Letters from Tove

by Tove Jansson

  The information I got from CIT was pretty negative, but they were friendly and helpful. I’m not allowed to take more than 50 lira (!) out with me because I’ve got travellers’ cheques, and they weren’t prepared to change them – because I hadn’t spent six months in the country. What’s more, we’re apparently not permitted to send any money at all by letter!!! But. I can change some lira in France, even if it means I lose a bit, and who on earth can know how many soldi I have on me when I cross the border? So it’s all going to work out fine, without my having to worry too much about defrauding the Italian state. And I’ve ordered my ticket here – as far as Stettin, with 60% through Germany. Besides, I don’t think they’re going to find out you’re sending me francs, but you can always stop the exporting until I tell you I’ve received the letter. And anyway, I don’t need any more for now, ça va trés bien! And you mustn’t be at all concerned or worried that I’m coming home via Paris rather than Nizza as I’d first thought.

  I had a terribly nice letter from Samuli who’s working in Chevreuse, with a level-headed and unusually pleasant addendum from Hebi. They want me to spend the July public holiday with them. I can’t deny I’d enjoy it enormously, and I could stay there, near town, and paint with Sam. Marmi’s very good of course, but apart from the bathing beach there isn’t anything to detain one for very long.

  As regards Hebi, to be honest I’m not the least bit worried any more.

  I don’t know if it’s the trip that has helped me develop a greater, and cooler, self-confidence but I think in these months I’ve made great strides in Gordin’s “healthy egoism”. My dreadful, misdirected deference to everything and everyone has suffered considerably as a result of having to elbow my way forward among people whose main aim is to live off tourists and cheat them as far as possible, from one town to the next, and of perpetually going on the offensive against their conviction of women’s inferiority.

  I feel strong and cheerful and don’t ask the whole world for advice. So I hope and believe it’s satisfaction you feel, more than anything else, at my doing what I want. For emotional and practical reasons, I am initially opting for my old hotel – 56 r. Monsieur le Prince, Hotel Medicis – you know, until I see what Samu’s landschafter look like. Write to me there! It’s going to be lovely to feel the free and easy Parisian atmosphere around me again. Don’t tell anyone, but I was much happier there than in the Roman! I’m going there at the start of July and then home straight after the public holiday. – Yesterday there was a strong wind here and the waves over the sand banks were huge. I danced in them for two hours until I could hardly move my legs, the only bather on the whole beach. Storm clouds and just magnificent. Other than that there’s nothing new to tell you except that I advanc- [letter ends here]

  Hebi: Herbert Rosenfeld, a good friend of Sam Vanni’s and TJ’s. See letter to Vivica Bandler 16.1.1947.

  “I am never alone when I talk to you”

  LETTERS TO EVA KONIKOFF 1941–1967

  Eva Konikoff.

  “YOU’RE RIGHT, I’M YOUR BEST FRIEND – AND I ALWAYS WILL BE,” writes TOVE Jansson to Eva Konikoff on 16 December 1947. It is over six years since Eva Konikoff, whom Tove Jansson sometimes calls Konikova, sometimes Koni, moved to the USA, but their friendship endures in their letters. It is as if the distance between them brings them closer together.

  Tove Jansson and Eva Konikoff (1908–1999) meet in the late 1930s – Eva Konikoff is referred to in a letter to the family when Tove Jansson was on her Italian tour in 1939 – and she moves in the same artistic circles in Helsinki. Among their artist friends are Tapio Tapiovaara, Sam Vanni, Wolle Weiner, Eva Cederström and Ada Indursky. One of their meeting places is the textile and interior design store Hemflit, where Eva Konikoff works and from which Tove Jansson receives various commissions. One of these is the composition of new fabrics, she tells her friend in a letter in 1942.

