by Tove Jansson
We will bury her on 14th July. I am going around in a great sense of unreality, calm but so alien.
I send you lots of love.
All the very best.
Tove.
Signe Hammarsten Jansson died on 6 July 1970.
1.7.71 [Klovharun]
Dearest Atos,
The fact is that your aphorisms do not need illustrations. I reread them yesterday, as soon as they arrived, with great reflection and joy. Both the earlier ones and the new batch. It will make a fine book but should not have pictures, not even abstract ones. I’m convinced now that it would seem forced, and irritate rather than stimulate.
You write to me so beautifully that I want to take you in my arms. I think it quite wonderful that we both have such a cheerful sense of gratitude to one another – not a debt of gratitude! – it’s very important for me, too. You had already given me “Framtida”, so I am sending back your copy, as the book is so hard to get hold of.
I’m so glad you were able to find the right English translator.
We shall come back into town sometime at the start of September. Atos, remarkable things are afoot! Tooti and I are off on a Round the World Trip! It’s an old dream we’ve been saving up for, and we’re all prepared and won’t be back until next spring. Our destination – Japan – was decided by a job I have to do in Tokyo, the Japanese are paying for that lap. Then Hawaii, and San Pedro, you know, where Taube loaded gasoline – and where Tooti’s aunt lives, and Mexico and then by multifarious ways and means (including paddle steamer!) up through the States to New York.
I still can’t really believe it’s true. Tooti’s studying English 4–5 hours a day and we keep the Map of the World permanently opened out.
Give my best regards to Irja and tell her about our plans. We must all meet up this autumn. Until then, a big hug and enjoy your summer!
Tove.
Tooti: Tuulikki Pietilä. See Letters to Tuulikki Pietilä.
where Taube loaded gasoline: A reference to “The Ballad of Gustaf Blom from Borås” by the Swedish singer and composer Evert Taube.
“Under the names of Tofslan and Vifslan”
LETTERS TO VIVICA BANDLER 1946–1976
Photograph of Vivica Bandler, signed “To Tofslan from Vifslan”
VIVICA BANDLER IS THE FIRST WOMAN WITH WHOM TOVE JANSSON truly falls in love. They meet at a party in November 1946. But their time together is short, a mere three weeks. When Vivica Bandler goes to Paris at the end of December (via Stockholm, Copenhagen, Geneva), their relationship is kept alive in frequent letters and occasional telephone calls. The plan is for Tove Jansson to follow her to Paris, but this remains a dream. The letters written in spring 1947 speak of passion and yearning, expectation and disappointment. This is a new and rapturous happiness, but it must be hidden from the outside world. Homosexuality remains illegal in Finland until 1971. Vivica’s letters to Tove Jansson are shorter and more restrained, urging caution. Both of them have commitments to other people: Vivica Bandler had married Kurt Bandler in 1943 – she went to Paris with him – and Tove Jansson had been in a relationship with Atos Wirtanen for three years.
Vivica Bandler (1917–2004) was the daughter of Erik von Frenckell, Chairman of Helsinki City Council, and his wife Ester-Margaret von Frenckell. The family had an estate called Saaris in Tavastland, and she trained as an agronomist, completing her studies in 1943. She also became involved in student theatre, and during the war was active in the Women’s Voluntary Defence Service. She made her debut as a director in 1948 with Jean-Paul Sartre’s La Putain respectueuse (The Respectful Prostitute) at the Swedish Theatre in Helsinki. The following year she staged Tove Jansson’s first Moomin play, The Moomintroll and the Comet, at the same theatre, and this marked the beginning of a long-term collaboration between the author and the director. Vivica Bandler went on to direct many productions of Tove Jansson’s Moomin plays in Finland, Sweden and Norway. In 1955 she assumed charge of the Little Theatre in Helsinki, and in 1967 took over at Oslo New Theatre. From 1969 to 1980, she was the head of Stockholm City Theatre.
