Letters from Tove

by Tove Jansson

  Your friend Tove.

  20/3 –42 [Postcard] SENDER: TOVE JANSSON. FÄNRIK STÅLSG. 3 A 20 HELSINGFORS. FINLAND.

  Dearest Eva!

  It’s the day submissions have to be in for the spring exhibition and I can’t bear to look at my one entry, “The Family”, any more. I’ve built myself a new picture shelf and put all my junk into the new corner cupboard, and I’ve rearranged all the furniture so it’s as neat and tidy as a hallway to heaven. It’ll be nice to start on some entirely new things, without any more exhibitions and in a fresh setting. And I suppose spring will be coming – though it’s still only –15˚. Though I’m a bit nervous about the spring; I know one feels everything more keenly then – I haven’t really taken it in yet that it’s over between Tapsa and me. He had another fortnight’s leave – and like last time, I scarcely saw him. He’d been in town several days before he rang me, claiming he was calling from the station. And there were a lot of other clues to make me realise I’ve become some kind of “Duty and obligation” for him. He knew I was waiting evening after evening, felt bad, put it off until it was a nightmare and impossible to go at all. That’s how it must have been. The last night he rang me from his lady-friend’s, drunk, and asked if he could come. We cleared the whole thing up on the phone, kept it friendly and workaday. I asked him if he wanted to be free and he was touched and grateful. “It’s too much!” So I let him go. It’s all very peculiar. The fact that we spent the whole war trying to keep each other’s zest for life going with our letters, often writing every day, talking about all the lovely things we’d do when we could be together, and that he loved me for seven years – and then when he gets some leave he goes to that painted blonde from Robertsgatan and is grateful to be free. But there’s one thing I know: I have paid my debt to him. Haven’t I, Koni. I miss you so terribly. The last letter I had from you arrived sometime in the autumn. Do you get mine? Are you happy over there?

  Tove.

  11/4 –42 [Postcard] SENDER: TOVE JANSSON. FÄNRIK STÅLSG. 3 A 20. HELSINGFORS.

  Have you read Lin Yutang: “Importance of Living”?

  Eva, dearest! Just got home from Samu’s and want to talk to you about what Samu was going on about: that my drawing makes my painting too graphic and they’re incompatible … It upset me. Perhaps he’s right. Perhaps I’m half and half in other ways too – the daughter, the painter. You know – everything at home. It should be something free and happy and simple … I wish I could go away – completely, go south – and I yearn for someone shrewd and lively, like you – someone to rely on. Or just to drift, to “be” – do you remember us talking about it once? No duties or obligations. Or success. – Guess what, I bought Beethoven’s violin concerto, Schubert’s 8th unfinished and a Bach toccata and fugue. They’re wonderful (And expensive!)

  Boris paid me a visit while he was on leave. Letter from P.O. today – fierce battles in which he’s had the whole command – losses. It’s starting now – “spring”. People so tired, off-balance, everything’s about food and politics – “The Family” at the spring exhibition was a shameful blunder; I shan’t show anything else for a long time. Paint in peace, doggedly, try to get somewhere. It’s got to be now. Studying Italian, doing a series of Christmas cards, illustrating a book. Maybe it disrupts the painting …? On Easter Day there were yellow flowers hanging on my door, a card: “Demobbed!” It was Tapsa. Curious to think of him in town – finally away from the front. Stupid, the whole thing. But it was only right to give him his freedom. – Wanted to talk to you about Carin. You see, a couple of months ago I sent her a huge cry for help, totally impulsive, not to say uncontrolled, I was at rock bottom and needed someone, frantically. She never replied. Only now, a letter full of excuses about work and having a cold. And you know, I felt awkward, wretched, stupid, naked. Like when you scream for help and the other person, cringing with embarrassment, looks away and changes the subject. She’s right, we’ve got to be “civilised”. But the thing is, I can only send her impersonal, entertaining letters now. However I try, that’s the way they turn out. Writer’s block! Yet she doesn’t notice the difference … I was out and about with Tito, Liv and a few others for 2 days. Tremendous. It made a nice change. – You’re so often in my thoughts. Wonder if you’re lonely over there? (Have you read Carson McCullers: The heart is a lonely hunter? Horrid book). Hugs.