  Photographer Eva Konikoff was born in Helsinki and came from a Russian-Jewish background. As a child, she lived for a while with a relative in Novgorod, probably at the time of her parents’ divorce in 1916. She had one brother, Abraham, called “Abrascha”, and later acquired two half-brothers when her parents, David Konikoff and Rosa, née Tsibuleffsky, each married again: on her mother’s side Ruben Kamtsan (b. 1918) and on her father’s, Boris Konikoff (b. 1922). Abraham later changed his surname to Karno (1938). Eva Konikoff’s family and brothers are mentioned in the letters, particularly her younger half-brother Boris. At the start of July 1941, Eva Konikoff goes to the USA, only weeks before the outbreak of Finland’s Continuation War. Finland has been allied with Germany since the end of the Winter War in March 1940. On 22 June 1941, Germany launches its major attack on the Soviet Union (Operation Barbarossa), and after the Soviet Union launches attacks on coastal defences and bombs towns in southern and north-eastern Finland, Finland finds itself at war on 25 June. The events of 22 June are described by Tove Jansson in a dramatic letter from Pellinge, dated the same day: “Then the news came on the radio down at Kalle’s. Papa just came in and said ‘Well that’s it then’. Nothing more was said, we just each of us went and got on with packing our own essentials.”

  Eva Konikoff goes first to stay with her uncle, Joseph Konick. There is no direct explanation in the letters of Eva Konikoff’s reasons for emigrating, but she is clearly seeking new directions in her life and profession. The political situation is very fraught and for anyone hoping to get away it is a matter of leaving while one still can, before the borders are closed. “I’m glad you made good your escape – after the war things could get distressing here in so many ways”, writes Tove Jansson after receiving her first letter from her friend in the USA. Eva Konikoff is as free as a bird and wants to move on, according to Tove Jansson’s later characterisation of her. That image recurs in more specific form in the short story “Brev till Konikova” (1998, Letter to Konikova). “Once you said you felt like an albatross and I thought that was laying it on a bit thick, but now I understand better.”

  When their correspondence starts, in June 1941, Tove Jansson is twenty-six. For the young painter, Eva Konikoff represents freedom, strength and will and she often writes about the resilience of their friendship, the mutual candidness that binds them together. They see each other outside Helsinki circles, too. In the summer of 1940, Eva Konikoff visits Tove Jansson in the island community of Pellinge where the Jansson family rents a house each summer. The following year, Tove Jansson starts a painting of her friend, entitled “Eva”. The model sits legs apart, hands clasped, her arms resting on her legs; she is looking to one side, not posing. A free woman, that is Tove Jansson’s perception of her friend. After Eva Konikoff’s departure, she repaints the background and changes the light. The picture is shown just once, at the Young Artists’ exhibition of 1942. The artist subsequently makes a gift of the painting to the sitter.

  The first letter from Eva Konikoff reaches Tove Jansson in August 1941. Postal services during the war are unreliable and many letters are returned to sender unopened. There is also censorship to contend with. “I don’t think you’ve received any of the letters I’ve sent over the past few months – but it’s been a joy for me to talk to you anyway”, writes Tove Jansson in January 1942. She is a scrupulous correspondent and numbers the letters for the sake of good order.

  Tove Jansson’s longing to see her friend is evident in letter after letter, but they do not meet again until the autumn of 1949. On that visit, Eva Konikoff is also a guest at a meeting of the Amateur Photography Club in Helsinki (15.9.1949), speaking on the subject of “photography in America and showing her own picture collection” according to the minutes. The minutes also note that the “interesting pictures, which differed in some respects from Finnish perceptions of artistic photography, generated lively discussion.” That same autumn, Eva Konikoff takes a series of pictures of Tove Jansson in the studio in Ulrikasborgsgatan and Tove Jansson comments delightedly on these in a letter in February 1950 (23.2). They meet on several other occa
sions in Finland, and on Tove Jansson’s round-the-world trip with Tuulikki Pietilä in 1971–1972 it is Eva Konikoff who books their hotel in New York. She also visits them on Klovharun a few times. But Tove Jansson’s dream in the late 1940s to go and visit her friend in New York is never realised.

  In her letters to Eva Konikoff, Tove Jansson writes about herself. The letters turn into a diary, written to “Koni”, and through them, she creates someone “to talk to”. This is an expression of extreme closeness and Tove Jansson uses it again and again: “I seem able to talk to you about all my great joys, all my agonies, everything going on in my head – there’s no one else I can talk to as I do to you” (August 1946). In her letters to Eva Konikoff she writes of her wish to dare to live her own life, her quest for an identity as an artist, as a social and sexual being. But in her choice of lesbian love she finds no support from her friend. When Tove Jansson writes of her plans to go over definitively to the “ghost side” (ghost being used as a synonym for lesbian) in the early 1950s, she makes it clear that this is her own decision and no one else’s: “I think I finally know what I want now, and as my friendship with you is very important to me and is very much founded on honesty, I want to talk this over with you. I haven’t made the final decision, but I’m convinced that the happiest and most genuine course for me would be to go over to the ghost side. It would be silly of you to get upset about that” (28.2.1952).

