by Tove Jansson
I’m standing on my head today, too, and am a proud Moomin squigglemaker! There, you see, it isn’t so impractical to build rainbows after all! Before one knows it, one has used them to cross right over to America.
I have delivered the next Moomin to Schildts. Warburton read it through and seemed positive about it, according to Ham. We will have to see. Today a very small lady came to me and said she was circulating a petition at school: “Why hasn’t a new Moomin come out?” To protest to Söderströms. I hope Appel will be impressed, I was!
Painting and thinking. Perhaps I shall be able to catch up so I can overtake myself. Perhaps I’m on entirely new paths and have passed my old latitude.
Longing to spread a new and happy forcefulness of colour, bigger and simpler than before. (+ individual explosions of capricious wealth of detail, where needed.)
And then I wonder whether you think it would be a good idea for us to get married. It wouldn’t change our way of life, I don’t think. If you don’t want to, we can talk about something else when you get back. There’s plenty, isn’t there.
The city has dressed itself in its snowy beauty, and it is cold and clear. It’s lovely among your spruces out there, I imagine.
The Janssons are going to the circus tonight. Do you think you will ever get to see the fight between the Bengal tiger and the boa constrictor? We must try to see a whale one day. Until then, the pike on Bredskär. Abbe has got hold of some timber for the weatherboarding and ceiling, so I shall go out early in the spring and finish building our house.
Interview as many kings as you can, and show them you’re “no ordinary boy, oh no!” and then come home; because in a few weeks the days will start getting longer again. And to see someone who is very fond of you, namely me.
Tove.
the next Moomin: Trollkarlens hatt (Finn Family Moomintroll).
Appel: Bertel Appelberg, head of publishing at Söderströms Förlags.
4.1.48. [Helsingfors]
Dearest,
Right now I am lying here surrounded by sixty newly prepared canvases, getting through a mild dose of influenza and reading Stendhal. Moomin has reached the end of the world, after which a New Age can begin to take shape, exactly as we want it.
I delivered your message to the paper, and your regards to Eva who was so revitalised that she instantly wrote a new column. One evening we went to the Collianders’ together; other than that I’ve been living a tower life and starting to feel comfortable in my painterly context. It paints itself into one’s head and one lets the urge grow.
Everything has been smouldering away disagreeably for so long that I’m ready for a fairly major explosion. 60 canvases ought to provide the right amount of material, don’t you think?
You enter the lists in many lands, musketeer! All the impressions and insights hurtling through you are of immense importance, but perhaps the most important of all is that you are able to be alone with yourself, even in the centre of Stockholm. I think – no, I know – that you will allow yourself a time like this every year, and that it will grow longer and longer. You’ve gradually discovered what a boon solitude can be if one is peaceful of heart and able to work (which amounts to the same thing?) Perhaps that very thing is the greatest happiness there is.
Sometimes I plan the island, sometimes the houseboat. The keel has been repaired, at a cost of 40,000; sold two canvases at the same time. (My first sale for a year.) Both the director and I were so pleased that we embraced. (He asked permission first.) And I might possibly get 50,000 for the glass paintings at the Domus Academy?
I’m afraid you’ll find you have a very rich wife, but you can console yourself with the fact that I never stay rich for very long.
Sofen, you are the warmest, bravest and wisest person I know. And as for you being “difficult”: it’s like what distinguishes a bunch of flowers one picks from the florist’s orderly, counted easiness. You see, there was a time when I wanted a proposal bouquet wrapped up in a cake doily, but I’ve learnt differently. Hopefully I shall learn even more in future, for it is certainly necessary.
Here it is cold enough for snow, and the sun has a slightly longer curve every day. In the mornings the room is full of friendly spots of sun and it’s easy to get up. You are not so far away from me.
Would like to talk to you about how heavenly bodies come to reignite spontaneously, or those little creatures that dash around in pools of water. About all manner of things. You’ll be so welcome when you come home, Atos.
