Tove Jansson's Genius: The radical imagination that built the visionary world of the Moomins

192 books Tove Jansson’s Genius The radical imagination that built the visionary world of the Moomins Evan James Tove jansson, the Finnish writer and artist who created and illustrated the Moomintroll children’s books, wrote a letter in 1978 to her Swedish publisher about her new collection of comparatively “hard-­ boiled” short stories, The Doll’s House. “You know, I sometimes think the nursery chamber and the chamber of horrors are not as far apart as people might think,” she muses. This observation pops up near the end of the five hundred pages Tove Jansson’s Genius | 193 of correspondence collected in Letters from Tove, which charts in intimate detail fifty years of Jansson’s day-­ to-­ day life, romances, apprenticeships, family relationships, business dealings, and artis­ tic triumphs—and opens an enticing window onto the imagination of a visionary. Jansson’s work consistently disturbed manufactured boundaries, dubious segregations, and artificial clefts rent in the flux of experience. This tricksterish border hopping between play and serious philosophical inquiry, between the heroic individual and the raucous collective suffused her art with adventure and rebellion. Take, for instance, the Moomintroll books, for which Jansson became known around the world. Though one would find them in the children’s section of most bookstores, the nine volumes in this series frequently combine whimsical, enchanting storybook scenarios with the most dreadful existential threats. They feature a charming ensemble of characters, the Moomins: “kind, philo­ sophical creatures with velvety fur and smooth round snouts,” accompanied by an expanding cast of associates like the mischie­ vous Thingumy and Bob, the stamp-­ collecting Hemulen, and the winningly contradictory Little My, “the family’s small, disre­ spectful, yet extremely positive friend.” In one of the first books, Comet in Moominland, the Moomins enjoy numerous adventures with eccentric acquaintances but also have to reckon with a comet headed for earth. Ultimately, it roars through Moominvalley and disappears over the edge of the world, a near miss; the narrator breezily declares that “if it had come a tiny bit nearer to the earth I am quite sure that none of us would be here now.” In the final installment, Moominvalley in November, the Moomins are actually absent from the story; the other characters—including a young orphan, Toft, searching for a mother—live with uncertainty about whether the family will return. (Jansson wrote the book while her own mother was nearing death.) One of Jansson’s biographers, Tuula Karjalainen, remarks of the book, “Loss and the finiteness of life are the main themes,” and Jansson herself wrote that “it seems to play in a minor key, I couldn’t make it play any other way”; and 194 | Evan James yet the droll, spirited world of the Moomins furnishes the instru­ ment for this song of loss. In her novels for adults, such as The Summer Book and Fair Play, a similar impulse prevails to investigate the boundaries where cat­ egories break down and extremes meet. The former, replete with Jansson’s wisdom, humor, and lightness of touch, tells the story of a six-­ year-­ old girl and her elderly grandmother passing the sum­ mer on a small island, building play boats, losing and finding false teeth, studying insects, and discussing life, death, and the divine. (The girl asks her grandmother, in passing, when she’s going to die and whether they’ll “dig a hole” for her.) The girl’s mother has died, a fact mentioned just once, but that loss adds depth and gravity to the sense of life captured through the vignettes. On the island (where, the grandmother thinks, “Everything is complete”), life and death intermingle and coexist, coming into being and passing away from one moment to the next through arguments about a neighbor’s bloodhound or building a miniature Venice from sticks and stones. In Fair Play, the interplay between life and art (another artificial separation) is depicted through a pair of characters based on Jansson and Tuulikki Pietilä, the woman who ultimately became her lover and partner in life, work, and travel. Here as in The Summer Book, two souls mirror each other, reinforcing yet also questioning their distinctness. Such paradoxes—explored through day-­ to...