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Tove Jansson’s Writing Process

“The Moomins, in case you haven’t already met them, are kind, philosophical creatures with velvety fur and smooth round snouts, who live in a beautiful valley in a forest in Finland” reads the jacket flap of Finn Family Moomintroll, the book which established the Moomins as a global phenomena in 1948. The creation of artist and writer, Tove Jansson (1914–2001), the Moomins have become iconic symbols of Finland. There are theme parks in Scandinavia and Japan. The books have been translated into fifty languages. One can buy Moomintroll skateboards, bedsheets, and mugs — there are lamps in their hippo-like image. They’re painted on Finland’s national airline. They have their own coffee.

In 2019 the Moomins have great cultural and economic heft and it’s a position and responsibility the company take very seriously. Having recently joined forces with Oxfam, Tove’s niece, Sophia Jansson, Creative Director and Chairman of the Board at Moomin Characters, is heavily involved with a major international initiative to protect the Baltic Sea and its cultural heritage. Named #OURSEA, the campaign has a particular resonance for the Jansson family. “The sea is an essential part of the Moomin stories”, Sophia explains. “Tove Jansson created the Moomin stories in the Pellinge archipelago, inspired by the beauty and power of the sea. She loved the sea, like we all do, Moomintroll included.”

East from Helsinki the Finnish coastline frays and scatters into myriad islands. The larger ones are forested, inhabited, linked by bridges and ferries, connected to the mainland, but the smaller isles are bare, mere hummocks of rock. This blue/green world, first explored as a child on family holidays in the 1920s, was sacrosanct to Tove Jansson and she returned here throughout her life — splitting her time between Pellinge and her turret atelier in the capital.

It was here that she wrote and illustrated many of her Moomin books, inventing Moominvalley in Pellinge’s image — the topography alive in her frontispiece chart of caves, coves, piers and paths through the deep dark woods.

On bright mornings when the Baltic sea is still and silvered, the heat haze makes the outermost islets appear to float slightly above the horizon line, as the mysterious Hattifattener’s island hovers at the top of the Moomin map.

Today Pellinge has a community of some 260 hardy folk dotted across the isles — boat builders, mechanics, fishermen, farmers, carpenters and guides; a practical people steeped in the sea, many descendants of sailors so skilled that King Charles XI of Sweden dubbed them his pilots of choice back in 1696.

At the archipelago’s heart, on the largest island, is the village shop in Söderby. Owner Erika Englund runs Island Riddles— a forest trail inspired by Jansson’s writing. We walk the path Tove took as a small child when her parents charged her with collecting milk from Söderby — a quest recounted in The Book about Moomin, Mymble and Little My. The way weaves through birch woods, reed beds and sticky firs, past blue- and lingonberry bushes. Bright lichens grow on the rocks reminiscent of the carbuncular Groke, a Moomin character who’s desperate for kindness and warmth yet freezes everything she touches. Here the trail is marked by red dresses. There are puzzles involving mirrors, water pumps and magnets. It’s charmingly low-tech and absolutely in keeping with the expedient spirit of Tove Jansson who so loved to explore, record and recount this landscape. The rudimentary nature might be a far cry from the soft-play crash-mat Moomin theme parks but, then, perhaps it’s fair to say that those amusements are a world away from Pellinge’s natural wonders. To stand in this pine forest cut red with late sun, hear the sea shush in the distance and spy the puckish islets flecking the horizon is to be as close to the Moomins and their maker as it’s possible to be. “There are no Moomins on the walk, you know?” Erika’s husband, Jon, tells me. “But this is where they came from, this unique and special place.”

From their first visit to the archipelago, Jansson’s sculptor father and illustrator mother found fellowship in Pellinge’s sea-facing community and the bohemian incomers were welcomed and quickly became an aestival fixture. The family rented a house from Kim Gustafsson’s grandparents. Gustafsson shows me the attic room where Jansson stayed in the winter of 1970 to write Moominvalley in November, pointing out the roof where she practised sliding off ‘as research’ while his bewildered family wondered what on earth was going on. A lot of people in Pellinge have similar anecdotes. Stories of a shy childlike lady: ageless, mischievous and charismatic; paradoxically astute and naive, warm yet removed; but always generous, particularly with children. And it was here that she and her partner, the artist Tuulikki Pietilä, known as Tooti, lived for many years, left to their own devices — the remarkable union passing unremarked, I was told; Pellinge being a safe haven from such gossip, a place of impeccable discretion and courtesy, central qualities of the Finnish character.

Before my trip, I’d met Jansson’s niece, Sophia Jansson, in London to get a better sense of her aunt. I immediately recognised her face as that of the heroic little girl of The Dangerous Journey picture-book and The Summer Book — an exquisite novel about an elderly lady and her six-year-old granddaughter’s exploration of life, mortality, love, and the natural world.

We talk about real-life adventures which fed into the books, the way Tove retreated ever further out in the archipelago as her fame began to grow. How the outpost of Bredskãr, inspiration for The Summer Book, would sometimes become overwhelmed with visitors, as the Söderby’s little post office became inundated with fan letters and how Tove and Tooti would sometimes pack up and ship off to another, smaller, barren rock to camp away from their guests.

As we talk, I begin to see the parallels between the writer and her most famous creation. Moomintroll often berates himself for being a pushover, no match for a bossy Hemulen or domineering Little My. One can imagine the pair bracing themselves against well-meaning but inconvenient interlopers from Helsinki and beyond, drawn out to the offshore shed by the question of what their artist friends were up to. “Making art!” laughed Sophia. “Trying to make art, or write or just have a quiet afternoon.”