Tove.
a New Age: a play on the title of Atos Wirtanen’s newspaper Ny Tid.
Eva: Eva Wichman.
Domus Academy: The Domus Academica student hostel in Helsinki.
IN THE SPRING OF 1948, TOVE JANSSON WENT WITH SAM AND Maya Vanni to Florence, where they took lodgings and spent several weeks painting. From there they moved on to France, first to Paris and then to the idyllic little town of Chevreuse, just southwest of the capital. The Vannis stayed in Chevreuse, but Tove Jansson continued alone to Brittany, to the fishing village St Pierre.
13.4.48. VIA DANTE DA CASTIGLIONE 1. DOTTORE MARANDINO. FIRENZE.
Mi caro sofo,
I should like to place you here, on one of the flower-covered hillsides, full of colours, buzzy insects and warmth – and send some other whale to make a speech in Finland. Every day I drink your health in the red wine you like so much and fall asleep with you as some unfamiliar bird sings a single, melancholy note over and over again, down in the garden. It isn’t true that it’s “too beautiful” here. It’s just as beautiful as it ought to be, and entirely natural for us to be staying in a palace outside the city with tall, cool rooms and a prie-dieu for a bedside table. The hills climb up all around. I rise early and go out to draw, and Sam heads off in his own direction. The landscape has a completely new face here, with more vivid contrasts, intensely decorative. And before one knows it one gets carried away doing tourist pictures of picturesque scenes – I have to be on my guard to avoid being taken in. In the evenings we go out and buy cheap red wine, black and green olives, bread and oranges.
Now of course it’s true that Italians of today dupe one in a perfect and rational manner, but at the same time are so brilliantly generous that one is entirely disarmed. On the train we met some curly-haired Neapolitans, beaming and radiating goodwill. They had as little idea as we did when the train was due to leave for Milan, but they obligingly invented a time for us. The upshot was that Maya and I almost missed the train, aboard which Samu was pulling his hair out and explaining in three languages that he had “lost his wives”. The rest of the carriage was all sympathy, showering him with oranges and unreliable advice. Meanwhile, the wives’ tram had got caught up in a crowd of demonstrators at Piazza del Duomo, where the whole of Milano (with prams) was listening to wild popular orators and the square was full of military vehicles. We leapt onto the train just as it started to move. To calm himself down, Sam bought a Chianti in Bologna, and the Neapolitans two, to outdo him. Everything they had, they shared with us.
The speedy journey down there made a deep and vivid impression. Particularly Germany, with its ravaged cities and grave people. The children ran shrieking along the railway embankment, catching the sweets and fruit that people threw out of the carriage windows. One little boy almost got run over when an orange rolled under the train. The passengers were cheery busybodies, just like on Högholmen. – eugh!
Switzerland went rolling by, a few concentrated hours of pure beauty – then came Italy’s explosion of colour and warmth – a great wash of impressions that are only now starting to shape themselves into reflections. I think I want to stay here in Firenze, not travel about as I did nine years ago. Understand the landscape, develop a peaceful sense of living here and not chasing round after things I shall find on every street corner if I give myself time.
Our casa is up on the hillside outside Porta Romana. All the walls are drowning in great armfuls of luxuriant garden growth, every house is beautiful in c
olour and proportion, and the black spears of the pines position themselves with almost irritating precision exactly where they are needed in the landscape composition.
We get on well together. Prowl all over the city, making discoveries and being amazed. It’s as if I have never been here before; I see things in a different way, nothing just brushes past, it all sinks straight in like water into dry ground.
Every day, aeroplanes streak across the city, spraying the streets with pink and green propaganda. It looks like confetti against the blue, blue sky – and seeing people grab them with shouts and laughter, one could so easily think the whole scene was nothing more serious than a carnival.
I have been infected by the general mood, trying to understand the temperamental speakers as they jig about in excitement, and reading the posters whose orgies of colour and outrage are splashed on every wall, every tree, every building.
