Letters from Tove

by Tove Jansson

  Tove.

  le cocu: The cuckold; a reference to Atos Wirtanen.

  30.12.46 [Helsingfors]

  Darling,

  Your express letter came zipping in just now – and I feel as if you have been here talking to me. You often take me in your arms, my sweet. Those wings that fly me to infinity exist nowhere else, and I no longer care about any other embrace.

  So yes, I have been indiscreet, still am and will continue to be. You’ll have to be in charge of the common sense for a while. I do promise, though, to stop being dithyrambic on the telephone, but only so you won’t be hanged for your “perverse inclinations”. Next time you talk about them, just remember that I’m equally afflicted, and might feel deeply offended! Never in the world have I felt as natural and genuine as I do now! I don’t want to hear anything about collars, either. I loved the person wearing them – and when I love, everything becomes clean and pure – shirts included.

  You’re wondering what he said. Well, not all that much. “There’s no need to use so many Words”. And a slightly surprised “But you’re my wife, aren’t you?” Perhaps he was slightly troubled, but it’s possible he’s forgotten the whole thing already. I mean, he’s so often seen me crying because he didn’t love me and then cheering up again, so for me to be crying now because I don’t love him isn’t all that different. Just feelings, women’s feelings. Happiness and Loving and Heart and other Words!

  At any event, he’s still turning up as usual. Affection, and feeling comfortable together, have a lot to recommend them, and I’m as much in love with his intellect as before. It’s just that my heart isn’t involved any more; it yearns, like my whole being, only for you.

  And the reason Ham isn’t saying anything? It’s nothing to be concerned about, Vif. She’s preoccupied with worrying about Lars and being cross with Peo for “wasting his artistic talent”. His family book is out now, written (as she sees it) to impress his wife and the public (quite apart from being a great source of delight to everyone who knows us.)

  Faffan, thank goodness, is so indignant about the erotic details that he’s barely noticed how much it gives away about him.

  It may have made Ham a little uneasy to see events moving me and Atos apart, but I’ve calmed her down again now.

  Today I wrote a long, careful letter to Lasse, trying very hard not to trip over his personality or force mine on him too closely. But it was an honest letter. I only hope I’ve been able to help him a bit – or at least to relieve his sense of isolation for a moment. Maybe he already knew about us. It sometimes surprises me that everyone can’t see it “written all over the place” – that I love you (is the Gestapo watching the post, too?) and do so more with every passing day, more joyously and exaltedly, and less fearfully.

  And the Muse be praised for those fatal Words that only exist for telling Vifslan that Tofslan loves her! You go ahead, “sit down in an armchair and feel superior”, I shall just sit down in another and laugh at you. If you wrote to me that some Vera had swept you helplessly off your feet, I would draw you a misabel in reply and write Zut! underneath, not believe you for a moment and laugh even more.

  And now you must answer me the following: Who is c/o Robin? Some character in whose house I can’t be seen, no doubt. And where else should I stay if I came to Paris but with you? You’re there for February and half of March? That’s still a month away. Have I got time?

  Will your progenitors have a nervous breakdown if I say I’m turning down the City Hall interior for a trip to Paris, to be made just when their daughter is there? Later in the spring I have an invitation to Stockholm with Ham. But will I be able to see you at all then – is there anywhere we can meet – or does it all have to be underhand and nerve-racking?

  There, see, all manner of common sense raising its head and saying “in that case” and “but”.

  Yesterday I wrote to you in all the reckless delight of my heart – one single thought: to come to you as soon as possible. Now I’m starting to wonder whether we are ruining our future happiness by rushing ahead. If we were able to marry, I would accept the proposal that I presume you would make. Just now, I feel I shall love you for as long as I exist – and I must start right away to construct the defences for the years we might perhaps be able to spend together. Do we risk tearing anything down if I come to you now? Think about it, Vif, think carefully! I’m not afraid of anyone, but I am afraid of any harm coming to us. This is the most beautiful relationship I have ever encountered and I’m busy building it up and securing it.

