by Tove Jansson
Tofslan,
and with a special x to Eca!
5th.
Birthday kisses to Uca! The weather is milder and we are going to make a statue in your honour. I telephoned yesterday and am so glad Polly is better and no longer in pain. But tell me, what’s this I hear? My younger and wiser has been surly with Eca and wouldn’t even go and look at the Runegren statue with her? I wonder what everybody’s up to over there. The only bad part about living in your house is that I can’t pop in to see you night and day to chat madly away and cuddle up and get cross with people. What if you were to send them out here, any friends you need a little rest from?! How was the Runeberg party? Did Moomin go really badly and will Nicken cancel its run because we’ve been such short-sighted dramaturges. Who’s doing what and with whom? An awful lot must have happened. What terrible things are they saying about us, and who adores us?
I know I adore Anni, anyway. She clucked with delight just now when we finished the snow lantern and she saw a new ornamental entrance going up at Saaris. So we’ve been working our socks off for you all and are dead beat, can’t do anything but sleep, and in a minute we’re having whipped cream. From what Eca says, you’ll get this letter in a couple of weeks.
Hugs to one and all! Bye!
“My stormy youth”: TJ is illustrating Muminpappans bravader (The Memoirs of Moominpappa).
Polly: Ester-Margaret von Frenckell is often called Polly in the letters.
Eca: Erica von Frenckell.
THE CHURCH AT TEUVA (SWEDISH NAME: ÖSTERMARK) BURNT down in 1950 and a new church, designed by the architect Elsi Borg, was built in 1953. Tove Jansson began work on the altarpiece in May and returned to the project in the late summer and autumn.
28 AUG [1953, Teuva]
Dearest Uca,
You sounded happy on the phone, so presumably she is more gorgeous than ever? How goeses her disc selling? I imagine you’ll build up a fine record collection. Pass on my regards and have a lovely time. She made a very cute impression on that recent visit to the studio.
Today I painted a cobalt blue dress and a carmine black cloak on Edla. All the girls have names, you see. She’s called Edla because she looks a bit stuck up, and to get my own back on Luoma, who wants his daughter’s pin-up-pretty face there. Thank goodness the altarpiece doesn’t look too small, I’d been worrying about that. It fits beautifully into Elsi Borg’s proportions, and if I keep the planes big and simple and make the most of the outlines, as in fresco, it can certainly be appreciated from further back. The church is airy and light, with clean lines. Airy, above all, because there’s a gale blowing through the gaps where the sanctuary windows are to go. In felt boots and with Jussi’s winter scarf round my head, I’m chasing sheets of gold leaf to and fro along the scaffolding while they hammer sheet metal below. The sheets are meant to be transferred to the wax on the walls with cotton, while one holds one’s breath, but with things as they are I can only flick them up into the air and slap them on where they happen to land, if I can catch them. The sanctuary windows can’t be put in “because there’s no workman who’d dare cut such big panes of glass to size”. I’ve made such a fuss about those windows that every time they catch sight of me they say all right, all right and go and hide. One day the whole tabernacle they’d erected to block up one window blew in, and wood and chipboard came crashing down on me and my painting. My tracings had paint splashed all over them. I was so livid that they promised to ring a more intrepid glazier in the next town. Or so they said. You know I need light for deciding my colours so I don’t get unpleasant surprises when it’s all done.
I feel terribly clever when I’m applying gold. It instantly looks so shiny and beautiful and can’t fool you. Not like paint can! Of course it may be that all the sheets of gold leaf will peel off eventually, because the wall is still very damp despite being hard, and good for painting on. But as long as they stay in place for the consecration, I can always pop some more up later. By all the rules of secco, the wall ought to have been in a fit state to work on ages ago, but today I found out they used soaking wet bricks for the outer walls and it’s been raining here since the end of June.
