Letters from Tove

by Tove Jansson

  I’ve taken a bath and hidden those shoes that pinch behind the closet and darned some stockings. Everything’s fine apart from a rash on one hand that the others say comes from eating dodgy seafood. All I had was one crab at Colomba, but maybe it was off. Goodnight everybody, and a big hug! Write and tell me in detail how you all are, especially Mama. Remember me to Gordin, and Ragni and Lauréns. How’s the Society of Illustrators’ exhibition going? Is Prolle going to lots of parties and did he get through his art history? Has Samu come home yet? And so on!

  your own Noppe.

  P.S. 26 April. –39.

  It’s drizzly today. Viktor Emanuel is gracing the Florentines with a visit, so everything is blockato, streets and piazzas and museums. I saw him drive past after a lot of men went rushing around in advance, telling the populace to clap. There are flags everywhere, and colourful banners hanging out of windows. Having found two or three churches that weren’t blocked off and elbowed my way along at a rate of about twenty metres an hour, I escaped up to San Miniato and from there tried to make my way to Giardino Boboli. After a couple of hours’ mountaineering I found it, but it was closed because the principessa was visiting Pitti. Casa Buonarotti too. I propped my legs up against a wall and bought some anemones, double, 15 different colours and 6x bigger than ours, for 1 l. 50 and now I’m drinking the vermouth Sigrittan and co. left for me. It’s pouring down outside.

  Elisabeth’s bought a genuine fascist cap and is going to wear it for té dansante and so on in Helsingfors. Bellissimo! The compatriots are thinning out. But a few of us are going to grande Opera tonight, at any rate, it’s going to be great fun – but expensive. – I’m assuming you won’t send letters to the Ferma here, but direct to Rome? I’ll go there one more time before I leave anyway, just to check.

  P.S. Rash gone. – If you could find a dozen visiting cards, or even fewer would do, in Papa’s wardrobe and send them to me, I’d be grateful. – (just pop a couple in your letter)

  2 o’clock in the morning. For the first time in my life I’ve heard an opera that doesn’t seem to me like a pointless combination of music and theatre. Il trovatore. Madonna mia, how they could sing! It was utterly beautiful. I got the ticket through our friendly Danish landlady at the guesthouse, and the whole crowd of us went by car, then when we got back she plied us with Chianti and cheese sandwiches. It’s so heart-warming when people abroad are kind, slightly embarrassing somehow. The king was also at the opera, it being the opening night of a festival series featuring Italy’s leading performers, and the flower of Florentine beauty and elegance was occupying every seat in the stalls. Such beautiful women, such dresses! The rest of us, the plebs, sat in the huge, banked amphitheatre of a gallery, just a set of stone steps really, with little cushions for hire, and so cramped that the whole row had to leave their seats if anyone wanted to go out to the toilet. Now I must sleep and nothing can stop me. Lots of love,

  your own Noppe.

  P.S. on the way home in the car, I almost fell out on a bend when the door flew open.

  “Baedecker frenzy”: refers to the German publisher Baedeker’s travel guides.

  Backberg: Regina Backberg, whom TJ met on the first leg of her trip, on the crossing from Helsinki to Tallinn.

  The Enckells: Artist and writer Rabbe Enckell and his then wife Heidi.

  The Thesleffs: the artist Ellen Thesleff and her sister Gerda Thesleff.

  tessera: Ticket.

  Gordin: Rafael Gordin, the Jansson family’s doctor. See also letters to Eva Konikoff.

  Ragni: The artist Ragni Cawén, Alvar Cawén’s wife.

  the Ferma: Ferma is used as a synonym of “post office”. TJ often gives her address as “Ferma in posta”, i.e. poste restante.

  29 APRIL. –39 [Florence]

  I read about “Adolt’s” speech in an Italian newspaper, but it came across as just evasive, cautious and friendly. You didn’t get a clear impression for or against. Here it’s more or less exclusively German tourists and not a single English one.

