the studio like so many pearl necklaces, maybe there are thousands of them. These candles are very interesting when they burn down because the cardboard dividing-wall could easily catch fire.
Later in the morning Daddy used to get very worked up because he took Christmas very seriously and could hardly stand all the preparations. He was quite exhausted. He put every single candle straight and warned us about the danger of fire. He rushed out and bought mistletoe, a tiny twig of it, because it had to hang from the ceiling and is more expensive than orchids. He kept on asking whether we were quite sure that everything was in order and suddenly thought that the composition of the Land of the Nativity was all wrong. Then he had a snorter to calm himself. Mummy wrote poetry and picked sealing-wax off wrapping-paper and gold ribbon from the previous Christmas.
Twilight came and Daddy went to the churchyard with nuts for the squirrels and to look at the graves. He has never been particularly concerned about the relations lying there and they didn’t particularly like him either because they were distant relatives and rather bourgeois. But when Daddy got back home again he was sad and twice as worked up because the churchyard had been so wonderfully beautiful with all the candles burning there. Anyway, the squirrels had buried masses of nuts along with the relatives although it was forbidden to do so, and that was a consoling thought at least.
After dinner there was a long pause to allow Christmas a breathing-space. We lay on our bunks in the dark listening to Mummy rustling down by the stove and in the street outside all was quiet.
Then the long lines of candles were lit and Daddy leaped down from his bunk to make sure that the ones on the Christmas tree were all upright and that the candle behind Joseph wasn’t setting fire to the thatched roof.
And then we had the Story of the Nativity. The most solemn part was when Mary pondered these things in her heart and it was almost as beautiful when they departed into their own country another way. The rest of it wasn’t so special.
We recovered from this and Daddy had a snorter. And now I was triumphantly certain that Christmas belonged to me.
I crept into the green primaeval forest and pulled out parcels. Now the feeling of love under the branches of the tree was almost unbearable, a compact feeling of holiness made up of Marys and angels and mothers and Lucias and statues, all of them blessing me and forgiving everything during the year that was past, including that business of hating in the hall, forgiving everything on earth as long as they could be sure that everybody loved one another.
And just then the largest glass ball fell on the concrete floor and it smashed into the world’s tiniest and nastiest splinters.
The silence afterwards was unbelievable. At the neck of the ball there was a little ring with two metal prongs. And Mummy said: actually, that ball has always been the wrong colour.
And so night came and all the candles had burnt down and all the fires had been put out and all the ribbons and paper had been folded up for next Christmas. I took my presents to bed with me.
Every now and then Daddy’s slippers shuffled down there in the studio and he ate a little pickled herring and had a snorter and tried to get some music out of the wireless he had built himself. The feeling of peace everywhere was complete.
Once something happened to the wireless and it played a whole tune before the interference came back. In its own way interference is something of a miracle, mystifying isolated signals from somewhere out in space.
Daddy sat in the darkened studio for a long time eating pickled herring and trying to get proper tunes on the wireless. When it didn’t work at all he climbed up on to his bunk again and rustled his newspapers. Mummy’s candles had gone out much earlier, and there was a general smell of Christmas tree and burning and benediction all over.
Nothing is as peaceful as when Christmas is over, when one has been forgiven for everything and one can be normal again.
After a while we packed the holy things away in the hall cupboard and the branches of the Christmas tree burnt in the stove with small violent explosions. But the trunk wasn’t burnt until the following Christmas. All the year it stood next to the box of plaster, reminding us of Christmas and the absolute safety in everything.
A note on the photos
All images © Jansson Family archive
In order of appearance:
Baby Tove with her father
Tove with her mother and grandmother
Uspenski Russian Orthodox Cathedral, Helsinki
Vik
tor Jansson in his Helsinki studio
Tove and her mother
Drawing by Tove of a view from her family home
Viktor Jansson playing guitar with the Finnish painter
Alvar Cawén
Tove and her mother drawing
Landscape of the Janssons’ summer island
Tove (or brother Lars) rowing
Infant Tove
Viktor and Ham rowing
A young Tove in the sea
Landscape of the Janssons’ summer island
Viktor and his monkey, Poppolino
Poppolino
Viktor and Ham in early married life
Viktor at work in his studio
Ham at work as a graphic artist
A young Tove
Viktor at work in his studio
Ham dressed as Saint Lucia for Winter Solstice celebrations
Also by Tove Jansson, published by Sort Of
THE SUMMER BOOK
‘The Summer Book is a marvellously uplifting read, full of gentle humour and wisdom.’ Justine Picardie, Daily Telegraph
An elderly artist and her six-year-old grand-daughter while away a summer together on a tiny island in the Gulf of Finland. As the two learn to adjust to each other’s fears, whims and yearnings, a fierce yet understated love emerges – one that encompasses not only the summer inhabitants but the very island itself.
Written in a clear, unsentimental style, full of brusque humour, The Summer Book is a profoundly life-affirming story. Tove Jansson captured much of her own life and spirit in the book, which was her favourite of her adult novels. This edition has a foreword by Esther Freud.
