Letters from Tove

by Tove Jansson

  May this be a happy and fruitful time. I kiss you.

  Your darling Tove.

  Herbert Rosenfeld: He is referred to as “Hebi” in TJ’s letters to the family from Paris in 1938.

  31 JAN 47 [Helsingfors]

  Darling,

  Your letter from all over the place arrived by express and took me in its arms!

  The model has gone, the walls are lined with endless sketches in every scale. It’s at that gruelling stage when one keeps recomposing and does battle with foreshortenings and objectivity and can’t find the right faces among the models and feels it’s either all high-minded motifs and anxious naturalism or too uneducated and loose. But I’ve sworn on my linseed oil not to start adding the colour until all my nice ladies are positioned where I want them and I’ve got hold of some prodigy in possession of a tail coat.

  On the subject of tail coats (and to avoid a single word more about the wretched frescoes), I’m planning to celebrate your birthday by going to the big Runeberg party at the Artists’ Guild. I shall go on my own, and intend to make myself as beautiful as I can and drink a toast with you.

  And in the morning I shall take your present to Villagatan, so you’ll find it there when you get home.

  If I could see you for a single minute. If I could just look at you, and you smiled at me for a few moments, it would fill me with serene joy and nothing in the world would seem difficult any longer.

  The distance has suddenly become real distance; I’ve lost the feeling that you could come running up the stairs at any moment, I don’t turn round when I hear a car stop. You no longer come to me at night as easily and naturally as before. You are far away in your own world of despondency and I can’t help you. If you could only find someone to help you relocate your happiness – find it more quickly – because it will come, I know it. Perhaps we are just a little tired just now, it will pass.

  My own darling, I have so little idea what to write this evening, except that I love you, more than before you left, maybe more than I have ever loved anyone. I have been given the greatest gift of all, and carry it with me as carefully as I can.

  Yours.

  My loveliest, most reckless, extremely earnest day-after Vifs,

  Your letter came today and made me happy again. I never thought you would be able to write again so soon! It’s wonderful, Vi, that your work is going so well!

  And oh, you must believe I am longing for us to go to France together as well. You must believe I am “trying” too! But I can’t push my work beyond a certain point; I would lose my nerve and the results would be poor.

  The very prospect of a trip in September, too – you don’t know how much lighter it made my heart, and my hand. These frescoes are possibly the most important project I have ever had, I simply must pull it off. The story has come out, people are indignant that I got the commission without a competition, but they aren’t openly kicking up a fuss yet. I have to show them that I can do a fresco. And for that I need time, and peace of mind. Today I crawled out of bed and am going around on shaky legs, the very picture of misery.

  Thank goodness you can’t see how repulsive I look. Every now and then I make a brushstroke and ponder the result with a sigh. I can’t even write a proper love letter any longer – but you’ll have to believe me, even so …

  It’s hard to take in that you’ll be coming home so soon. I needn’t count months any more, I can count weeks … Darling mine, I would write odes and dithyrambs, I would fashion my words into garlands and love wreaths to hang on your door – but fatigue is to blame for my sending only a vase of withered flowers.

  Just think if you could make the trip in the autumn instead. Would your work suffer – answer honestly. Can you wait for me? Because then I will come, oh yes indeed, even if it has to be over the authorities’ dead bodies.

  Cuddles me tonight – you likes me, doesn’t you, even though I look like something the cat brought in and fail to send you the poems I ought to be writing in your honour every morning and evening, if I was remotely worth my salt.

  Tofslan al Fresco

  PS Faffan got the statue commission for Åland after all. Isn’t that good news!

  the statue commission: Viktor Jansson’s statue of Julius Sundblom, who was speaker of the Åland parliament.

  15 FEB. –47 [Helsingfors]

  My darling,

  Good morning! Beethoven’s fifth is marching through the studio, solemn and rapturous. Atos brought it back from Stockholm with him. I’m not working today, not even bothering to heat the place or cook anything. I finished the colour cartoons last night, and now I can’t bring myself to care about Art for a whole day. I want to think about you, listen to music and be outside time.