When I came back I got such a fright because my whole niche was covered in big uneven patches of damp, with one wide, dark band running horizontally right across. I thought it would all have to be pulled down, but then I found that the fungus, or whatever it was, could be scraped off with a knife. So I scratched away at the whole wall between the outlines of the tracings and scrubbed it with a bath brush. Now I’m praying to heaven that the patches don’t break out again. The whole of Teuva is a sea of mud and the stooks of rye are standing in lakes. In the middle of the day I have to leg it to a restaurant several kilometres away, because they’ve closed the catering huts. Sometime between 6 and 7 I walk through the wet, horizontal landscape in the other direction, where the vicarage is.
There’s a cooking stove in my gatekeeper’s lodge where I can prepare meals. The dean himself is away with his family and I’m very happy on my own. Even the workmen have stopped watching me when I’m chasing after my gold or painting cloaks, so I’m left in complete peace and quiet. In the evenings I’m revising the Moomin book, following your directions (they are even better than I thought), thinking about the sketch for the Cooperative Bank and reading the psalms of David, which are actually rather dull. He spends most of his time moaning about his enemies and asking God to destroy them.
There are two of the workers that I particularly like. One of them gilded the cross on the steeple, and we talk about work and offer each other cigarettes and sweets, the other is a skinny middle-aged woman who is the most cheerful person I’ve ever seen. She positively radiates happiness. [ … ]
Can you imagine, I swear my room was full of bats last night. Maybe they live in the chimney. Or they could be little devils, out to tempt me just when I’m producing something as solemn as an altarpiece. Joking aside, I’m very taken with this job and will be more upset than usual if it proves a flop.
I started with the strongest colour, the fiery red cloth Magdalena is kneeling on in the foreground. I made it as red as I could, with a layer of white paint underneath. You see, it lifts the whole colour range, which is brightened and lightened by the perpetual obligation to match all the colours to the cadmium red.
Now Jussi wants something on the organ loft as well. It’s divided into panels. But first they’ll have to find another Luoma (hopefully childless). Presumably they’d have to use me for it, having started with me.
The Vasa plane is just going over.
You know what, Ham was so pleased with her trip. I delayed leaving so I could see her for one day, at least. What a storyteller she is! She gave me an absolutely brilliant picture of the family meeting at Ängsmarn, funny, touching, ridiculous, sublime, full of pathos. They’re totally barmy, the whole lot of them, but nice, and very intense. Do you know why cousin Karin didn’t come to the island “to finally let myself be lazy and happy, talk about everything, not have to be so terribly moral”, as she wrote? She’s joined a sect that’s even stricter than her parents and is waving her arms about and going into ecstasies. And Kerstin has become very good friends with Karin’s sister, and Elsa’s husband has converted Torsten. And everyone’s still squabbling about the privy and who eats the most. As far as I could gather from Ham, she was cheerfully “dafratty”, vaguely shocked and very jolly with them, and refused to be pathetic and this-is-the-last-time-we’ll-ever-meet.
So now, loads of hugses from me and awfully good wishes to everyone. Kisses
Tove.
Edla: A play on words because the name sounds like ädel, the Swedish word for “noble”.
Luoma: A local sponsor of the church-building project.
Jussi: Jussi Annala, the dean of Teuva.
the Moomin book: Farlig midsommar (Moominsummer Madness).
sketch for the Cooperative bank: Design for a mural TJ painted in the staff dining room at Nordiska föreningsbanken in
1954.
“dafratty”: Swedish dafratig. Derived from “dafrat”, meaning “so what”, “who cares”, a Viennese slang expression introduced by Kurt Bandler and adopted with alacrity by Vivica and Kurt’s friends.
TOVE JANSSON REPORTS FROM HER TWO “WORKING WEEKS” IN London in March. Her later trip, in April–May, is described in the letter to Eva Konikoff dated 7 May 1954.
TUESDAY 9.3.54. LONDON
Dearest friends,
First let me introduce sister Mutton’s poem, which he sang and danced for me one evening:
Moomins, naked Moomins,
they were flown to England
from the Finnish dark
straight into Hyde Park
all their navels petrified
now they’re buried side by side!