  I can wait, I know that now. For as long as I have to, if only you take me in your arms when that time is up.

  Vivica Bandler with Tove Jansson on Bredskär, early-1960s.

  Eva Wichman was here just now. She could see it! “You’re different through and through, your manner, your face, the way you move – maybe your thoughts?”

  I certainly am different. Or perhaps it’s only now I am truly myself.

  Because I love you, Vivica.

  Tonight you are here with me.

  Tove.

  P.S. I got my hairdresser to write the brown envelope so you won’t have to start the year with a dreadful scene. I can be sensical! Next time I’ll get the caretaker and after that the grocer. My sweet one!

  His family book: Per-Olov Jansson’s Ung man vandrar allena (Young Man Walks Alone).

  [Undated, but the content shows it was written 1–4.1.1947] FROM TOVE JANSSON. ULRIKABORGSG. 1 H:FORS

  Darling!

  It’s the first day of the New Year, the year I already think of as “ours”. I’ve been partying for twenty-four hours at the Vannis’ with Atos, the Bäcks and Kutter and am utterly exhuasted – but I can’t get to sleep until I’ve chatted to you for a while. I can’t send off the letter for a few days, to make sure you don’t receive too much post in Denmark. – That’s why I’m writing a little at a time, and perhaps we’ll meet tomorrow as well.

  I know how hard it is for you to get the time – and the quiet – to write to me. A letter prompted by duty can feel excruciating when it’s like that – but a letter prompted by yearning even worse. Don’t you think I understand what it takes for you to find the space to talk to me every couple of days amid the whirl of people, impressions and travel engulfing you at present! Every letter brings me affection and strength. In a new, strange way you are with me everywhere, sometimes so close that I give a start and look up.

  That night things were hard for you I lay here longing for you, repeating your name – and really did hold you in my arms. On the stroke of twelve on New Year’s Eve I strode out into the snow and called out for you. But time and distance no longer frighten me. It’s as certain as my painting that we will come to one another this spring. I’m waiting calmly now to see how things go with the commission. If I get it, I suppose I’ll do it. Atos’s press pass would have been a cynical way out, after all. Good night, my sweet.

  Good morning! We were just talking to each other! Your voice still lingers with me, your slow, soft voice. And I dance around and bless Blomberg and believe you’ll be home when the snow thaws! I ought to be absolutely terrified and think of Kurt with remorse – but I simply can’t do it. In the past I was always a bit of a deceiver and sinner because I dragged so much around with me: ideals, principles, consideration, guilt and duty and demands for fairness. Perhaps it’s only now I am the deceiver, but greater than all that sorry fandangle is my love for you, Vif who is the sweetest of all! Happiness is what I feel – and today I am not so much a tree as a bouquet. A bouquet with colours and bees and honey (and thorns and spiky grass) bound with little bandlers, and I present it to you!

  What a painting I could do of you.

  3 Jan.

  And tomorrow you move on to Denmark. Somehow that is a little nearer to me, because you have already reached the second stage of your trip. Today the sun is out, the stove is roaring away, there’s dripping on the windowsill. The whole room is filled with dancing spots of sunlight and I have
Lenten roses and white cyclamen on the table in front of me. This very instant, in the middle of the day, I feel like having a party in your honour. It’s unthinkable to spend a day like this on sensible pursuits. Perhaps I’ll finish off Tofslan and Vifslan’s Moomin chapter, or draw up a plan of the house-to-be on Kummelskär.

  The biggest window facing the sea, wouldn’t you say. But should the other one face west or east? What would you like best, waking up in the sunlight with me, or for us to have the whole room suffused in glorious red in the evenings? We’ll put the door on the north side, where there’s only the mainland.

  But I’m seriously considering a skylight; it’s so nice to look at the stars before you go to sleep.

