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T
Tove Jansson at her home in Helsinki, 1956
January 17, 2014 6:43 pm
Life, Art, Words, by Boel Westin; Sculptors
Daughter, by Tove Jansson
By James Lovegrove
How the author of the Moomin books created a childrens fantasy in tune with the postwar world
ove Jansson: Life, Art, Words, by Boel Westin, translated by Silvester Mazzarella, Sort of Books, RRP25, 528 pages
Sculptors Daughter, by Tove Jansson, translated by Kingsley Hart, Sort of Books, RRP9.99, 192 pages
In autumn 1945, as an exhausted Europe emerged from almost six years of war, young
Finns and Swedes were introduced to a family they would come to know very well.
Tove Janssons first book, The Moomins and the Great Flood, follows
Moominmamma and her son Moomintroll in their search for Moominpappa, who is
lost, feared dead. They travel through a dark forest, drawn beautifully by Jansson in
pen and tinted wash, using a primitivist style reminiscent of Henri Rousseau. Near the
end of their quest, the weather turns strange: It had become very hot late in the
afternoon. Everywhere the plants drooped, and the sun shone down with a creepy red
light. This presages a rainstorm so powerful that the land is submerged.
Moominpappa is eventually discovered alive and well, perched high above the waters
in the branches of a tree.
The Great Flood was not a commercial success and attracted little attention which
perhaps explains why it was the last of the Moomin books to be translated into
English, in 2005. It was only when the third volume in the series, Finn Family
Moomintroll, came out three years later in 1948 that the Moomins begin their ascent
to international fame. By the 1960s Janssons creation was manifesting as TV
cartoons, stage plays and a bewildering range of licensed merchandise. There were
picture books and also a widely syndicated newspaper strip, which Jansson wrote and drew herself before handing over responsibility to
her younger brother Lars.
The Moomins remain big business. All the books are in print and sell healthily. The Finnish city of Turku boasts a theme park, Moomin
World, where you can visit the characters houses and have your photograph taken with actors in costume. There is even a shop in
Londons Covent Garden peddling nothing but what one might call Moominery.
The stories have also exerted an influence on many modern writers, for adults as well as children. Ali Smith, Jeanette Winterson and
Maggie OFarrell are self-professed Moomin fans. Philip Pullman has called Jansson a genius, while Frank Cottrell Boyce drew
important life lessons from the Moomins at an impressionable age. Jansson valorised coffee and pancakes and reticence and the mystery
of others, he wrote in a review of Moomin picture book The Dangerous Journey. But more to the point she showed me how it might be
just those small pleasures that keep us together when we start to grow apart.
The young Boyce, however, was also drawn to the Moomins because he sensed an existential darkness at the heart of the books. Jansson
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Tove Jansson Life, Art,
Words
Boel Westin
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An illustration by Jansson from The Book about
Moomin, Mymble and Little My (1952)
wrote in the dominant mode of 20th-century childrens literature, fantasy, but hers was fantasy shot through with a quiet anguish.
Apocalypse through natural disaster flood, volcano, potentially earth-shattering comet looms in the background of her stories.
Characters are solitary, lonely, sometimes on the brink of despair, and acknowledge the fragility of things with an accommodating liberal
shrug.
Boel Westins biography of the author, Tove Jansson: Life, Art, Words, arrives in English translation in time for the
centenary of its subjects birth (the Swedish edition came out in 2007, the Finnish in 2008). Westin is at pains to show
that, although the Moomins are Janssons lasting legacy and a significant body of work in their own right, there was
more to her. The book gives equal weight to her achievements as a painter, cartoonist, muralist, memoirist and writer of
fiction for adults.
Jansson grew up in Helsinki, the eldest of three children. Her parents, Finnish sculptor Viktor Jansson and Swedish
illustrator Signe Hammarsten, maintained a bohemian household in which love and art were valued above all else, but
the familys existence was financially precarious. By her mid-teens young Tove was already helping top up the Jansson
coffers by providing illustrations and comic strips for childrens periodicals. Studying fine art in Stockholm, Helsinki
and Paris, she saw her future as a painter, with commercial illustration an income-generating sideline. During the war
she contributed frequently to the magazine Garm, including several cartoons lampooning Hitler and Stalin. Soon she
had begun accompanying her signature on the pictures with a drawing of a cute little hippopotamus-like creature with
big guileless eyes, which she called a Snork the prototype for Moomintroll.
Once the Moomin bandwagon began rolling in earnest, Jansson almost to her own surprise proved to be a shrewd
businesswoman. She personally supervised contracts for merchandising spin-offs and berated licensees when their product failed to meet
her exacting standards. On one occasion, she lambasted the makers of a Japanese animated series that depicted the Moomins (normally
plain white) in various colours and featured them boozing and carousing, something they never did in the books. She also nixed, on
grounds of good taste, a proposal from a tampon company to manufacture sanitary towels for young girls printed with the image of the
Moomins adopted daughter Little My.