  Beloved!

  It’s still bucketing down on Firenze, and what with that and my head being so full of the art of various periods that I can barely digest it all, I’m staying at home for a few hours. I feel as if I’m working hard – let me tell you what I’ve achieved in a day and a half. Yesterday I went early to S. Croce, which I think is the loveliest church I’ve seen here, and stood in front of Robbia’s blue and white madonnas, which I liked unreservedly. Then I went round Casa Buonarotti with Backberg, and it was a disappointment to me, you got no sense of the master ever having lived in those impersonal rooms. But museo Archiologico, which we found after a look at Perugino’s frescos in S. Madd. del Pazzi, was simply splendid. I had never looked at (or walked past) the Etruscan sculptures and vases before, and their lines and palette – siena, ochre, van Dyke, bright blue and dark violet – were glorious. It has some similarities to the Egyptian, though that has nephrite green or turquoise instead of blue, and the ochre is warmer. Afterwards I didn’t bother going back home to Scandinavica to eat. Instead, Regina Backberg and I went to your Barilaristorante on Via den Cerchi before plunging into the Ufficies, where we spent the whole afternoon. I’m not really interested in the baroque or rococo, and I don’t get so carried away any more by those Dutch magnifying-glass still lives and minutely detailed portraits or those lifeless, petal-like, S-shaped madonnas on a gold background. Veronese, Giorgione, Rembrandt and Rubens, along with Botticelli, were the best things I saw there. In the evening, after I said my goodbyes to Regina who is off to Nice, I went to a little café with the Enckells and drank vermouth. Today I went to a big Medici exhibition, and the chapel of that same dynasty with its Michel Angelo sculptures and their library, plus the cathedral museum and S. Lorenzo. In a little laffka I found watercolours in tubes and bought 20 of them. They’ll be good for me and Mama to have this autumn. All this art can be quite draining sometimes. You get this weird sense of the fantastical number of artists employed through the ages on an even more staggering number of works of art – and all you see is better than anything you can ever hope to produce … Well, I don’t know why, but sometimes it makes you scared of the whole profession. Dashing from one gallery to another here, vaguely worried that some critical development in the political situation could send me home, I can’t get on with my own work – but I’m collecting up everything I see and consciously spending longer on anything that could have a positive effect on my own painting. I’m longing to go and see some modern stuff too, eventually. I hear that in Rome there’s currently an exhibition of young artists’ work.

  Tove’s coat of arms with crossed pencil and pen and heart. Her caption reads ‘contd. in next letter – 2 hrs later – hip hurrah’.

  SATURDAY P.M. 29 APRIL –39

  My beloved Papa and Mama!

  I happened to be sitting on a chair when I read your letter, otherwise you could very likely have knocked me down with a feather. Madonna mia, the blood rushed to my head with surprise and delight. 12,000! And not just because of the money – I have more faith in myself now, and a fresh urge to get down to work and show them they weren’t wrong about me. I’m quite sure I’ll be able to borrow a brush from the Enkells and paint my anemones tomorrow. So now I shan’t be leaving here on Monday after all, and I no longer feel guilty about the shoes that pinch! Magari! I could have sent much posher presents with Sigrittan. And that letter from you both made me so happy, I wasn’t expecting anything as I set off to the Ferma in the rain after the Bargello museum and looked for any signs of life. When I saw there was a letter I was so enchanted that I started to laugh, went straight to Donnini at Piazza Vitt. Em. nearby, and ordered the most luscious thing I know, iced coffee with cream. And now I’ve turned into a capitalist I shall invite the Enckells out tonight and drink your health in “Tears of Christ”, as recommended by il professore. The “rhythmic” picture is a birthday present for Mama on 1st June and Papa, you can choose whichever you want and like best. – Never, with the
possible exception of when I went off to Brittany, have I had a letter from you at such an opportune moment, when I badly needed one. Now I know all is well with you (assuming Mama’s cold clears up quickly?!) and that Polon has passed his exams. – And I also think it’s now completely justifiable for me to take a room on half board for a whole 30 l. and to buy some new shoes in Rome. I don’t think I shall need more than half the money, and even on that I won’t have to worry about my travel and accommodation and can even let my hair down now and then. So I expect I’ll be home at the start of July now that I’m obliged (!!!) to be abroad for two months. Looking forward to Rome enormously. Look after yourselves, all of you, and hugs to each of you in turn. – Expect I shall nip over to S. Guiminiano and Assisi sometime.

  your own Noppe.

  laffka, also lafka: Shop.