The Germans blew up all the bridges, only Ponte Vecchio is still standing, amid the ruins of districts on both sides of the river.
A letter came from Ham, who writes that they have coltsfoot at the market. By the time I get home the August flowers will be coming up along the shore. I don’t think Bredskär will appear any less beautiful to me for having seen all this.
It is wonderful for me to be given so much, to possess such quantities of friendship and love. Today I feel as if I lived in a horn of plenty. Greetings to my friends! A big hug.
Tove.
Raporto primo
Il buono Sofo. Make sure you ask Tove in your next letter:
Who is Fernandel?
–– "–– Antonio?
Other than that we are fine. With warmest greetings.
Sam
21.6.48 ST PIERRE
Kino vo! which is Breton and means: hello there, sof.
Just now your still faithful Tofsla is seated in the bar de l’Ocean by the harbour, drinking absinthe and thinking about it being midsummer and all that, and the quayside is a riot of blue-and-pink-trousered sailors and fishermen, carrying on in their strange semi-Gallic Celtic language; they ask me from time to time if I’ve done any “photographs” today, and why on earth the Finns don’t rate the Russians. We’re in a strongly Communist part of the country here, as I discovered at the lobster festival in Guilvinec. They took the greatest delight in attempting to knock a gentleman’s hat off with soft fabric balls – and it was a star-spangled-banner hat. You could also amuse yourself by walking ten times round a post and then balancing your way along a rope to a packet of cigarettes, which no one ever reached, of course, or drinking red wine in tents decked out in green, crammed in like sardines in a tin – then there was a little propaganda, some dancing at the youth centre, some missing of the bus and a walk of eight kilometres across flat country, heading straight for my friendly lighthouse. Sky full, simply full, of stars and the breakers ever closer, and the mighty cross of light sweeping over and hurling itself towards me, past me and way out across the sea.
There’s something enormously soothing about this flat, treeless landscape, the row of huddled houses by the sea, the expanse of ebb-tide beach with glimpses of blue in the far distance. A landscape of horizontal lines, barely in colour, but in a pronounced variety of shades. Lovely cadmium yellow moss on the low stone walls, seaweed in every hue from black purple to honey yellow, grey-white sand, the sun-bleached grass – and perpetual wind. All the waves of the Atlantic brought up short at this particular low beach – though there are sharks and whales further out – where Tofslan and others collect shells in the harmless shallows.
Talk of shells and offshore winds must seem very far removed from what you are working on now, which takes up all your time and all your thoughts. But they are on the island too, with us. The seaweed and the horizon, everything. Perhaps you’ll be weary of speeches and crowds sometime towards the end of the summer, and feel like coming out there. That’s why I’m sending you words of temptation from this coast, where the days go by without one speaking much or seeing many people. Just now, the lilies are blooming in the potato patches within the walls. Wind-torn bushes with shiny leaves and two stunted apple trees in front of the gateway.
Facsimile of Tove Jansson’s letter from St Pierre (21.6.48), with greetings from the whale.
Down by the fishing port and the jetty, the boats are at rest on the low-tide mud, red and blue among clouds of shrieking gulls, the chug-chugs are puttering out along the inlet and heavy brown nets are spread on the sand. The women sit in demurest black, doing their crochet in the shade of the walls. And I walk around in all this – the “most genuine” landscape I have found on my travels, and the most pacifying. If one were not at peace with oneself, the monotonous desolation might be maddening – but, as things stand, it just cancels out the expectations of one’s desires and one lets the days pass as calmly as the rain falls.
Unfortunately my banknotes are taking walks as well, so sometime in July I shall have to hurry back to my own domain. Eva is welcome to stay on in the studio, because I will only give myself time to collect working materials, cement and food, and then go out to The Island, where I shall stay until the winter storms start. If you have a week free, you’ll be most welcome there – I’m sure you can do with having them blown away, all those idiocies you’ll have been obliged to listen to by now, from the right and elsewhere.