  I’m starting to wonder if we should give up on the Call of the Wild approach. The sauna I bought fell to bits when they took it down, five generations of ants having gobbled up the beams from the inside. It has to be new timber, and we have a completely free hand. The idea of the ascetic’s solitary eyrie appeals to me sometimes. But just as often I feel the urge to build something barbaric and comfortable with lots of colour and let my horror vacui run riot. What does Vifslan think of that? No garden plants. No ghastly seats for admiring the view. Just little winding paths through the heather and the bog bilberry. As for the boat I ordered in the summer, we’ll have to haul it up with some kind of winch mechanism, because there’s no safe harbour on the island. And the hollows in the rock are the only source of water, so we’ll have to bring Vichy with us. And wine. But there is a clump of osiers, birches and bird cherries growing in the middle – it’s possible we could get a well going. Naturally you’ll also have to learn how to operate the two lighthouses. I’ve been to the Maritime Pilot Administration to discuss the matter. They had no objections to a lighthouse keeper. Their last tenancy payment for upkeep of lighthouse, path and landing place was made in 1889 to a person unknown. Not to the state, that is.

  Now I’m frantically hunting for the owner of my island. I dragged a lawyer off to the Land Registry and went through piles of old papers from pre-land-reform times, before the Great Partition. After a day’s search we found a meeting at which all the farmers were arguing over Kombelskär with a crown bailiff named Hindrikson. None of the later meetings say whether the island fell to the village or the crown, so maybe they all went out for a drink on the question and forgot the whole thing. In that case we shall lay claim to it by custom and prior ownership. We can call the building work renovation of an ant-eaten sauna, otherwise we’ll be sent to jail.

  But we must be sure to get ahead of some other smug contender who had blatantly been through all the documents not long ago, making notes. Just imagine, Vif, what a superior air it would give us to be able to drop into conversation in company: Oh yes, our land rent from the Maritime Pilot Administration is due tomorrow!

  But darling – I was forgetting that you already are a landowner! Even so, you must find Kummelskär exciting.

  Night.

  The clear weather brought the cold with it, and in my room it’s only 8˚. The studio’s below zero. Moonlight reflecting onto the ceiling now. I got home from the Social Democrats’ New Year review, which the philosopher was keen to take me along to. His round and kindly mother looked so sweet in her black headscarf, as solemn as in church. – The thing is – I always find their Community Centre dreadfully depressing. It’s all so worthy and cheerless.

  Vifslan, you know what, I’ve started getting a strange new sense of “coming home” when I go into the studio. Home to you. Of course there could be a letter waiting, and your chain is hanging on my bedhead. I look at it before I go to sleep and when I wake up, and hold it in my hand when I’m unhappy. But it isn’t only that. Sometimes your thoughts are here, I can sense it. And sometimes it’s as if you are folding me in your arms. Vi, I long for you so much this evening. I’m lonely without you, Vi.

  Hold me, my darling.

  4 Jan.

  My sweet, I got the City Hall wall, 10 x 3 ½. So that’s that – I won’t be able to see you until the spring. Time seemed to drag on so, for a while. I really had hoped, in spite of everything. I suppose it was wrong of me to wish you home in March; your work down there is certainly more important than what you can get from Blomberg in Finland. I shall have to start being a bit more of a painter now – not just go around yearning and dreaming. Do some sketches – but not of Kummelskär, not yet.

  I think I can risk sending this letter now. But surely the cat is out of the bag now, Kurt knows about me. And if he comprehends the slightest thing, he must loathe me. I would. Austrian humanity must have its limits!

  This has never happened to me before, a big, engaging work project being less important than my love. It feels odd. But maybe I can combine the two. That ought to give your father a beautiful wall to look at!

  Tove.

  Kutter: Hans Kutter, theatre and film critic.

  Blomberg: Film director Erik Blomberg, with whom Vivica Bandler was planning a Franco-Finnish film project.