  12,000: TJ had won third prize in the Finnish state art competition.

  Magari!: Of course!

  1 MAY –39 [Florence]

  Beloved!

  On this day last year I sat on my own in the Bois de Boulogne eating an apple in the rain and thinking of you. This time it’s vermouth with the Enckells, but I’m sending my thoughts in the same direction. I spent all afternoon painting the flowers I picked in Certosa but fear I haven’t achieved a great deal. Tomorrow I’ll go up onto the terrace and start on landscapes, and that’s all I’m going to think about while I’m here. I can fuss over still lives and interiors when I’m back home. I’m convinced I shall be able to work once I find the impetus and get going.

  This morning after I’d been round Palazzo Veccio I bought a whole set of materials, 12 little panels, oil, brushes and paint, paper, crayons and a little paintbox – all for 180 lira. So that was a pretty cheap way of establishing myself as an artist, wasn’t it? Enckells have been in Venice for a day and it’s nice to have them here again, even if I really only see them at dinner. Our evening out was very pleasant, Lacryma Christi and asparagus in a little eating house with lots of kittens running round our legs. We agreed to drop the titles when addressing each other, and later I had a look at Rabbe’s sketches. – I spent a whole morning rambling through the Pitti galleries and the Bobolito gardens, then I went to Porta Romana and caught a bus to Certosa monastery. It was extremely attractive from a distance but the interior, or what we were allowed to see of it, seemed to me somewhat marred by all the gaggles of tourists being led round and the monk droning the lesson. I went to fortify myself with green liqueur (1 lira!) afterwards and then took a random walk up a high hill uncrowned by any of the kind of tourist sights that feature in Grieben. It was lovely and peaceful. The valleys with their little houses crept ever lower, the track that wound between grey olive fields and red clover meadows rose ever higher to a tiny chapel, no bigger than our dining room, where there was a monk going round lighting candles in front of the simple images of saints. I picked as many flowers as I could carry, thinking to myself that these hills could very well be the “cassia-scented” ones of the Song of Solomon. And the only people I saw were pairs of lovers. When the sun went down as a mass of dark-blue clouds towered up in the east it was wickedly beautiful, all warm pink, ochre and endless shades of green. – Now there’s a radio starting to play some inflammatory speech so I’ll go back down into town. Buona notte!

  2 May. I’ve decided now that I shall leave for Rome, via Perugia and Assisi, because the Florentine climate is far too capricious. You’ve hardly started painting before your subject’s obscured by a curtain of rain, and as soon as you’ve packed away it clears up, only to pour down again just when you’ve got everything ready to go out into the wilds. Thorsen, the proprietress, says it’s always like that in Florence, right through to mid-May when summer abruptly begins. So as I ‘d reached the last thing I wanted to see, Belle arti, I shall leave for slightly more benign climes today. I met Gerda Thesleff in the afternoon and we went out for coffee together. Ellen’s quite poorly, apparently. And Sigrid was very ill here for a while before they went home.

  I’m sending a letter I received yesterday. I shan’t answer it, but feel vaguely worried. Damn it! What could they mean? Anyway, time to send off this letter. I’ll write from Rome. Love to everybody from me.

  A big kiss x your own Noppe.

  PTO!

