by Tove Jansson
Peo’s out here again, stocking up on fish for his family for the winter. Peter’s first word was “hi”. Modern, eh?
Lasse’s here as well, but staying placidly aloof from all the hysterical food gathering in the knowledge that he’ll be in the army from October. We’re growing ever closer to each other, I feel – we like the same objects and topics of conversation, have similar imaginations and often the same plans and ideas. We pitched the tent at Laxvarpet and we read until late into the night by the light of our last candle stumps, recommending our books to each other. Erika v. Frenckell was here for a while. I’m glad that Lasse has her. It might be good for him.
Faffan’s been an angel since I wrote him that letter after a clash over politics; a conciliatory letter in which I tried to explain that I’m actually apolitical and not “setting up a front” against him. That I’m upset about what’s going on in Europe mainly out of a universal human sense of justice and that I’m not capable of political theorising and have no appetite for it. That we must try to get on with each other and remember everything we were able to keep after the war, in spite of everything, try to build something up again for the sake of peace of mind in our work, try not to wear each other to shreds with gloom, defamation and bitterness. –
And if rocket-propelled missiles are eventually going to blow us to smithereens along with everything we’ve done, I want to be as calm and happy as I can now and work in peace.
But today he was black again and full of negativity, homing in on everything difficult, sad or deranged in every event and utterance. The way one does when one is deeply unhappy, disappointed and bitter. It’s such a pity for him, the war has shattered his nerves. He now even talks of fishing and mushrooming, which used to be his greatest pleasures, as a duty and a nuisance. […]
19 Aug.
In town, nearly autumn. This was the first night it was too cold with just a blanket … Peo and I sailed over from Pellinge, a wet and stormy trip with our baggage swimming in oil and salt water … But Peo is first-rate, always calm and kind. We took in more and more of the sail, and in the end we had to take refuge for the night on a little island. How simple they are, the setbacks nature gives us to do battle with – being freezing cold, wet, afraid of capsizing, seasick, hungry …
But now I really do feel sick, since getting that little note on squared paper two days ago from the new company that’s taken over this block, giving me notice to leave my tower, the studio. You can’t do battle with regulations, companies, documents, authorities!
19 Aug cont.d.
A hotel and restaurant firm wants to rebuild the whole attic storey where my tower is. I can’t do anything, but hope Atos will be able to help – or perhaps a lawyer I know. Though it’s not very likely – I punched him on the nose once when he tried to kiss me at an after-party. It’s dangerous to own physical objects, grow attached to them! If the best I can hope for is that they give me a standard little room instead of my castle – where will I find room for my enormous work table, my newly prepared canvases, the sculptures, the huge bookshelves I’m so proud of, and – I can’t help smiling – my four-poster bed? I’ve tried to build up a home, and ideal studio in the tower I’ve been dreaming of all my life, and thank the Muse for every morning. And then a bit of paper torn out of a notebook arrives, and I’m to clear out to wherever I like on the first of September. So much for the social life, the civilised city life I’ve always held as important. Maybe one should live on remote Kummelskär, on one’s own land, which only a new war can take away (it’s in the mine-laying zone) and not own anything to make one dubious about leaving the door open for fishermen and anyone who happens by and needs to get warm when one isn’t there. Now what is to become of my exhibition on 19th October?
Oh Konikova, I try to take things the way Atos does, laugh and shrug my shoulders. At ambition, at beautiful objects, at having a Home one is always embellishing and making more personal – but I’m weak, I can’t do it. Yet!
When I dream of a simple little shack on a bare rocky islet, it’s not because I scorn space, warmth, lovely things, company, the glitter and bibelots of life – but just a Romantic craving for contrast. – The way I’d enjoy, say, wandering about the docks one day in a shabby raincoat and drinking my own health in raw spirits in a disused goods wagon – and the day after that, in a hat with roses and a veil, skip playfully through an abstract discussion at some restaurant. An asocial aesthetic snob, as Turtiainen, Tapsa’s friend, put it.