  Rejoicing and triumph, my lovely is coming home! Only two weeks to go, because the third one doesn’t really count as “time without Vifs”. Everything I do (even cleaning out the coalbox) will be like a welcome to you, a caress of you, like dancing alone at one’s party just before the guests arrive.

  The guest! It will be the happiest spring – I’m not even afraid any longer of tempting happiness by saying it, and I’m waiting for it without a shred of doubt. We will be working, both of us. But the time we spend on that will not separate or harass us, our professions will be new gardens where we can show one another the way around, and if we close them to each other occasionally it will only be so we can later reveal all the new growth there.

  Facsimile of a picture letter to Vivica (3 February 1947), comprising a series of Moomin drawings, with captions, charting Tove Jansson’s recent activities and feelings.

  You’ll be the model for the woman with blue hair who is dancing in the middle of the balcony ball. You’ll meet my friends. You’ll come out to Kummelskär in the new sailing boat with me and show me Saaris without mist and grey skies. You’ll win over your mother Polly at last. And we won’t be hounded by the knowledge that you will soon be leaving, but will have a trip together to look forward to.

  All my life I have dreamt, planned, waited and hoped for a variety of different things, but seldom been able to appreciate them when they came to me. The joy of the moment is one of your gifts to me, I think. And being braver.

  My dearest, take me in your arms! The best elements of me are yours, because you created them yourself.

  Tove.

  UNDATED [spring 1947, Helsingfors]

  Darling,

  It is utterly impossible to let you wake up and remember everything has gone wrong and maybe go off feeling dismal and wretched. I find it hard to talk to you on the telephone because I can’t see you – and even when we meet I’m no less tongue-tied. Perhaps it’s best for me to write down what I want to tell you.

  It isn’t so terribly much, really. Only that I’m so grateful to you and proud of you and my trust in you is boundless.

  Of course I don’t imagine I shall ever be able to keep you for myself.

  But I know that you will always exist and be fond of me and that we will follow one another’s work.

  If you could believe in your work as much as I do! What you do is so genuine and has such great potential for the future – it is like you.

  Vivica, you mustn’t forget how much richer and more concentrated my life has grown so since you came into it. What does not being happy matter, as long as one sees and feels and thinks more intensely. I know I am living more full-bloodedly than ever and perhaps this last fresco will be the best thing I have done, in spite of – or thanks to – how it weighs on me. And if I don’t rise to the ambitions I have for it, then that will come later.

  I know that my whole way of painting is changing at the moment, growing stronger and more alive, and I have you to thank for it. Beautiful lines and colours are not enough unless they are backed up by expression and real pith and intensity, albeit the intensity of despair. If I don’t instantly find the form for what I want to paint, it doesn’t matter. It will come.

  So there is no need for you to feel distressed about the
frescoes, my dearest. Both of them are you – and one can by no means assume that the best you have given me is in the first.

  Vivica, I long for you very much, but it is a new kind of longing that isn’t sad and fruitless. It makes me feel surprised and a little in awe to realise that my love for you is perpetually growing, and I am altogether too proud of it to be able to hide anything from you.

  Tonight I feel almost happy – and could barely be more so if you were here. I am writing poems to you that may be a little strange, and drawing you – though the likeness isn’t always terribly good! and if I knew anything about musical notes I’m sure I would optimistically be trying to write a song in yourses honour! Everything you touch begins to live and grow – that’s what I am so grateful for.

  You mustn’t be sad, Vivica, because I know this trying period will not only end, but bring something exquisite with it.

  Are you so sure that the most crucial thing is to make me happy? Delete that from your conscience, Vifs, otherwise I shan’t dare love you as much as I could.

  We will never find our way back, Vivica – if we don’t free ourselves from the weight of one another. Remember you have no more responsibility for me than whatever feels like proud delight, and there’s no limit to the walls my yearning can paint if it only liberates itself from wounded vanity and exaggeration.