  The letters to Eva Konikoff chart the changes in Tove Jansson’s life from her time as a young painter in wartime Finland to the hectic existence of the famous Moomin author in the 1950s and 1960s. Here we find probably her most candid accounts of life during the war, encompassing both family and friends, reflections on the theory and practice of painting, declarations of principles in the art of painting self-portraits, and accounts of the emerging, developing world of the Moomins. One of the letters contains what is probably Tove Jansson’s earliest introduction of herself as author of the Moomin books.

  The correspondence extends over twenty-five years from 1941 to 1967 and comprises some hundred letters. The intensity of the letter writing declines with time and distance, but the friendship endures. At the same time it is clear that the correspondence changes in content and becomes more sporadic. The frequency and length of the letters is most marked in the 1940s; in the war years, Tove Jansson sometimes writes two or three letters a month, but later the intervals grow longer and there is a period when they try keeping in touch by means of postcards. After 1951 there are only about ten letters. Eva Konikoff is clearly the one most keen to keep the correspondence alive. On St Lucia’s Day 1962, in her penultimate letter, Tove Jansson writes:

  You know what, I strongly suspect nothing can come of our correspondence, which we have restarted so many times. With great Solemnity and Resolve and Explanation!

  Instead, let’s do this: occasionally when the spirit moves us, a little card like this. That doesn’t tie us, it’s a fleeting smile, a signal that we haven’t forgotten, though time and distance fracture our intimate contact.

  Is that all right? I think so.

  The letters to Eva Konikoff became the material for one of Tove Jansson’s last short stories, in her collection Meddelande (1998, Messages). Alternative titles Tove Jansson experimented with are “Portrait of a Friendship”, “Early Friendship”, “To my Albatross” and “Just Before the War”. The idea was to write a novel, but the material was hard to work into shape. She went through the correspondence and wrote notes on scraps of paper that she tied up together with the bundles of letters. The notes might read “checked through; some transferred, leave the rest” or “checked through – unusable”, or simply “twaddle”. But what recurs in her drafts is the impossibility of writing about the war – which she describes as the hardest time in her life. “Old letters are dangerous, and it’s hard to fathom that all of that no longer exists unless I breathe life into it – and I can’t”, says one of her notes, made in 1993. Later she writes: “I visualised a book about the Winter War and Eva’s brave new life in America as background, and it would have been illustrated with her terrific photographs of Harlem and Manhattan. Then Helen Svensson came and said: how about boiling it down into a short story? That’s not the first time she’s helped me when I’ve got stuck.” (Letter to Boel Westin 9.3.1998).

  Tove Jansson got her letters to Eva Konikoff back from her friend in the USA. Like the correspondence with Maya Vanni, the addressee was urged several times to burn letters – “Kisses and please, burn my letters” says a letter written on 28.2.1952, for example – but we do not know whether any really were burnt. The letters that Eva Konikoff wrote to Tove Jansson have not been found. But the letters from Tove Jansson to her friend Eva Konikoff can be read as living conversations, even though only one of the parties speaks.

  * * *

  10/6 –41 H:FORS TO EVA KONIKOFF ADR/ JOSEPH KONICK. C/O SYLVANIA HOTEL. BROAD & LOCUST. AT JUNIPER. PHILA. PA. – FROM TOVE JANSSON. APOLLOG. 13, H:FORS FINLAND.

  The whole of Hemflit and Gylling send their greetings! (Getting the table soon.)

  Dearest Eva!

  Now I know from Pergament’s telegram that you’ve safely arrived in the new country, and can write the letter I’ve been postponing, out of childish fear of tempting fate.