  16.1.47 [Helsingfors]

  My darling Vifs,

  now, you see, I have put all my sketches up round the walls, and I know what composition I want. “Breakfast” has turned into simply “Joy of Living”. The girl in the tree is leaning down to kiss the boy, who I’ve made younger and more bashful. He’s no longer a “he man” strong enough to have hoisted her up there; his raised arms express tenderness, not power. But the fiddle player is bolder, and the tiresome breakfast table has had to give way to a well-endowed woman with armfuls of garlands, her much foreshortened arm extending towards the centre, and a child in the background who is running to her. Through the branches and blossoms there are glimpses of water and the bodies of bathers. It so happens there are eleven figures in each of the two compositions. My “Party” has been in progress for so long now that the participants have lost their formality, are kissing one another on the cheek rather than the hand, look freer in the way they move, and are dancing a polka at the very least. I’m now working on two details, cartoons of 1 m x 75.

  I’m intending to keep all the sketches I’ve done, from the first chaotic sheet of writing paper – to amuse you when you come home. Whatever flaws or merits the compositions may have, it could be fun for you to follow their development, understand why I altered an arm movement, muted a tone, changed the dominant.

  My own insights into art are something I’d very much like to share with you. You will get infinitely more pleasure out of paintings if you’re aware of what you are seeing. And having once learnt the steps of the dance, one can forget them and simply – dance.

  Today you are in Geneva. Soon you will be travelling north again – and I’m pretending this is the start of your journey home. You are a little closer to me in Paris. Vifs, sometimes such an intense feeling of joy comes over me that I have to put down whatever I’m doing and just stand there smiling to myself.

  It is some sort of miracle that we have found each other and will be able to experience the spring together. Won’t we always be in each other’s lives, whatever happens? My confidence in you and my affection for you are growing by the day. It feels to me as if I have suddenly become a happier, more serene person. My work has grown richer and my ambition no longer drives me so furiously. Even my bitterness towards Faffan has been completely erased and my nervously obsessive conviction that “everyone’s persecuting me” is starting to wear off. It’s as if you have created me anew. My love for Atos, you took that – but other things have happened, things I’m just starting to notice and be surprised by. I’m not scared of him any more. My respect for him is the natural, self-evident kind I have always had for an intellect brighter than my own, but my self-esteem has calmly expanded. After all, it’s only right that anyone who is an artist thinks differently, in pictures perhaps. He expresses himself in colours, not in the Word.

  I have started to express myself without that persistent fear of committing some faux pas, and am no longer trying so hard to be witty but am just bein
g myself. And all at once we have much more to talk about than before, much more to laugh at and reflect on. Maybe that is friendship in its best form. The erotic side has such a small part to play at present. It is as if I were asleep. I feel nothing and don’t even have any desire to do so. It’s true that this is what I often find when I am in the middle of a major piece of work, but there’s also something more. My heart is with you, and I have never been capable of loving without that.

  I am happy for you to do with it as you will; I have never given it away with a greater sense of trust.

  Tomorrow I shall see my lawyer and draw up a letter to the farmers of Stor-Pellinge. By all means raise an aperitif glass for the success of our plans. Kummelskär has to be ours, even if only for me to sail you there for a single day, climb onto the rocks with you and say: our island!

  Vifs, will you do me a favour. I so much want to know whether Herbert Rosenfeld died in the concentration camps during the war. He was a Jew, an author and writer of film scripts. I am aware of only one person who would know anything about him, and that is Clelia Assayas, and her husband who is Armenian. In 1939 they were living at 11 rue de Magdebourg Paris XVIe. Look them up in the telephone diectory and see if they are still there, that’s all. I assume they are in some completely different part of the globe. And Hebi must be dead – otherwise he would have written to me. We were very good friends. My ring in the shape of a coat of arms with a helmet was a present from him. He lived in a studio that Faffan once had, 7 rue Belloni. Suffren 3445.

  If I could just dash down to you for a single evening and stroll along the boulevards again. The boats are hooting in the harbour again, making me uneasy. But we’ve got time. We will walk together there some day. Take me in your arms, my dearest. Write and tell me about your work there!