Perhaps this is my allotted portion. To finally be driven from happiness in the ostrich’s hidingplace of my post-war years, to the others, those who still have to live in air-raid shelters or lodge in tiny rooms off other people’s kitchens, bombed out … Does it serve me right, Eva? Will it make me a better person? (But like hell will it make me paint better, having to work in a corner of poor Faffan’s studio!). Since the war I’ve closed my eyes to everything, only tried to be happy, to find peace for my work, to fill my surroundings with lovely things and my heart with dreams of moving forward. Never back – hardly even seeing the misery that persists everywhere – or the threat, the one about which Faffan always assumes the worst. Perhaps nobody has the right to isolate themselves in private happiness? But oh, Eva, I feel such a strong urge to build. Work, home atmosphere, a relationship with another person I love. Before the war I couldn’t, during the war I wasn’t allowed to. Now I want to! But I’ve never cared about the general work of building up society. Only what can be achieved alone, the way I built that crazy, childishly fantastical grotto in a desperate flight from reality during the war …
You know, Eva, 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. I’m not putting a burden on you – am I? I think, I know, that the way you always listen to whatever I tell you is like the embrace of a friend.
Tove.
20 Aug.
Ah Eva, how happy your parcel made me! Coffee and tea! Unpacking it felt very festive – and I’m wearing the spotted dress as I write. You should see what a nice fit it is; it doesn’t need a single alteration. And the trousers are extremely interesting. Even my Junoesque hip measurement is made to disappear by their streamlined American cut. If I ever become the owner of Kummelskär I shall walk its cliffs in your trousers, snug against the south-westerly! I was especially touched that you’d thought to send me powder (a well-chosen shade!) and cream. Woman cannot live by grain and wool alone! You dear, thoughtful friend, how will I ever be able to thank you for all your presents. Today I’ll have macaroni for dinner, but I shall save your tin of tongue for Atos and me one Sunday. And I’ll give one of the soaps to Peter, he’s allergic to the soap we get on ration here. How many different things one can do with rice! I feel so rich, Eva – but richest of all in my knowledge of your friendship, which stays the same in spite of the distance and the length of time that separate us. My longing to see you again is growing stronger and stronger. When will it be, and where. In your country, in mine – or France? Do you know what, if I get thrown out of my building and lambasted at my exhibition I shall jolly well feel like leaving, without the ballast of the tower and the heights of fame! I could come to you, why not!? But it isn’t so easy to get away from this country when one even has to kick up a fuss, and for months, just to travel to Åland!
Evening. I’ve sent out distress signals in all directions – and it’s simply wonderful how many kind people and friends there are who really are doing all they can to help. And the muse knows I’m unworthy of it. But, however things turn out, it’s heartening not to stand alone with one’s troubles, and the fact that people care for me is something to treasure. [ … ]
Hugs and farewell, Eva, my dearest. If the worst comes to the worst I shall put up my four-poster bed on Hesperia Esplanade over my American tent, which I also bought entirely by accident. Alack, you possessions! A kiss from your friend Tove.
Peter’s first word: Pet
er Jansson, Saga and Per Olov Jansson’s son.
bibelots (French): Trinkets.
TOVE JANSSON HAD MET VIVICA BANDLER IN DECEMBER 1946. In the year that followed, many of her letters are about this new relationship, her overwhelming passion and great disappointments. See Letters to Vivica Bandler.
A WEEK BEFORE CHRISTMAS –46. [Helsingfors]
Dearest Eva,
Something has happened to me that I realise I have to tell you about. I’m so happy, so elated and relieved. You know I feel like Atos’s wife, and I expect I always shall.
