by Tove Jansson
SUNDAY [Postmark 10.5.1967. Klovharun]
Dearest Ham,
It may be that Abbe comes out to visit and can take a letter with him – despite the terrible weather. It’s a typical Finnish spring, with angry gales from the north or east, squally rain and hellish cold. There was one nice day in town, so we heard on the radio. But you know how it is, at the start there’s always so much to do in the house, and it really makes no difference what Sjöberg is up to. At least he was feeling benign when we came out here, and we had a fine, sunny evening.
Tooti discovered with outraged delight that some winter guest has shot a round hole (a real one this time) through the windowpane on the north side and also indulged in target practice on her crispbreads hanging up by the ceiling. They also used up every last bit of firewood, burning the lot. So we had to lug loads of wood into the house to dry and at first the weather was so vicious that I had to saw the wood indoors. All of this actually added to our relish of the new-settler feeling, though we cursed, of course.
One day it was calm – with a mist, so I planted all seven rose bushes (what was left of them) in peat. One by the potato patch, one by the big hollow in the rock, one above the inlet and the other four round the house, one on each side. We’ll see how it goes, they looked a bit droopy after their stay in town.
Pipsu is now very clearly “my” cat, follows me everywhere and sleeps on my pillow every night. We haven’t had time to put a cat net out, but the fish we brought with us is keeping well in the cellar, which is ice-cold. That’s still in a state of chaos (except the food shelves) but we’ve got the house tidied up.
Various bits of romantica nautica have been discreetly stowed away so the place doesn’t look quite so much like a maritime museum any longer.
Tooti is in the middle of making a tool cupboard to go in the corner where her carpentry bench is, it’s going to be perfect and she’s totally and happily absorbed in her woodwork. The curtain in front of the wardrobe, a drab architect fabric design, has given way to the patchwork quilt (the Pietilä relic, you remember) that she tearfully persuaded Raili to let her have and now the place looks much more like a fisherman’s cottage. It’s made of lots of small-patterned fabrics in pale colours. The studio rug fitted well under the table and its top is now exactly the right size.
First thing in the morning it’s only 10˚ in the house, even though we keep the fire burning like crazy all day (20˚ by evening) and later in the night, around 4, I have to put on a woolly hat. The first mornings we got up at 5, but now we’ve calmed down to 6 o’clock. The pennant is mended and has been hoisted up the signal mast.
I’m still trying to knock Kometjakten [Comet in Moominland] into shape in the same naïve style. Assuming it can be patched up. A terribly bad book but with some oddly authentic sections. Too few of them, unfortunately.
Oh, and guess what else Sjöberg has been up to – carrying off the morass of rock blastings again and depositing it in the channel where the boat has to be pulled up into the grass! It looks pretty hopeless this time.
And he’s also cleared nearly all the red rock (where we go down from the house to the inlet) of stones. I can see how beautiful the bare rock is, so I shall let him have things his own way in that department. Now there’s only a narrow edging of stones to keep in the earth up top, unfortunately. He swung the green barrel round as well and ripped out the wire it was fastened with, and stripped off all the seaweed I’d laid out on the steep rocks to make a kind of rock garden. But the woodshed is unscathed.
A few scraps of green are starting to poke through here and there, but very cautiously. There’s no wood or oil spill on the beaches.
Everything looked fine on Bredskär as we came past, including Sophia’s house. What a wonderful time we shall have when you come out with them! Just to think that we’ve this family archipelago to enjoy spending the summer in.
Now I’m going to dive into the ice cellar for a while and carry on with my rooting. Kisses! Bye!
Monday.
Abbe and Greta are here on an evening visit – with greetings from you!! We’ve finally had a still, sunny day and done loads of nice outdoor things – sauna, driftwood stash, putting out nets – without having to freeze. Forgot to tell you Pel left the whole potato box behind, 15 kg! Maybe Lasse could bring a few cooking potatoes out to us when you all come? For now we’ve got some that Abbes have given us, and are eating macaroni and rice, so it isn’t that crucial.