So it was that Tove established a small cabin on the outcrop of Klovharun — a rock which resembles the back of a great black whale. This was where the pair summered for close to thirty years. Söderby’s retired shopkeeper showed me an example of the shopping lists Jansson and Pietilä would wire ahead in readiness for a Klovharun stint — a marvellously idiosyncratic roll-call of vivers, staples and vices. Like Roald Dahl and Tom Waits, Jansson required vast quantities of cigarettes and coffee to work and one can imagine them working in the square little room with enormous windows. The sun streaming, smoke spooling, the bawl of seabirds; happy and safe in their far-flung fort.

Sometimes deliberate people look for their island and conquer it, and sometimes the dream of the island can be a passive symbol for what is one step beyond reach. The island — at last, privacy, remoteness, intimacy, a rounded whole without bridges or fences… Dreams become simpler and one wakes up with a smile.
Tove Jansson

Tove wrote the above in 1961 and one can read her love of island life in many of her books and paintings. In Moominpappa at Sea, Moominpappa decides to uproot his family and move out to a lighthouse on the high seas. Jansson was always fascinated by lighthouses. Her Helsinki studio is full of books and box-files of collected clippings about such seamarks; pictures of waterspouts and glowering storms. Sketches of paddle-steamers are pinned to the walls while fishing boat maquettes sit on the windowsills.

In the catalogue of a recent retrospective of paintings, a contributor notes how, though initially drawn to the Moomin books by their charming, magical woodcuts and the cheery character names, when he actually sat down to read Moominland in November et al, it was like Søren Kierkegaard had come round to play. When I ask my own mother why there were no Moomin books in the house, growing up, she replies that they always seemed ‘too dark’. Reading back now, I see that darkness as a subtle thread which runs through all of Jansson’s work, the summer days may be bright but the winter nights are long and deathly cold.

The night before I’m due to sail to Klovharun, I look out into the moonlight gulf. I think about the Finnish faces I’ve encountered so far, their shared look, an ancient steely calm. Earlier in the day, Marie Kellgren, who fishes in the waters around the peninsula throughout the year, told me how when the waters freeze and the days turn dark for months on end, she skates out onto the ice on her motorised fan-sled to fish — attuned to the behaviour of the animals above and below her feet, the slightest hint of thaw. After the depths of winter, it’s no surprise the people of Pellinge celebrate the summer equinox with special fervour and welcome the sun back with euphoric fires and shindig, and revelled in the return of jolly, itinerant friends – as the arrival of Snufkin in the Moomin books always heralds Spring – but you’d know something of ennui and fortitude too, oh my goodness yes.

Early on in Moominland Midwinter, Pietilä’s avatar, Too Ticky, says, ‘Everything is mostly uncertain and that’s what comforts me’. It’s this ambiguity which best explains the artists’ love of the Pellinge peninsula as their muse, I think — Klovharun a unique vantage of Sturm und Drang.

The next morning is still, the pines and rocks around my cabin frosted. The waters are gold, the approaching vessel’s wake torn silk. Jon Englund, Erika’s husband, helps me aboard. Lisbeth Forss, my island guide, shakes my hand. The outboards rally and we turn to face the sea.

In the summer, few are allowed onshore – the waiting list for tours is long and selective – but in the winter everything is closed up and I’m keenly aware that I’m a lucky chap as we make the fifteen-minute journey. The wind grows and the waters chop and we leave Pellinge’s natural harbour. I can see Klovharun ahead now and, as it grows, the little cabin reveals itself. Here is the jetty. I scramble onto the slippery rocks. The island is tiny, a wind-skimmed nub of bristly grass. One could walk around it in a minute.

“Is Sophia’s Summer Book island near?” I ask Lisbeth. Yes, she says, but she’d prefer not to show me. The privacy of the Janssons is important. I look out at the surrounding islets and fir-Mohican’ed tumps. ‘That is Sophia’s island over there’, announces Jon, wandering over having tied up the boat. Lisbeth has a word. “Oh”, says Jon, “Well, there is it. Never mind”.

Whenever Jansson and Pietilä returned to Pellinge, parties would be thrown. “I knew that, as soon as we saw their boat coming in, everything would stop”, says Gustafsson. “Activity for that day would be suspended, everyone would sit down at the garden table and drink coffee…then small spirit glasses would come out…”.

There is a fierce pride in these stories, a sense that this most celebrated artist was theirs for a time, their friend. “It felt like family really”, Gustafsson sums up. As a child he was endlessly fascinated by Jansson and Pietilä’s travels. Postcards arrived from every corner of the globe and when they returned the couple would sometimes bring back interesting food and, occasionally, gifts. Gustafsson almost bursts with pride at the memory of a Hattifattener that he was once given, handmade from cloth and wood. “Of course, it wasn’t as fancy as the other presents… but it was just so kind and thoughtful. It’s the most amazing, beautiful thing.”

All of Tove’s books, whether they were for adults or children, involve consequence and interrelation. They’re surreal psychedelic stories that highlight the importance of ecology, kindness and care so it’s wonderful to know that the people of Pellinge are working hard to simultaneously salute and preserve Tove’s legacy in a way that celebrates the archipelago’s peculiar magic and beauty on their terms. It’s an initiative rooted in the animism at the heart of both Jansson’s writing and the Finnish culture, a wonderful confluence of respect cultures — the practical and the fantastical, the local and universal; these lingonberries, that global hippo-troll phenomenon. “We were visited by this amazing woman, this pair of amazing artists’, Gustafsson told me. ‘Of course, we loved them — even as children we knew they were exceptional and we felt very protective. We wanted to take care of them. I hope that we still are.”

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