  Eva dearest, I’ve been following your whole journey! Twice I was gripped by terrible anxiety, thanks to people’s baseless rumour-mongering. Now it’s all fine and I’m glad you have left this whole merry-go-round of ours behind you – though I miss you, enormously, every day. I got your letters on Åland, and cycled a long way so I could read them in peace, to a hillside of birches with drifts of wood anemones and placid sheep.

  In my studio I found you everywhere in the things you had given me, there are so many places in town where you still walk beside me – and to start with I was often on the verge of ringing you when I felt like a chat. And Tapsa ran after a girl the whole length of Alexandersgatan because she looked like you!

  But of course there isn’t anyone like you! It feels empty without you, Konikova. As the train carried you away I had a feeling that we would meet again very soon. And I still don’t think it will be too long. In Karis I overtook Issi who was on his way to you, but hadn’t time to talk to him – chuckled to myself; I knew he would come! And then I found myself on Åland, leading a peaceful existence in which the frenzy of Helsingfors just melted away.

  I sat shivering in an empty sailors’ hostel as the foghorns wailed in the harbour. The very next day I went off to a remote part of the island, where I spent long days strolling in the birch-dotted meadows and along the beaches. All at once the weather turned warm. I borrowed a dilapidated little rowing boat that had to be bailed out after every 20th oar-stroke and then pottered round the coast stark naked, made fires and cooked food, painted, went swimming (it was cold, the floes of ice were coming in from the sea in great log jams!), read the legends of Paul and generally felt I was living in paradise. I saw neither houses nor people on my excursions, but in the evening I sat in the inn and had a leisurely chat with Villebisin about drought, leaseholds, cows and the injustices of the world.

  [ … ] The sun shone day in and day out, I ate card-free and got a tan, and Villebisin’s unruffled calm crept over me. But in the end the superintendent’s conscience got the better of her and she went back to Mariehamn to look after the exhibition. Just a single picture had sold – a little Carlstedt, but the Ålanders’ own works, which they had mixed in with ours, sold splendidly. No wonder, as their prices were in the hundreds and ours in the thousands! And besides, they have such “natural colours”, you see! As consolation I was invited to dinner at the town’s smart clubhouse, and then I gave myself a present of two of those charmingly romantic shell boxes I used to long for when I was little. Then I left all the pictures I painted on Åland unframed at the exhibition, finished painting the last one at the sailors’ hostel in the hours before my boat was due to leave, and put Åland prices and names on them, like “Fog
Lifting at Lotsberget in Geta”, in the most shamelessly literary and unartistic way. But it worked! “New ÅLAND views!” announced the newspaper. Direct from our landscape! And “Fog” sold on the spot, along with another canvas, to the Collections. So now I’m almost immortal, and my trip is paid for! The newspaper wrote really nicely about the way I “practised my cherished artistic craft on their cherished island.” (How horribly easy it would be to get rich.)

  Back in Lallukka, Ham and I felt the urge to get away from home and work, so the gents were dispatched to Pellinge to dig the soil and we went to Ekenäs to meet Prolle and celebrate Ham’s birthday. It was a cheery, festive little trip, which we made the most of in every way. Prolle instantly showed us his latest short story, which was the best thing he had ever done – but too long for a newspaper. So we solemnly decided that he should start work on a short-story collection. He looked hale and hearty and was pleased to have been selected for a radiotelegraphy course, which he’s very interested in. In July, when Ham’s free, he’s going to put in for a week’s leave with us at Pellinge.

  We’ve sent Lasse to Jullan’s for June, to their place in the country outside Åbo, where he’s busy swapping stamps with his uncle, collecting butterflies, and has to our dismay started writing another novel. He went up to seventh grade unconditionally, thank goodness! Papa is busy with another fountain, which is going up in the courtyard of the new building beside Bronkan and Lyhty on Espen. He was ill the other day and was overwhelmed with anxiety. We’d been at Ragni Cawén’s 50th birthday party, where everyone was dressed up as Orientals with their faces painted brown, and laid their gifts, food and wine before the guest of honour’s throne, above which I’d painted big angels carrying horns of plenty. It was a very lively occasion and Papa came home in the morning without his coat after roaming round town with a friend. They drank some arrack punch and then dashed out for a long Sunday family walk. And when Papa started getting stomach pains I assumed he was growing old and couldn’t take much any more! I do so much hope my papa Faffan will never fall seriously ill – he would never cope!