  Darling, let us try to be patient with one another a little longer.

  And do you know what we will do then – that terrific picture of you in the red shoes. I think I know how I want it now.

  Tove.

  Translator’s note: “Yourses honour”, as with other words such as “sickses” and “goeses” in the letters below, refers to the play on words used between Tofslan and Vifslan in Trollkarlens hatt (Thingumy and Bob in Finn Family Moomintroll).

  30.6.47. [Helsingfors]

  Yesterday I got it into my head that I didn’t love you any longer and I went up to Villagatan to test out whether it was true. But it wasn’t, unfortunately.

  I suggest we stop seeing each other, and definitively this time. It’s miserable having to concede defeat after so much work, but it can’t be helped.

  If you plunge back into feeling guilty, that’s stupid of you. (But I don’t think you are stupid.)

  The fact of the matter is that I can’t cope with feeling unhappy any longer, and fighting for you with a joy I don’t possess.

  I’m sending you some poems: “Songs to My Beloved.” Please don’t ring me; I feel so calm now.

  Tove.

  TOVE JANSSON WRITES FROM FRANCE, AFTER HER TRIP TO Italy with Sam and Maya Vanni, previously described in letters to Atos Wirtanen.

  13.6.48. [Brittany]

  Dearest Vifslan –

  I am utterly enchanted by your daring Moomin idea. Why not indeed, just as well that as Sleeping Beauty or The Pearl of Truth?! Of course The Loveliest of Them All will have to feature … not just my peculiar little creatures. It would be fun to build a fantastical fairyland in the wildest of dream colours: trees full of fruits, jewels, sweets, flowers, birds – one act incredibly lush, one a landscape of ghastliness. If the comet is included, the sky can grow redder with every act – and at the end it will be bright blue with a Van Gogh sun in the middle … Am I interested … You bet I am! It will have to be rewritten into something completely new – you could do that.

  Sometime when we are in the right, light-hearted mood, we can set to work. I take it for granted that we will work together again one day, and perhaps on less limited projects than old Kålle Syra. Maybe with our stomachs pressed to warm rock on Bredskär, planning Moomin plays or “The Lady in the Pocket” who became the crows’ cook. (Yes of course, I and my younger and wiser will live in the Chateau – the idea was for Tofslans and Vifslans and their ilk to be put up in the annexe!)

  You can’t send me any letter more “real” than one about work. I am glad and wish you all the success you certainly deserve.

  We didn’t end up at rue de la Gaité after all – it was too irresistible to stay at the same hotel as Willy … So are you wondering what she said? Well, that Vifslan hadn’t written at all. And she was polite. Kut! Unbelievable! French, cool, courteous, amiable but reserved. Oui? Vraiment? Tant mieux! We danced a little. I can well understand a certain Uca being unfaithful in Paris. I went there again the next evening, without Maya, but that time Willy only sent me a correct smile and asked about choice of subjects in Helsingfors (she only meant for painting, unfortunately). How deep inside is she hidden, that person who sent those vivacious letters? I suppose one has to be a Vifslan to find her.

  And after that I lived the provincial life in Chevreuse beside a miniature triangle of market square with the five streets of the town clustered around it, enclosed by green hills and a brown river. A jumble of roofs, fences, bridges, delightful dusty greenery and silence after eight, with a clock thoughtfully striking the hours. (but Paris far too close!!!) I calculated that those hours would be all too few if I didn’t hurry straight off to Bretagne and live cheaply. Now I have broken the “family circle” and am here in a fishing village with a nice tangy smell of rotting seaweed, and the beam of the lighthouse sweeping across my whitewashed wall each evening. Colour and stiff wind and another kind of peace, a mobile one. You can consider Tofslan a happy person and imagine her clinging on here as long as she can. Spread greetings around you and reserve a seat of honour in the stalls for your opening night, and may the muse free you from Grokes, infidelity and every kind of depression, so thinks

  Tofslan!

  your daring Moomin idea: The first Moomin play, Mumintrollet och kometen (Moomintroll and the Comet) premiered in 1949 at the Svenska Teatern, Helsinki.