Maybe he composed it in sheer relief at handing over all comic strip duties to Mr Phipps. Phipps is 2 m tall, very English and a typical practitioner of their “understatement”, which I’ve only started to value and feel comfortable with since I came here. To take one example, the solemn gentleman with the pipe and foxy moustache by the pond in Kensington Garden, trying to get a boat going. It was slightly over 1 m long and its name was Smoky. I and fifty others stood there watching for a long time, getting very cold. He finally carried his work of art out into the water and with much smoke and hooting, Smoky set off among the swans (who seemed used to it). No one showed any emotion as they witnessed this Event, but there was so much interest and goodwill among those frozen onlookers that you could sense the appreciation in the air.
There’s definitely only one thing in England prone to overstatement, and that’s comic strips. Any action in them has to be reacted to with “sobs”, “oomph”, speed lines, sweat and tears. I’m achieving all this with an insight into Fleet Street that grows by the day. I don’t really object to queuing for the bus in the morning, going to work like everyone else, grabbing a standing lunch at the reporters’ bar round the corner and spending my tired and not remotely touristy evenings out in town.
After discussions with Phipps I am cutting up my strips and sticking them back together again, anglicising the captions, adding some things and taking others out, all the while with a strong and reassuring sense that it’s my stories they want, and that they like the Moomin family as it is. I work in Forkes’ office, he’s one of their great comic strip idols. He’s away for a month, possibly at a nerve clinic. His creature, which is hairy except for a bare face with a trunk, is staring at me from all directions – in plaster, fabric, papier mâché, wood … There’s a dog-eared sheet of paper on the wall: Ideas for “Flook”, “Couldn’t he go to Hollywood … Something with winter … Flook has flu …”
I’m seeing Liz tomorrow, and Francis in a few days’ time. A rep from Benn’s publisher’s took me out and made a fuss of me one evening. Tired cartoonists sometimes come into my office to take a look. They all say “be sure to have stock-material so you don’t get behind, otherwise you’ll go crazy …”
I find time for a bit of art, a bit of theatre, mostly I like just to drift aimlessly along the glittering streets at night. Everything’s bigger and more frenzied than in Paris, it feels like drowning in a whirlpool of speed and a few million people’s unconcern.
I’m captivated by that sensation of indifferent metropolis and anonymity – but perhaps I wouldn’t be if I didn’t have my work and a few interested people in the background to hold me steady.
Kensington, where I live, is a quiet place that seems to be populated mainly by ancient little old ladies whose clothes are as individual as their dogs. Doesn’t it strike you that a considerable percentage of the women look as fresh as daisies while an equally large proportion are soberly dressed ghosts, bags of bones with stick-like legs? And that the men, regardless of age, have a comically young and boyish appearance?
It’s expensive here, dreadfully. But in spite of that I’ve indulged in a Delightful Act of Folly, a Skirt Suit that’s apparently “mole grey in a flappy style”. What they mean is that the peplum waist of the jacket sticks straight out, the collar is feminine and the skirt a straight line. And, even more irresponsibly, I allow myself whisky.
And, by the way, I miss everybody very much. I’ve been away so long – anything at all could have happened to you! I send all manner of wishes, for opening nights and success and every kind of peace and quiet, and that you won’t forget me, and will pass my greetings to Erica and Ester and Eric and all the other friends who might appreciate them. A big hug,
yours trolly Tove!
sister Mutton: Mister Sutton, i.e. Charles Sutton.
Mr Phipps: Julian Phipps, head of the comic strip department at Associated Newspapers.
Forkes’: Wally Fawkes, who from 1949 onwards drew a popular series of strip cartoons featuring a boy, Rufus, and a small creature named Flook.
Liz: Elizabeth Portch, who translated Trollkarlens hatt (Finn Family Moomintroll) and Kometjakten (Comet in Moominland) into English.
Francis: Francis Crowdy, an English actor friend of Vivica Bandler.
THE ISLAND 7.7.56.
Darling Uca –
Thank you for your nice, loving letter! I read it in the greatest confusion you can imagine: Harald’s birthday with wife and daughter and in the middle of it all the Peos for breakfast and pouring rain and someone fell into the sea with all the comic strips and thunder and alarming English letters and a tent that almost blew away.