A WINTER BOOK
‘As smooth and odd and beautiful as sea-worn driftwood, as full of light and air as the Nordic summer. We are lucky to have these stories collected at last.’ Philip Pullman
A Winter Book features thirteen stories from Tove Jansson’s first book for adults, Sculptor’s Daughter (1968), along with seven of her most cherished later stories (from 1971 to 1996). Drawn from youth and age, this selection by Ali Smith provides a thrilling showcase of the great Finnish writer’s prose, scattered with insights and home truths. It includes afterwords by Philip Pullman, Esther Freud and Frank Cottrell Boyce.
FAIR PLAY
‘So what can happen when Tove Jansson turns her attention to her own favourite subjects, love and work, in the form of this novel about two women, lifelong partners and friends? Expect something philosophically calm – and discreetly radical. At first sight it looks autobiographical. Like everything Jansson wrote, it’s much more than it seems … Fair Play is very fine art.’ From Ali Smith’s introduction.
What mattered most to Tove Jansson, she explained in her eighties, was work and love, a sentiment she echoes in this tender and original novel. Fair Play portrays a love between two older women, a writer and an artist, as they work side by side in their Helsinki studios, travel together and share summers on a remote island. In the generosity and respect they show each other and the many small shifts they make to accommodate each other’s creativity we are shown a relationship both heartening and truly progressive.
THE TRUE DECEIVER
‘I loved this book. It’s cool in both senses of the word, understated yet exciting … the characters still haunt me.’ Ruth Rendell
In the deep winter snows of a Swedish hamlet, a strange young woman fakes a break-in at the house of an elderly artist in order to persuade her that she needs companionship. But what does she hope to gain by doing this? And who ultimately is deceiving whom? In this portrayal of two women encircling each other with truth and lies, nothing can be taken for granted. By the time the snow thaws, both their lives will have changed irrevocably.
TRAVELLING LIGHT
‘Jansson’s prose is wondrous: it is clean, deliberate; an aesthetic so certain of itself it’s breathtaking.’ Kirsty Gunn, Daily Telegraph
Travelling Light takes us into new Tove Jansson territory. A professor arrives in a beautiful Spanish village only to find that her host has left and she must cope with fractious neighbours alone; a holiday on a Finnish Island is thrown into disarray by an oddly intrusive child; an artist returns from abroad to discover that her past has been eerily usurped. With the deceptively light prose that is her hallmark, Tove Jansson reveals to us the precariousness of a journey – the unease we feel at being placed outside of our milieu, the restlessness and shadows that intrude upon a summer.
ART IN NATURE
An elderly caretaker at a large outdoor exhibition, called Art in Nature, finds that a couple have lingered on to bicker about the value of a picture; he has a surprising suggestion that will resolve both their row and his own ambivalence about the art market. A draughtsman’s obsession with drawing locomotives provides a dark twist to a love story. A cartoonist takes over the work of a colleague who has suffered a nervous breakdown, only to discover that his own sanity is in danger. In these witty, sharp, often disquieting stories, Tove Jansson reveals the faultlines in our relationship with art, both as artists and as consumers. Obsession, ambition, and the discouragement of critics are all brought into focus in these wise and cautionary tales.
Tove Jansson
Author photo © Beata Bergström
The Finnish-Swedish writer and artist TOVE JANSSON (1914–2001) is best known as the creator of the Moomin stories, which were first published in English sixty years ago and have remained in print ever since. However, in her fifties she turned her attention to writing for adults, producing four novels and eight story collections.
Sculptor’s Daughter, published in Swedish in 1968, was her first book for adults – a sequence of stories based on her memories of a Helskinki childhood. It was followed by a story collection, The Listener (1971), and her novel, The Summer Book (1973), a Scandinavian classic, and a bestseller when reissued in English by Sort Of Books.
Sort Of Books have also published translations of Tove Jansson’s novel The True Deceiver and the story collections Travelling Light, Fair Play, Art in Nature (originally The Doll’s House), and an anthology, The Winter Book. In 2013 Sort Of Books published an English edition of the ‘forgotten’ first ever Moomin book, The Moomins and the Great Flood, originally published in 1945.
Copyright
Sculptor’s Daughter © Tove Jansson 1968
First published (as Bildhuggarens Dotter) by Schildts Förlags Ab, Finland.
English translation © Schildts Förlags Ab, Finland 1969
All rights reserved
This English edition first published in 2013 by
Sort Of Books, PO Box 18678, London NW3 2FL.
Distributed by Profile Books
3a Exmouth House, Pine Stree, London EC1R 0JH.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher except for the quotation of brief passages in reviews.
Typeset in Goudy and Gill Sans to a design by Henry Iles.
Thanks to Sophia Jansson for her encouragement and advice, and to Peter Dyer, Henry Iles and Susanne Hillen for design and proofreading.
192pp.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978-1908745330
ePub ISBN 978-1908745347