  Your Tove.

  Liv: The writer Liv Tegengren.

  20/4 –42 [Postcard] SENDER: TOVE JANSSON. FÄNRIK STÅLSG. 3 A 20. H:FORS.

  Dearest!

  Today I had dinner with Tapsa, who rang and said he had “spring feelings” and wanted to be out in the sunshine. He’s always done that at this time of year, probably didn’t want to spoil the ritual. Afterwards, coffee and Beethoven in the studio. Peaceful, very nice. It looks as if I’ll be able to be his friend, just as he wants, and I’m glad about that. He’s entirely back in civilian life now, drawing for W. Söderström, a permanent position. (3000 a month.) Turtis still in clink. I’m very happy that Ham and I are going out to Pellinge at the start of May to tidy the plot, do some planting etc. When Faffan comes out I shall go back in again because somebody always has to be in town keeping in touch with Prolle. Really looking forward to spending time there with Ham, just the two of us. Perhaps it will be as wonderful as it was in Sept. She and I have pasted all her caricatures and books into two big albums, a huge job. I paint outside every day now, and I’ve got some new paintings in the studio, too. There’s something new in them – and they’re not graphic, so to hell with Samu!!! An idiotic couple came up to buy a canvas today, trampled around among the paintings: “It won’t do them any harm”, turned their noses up at everything. Sold 4 pictures to the Björneborg exhibition at the Salon. At my door one night I had two soldiers of the kind I don’t like, you know, but they had greetings from a friend in Estonia. The music in my studio made them feel homesick, poor things – they had nowhere to go so I let them sleep here and went home. Strangely enough, Faffan wouldn’t take them in … So much for female logic. Illogical, but often more sound than the male variety. I trusted the people, not the idea – he the opposite. But I still didn’t want to be seen at a restaurant with them – to Faffan’s annoyance. O, Koni, I do so long for a sign of life from you – or just to know that you get my cards. But I expect you aren’t able to write. I feel lonely – but cheerful and confident again, now the painting’s going better. That will carry me over everything else one day.

  Your Tove.

  Turtis still in clink: Left-wing radical writer Arvo Turtiainen was held in protective custody during the Continuation War.

  29/4 –42 [Helsingfors]

  Eva, dearest!

  My first try with a proper letter again. It’s warm here now; I’m going round in your coat with the bobbly bits and your shells are between my windows. The skylights have been cleaned (first time in 15 years). And the light, blue night is shining in on me. Boats are tooting in the harbour again as I stand outside to paint, and one day the cranes came flying back, in their wide skeins. There’s something strange about those birds – whether they are coming or going, they ignite wild restlessness and yearning in me. And – I felt almost moved that they made the effort to come back – here.

  Tapsa popped up to the studio to show me his new suit, he’s so used to me in spite of everything that I have to be part of whatever happens to him. So we exchange unreliable versions of what we’ve done, seen and heard – before he leaves again – but don’t tell each other what we’ve been thinking, not any more.

  Ina Colliander is trying to make friends, Volle’s grown very dependent on me, colleagues come and go and little girls are allowed to borrow the studio for their young men. I never go to them, but I accept them all.