Tooti wonders if you would kindly give Reima a ring, just to let him know she’s OK.
A big hug, my dear one. Look after yourself. I expect we’ll go over to Viken before too long and give you a call. My very best wishes to Impi and our friends.
Your Tove.
“A letter that you burn – please! – is better than talking”
LETTERS TO MAYA VANNI 1957–1983
Maya Vanni, 1940s.
MAYA VANNI AND TOVE JANSSON BEGAN THEIR CORRESPONDENCE in 1957. Maya Vanni, who had been to visit Bredskär, wrote a letter of thanks, and in her reply Tove Jansson observed how readily her friend had slipped into island life: “we simply lived together as if we always had”.
They had already known one another for a long time, but their friendship deepened. Maya Vanni, née London, was married in 1941 to the artist Sam Vanni, one of the men with whom Tove Jansson had affairs in the 1930s. The couple was part of her close circle of friends over a long period. “We meet at events now and then”, wrote Tove Jansson to Eva Konikoff in autumn 1944, describing Maya as “a dear, wise person when you get to know her a bit better”. During the harsh war years, she and the Vannis dreamt of “constructing a happy society and a peaceful world,” as she put it in her diary in March 1944. When Sam and Maya Vanni, their marriage by then creaking at the seams, went to Italy and France in the spring of 1948, they asked Tove Jansson to go with them. But after a couple of months Tove Jansson abandoned her “mediating role” as she wrote to Eva Konikoff (18.6.1948) and went off to Brittany to get on with her own work. Sam and Maya Vanni later divorced, although not until 1958.
Maya Vanni (1916–2010) lived in Paris at the end of the 1930s and later studied Romance philology at the university of Helsinki. She worked as a translator and was employed for many years at the Post and Telegraph Authority and at the Prime Minister’s Office in Helsinki. Her various jobs are sometimes commented on in the letters. After retirement she studied philosophy and wrote a master’s thesis on Martin Buber.
In Maya Vanni, Tove Jansson found someone else to talk to through letters, a successor to Eva Konikoff, although on a smaller scale and in a different way. She wrote about her work on the illustrations for Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland and Tolkien’s The Hobbit, about short stories, plays and exhibitions. The letters revealed the energy she put into the honing of artistic expression: there is no mistaking that they are the work of a practising artist and author. There were Tolkien pictures that had been redrawn 60–80 times, Tove Jansson confided to her correspondent in the summer of 1961. Maya Vanni was also one of the select few allowed to read and offer opinions on the author’s books before they were published, and the letters teem with references to texts and illustrations in progress, including the picture book Vem ska trösta knyttet? (1960, Who Will Comfort Toffle?) and Pappan och havet (1965, Moominpappa at Sea). The laborious nature of the Moomin strip-cartoon work is vividly evoked, as is the sense of liberation when it finally ends: “I’m living island life with such relish, especially since I finished with the cartoon strips once and for all a few days ago – and I’ve suddenly started taking an interest in planting and fishing and hammering in nails and other natural activities I only tackled out of duty or guilt all these years” (11.7.1959).
Most of Tove Jansson’s letters to Maya Vanni were written in summertime. They take the form of reports from an island, where the seismograph-like correspondent recounts tales of life and work, joys and problems, hard times and happy times in various circles of family and friends. Hamm and
Faffan (in the earlier letters) occupy a lot of space, as does Tuulikki Pietilä. Her importance as a life partner and artist is expressed in vivid and concrete terms. But Tove Jansson also writes of trying to strike a balance within the triangle of herself, Tuulikki Pietilä and Signe Hammarsten Jansson, depicting in close-up the interactions of the three protagonists: daughter, mother and life partner. The process of leaving Bredskär for Klovharun proves a testing time for the mother-daughter relationship and Tove Jansson writes somewhat dejectedly about the black wave of “guilt–melancholy” she experiences (14.7.1963) as plans for the new island start to be realised. Correspondence with Maya Vanni also allowed for an airing of the recurrent dilemma of duty versus love. Tove Jansson writes of her need for solitude, but also of friendship and love, and of inviting “ghost invasions” from her various circles of friends to come swarming across the rocks. But the most important element of all is the changing landscape of the island and the sea.