And it made me giggle and cheered me up awfully to read about other pretty kettles of fish and to sense in the pages of the letter your understanding of it all – and at once everything went much more easily and it seemed terribly good fun to have all these people trying to combine themselves out here.
It’s such mayhem here now that I can hardly impose any order on this letter – but there’s one thing I want to get straight and clear: that you and Nita are heartily welcome on the 21st and that it would be really lovely if you could come a bit earlier – whenever suits you.
And I’m assuming you’ll ring Abbe yourself. Stor-Pellinge 12. You see, I think everything will be all right, whoever happens to be here then. It could even be empty, who knows – and the two of you can finally have some time to yourselves for a while.
You see, nothing seems so bad now I’m calm and happy and not so nervous and have at last learnt to be honest.
I shall do whatever work I need to for certain hours of the day, remorselessly setting my friends to work as well – and take the rest of the time off with a clear conscience, to enjoy your company. Happy in the knowledge that you’ve thought it worth the effort and cost of coming out to this primitive jumble of mine!
Darling, you needn’t worry, I’m thoroughly rested and content with everything and I will find time for what has to be done. I’ve completed pencil sketches of all 10 of Landström’s advertisements – and been able to fit in some peaceful summer hours with Ham and Faffan as well.
These days have been perfect. Ham has finished off Moune’s frigate – it is a masterpiece, and has been terrific fun for her.
“Moune – Borgå” it says on the stern. She swims every day, slowly and sensually with her cigarette in her mouth, out at the red rock, reads wickedly bad books and simply exists. In the evenings she and Faffan set out a little net so his favourite seagull will have something to eat. The filleted (and sometimes cooked) seagull bait is laid out on the rocks, a bit closer to the cottage every day – and it is Faffan’s hope that the seagulls will eventually come strutting in through the door.
He’s taken over the guest room, wakes at 5 every morning and goes out to wait for his coffee and study the wind direction – no games of patience, no politics, no anxiety. An awful lot of messing about with sinkers and sculling seats and snells, he’s even started playing the accordion. And if I bring out the kiljun (which turned out well, and strong) he only takes a glass or two – never fancies more than that.
Ham sleeps and looks as fresh as a daisy – (die Boschena und die Marj
anka – God knows how you spell it) like that time Kurt was here.
You’ll understand how glad I am to see them having such a good time. As for me, I’m finally at deep peace with my world – waiting patiently for Tuulikki, and my previous guilty consciences are, I fear, being rocked to sleep by the south-wester. Because I know full well that I don’t really deserve it, having my existence made as easy for me as this.
The children, Peo’s and the rest, are just putting in at Viken, but Peo will be back again this evening for the “blow-out dinner”. And the kids, the whole lot of them, will be coming later to camp out. That’s a long-standing promise. I just hope the weather will be good.
Goodness, Vivica, I’ve so much to say – even though we had those two whole days together. And weren’t they wonderful?
You know what, I suppose Bitti will just have to turn up whenever she happens to. Her trust, which evidently hasn’t been remotely shaken, is so precious to me that I don’t want to impose any restrictions. Her letter came at the same time as yours, and she writes that she might already be on the island by the time I get it. And she definitely wants to meet Tuulikki and be here at the same time as her. I’m not at all apprehensive. I’m sure everything will be fine.
It would be jolly nice if people told me as clearly as you when they are arriving and how long they plan to stay – but you know how hard it can be to ask sometimes. They think they’re not welcome. That’s why I can’t give you the plain answer I would like to: who else will be with us when you get here.
But don’t worry, it know it will all work out and everyone will have just as much freedom and privacy as they want. And on the same subject: things have gone very wrong for Maya in that business I told you about. You know what, in nine years she’s only ever been here the once – and now she writes, despite her usual reserve, and begs me to let her come here with him for a few days to “sort things out”. I haven’t the foggiest notion when that will be, whether he wants to, or if it would be a good idea at all.