  Constant fighting in the north, no chance of the post getting through now the thaw’s set in. When I’m outside painting I can hear the salutes being fired at regular – and such short! - intervals over at the cemetery, it makes me shrivel up inside. The Col
lins have lost a son, as have so many of our friends. At home it’s like a well of silence, everyone shut in with their own thoughts. I slink away like a dog to the institute, the studio, the docks. One evening Ham and I went to a concert, the young virtuoso had to play 4 encores before the applause died down. The blunted apathy of winter has given way to an intense receptivity to everything, people listen, see and feel all too acutely – maybe because of the endless waiting. The spring offensive has started now –

  [two lines blacked out by the censor]

  I was happier than I have been for quite some days as I sat there restoring a little lightship, a model boat made of metal (45 cm) that I paid a lot of money for in a fit of juvenile transgression in a junk shop. It was constructed with great expertise, affection and patience, with tiny doors and hatches, winding gear with cogwheels and chains, bells and whistles, sleek lifeboats (named Eugéne, Lucio, Jacques Ferencz – and Lucio’s even got a silver trim!) and anchor. The main light is working, and to port and starboard I’ve mounted little lamps, green and red, plus one in the cabin, and a little storm lantern with wire wrapped round it on the roof. When they’re all shining in the darkness it’s like being on board at sea – among the shadows of davits and struts on deck. They took me two days, the eighteen little double blocks with balsawood pulleys …

  Raffo ran into me as I was coming along with the ship, and he laughed. Maybe he saw it as a flowering of my masculinity complex! – I happened across Kajus one day and we decided to be friends. His latest mistress even comes here sometimes. I like her. I’m seldom “with” all these people, I listen to them, and watch. But you’re always close, and more alive than they are. I know you often write to me in your head even though I can’t receive any letters. I wish you all good things, Eva!

  Tove.

  Collins: The family of artist Marcus Collin.

  The spring offensive has started now: At the end of April, the Red Army mounted large-scale attacks on Finnish positions at Svir.

  A model boat: This is the one Tove is pictured beside on p.487.

  Eugéne, Lucio, Jacques Ferencz: A humorous detail; TJ has named the lifeboats after her male friends in Paris in 1938 and Italy in 1939.

  17/6 –42 PELLINGE TO: MISS EVA KONIKOFF. C/O H. HANSEN RIVERSIDE DRIVE 258 NEW-YORK. U.S.A. FROM: TOVE JANSSON. FÄNRIK STÅLSG. 3A 20 HELSINGFORS. FINLAND. WRITTEN IN SWEDISH.

  Dearest Eva!

  For once this is a happy Tove writing to you. I’m on my own out at Pellinge and intensely at home with the absolute silence, with being able to wear the scruffiest, comfiest old rags and divide up my day exactly as I like. In these white nights one can go to bed and get up whenever one likes, anyway. There’s a stiff breeze this evening and it’s storm-red over Sanskär – I’ve just had my dinner: little pancakes that I ate one by one as they were ready (the only proper way to eat pancakes – and what’s more, no washing up!) and I’m now going out to plant the last things in the garden. Beside me I have Taidekorttikeskus’s little bear series; cards to rival your Mikky Mouse – a domestic equivalent, you see!

  It was a very sound idea to bring my work out here – but I haven’t made a start yet! The native hut and the cave are uppermost in my mind, with its current childish bent. But why shouldn’t I be allowed to crawl behind reality for a while and just be happy after this long and awful time?

  A month ago, when I last wrote to you and was out here with Ham, I made a bit of a start on the new hut before we went back in to work. I pulled down the old shack with the straw roof out at the point at Laxvarpet, and the timber from that plus what I scavenged from the beaches out at Tunnis were enough for the new “house”. What are these atavistic nest-building instincts that constantly beset me? However infantile it may be, I always so much enjoy this work, sawing, lugging, chopping, hammering and digging. Maybe because – unlike my painting – it always turns out as one had imagined, a quicker and more tangible result.

