Tove Jansson: The complicated artist behind the Moomins
Tove Jansson longed to be alone. As a child, she slept on a high shelf in her family’s home in Helsinki. Her mother, a successful illustrator, piled books from floor to ceiling and her father, a sculptor, kept a studio that dominated the majority of the space. The Janssons were part of the relatively affluent Swedish-speaking minority in Finland, a group stereotypically regarded as artistic. Magazine and newspaper articles were written about the Janssons’ bohemian home.
“I want to be a wild thing, not an artist,” the young Tove wrote in her diary. But she was an artist, ineluctably, just as her father had hoped she would be. She didn’t create out of a desire for notoriety — when fame hit in her late 30s, it only made her shyer, as Boel Westin, an emeritus professor of literature at Stockholm University, points out in her biography, “Tove Jansson: Life, Art, Words.”
Over the course of her life, Jansson would create political cartoons, still lifes, opera librettos, portraits, murals for public buildings, children’s books, short stories, novels, syndicated comic strips, poetry, abstract paintings, essays, scripts for film and television, plays and, of course, the Moomins.
“Oh, we are all Moomins,” a Finnish person once said to me, by way of explanation for her offbeat personality. Today, Moomin Characters is one of Finland’s most profitable businesses.
The Moomins are a nature-loving, philosophical family of long-snouted, rotund white troll-creatures, born during World War II in a period when Jansson was a leading political cartoonist. Jansson found herself at odds politically with her father during the war, but never wavered in her hatred of
Hitler. “It was the utterly hellish war years that made me, an artist, write fairy tales,” she later wrote. The word “Moomin” was never given a clear etymology, though Jansson traced their lineage to the ghost stories of her childhood. Published and received as children’s books, the Moomin series appealed equally to adults. Jansson never censored her stories out of a false sense of childhood’s innocence. Most children, she believed, “live in a world in which the fantastic and the matter-of-fact have equal value,” and death visited the Moomins’ lives like any other.
The first several Moomin books received little fanfare in Finland and Sweden, where they were eclipsed by the contemporaneous appearance of Pippi Longstocking, yet Jansson was, characteristically, completely undeterred. She wrote the second book before the first was printed, and the third before the second was published. After the war, color rushed back into her work.
Despite their particular Finnishness, the appeal was international. The Moomins landed in America, were syndicated in newspapers throughout England, took Japan by storm. Academics debated Moomin philosophy. The Moomins grew larger and fatter as they grew more famous, and Jansson’s anxieties about her celebrity became a subject in their stories.
“It’s going so well I can’t help getting rich, even if they keep cheating me,” she wrote to a friend. The Moomins, in their strange specificity, spoke to a near-universal audience, and Jansson’s readers felt they knew her. She received approximately 2,000 letters a year, and sent a handwritten response to every letter she received.