Although Jansson had had affairs with men and nearly married a leftwing intellectual called Atos
Wirtanen, it was with a graphic artist called Tuulikki Pietil that she found contentment. From the
1950s the two women lived together, travelled extensively and collaborated professionally. Janssons
lesbianism upset her mother but, by Westins account, seems not to have scandalised Scandinavia or
raised any eyebrows in the wider world.
Westin shows how the Moomin phenomenon became a millstone for Jansson. As the cash and
contracts kept rolling in, the author found herself longing increasingly for space and solitude, the
freedom to work uninterrupted by business demands and by the promotional duties that were
stressful to someone so solitary and self-contained. She built a house on a tiny, remote island in the
Gulf of Finland but still Moomin aficionados trooped to her front door and begged her time. She
dutifully, if grudgingly, replied to fan mail, which came in by the sackful. Her mother had drilled into
her the importance of not leaving correspondence unanswered.
After the ninth and final Moomin book, Moominvalley in November (1971), Jansson concentrated
on writing for adults, mostly in the form of short stories. By then, the Moomins had in any case
become victims of their own success, at least as far as the critics were concerned. Reviews of the later
books found the stories and settings too cosy, too conservative. Ideology and class were more
important on the agenda of the age, Westin writes, and the Moomins superficially gender-
determined way of life was an easy target in the socially aware 1960s.
Here we come to a problem with Tove Jansson: Life, Art, Words, namely that Westin is a professor of comparative literature at
Stockholm University, specialising in childrens fiction, and her own criticism of the texts carries a deadening whiff of academe. When
discussing Janssons picture book Who Will Comfort Toffle? (1960), for example, Westin says: The story is in fact constructed from
holes, openings and grottoes combined with phallus-shaped environments and objects [!.!.!.!] The oblong milk can links mother and child
(though the milk goes sour) and is transformed into a symbol of incipient (male) independence. Yes, or it could just be a charming,
inventive little fable for toddlers.
Tove Jansson/ Oy Moomin Characters Ltd
1/19/14, 5:34 PM Life, Art, Words, by Boel Westin; Sculptors Daughter, by Tove Jansson - FT.com
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Sculptor's Daughter
Tove Jansson
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Parts of the book read like a doctoral thesis, and at times the tone seems to straitjacket its subject matter. We get precious little sense of
the whimsicality thats to be found in the Moomin stories, nor the underlying sombreness. Westin could afford to lighten her analysis, to
relax and let her evident love for all things Moomin shine through.
That said, her biography translated smoothly and unobtrusively by Silvester Mazzarella is never less than engaging. It is also
copiously illustrated with photos and reproductions of Janssons artwork, which is appropriate for a book about a woman for whom word
and image were of equal significance and who did her utmost to find a harmonious balance between the two in her creative output.
Jansson, a habitual self-portraitist, left several prose snapshots of her life in the form of novels and short-story
collections that are so autobiographical they may as well be called memoir. One actual memoir, Sculptors Daughter,
first published in 1968, has recently been reprinted, and its an unusual, haunting re-creation of Janssons childhood,
told impressionistically as a series of discrete episodes.
The Bays, for instance, is a tour of five deserted rocky inlets that Jansson loved to explore in her youth. It opens with
the line: The house is grey, the sky and sea are grey, and the field is grey with dew. The girl in the story is herself light
grey, almost invisibly a part of the landscape. It is an affecting evocation of a pure, unquestioning relationship with
nature, the kind that we can only really have as children.
Elsewhere there are glimpses of life in the freewheeling Jansson family household, where mishaps are greeted with a
phlegmatic, Moomin-like acceptance. When the narrators fathers pet monkey knocks over a couple of his works-in-
progress in the studio, ruining them, he speaks consolingly to it. When the narrator hides under the Christmas tree and
accidentally breaks one of the baubles, her mother says, Actually that ball has always been the wrong colour. Similarly,
when Moominpappa drops a vegetable dish on the floor in Comet In Moominland, (1946), Moominmamma calmly says,
Never mind. Its really a good thing its broken it was so ugly.
Sculptors Daughter tells us as much about Janssons formative years and the genesis of her most famous creation as any biography
could, in succinct, dreamlike prose shot through with striking images and turns of phrase. Its themes are the consolations of home, the
certainties of family relationships, the contentments of childhood the same things that have kept the Moomins forging stoically on.
James Lovegrove is the FTs childrens book critic

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