  This is what it looks like, my latest flight from reality. It’s built in such a way that the cave opens up like an inner room, the back wall isn’t covered but allows you to look up the rock face and see a patch of sky. I got some tar for the walls down in the village, and the roof will be of wood shavings. There are primitive, multi-coloured spikes protruding from under the edge of the roof, the window is of woven willow, and outside stands a totem pole with a wildly grimacing goat face, its beard and horns made of twisted roots. There are similar root systems topping the poles at the entrance. The palisade will be made of light grey branches, dried in the sun. I’ve put ladders in, leading all the way up to the top of the rock, and over to the right I’m busy digging out a particularly promising ravine. Inside there’s an earth floor with flat stones and a set of steps up to the cave, where I’ve scattered shells on the white sand, and on its walls I’m in the process of carving out mammoths and other animals I’ve faithfully copied (from prehistoric finds). In the hut there’s a wide, comfortable seat covered with my big goatskin, and raffia matting on the walls. My china Madonna tries discreetly and in vain from the depths of the cave to outweigh the savagely proto-barbarian atmosphere. The local population seems a little bit crazy, but interested. Lisbeth from Odden comes sometimes and talks about dance and young men and smiles down on me in a wise and patronising way. She’s sixteen now and tells me “what it’s like to be young” – which “the rest of us have forgotten” – the “new age is totally different from back them when we were young …”

  In a letter to Eva Konikoff 11.9.1942, Tove Jansson writes: “I’ve started on a portrait in a lynx boa. I myself look like a cat, with my yellow skin, my cold slanty eyes and my new smooth hair in a bun. And a firework display of flowers. I don’t know yet whether it’s good or bad, I simply paint.”

  O Koni, if only you could be here – you, at any rate, are young enough to feel at home in all my “palaces”!

  Tomorrow I shall ring home – and I’m already dreading it. All the rest of it will come sweeping over me down the wires. Maybe I’ll be called up for compulsory labour? It would serve me right, antisocial old painter, to spend the rest of my summer in some turnip patch! [ … ]

  1st June we celebrated Ham’s sixtieth birthday, a hectic and happy merry-go-round. I decorated the boys’ room all over with flowers – in the middle of the table was Faffan’s marble bust of me as a little girl, and hanging on it a picture from me. Lasse gave her a terribly expensive bracelet – his latest passion is studying precious stones – his ambition now is to take up chased-work. He buys cameos, opals etc. in little junk shops, borrows books to bring home, goes over to discuss things with Lindroos. With the same fervour he devotes to everything he does. (That one’s definitely going to be your most difficult child – said Raff. Hmm.)

  And then earrings, silk stockings, books, a giant copper pan for spring water at the cottage, teacups, wine glasses – candles and a cake we’d spent ages saving for. Wine, cigarettes. The next day we had to write 90 thank-you cards for flowers and telegrams – all day long a stream of people to be plied with port, Madeira and coffee. They ended up colliding with the dinner guests all dressed up to the nines, which was rather awkward and had to be dealt with by lots of tactful grinning – and then the dinner ditto were herded into the boys’ room where they had to sit and meditate. By the time we finally got to eat (after a lightning change of outfit in the bathroom), we were completely limp. Very late by the time we got to bed. But it was a splendid day – and the best thing of all: a letter from Prolle saying he would now be able to rest.

  The next day Ham was in such festive spirits that I persuaded her to buy a lovely squirrel cape, straight, dark and exceedingly beautiful. A lynx happened to slip in for me too – I was in festive spirits as well.

  And Eva, you were part of it too – because we served the guests’ coffee with your bottles of cream, which I’d been saving up! Ham sends her thanks!

  And then it was back to the usual routine and intensive Taidekortti production. Lasse went to Åbo, Faffan go
t to work on the Kramer fountain, Ham on her books. I must actually get back to the grind tomorrow as well. But there’s sunshine and sea here – and carving mammoths is more fun!

  A heartfelt hug, Eva. You are always with me. Be well.

  Tove.

  Tunnis: The island of Tunnholmen.

  Taidekortti production: In 1941–42 TJ designed a number of sets of Christmas, New Year and Easter postcards, and some with humorous animal pictures, for the publisher Taidekorttikeskus.

  TOVE JANSSON’S DECISION TO MOVE AWAY FROM HOME develops over the summer of 1942. She has had her own studio for short periods before, but when she moves to Fänrik Stålsgatan 3 it is definitive. The time has come for the liberation she has dreamt of for so long. Two years later, she moves into the studio at 1, Ulrikaborgsgatan.