1/19/14, 5:34 PMLife, Art, Words, by Boel Westin; Sculptor’s Daughter, by Tove Jansson - FT.com

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Tove Jansson at her home in Helsinki, 1956

January 17, 2014 6:43 pm

Life, Art, Words, by Boel Westin; Sculptor’sDaughter, by Tove JanssonBy James Lovegrove

How the author of the Moomin books created a children’s fantasy in tune with the postwar world

ove Jansson: Life, Art, Words, by Boel Westin, translated by Silvester Mazzarella, Sort of Books, RRP£25, 528 pages

Sculptor’s Daughter, by Tove Jansson, translated by Kingsley Hart, Sort of Books, RRP£9.99, 192 pages

In autumn 1945, as an exhausted Europe emerged from almost six years of war, youngFinns and Swedes were introduced to a family they would come to know very well.Tove Jansson’s first book, The Moomins and the Great Flood, followsMoominmamma and her son Moomintroll in their search for Moominpappa, who islost, feared dead. They travel through a dark forest, drawn beautifully by Jansson inpen and tinted wash, using a primitivist style reminiscent of Henri Rousseau. Near theend of their quest, the weather turns strange: “It had become very hot late in theafternoon. Everywhere the plants drooped, and the sun shone down with a creepy redlight.” This presages a rainstorm so powerful that the land is submerged.Moominpappa is eventually discovered alive and well, perched high above the watersin the branches of a tree.

The Great Flood was not a commercial success and attracted little attention – whichperhaps explains why it was the last of the Moomin books to be translated intoEnglish, in 2005. It was only when the third volume in the series, Finn FamilyMoomintroll, came out three years later in 1948 that the Moomins begin their ascentto international fame. By the 1960s Jansson’s creation was manifesting as TVcartoons, stage plays and a bewildering range of licensed merchandise. There werepicture books and also a widely syndicated newspaper strip, which Jansson wrote and drew herself before handing over responsibility toher 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, MoominWorld, where you can visit the characters’ houses and have your photograph taken with actors in costume. There is even a shop inLondon’s 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 andMaggie O’Farrell are self-professed Moomin fans. Philip Pullman has called Jansson a “genius”, while Frank Cottrell Boyce drewimportant life lessons from the Moomins at an impressionable age. “Jansson valorised coffee and pancakes and reticence and the mysteryof others,” he wrote in a review of Moomin picture book The Dangerous Journey. “But more to the point she showed me how it might bejust 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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1/19/14, 5:34 PMLife, Art, Words, by Boel Westin; Sculptor’s Daughter, by Tove Jansson - FT.com

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Tove Jansson Life, Art,Words

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An illustration by Jansson from ‘The Book aboutMoomin, Mymble and Little My’ (1952)

wrote in the dominant mode of 20th-century children’s 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 liberalshrug.

Boel Westin’s biography of the author, Tove Jansson: Life, Art, Words, arrives in English translation in time for thecentenary of its subject’s birth (the Swedish edition came out in 2007, the Finnish in 2008). Westin is at pains to showthat, although the Moomins are Jansson’s lasting legacy and a significant body of work in their own right, there wasmore to her. The book gives equal weight to her achievements as a painter, cartoonist, muralist, memoirist and writer offiction for adults.

Jansson grew up in Helsinki, the eldest of three children. Her parents, Finnish sculptor Viktor Jansson and Swedishillustrator Signe Hammarsten, maintained a bohemian household in which love and art were valued above all else, butthe family’s existence was financially precarious. By her mid-teens young Tove was already helping top up the Janssoncoffers by providing illustrations and comic strips for children’s periodicals. Studying fine art in Stockholm, Helsinkiand Paris, she saw her future as a painter, with commercial illustration an income-generating sideline. During the warshe contributed frequently to the magazine Garm, including several cartoons lampooning Hitler and Stalin. Soon shehad begun accompanying her signature on the pictures with a drawing of a cute little hippopotamus-like creature withbig 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 shrewdbusinesswoman. She personally supervised contracts for merchandising spin-offs and berated licensees when their product failed to meether exacting standards. On one occasion, she lambasted the makers of a Japanese animated series that depicted the Moomins (normallyplain white) in various colours and featured them boozing and carousing, something they never did in the books. She also nixed, ongrounds of good taste, a proposal from a tampon company to manufacture sanitary towels for young girls printed with the image of theMoomins’ adopted daughter Little My.

Although Jansson had had affairs with men and nearly married a leftwing intellectual called AtosWirtanen, it was with a graphic artist called Tuulikki Pietilä that she found contentment. From the1950s the two women lived together, travelled extensively and collaborated professionally. Jansson’slesbianism upset her mother but, by Westin’s account, seems not to have scandalised Scandinavia orraised any eyebrows in the wider world.

Westin shows how the Moomin phenomenon became a millstone for Jansson. As the cash andcontracts kept rolling in, the author found herself longing increasingly for space and solitude, thefreedom to work uninterrupted by business demands and by the promotional duties that werestressful to someone so solitary and self-contained. She built a house on a tiny, remote island in theGulf of Finland but still Moomin aficionados trooped to her front door and begged her time. Shedutifully, if grudgingly, replied to fan mail, which came in by the sackful. Her mother had drilled intoher the importance of not leaving correspondence unanswered.

After the ninth and final Moomin book, Moominvalley in November (1971), Jansson concentratedon writing for adults, mostly in the form of short stories. By then, the Moomins had in any casebecome victims of their own success, at least as far as the critics were concerned. Reviews of the laterbooks found the stories and settings too cosy, too conservative. “Ideology and class were moreimportant 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 atStockholm University, specialising in children’s fiction, and her own criticism of the texts carries a deadening whiff of academe. Whendiscussing Jansson’s picture book Who Will Comfort Toffle? (1960), for example, Westin says: “The story is in fact constructed fromholes, 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

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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 ofthe whimsicality that’s to be found in the Moomin stories, nor the underlying sombreness. Westin could afford to lighten her analysis, torelax 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 alsocopiously illustrated with photos and reproductions of Jansson’s artwork, which is appropriate for a book about a woman for whom wordand 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-storycollections that are so autobiographical they may as well be called memoir. One actual memoir, Sculptor’s Daughter,first published in 1968, has recently been reprinted, and it’s an unusual, haunting re-creation of Jansson’s 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 withthe 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 “lightgrey”, almost invisibly a part of the landscape. It is an affecting evocation of a pure, unquestioning relationship withnature, 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 aphlegmatic, Moomin-like acceptance. When the narrator’s father’s 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 andaccidentally 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. It’s really a good thing it’s broken – it was so ugly.”

Sculptor’s Daughter tells us as much about Jansson’s formative years and the genesis of her most famous creation as any biographycould, in succinct, dreamlike prose shot through with striking images and turns of phrase. Its themes are the consolations of home, thecertainties of family relationships, the contentments of childhood – the same things that have kept the Moomins forging stoically on.

James Lovegrove is the FT’s children’s book critic