In the world of the Moomins, the love between Tove and Vivica is coded in the symbiosis of Tofslan and Vifslan [known to English-language readers as Thingumy and Bob], identical in appearance except for Tofslan’s pointy cap, and the two of them speak a language of their own. Their suitcase conceals the sparkling King’s Ruby which, when it is shown to the world, radiates its light far out into the universe (Trollkarlens hatt/Finn Family Moomintroll, 1948). In 1947, the two characters also make an appearance on one of the Garm covers and in an advertisement for a fizzy drink. From the very start, Tove Jansson writes in terms of a close relationship between two people, interweaving her loved one’s landscape and her own – the island of Kummelskär, which she coveted so much, and Saaris, the von Frenckells’ estate: “Sometimes I think about the journey we will embark on together, writing and drawing. Under the names of Tofslan and Vifslan. On Kummelskär and at Saaris.” (21.12.1946) In her own notes of about the same time, she sums up what this is all about: “All that’s most important will be there, work, love and play. All year, every year.” When she is not painting she finds herself torn between, say, finishing off the fourth Tofslan and Vifslan chapter, or drawing a map of the house-to-be on Kummelskär. She devises trips for them to go on together, but none of these ever progress beyond plans and dreams. In a letter to Eva Konikoff before Christmas 1946, Tove Jansson describes the woman she loves:
Vivica is Erica v. Frenkell’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.
Tove Jansson’s love for Vivica Bandler finds many forms of expression, in words and pictures, the grandest among them the pair of frescoes for the restaurant at Helsinki City Hall, to which Tove Jansson devotes the spring of 1947. “What a painting I could do of you,” Tove Jansson writes as she waits to hear whether she has secured the commission (which comes from the Chairman of the City Council, namely Vivica Bandler’s father). But by the time Vivica Bandler returns to Helsinki in March 1947, their relationship has altered and Tove Jansson writes repeatedly of breaking with her for good. In the fresco, the artist turns her back on the dancing woman who has borrowed Vivica’s facial features. Their respective positions have been rearranged. One of them is in motion, one sitting still. Work on the frescoes is described in some detail in letters to Vivica Bandler, and is also mentioned in letters to Eva Konikoff. But pictures are not enough when the relationship falls apart; Tove Jansson writes poems. One collection, held in the Helsinki archives of the Society of Swedish Literature in Finland, is called “Songs for a Lady”, but there are several versions. In the letters, Tove Jansson refers to “Songs to my Beloved”.
Once their love affair’s roller coaster of emotions and sorrows has subsided (which takes time), Vivica Bandler gradually becomes a close friend and work colleague. Her influence is certainly discernible in Tove Jansson’s dramatic works, but Bandler also has an impact on her friend’s artistic development. One example of this is found in the letter in which Tove Jansson describes her work on the altarpiece in Östermark (1953), a project that she intersperses with reading the Bible and writing Farlig midsommar (published in 1954, and in English as Moominsummer Madness). The story is largely set in a floating theatre and is dedicated to “Vivica”. It is an idiosyncratic take on the nature of theatre, and Moominpappa is even seen composing (with some difficulty) a drama in hexameters, which he calls “The Lion’s Brides or Blood Will Out”. Tove Jansson’s own, not dissimilar, agonies are revealed in a subsequent
letter. Vivica Bandler is clearly of great importance for Tove Jansson’s dramatic work, not only her Moomin plays but also other texts for the theatre. Later, they collaborate on a TV project, the traditional advent calendar programme for Swedish television. Vivica Bandler is also (like other addressees in this volume) entrusted with reading drafts of the Moomin books. As with her other friends, Tove Jansson calls Vivica by a variety of names, including Vi, Vifs and later Uca.