  The Pearl of Truth: a play by Zacharas Topelius, based on a Finnish folk tale.

  Kålle Syra: A reference to drawings and advertising slogans for Kålle-Syra fizzy drinks, which featured Tofslan and Vifslan.

  my younger and wiser: TJ’s playful name for her brother Lars.

  Willy: One of Vivica Bandler’s French loves, also referred to in Bandler’s autobiographical Adressaten okänd (Not Known at This Address).

  Kut!: possibly intended to be Zut!

  UNKNOWN DATE IN A SNOWSTORM. 1950 [Saaris Manor]

  Dearest Vivica and Kurt!

  Ham and I have only been here for a couple of days, but it feels as if we have always lived here and will go on doing so. We really are sleeping in “the spotted room” with Kurt’s flowers in the middle of the table, which incidentally is a pyramid of work tools.

  Anni is full of moans about our (sporadic) energies, but the fact is that we discovered a whole new urge to draw beautiful lines as soon as we arrived. Some places seem to take the effort and anxiety out of work, lend it fresh impetus and leave all the relish intact. Ham is drawing muscular postage-stamp lions and I am illustrating “My stormy youth” and finding it just as enjoyable as building houses. So now you understand!

  Other than that, we are doing absolutely nothing – and it’s really good to see Ham’s face sort of smoothing out with every day that passes; she feels at ease here and fits in so well. Sometimes we go to look at Oskar [written in above the line: horribly ugly!] who (according to the genealogical table) begat almost all the cows, and are astonished. Once we walked to the foot of the hill with the lookout point but then decided we could be let off climbing it because everything this week is meant to be completely and self-indulgently optional. So we went back home for some coffee. And today I took a sauna and now I am delightful and scented with anti-hemulen water. A terribly fat cat is in the habit of fishing for bits of crispbread in our lavoire. Oh, and we’re waiting for a slight thaw because Ham says she wants to make snow lanterns. She brought two candles with her for the purpose. She says they always did that at the vicarage in Sweden. There seems to be quite a lot here that reminds her of it. So it must have been a rather grand place.

  As for me, I intend to make the most of any thaw by building a giant Moomin on a pedestal at the front
entrance and letting him turn to ice.

  Uca, it’s your birthday any day now! You always thought the Runeberg candles were being lit in your honour, didn’t you? How stupid of me; I should have remembered that was why the two of you couldn’t be here for Sunday. We’ll have to have lots of special hugses and think of something nice to do when we meet again!

  We weren’t particularly sickses on the bus, but we almost died of heatstroke after we got here. Once we had stuffed ourselves with food, you see, we decided to sleep, so with that aim in view we piled on all our wool jumpers and snuggled under those violet eiderdowns. When we woke up the temperature in the room must have risen to 40˚ and we had to stagger over to the window and hang out of it for half an hour.

  We’ve got used to living without woolly drawers now and are sleeping with just one thin blanket. I wonder if there’s anything I enjoy more than being able to go round in a thin dress even though it’s winter and get up to a warm room. Ham is sleeping much better here. At nine o’clock, Anni brings in the coffee and puts up the blinds. She really is a terrific woman – combining enormous goodwill with such capacities. I swear on my linseed oil that you will find me a somewhat Junoesque figure! (One of these days I shall jettison all the padding in my clothes, she said gaily.) And so far I haven’t noticed anything asymmetrical about Anni’s serving.

  It’s so lovely here, and so nice to be with Ham but away from the frenzy of Lallukka and from all possibility of going to my studio – such peace descends on one, a kind of natural resignation.

  I also wanted to convey something of that to Polly and Eric, whom I hope to see soon after we return home. Give them a hug in advance – and an embrace to both of you, too, from your happy and tranquil friend