But what has happened now is that I’ve fallen madly in love with a woman. And it seems to me so absolutely natural and genuine – there’s nothing problematic about it at all. I just feel proud and uncontrollably glad. These last weeks have been like one long dance of rich adventure, tenderness, intensity – an expedition into new realms of great simplicity and beauty. Vivica is Erica v. Frenckell’s sister, three years younger than me. It was actually Lasse and Erica who had been saying for ages that Vi and I might get on well together, and one day they brought her to the studio. I saw a tall dark aristocratic girl with a prominent nose, thick straight eyebrows and a defiantly Jewish mouth. She is blind in one eye, but the other is clear, dark, penetrating. A mop of short hair and the loveliest hands I’ve seen. She’s such a gorgeously feminine creature, and one day I shall paint her as she is, chiefly as a profusion of fruit and blossom in full bloom.
One evening we went to see The Song of Bernadette and walked home in silence, deeply affected. Two days later I went to a party at their place for the French minister, and when everyone had left we stayed on and danced. That was when I realised, as we were dancing. It came as such a huge surprise. Like finding a new and wondrous room in an old house one thought one knew from top to bottom. Just stepping straight in, and not being able to fathom how one had never known it existed. We took a trip to their estate in Tavastland and stayed for four days. What conversations, Eva! Like finding the best I had in me refined and explained. Time has rushed wildly on, dragging with it one inner event after another. You’ll never guess, all my bitterness towards Faffan has suddenly gone! We joke – and are comfortable together. And you know what, I’m finally experiencing myself as a woman where love is concerned, it’s bringing me peace and ecstasy for the first time. And I know I can go on and find even greater sweetness. You see, I’m no longer afraid of the dark outer reaches where the “seascape painter” led me. It’s being able to talk about everything, and not feel ashamed any more. It’s my friends staring at me and asking what’s happened to me. I’m new again, liberated and glad, and with no feelings of guilt.
I don’t think I’m entirely lesbian, I have a very clear sense that it can’t be any other woman than Vi, and my relationships with men are unchanged. Improved, maybe. Simpler, happier, less tense. Atos has been away and will be back tomorrow. And tomorrow Vi is off to her husband in Stockholm, and then travelling on via Denmark and Switzerland, where his parents are – before spending the whole spring in Paris, where she’ll be directing a film.
It’s dreadful for us to part just when we’ve found each other, but we have our work, of course, and can safely wait. There may be great difficulties lying ahead for us. The others don’t understand, you see – they haven’t experienced it. The backbiting has started creeping in. But I don’t care. I’m even ready to lose Atos now.
The fact is, Eva, that just now I can’t write any of the things I intended to. Your art magazine, which I wanted to analyse, Christmas, the family, my work, my friends. I’m caught up in this one big joy and agony.
Eva, life is so tremendously rich!
I embrace you. All the best – everything you wish for yourself and Ramon!
Your friend Tove.
her husband in Stockholm: Kurt Bandler.
15.3.47 [Helsingfors]
My dearest friend,
I’ve been worrying for a long time that you might be ill, or cast down by some sad event. But then today it arrived, your parcel that I’ve been so eagerly waiting for. You sent it off ages ago, of course, and a great deal can have happened to you since then – but it was still contact with you. Eva, I felt so festive as I unpacked it here on my own! I was absolutely delighted with it all, the lovely clothes, coffee, tea, cocoa, cigarettes! How funny that you happened to send plums, of all things. They are more or less the only thing Atos really craves, and I’m always trying to get hold of some and hang onto them somehow. Now I’ll be able to make us a spaghetti dinner when he comes back from his trip to Vasa – but I shall save the apricots for the summer. My Kummelskär plans have advanced to the extent that I think I can get permission to build on the island, that the boat is ready, that I was able to get nails – truly phenomenal! It’s the timber that’s the problem now, we aren’t allowed to buy anything without a licence to build, which of course I can’t get. But this will resolve itself. If I dream and act intensely enough, it will happen!