Vivica Bandler’s memoirs Adressaten okänd (1992, Not Known at This Address) include a short chapter, “Tove”, about their friendship and how they met, but she says nothing about the all-engulfing passion that runs through Tove Jansson’s letters of the 1940s. Her rapture is expressed in other, more universal ways: “When Tove is near, every stone, every blade of grass, every hue and tint has meaning, and also therefore every word.” In her own, often lyrically couched, letters to Vivica Bandler, Tove Jansson, too, draws on nature for her many images of love. Here we find carpets of seashore flowers, uninterrupted horizons, but also angry breakers, rocks and seaweed.
Translator’s note.
This translation retains the original Swedish names Tofslan and Vifslan, which Tove Jansson uses for herself and Vivica in the letters, as well as for the two characters she invents in their image for the Moomin books. The literal meanings of the names approximate to ‘Tuftsy” (i.e. the one with the pointed hat) and “Viftsy” (the one who’s out and about), and their initial letters match the names Tove and Vivica. English-language readers of the Moomin books know these characters as Thingumy and Bob, names coined for Finn Family Moomintroll by the translator Elizabeth Portch, possibly in consultation with Margaret Washbourn and Lars and Tove Jansson. These names are much further from Tove and Vivica’s own than the originals and the name Bob would generally be considered masculine, whereas the names Tofslan and Vifslan have the typical form of feminine diminutives in Swedish.
* * *
THE FIRST EVENING YOU ARE IN STOCKHOLM. [December 1946, Helsingfors]
My darling,
This evening I’m clearly and patently jealous, I who was so proud of my noble incapacity to experience jalousie. I have been standing here all day, pasting gold flowers on to pale blue Christmas wrapping paper – and thinking as you once did: make them black! It’s already late. I’m sitting in a corner at Arbetarbladet while Gudrun Mörne makes up the paper and Atos writes the leader. Gudrun is telling us about her father, and the last poem he wrote. The opening poem in this year’s posthumous collection, his request for one more spring. The book was already at proof stage, but Arvid Mörne’s room was not at rest, he was there and wanted something. Then they found the poem, and included it – and the room calmed down. I’ve heard people claim that what you do with your hands and brain is worth nothing to you after your death. But if it was the most important thing in your visible life, it must be the same afterwards, too. I mean, the art in which you try to bring alive the best in you is, more than anything else – your self. You know that.
I know you don’t believe there is an afterwards. How surprised you will be, Vi, when I come floating along on a little cloud one day and say, Hello! Do you still want me?
Tomorrow I shall buy a tree, set up Bethlehem at Lallukka, do some baking. All of that. Gentle things. In actual fact, these last days I’ve been doing everything as absently as I would fasten a necklace round my neck.
Now I’m out at Grankulla. Atos is writing a speech, it’s late at night. I was intending to go home, but I leapt up when the train started moving. I didn’t want to be alone tonight.
You will get wittier letters from me later on, Vi. Letters that are full of action and Moomintrolls. But I can’t do it yet.
In words, any old words – I am desperately trying to make contact with you, now you have chosen to leave … Ick. What else can happen but that my love for you goes on expanding, growing ever warmer and more honest.
Take care of yourself. Bye.
Tove.
Ick: One of the many pet forms of Vivica’s name used by TJ in the letters.
21.12.46 [Helsingfors]
My darling –
It’s as if I can’t really be properly happy until you are here again. As if I have retreated deep into myself and am waiting there, leaving my umbrella-fixated, friend-meeting, Christmas-rushing self to perform for the outside world. She performs well: laughs, takes an interest and is genuinely involved – and yet she is not entirely present.
When I was very young and very much in love, it was different. An unconscious dance, confusion, stimulation – and I let myself be carried away by it, unaware of what it was doing to me. After that came the safety margins, those little skills for attracting and keeping someone, the doubt and anxiety, the observing and weighing up.
Now it’s as if I have circled back to being the bewitched devotee who asks no questions – but bringing all that awareness with me. It hurts! I am filled with happiness – that is true, but feeling so lonely is tearing me apart.