  Rabbe was up at the Ufficies yesterday with his canvases to get them stamped before he leaves the country. They asked him to state the total value of the pictures and he said 5,000 l. The gentlemen stared at him as if paraffinised and then burst into hysterical laughter. In the end one of them, with tears in his eyes, managed to stammer out: “Well, shall we say 300 then?” Rabbe was highly amused. Priceless story, isn’t it! Kisses!

  Tove

  Grieben: German publisher of such titles as Griebens Reiseführer and Griebens Reise-Sprachführer.

  paraffinised: TJ is playing here on the similar sound – and even more so in Swedish – of the words “paralysed” and “paraffinised”. Possibly a family joke.

  ROME 8 MAY. –39

  Beloved Papa and Mama! And boys –

  Sitting waiting for my spaghetti in this cheap little something-somewhere after four hours going round a big exhibition of modern sculpture and painting. Overall I find the sculpture better, the quality is more even. But they can paint as well, oh yes. I hope I’ve learnt something from it all, even though the result at present is mostly making itself felt in my legs. This morning, thank goodness, I bought myself a pair of flat, boat-like shoes with air holes and other finer points, healthy and practical, so even if my feet look like a German’s, I can traipse unbelievable distances without getting tired.

  The man in charge at “Flora”, a square little chap with a pug face, white hair and jet-black beetle brows has moved me from room 13 to 11. He was incredibly proud to be able to give me his “most elegant” room. I tidied up the elegance afterwards and bought new drinking glasses plus a soap dish, and like the chipmunk in Snow White I cleared a round patch on the window, and discovered that the sun shines straight in there in the mornings! I can also look down over the little triangle of the Piazza (del Biscione), just along from the fleamarket at fiori, where there’s a terrible hubbub in the evenings round all the little cafés, and where they sell flowers and puppies in the mornings. The room is pink with St. Antonius above the bed, a stone floor and a bed you have to climb into from a chair. I like it. Perhaps you could send a few letters here, (not registered mail. – I always keep my valuables on me), i.e. to Albergo la Flora, via dei Biscione 6. I’m so enchanted by Rome that I shall probably stay several weeks.

  The modern exhibition halls here are amazingly grand. The one I went to today had at its centre a bar and café (that would be something for the Kunsthalle at home) and music, a fountain in the middle, and above it you could look up to the sky through a big, round opening. One side was constructed in terraces of glass with indirect lighting and mosaics, and the water dancing down in countless little cascades. Something else that impressed me very much was Forum Mussolini, an enormous sports hall where I go every Sunday morning. The swimming pool (where I splashed about for 2 hrs.) was magnificent, with mosaic on the floors, ceilings and walls, a café and all sorts of diving and jumping paraphernalia, which rises to the right level automatically. The whole of one wall was a window, the other had vast marble staircases going up it, and the bottom of the pool was turquoise with mosaic flowers. And while I’m on the subject of all things modern in Rome, I must also tell you about the huge Mostra Minerale, where I found myself par hasarde while I was out looking for some ruins.

  As big as a world exhibition and quite exhausting, but interesting. They had reconstructed a proper marble quarry, for example, complete with workers and machines for polishing the stones, a tower for drilling for oil, and two mines. Everywhere there was the roar of machines. A fountain sprayed out quicksilver rather than water (you were allowed to dip your hand in it), and there was gold, and mosaic makers and glassworkers producing little spun-glass animals. And they showed everything mad
e out of Italian minerals, from flying machines to cannons and the most delicate goldsmithing.

  Home again. The museums are shut today so I’ve concentrated on churches. If I had unlimited funds to decorate a church, I would use modern art to make it as gorgeous as the old ones. Contemporary sculpture and painting, glassware and mosaic, textiles, metal, marble and gold. Alongside all those studies of the female form, futurist works and tendentious “men of power”at the sculpture exhibition, and a stylised interpretation of the figure of Christ that wasn’t at all traditional. As I stood there wondering whether “the masses” here could worship such a naked, modernist image as readily as the old ones, a workman came up, knelt and kissed the knee of the sculpture. I found it very touching. –