Spread greetings to the old kolkhos system, and greetings to you too, via this Whale, from
Tove.
Eva: Eva Wichman had borrowed TJ’s studio as a workroom while TJ was away travelling.
IN 1951, TOVE JANSSON TOOK A TRIP TO ITALY WITH VIVICA Bandler. From Italy, they went on to North Africa.
POSITANO [Postmark 3.4.51]
Dearest Atos!
We had to fight our way through a real tangle of difficulties to get down to this peaceful place, a narrow strip of sand looking out onto the sea, enclosed by a dramatic massif, with the town climbing upwards above our heads. At night the fishing fleet lies out there like a pearl necklace of light and we fall asleep to the sound of lazy surf.
It took us a long time to catch up with the spring. In Stockholm I had to wade through the snow between my various relations, freezing in optimistic summer clothes. In Denmark the ground was bare of snow but brown, and it was only in Germany we saw the first flashes of yellow broom and a few anxious crocuses. Switzerland welcomed us with snowstorms. It was only at the Italian border that the streams in their spring spate were starting to tidy up and the first cherry blossom made us throw our woolly knickers out of the window. We travelled through Italy overnight, this time without a sleeping berth, and arrived in Rome pretty cold, tired and out of sorts to devote ourselves to hotel – money – and passport troubles, plus racing around a confusion of monumentality.
Italy and the realisation that I was finally on a Journey didn’t really sink in until I went up behind the Forum Romanum on my own and sat there quietly, watching and feeling for a long time. White architectural fragments against static, dark-green foliage, warm ochre tones in the heat, attractive children shouting, skinny dogs, priests flapping by like bats.
I walked slowly home through the dusk, ordered a white vermouth and bought some red flowers, stood on the Spanish Steps and thought of nothing. Simply existed. Other than that, the days and nights in Rome passed in one hectic whirl. This is the first time I’ve really tried the nightclub life – it’s entertaining, but I can’t keep up. When we next meet I shall tell you about my most potent experience in Rome, a human one, of course, Vera. Her tragedy still haunts me.
Quick dash through Naples, where we only just caught the boat to Capri. On board we got talking to four charming youths, hominids from America on scholarships, making for the hominid paradise of Capri. They then came with us on daytime and nighttime outings, and Uca was the boss of us all. I must tell you more about all this. Capri is a strange place of beauty and indolence, of decay and primitive simplicity, of superficiality and intensity. Parting from the youths on friendly terms,
we looked over our finances, and discovered to our horror that our funds were very much depleted. But we were in luck. While the Positano bus was waiting at the piazza, we met a real local character who for the price of a night at the hotel let us rent two ramshackle rooms down by the beach for a week. The walls are caving in, the door won’t shut, dirt everywhere – but thoroughly homely. On the outside of our green door someone has scrawled in big letters “Votate per la monarchia!” (vote for the monarchy!) and in each bedhead there is a special little compartment for one’s prayer book.
To atone for our offences hitherto, we’ve been buying food and wine to consume at home. For me, the Positano hovel is the best place we’ve stayed. No front doorstep, you just walk straight out into the street.
Today I shall walk up into the mountains and find a primitive little village. I yearn for scenery, Uca for people. But I’m not very bothered about them at the moment. I sense that there won’t be any mymble on this trip, neither one kind nor the other. All I want is warmth and colour and peace.
You would like being here. And could do with it. I’m hugging you in my thoughts, wishing you all the best!
From here our trip takes us to Tunis, then Paris. We’ll be there from the 17th onwards, until the 30th. Take care of yourself and don’t forget your
Tofsla
7.7.70 [Helsingfors]
Dear Irja and Atos,
A sad letter to you both. Ham is dead.
They let me stay in her room at the hospital for the final forty-eight hours.
The end came quickly and without dread, another blood clot. She was able to go as she wished, without paralysis or a long wait and without losing a scrap of her intellect. Lasse and Prolle came to her every day. And Ham sank into extreme exhaustion.