There is no possibility of my coming after you. Time is shuffling past at a horribly slow pace. It’s only four days since you left – and there are four months still to go. Something might happen to you over there, and I won’t be with you.
I went out to the Vannis’ so I could talk about you, but Maya’s disagreement with Svenska had nothing to do with us. I felt so disappointed and tired – I’d been planning to defend us and tell them how wonderful you are. Ham says nothing these days. After Christmas I shall look up Illo or Ulla. They know. I was tremendously pleased about one thing: a card from your parents. I think it was Ester’s handwriting. Going through the wrought-iron gate with the flowers, I suddenly had this overwhelming sense of excitement. It would have been so natural to see you coming towards me.
Would our lovemaking be different some other time when we weren’t under such strain from exhaustion and time running out and our first discovery of one another? Will events and people come between us and change things? Time? Distance? I don’t believe so.
My trust in you is unbounded And for my own part, I have experienced something of a miracle, which nothing can diminish or corrupt. If I could only see you for one moment! The bold cloak of cheerful self-belief you gave me can slip off sometimes.
If only we’d had a little more time. Why didn’t I ask you to come to the studio then – when you first wanted to! Why didn’t you go to the automobile club party so we could have met earlier. A year ago, two years ago. You were here all the time and I knew it.
But we have a boundless length of time ahead of us. And surely we must be able to keep part of it for ourselves without hurting anyone else.
Sometimes I think about the journey we will embark on together, writing and drawing. Under the names of Tofslan and Vifslan. On Kummelskär and at Saaris.
I think about the way we will be part of one another’s other’s work. There is so much to wait for, so much to be happy about, I know it.
But sometimes longing for you too much drives me frantic.
We must try to cope without each other for a while. It would be wretched if we couldn’t.
I wish you a truly auspicious trip. Not remotely overshadowed by missing home. Or perhaps just now and then – by missing me. When you’re by yourself and not working.
Tove.
P.S. After a long break I have started a new chapter of Moomin 3. It’s all about Tofslan and Vifslan. And the Groke. This year’s Moomin 2 has gone down very well.
Svenska: The artist Sven Grönvall.
Illo: Illo von Walzel, a good friend of Kurt Bandler’s.
Ester: Ester-Margaret von Frenckell.
Moomin 3: Trollkarlens hatt (Finn Family Moomintroll).
Moomin 2: Kometjakten (Comet in Moominland).
29.12.46 [Helsingfors]
Vifslan, my sweet!
Some days I feel as strong and happy, as slender and vigorous as a tree.
On those days I laugh at being sensible and couldn’t give a fig about the interior d
esign of City Hall. And then this, oh you tulip flower, you crowning glory of my heart: I shall get my press pass from le cocu to write about the gloire of Communism and take passage on a cargo boat as soon as the snow starts to melt to conquer you and the big city with Moomintrolls and the sound of cymbals.
Do you think I make a passable model? I’m a bit skinny perhaps, but my anatomy is nice and visible for beginners, and realism is modern. And I’m good at posing.
Last night I dreamt we lost each other at the flea market, and woke up to find I was shouting out for you. Then I had all the trouble of explaining who Vifslan was. A character in my new book! Who goes round holding hands with Tofslan and can’t speak a word of sense!
You know what, I’ve got toothache today, but it doesn’t bother me in the slightest. I stacked all the wood for the winter, and thought: good job it will be out of the way by the spring when they do the alterations to the attic and I’m not here …
Every object is only of significance as an article to be packed, every individual is considered as an opportunity to get away. Never before have the desires of my heart won out over my work, never before have promises been swept aside. It isn’t Paris I’m yearning for. It’s you.
Can you work out when you’ll get to France? How many months? As long as I can provide guarantees of a monthly press allowance, they’ll let me go. We’ll keep your invitation as a last resort. Think if I were to have an exhibition over there?
Vi, I miss you so dreadfully. Hold me in your arms – and don’t let me go!