Maya Vanni moved to Israel in 1992, at which point she returned the letters to their author. “I’m so pleased that you are going to look after them,” she wrote in an accompanying note. Tove Jansson asked her in several of the letters to burn them after reading, but this clearly did not happen. There is no way of knowing whether any other letters were in fact destroyed by either Maya Vanni or Tove Jansson.
* * *
20.7.1957 [Bredskär]
Dear Maya,
thank you for your warm and news-packed letter which really did make me happy.
It gave me the urge to write a letter of my own, right away – and I certainly haven’t felt anything like that for many years.
I’m so glad you felt as much at home with us as we did with you. It’s rare for anyone to slip into island life as easily as you did, we simply lived together as if we always had.
When you left I thought a lot about how the town would receive you with all its tangles and complications. The tangles are still there, apparently – but you were able to put up your defences and stick your nose in the air!
We relished your account of the conversation with Sigrid! What you said was so unruffled and factually correct – and should for that very reason have taught that woman not to be so impertinent or to offer her opinion on personal matters that she can’t judge. I imagine August, when he comes back, isn’t going to be an easy month for you.
But your attitude is clear: you know what you want and can maintain your composure.
I especially admired your presence of mind when our friend rang. That was definitely the only right and fair thing for you to do. To think that you actually managed to pull it off – and that you weren’t plagued with doubt and anxiety again afterwards. I think that little by little, despite all your regret and disappointment, you’ve grown stronger than him.
That can only bode well – whether the outcome is definitive liberation or a new kind of contact in which he finally brings himself to be honest.
I was terribly pleased to hear about all your commissions. So you’re now the no. 1 translator from French and translating for Uca and a mechanical engineer! Isn’t it funny how everything comes tumbling in at the same time, once it actually starts! I just knew Svedlin wouldn’t take long to discover what you were made of. Nice that he was the one to say it, and was grateful – clients don’t often do that, just take delivery and pay.
In a few days I shall be sending him 34 illustrations, when Ham goes back, and I despatched 30 into town with Peo a while back. I’ve only five left to do now, on scraping paper. That feels good!!!
Oh Maya, I’d have loved to see you at the Embassy party in all your glory! It really is a very special sensation, knowing yourself to be as right as you possibly can be and then floating around at a large social gathering, feeling utterly at ease and comfortable with yourself. I struggled for half a lifetime before that happened to me for the first time. It was like when you learn to swim and find yourself buoyant for the first time.
So Willie is coming over. In that case we must confront her with Tooti’s Andree who is already here in Helsingfors. A telegram that had been lying around in Söderby belatedly got through, completely deflating Tuulikki. Now we’ve arranged for Ham to take keys and a letter to Andree’s hotel, so then she can stay at Tooti’s flat and sometime around the 10th Tooti will go in and make sure she’s all right.
Faffan and Ham came out for a few days after you’d left. Faffan instantly found his seagull Pelle, laid claim to the guest room and settled in for an intensive three weeks of fishing. So we were in no danger of getting scurvy from lack of phosphorus!
I think he had a good time until he started missing city life. The day he went, Kurt arrived for a weekend with some lovely steaks, and wine. We picked him up from Tirmo and the machine ran like an angel. He had good weather and everything was rosy. A couple of days after him, yesterday, Uca arrived – tired but happy, and bringing the play with her. If only she could have a little rest in this week she’s here!
Since you left we’ve had various knottywood projects on the go – mainly Tooti of course.
We emptied and scoured one of the big water-collecting hollows and Tooti built a greenhouse near the mergansers’ nestbox. Just behind it I found an uprooted bit of tree that had brought a clump of earth up into the air with it. I broke it open, freed the roots with the saw and scraped out lots of soil from between them to plant salad crops in. Good going, eh? Then we ran down every couple of hours to check whether any of them had come up.