I’m so pleased with the soap and face cream! I generally look an absolute mess, because the stoves play up on a daily basis and refuse to eat their peat dust, which they spew out over the studio in black clouds. It’s a bit warmer now at any rate, I’ve survived my last bout of influenza and the snow is crashing down from the roof of the tower in great avalanches and melting on the windowsills in the March sun. I’m wildly happy that spring is coming, more so than ever – and about the days growing lighter, filled with intense work as they have been since the start of the year. I’m very tired, and nervous about the frescoes at times – but I enjoy having one big job and finding that I can concentrate on a single task after all. The result just has to be good. Not only because my colleagues are all fired up with indignation that the commission went directly to me without any sort of open competition beforehand. All this unpleasant talk that chips away at one’s ability to work and one’s peace of mind! There’s nothing to do but isolate myself in my tower and carry on, taking no notice. Perhaps one day they’ll say I got the commission from v. Frenckell because he’s Vivica’s father. I mustn’t take any notice of that, either.
Eva, how thoughtful of you to put in those sewing bits for me, darning wool, some tape for my skirt! All the things I can’t get. It was lovely to put on a pair of stockings without holes – the others were nothing but darns that I could barely hold together. Dearest – you definitely are the most wonderful friend a person could have. You’re short of money, have a crazy amount of work, many years and half the globe divide us, yet still you go on sending me presents. Every day my hands touch something you gave me, and every time a happy, warm little feeling comes over me. – I think the black dress will be just the thing to wear for those mysterious cocktail dos they have in the circles Vi is introducing me to. Last time I noticed I wasn’t the same as all the rest, and there’s no need for that. I hate it when people think “she’s an artist, so she has to be (or is allowed to be) different! Clothing shouldn’t be a badge of one’s profession. (And not just a badge, either – but my way of dressing – though not an “artistic” one.) I simply love the blue suit. You may not believe it, Konikova, but I look really rather pretty in it. I’ve had an idea for a cap to go with it – with something red in it – and on more formal occasions my blue hat, which I wear with your coat. How lucky I feel! I pulled out one top after another, one gorgeous colour after another and tried them on in turn, dancing round the studio in your grey trousers, which have kept me warm all winter.
If only I could take you in my arms right now and thank you, and you could see how glad and happy I am – and how smart I look! We could have a celebration meal together (do you remember that one we had, just the two of us, in your old nest?) and then I’d show you my work and get your verdict. It’s coming on slowly, but steadily.
18th.
My assistant Suihko and I have finally been able to get hold of two-year-old limewash and brushes and powdered lime from Sweden, the half-scale colour sketches are done, and one of them drawn on the wall, full s
ize. In between times I shall take on beer labels and glass paintings to stabilise my rocky economy. I shall use the big honorarium coming my way this autumn to try getting to Paris. Vivica’s back from her month of directing there and started making our September plans. If only it works! Surely we’d be able to manage for a month or two over there.
And you? How far ahead are you and Ramon looking as you make your Paris plans? It would be too good to be true if they coincided …
Atos will be travelling this spring. Political invitation to Oslo and Copenhagen – then he goes on to London, Paris, Berlin, trying to get his Nietzsche book translated. He’s also talking about his big trips later on. Politics is starting to get on his nerves. Sometimes I think he’s serious when he says he’ll give it all up for good. We see little of each other and I find now that I very readily slip into his tone of camaraderie, don’t miss Those Words and feel no need to utter them myself. If he asked me to marry him I would, of course, but not with the stirring sense of joy and solemnity I’d have had before.
There are enchantments, Eva, or miracles if you prefer to call them that. But they happen quickly. It’s over now with the one that so transformed me before Christmas and gave me such wonderfully candid courage, a joy and strength that meant I could tackle anything and made people wonder what had happened to me. When Vi came back, her initial tempestuous passion was over, she had had an experience in Paris that now lay between us. It is gradually fading and is of no consequence – but it exists. At first I was confused, disappointed – everything seemed to take on a strange and ugly face. But now I’ve had time to think and understand. That regeneration isn’t lost, it’s still there. But there will be no more instant enchantments, I will have to fight my own battle to lure out that free and happy person within me who suddenly spoke, moved, painted and loved in a fresh, new way.