The most interesting thing we made was definitely the beaded curtain for the door. One of those real bordello-style affairs, multi-coloured. We soon ran out of wooden beads so we complemented those with velvet grass, bamboo and reeds. It rattles nicely in the south-westerly, scares the flies (we hope) and catches round everything as we try to get through it. We also collected round stones all over the islands and Tooti made some of them into abstract sculpture! And we deepened the western harbour with Hamsie’s help.
One little serpenticle has sneaked into our paradise – a sort of rivalry between the two former scout leaders, which I’ve found quite hard to handle and am seriously worried about.
Maybe I’m exaggerating – or it will pass. I shall talk to you about it sometime.
This evening the thunder is rumbling along the horizon again, but not bringing any rain. The danger lamp is lit and suddenly the late-summer darkness is outside, with frogs and flashes of lightning.
Uca’s translating, Tooti is tapping tacks into silkscreen printing frames, Ham’s making a plasticine Fillyjonk and I’ve been groaning over an idiotic scrapbook sheet for Bull’s. Then I shall get started on Save the Children. Ham leaves tomorrow and Nita will be here in a few days’ time.
Then, on the 30th, Lasse will have the island for his friends and Tooti and I are heading for even greater solitude on Kummelskär. I’m hoping it will be splendid. Everyone sends you their warmest wishes!
Thanks for the lovely time we had while you were here. And look after yourself.
All good wishes, your friend Tove.
Svedlin: Thure Svedlin, head of the Holger Schildts Förlags publishing house.
Willie: See Letter to Vivica Bandler 13.6.1948.
Andree (sometimes spelled “Andrée”): An old friend of Tuulikki Pietilä from her student days in Paris in the early 1950s.
34 illustrations: TJ is working on the illustrations for Trollvinter (Moominland Midwinter).
knottywood projects: Swedish knaggbestyr. The invented verb att. knagga (derived from the word knagge, used in the letters for a hook fashioned from driftwood, or other handcrafted object) came to be applied to any kind of practical project. The phrase was probably coined by deft handywoman Tuulikki Pietilä.
former scout leaders: Ham and Vivica Bandler.
BREDSKÄR, 18 AUG. 58.
Dearest Maya,
Thank you for your long, entertaining letter. Your glimpses of the Post and Telegraph Authority tally well with Ham’s accounts of that institution. Rather
long-winded, idyllic in a benevolent and dignified way, not to be rushed and awful sticklers for etiquette.
On the whole I think your job outline sounds pleasant enough – I assume it will be entirely up to you to develop the work and organise the time-sheme, as Uca would pronounce it!
Ham would very much like to know the names of those fellows – she knows them all from when she was designing stamps.
Island life is going better than ever for the three of us, and suddenly there’s not the slightest doubt that Ham and Tooti are friends – and our days together pass peacefully and harmoniously.
The island has worked wonders – Ham is much better and feels like pursuing all sorts of activities again – the worst shock of Faffan’s death is behind her. But as soon as anything disrupts the uniform tranquillity of the island she can’t cope and is ill again and starts to brood. That’s why I was grateful you didn’t bring Andrée here. A Frenchman and complete stranger to converse with in gales and torrential rain wouldn’t have been particularly good for her. This summer just needs to be calm.
As for me, I find the prospect of new people very unappealing. You know Uca and Nita have been here for a few days – the only fine weather we’ve had, as luck would have it – and that went well and was very pleasant. Then Mary turned up for twenty-four hours to talk plays with Uca – she blew in unannounced and full of charm to scatter anxiety and rash indiscretions among us – and then blew out again. I can’t help being bewitched by her, liking her – even though she always seems to cause trouble.
Uca liked the play – that was nice. Mine has now been rewritten three times, getting better each time, but that doesn’t mean it’s good, of course. I’ve another new version to show Uca. And I’d like to show you, too, I think you’d be interested and I know you’ve a critical eye; it’s important not to release anything mediocre.