It’s the mystery that’s important, somehow very important - creative Tove Jannson

To finish what I charitably call my thought, the second thing I have found to be uniquely enjoyable in the fiction of Tove Jansson is her complex understanding of creativity.  It is perhaps her great subject.

Jansson was painter, her parents were both visual artists, her brothers were artists – the subject is lifelong.

Daddy’s women are sacred.  He doesn’t care about them after they are cast in plaster, but for everybody else they are sacred.  (Sculptor’s Daughter, “Christmas,” 184)

The word “sacred” is meant ironically, which does not mean it is not true.

As soon as the Christmas tree was in the studio everything took on a fresh significance, and was charged with a holiness that had nothing to do with Art.  Christmas began in earnest.  (“Christmas,” 185)

So art is not the only source of sacredness.  Just one.

Thus the snow horse in Moominland Midwinter:

Moomintroll now saw that it was made of snow.  Its tail was the broom from the woodshed, and its eyes were small mirrors.  He could see his own picture in the mirror eyes, and this frightened him a little…

“If there only were a single soul here that I knew of old,” Moomintroll thought.  “Somebody who wouldn’t be mysterious, just quite ordinary.”  (32)

One might detect here a link with the theme of sublimity I described yesterday.  In the title story of Jansson’s 1978 collection Art in Nature, a couple has bought an abstract painting at an outdoor art fair that they insist is actually representational (and perhaps it is).  They argue about exactly what is represented.  A guard, who understands art like Jansson does, has a solution:

“Since a piece of art can be just about anything, and since we only see what we want to see, you could just not unwrap it and hang the package on the wall.  Then you won’t need to argue.”  (19)

The guard sounds like Andy Warhol, but the emphasis is actually different: he, and Jansson, are urging the viewer to match the artist in creativity.  The results don’t matter that much.

But what I said was completely right, he thought.  It’s the mystery that’s important, somehow very important.  He went and lay down in the sauna with its four bare walls.  It was nice to look at them and fall asleep without all the humdrum thoughts he was used to.

Or perhaps the couple has been bamboozled by a lunatic who likes to stare at blank walls.  But I think, rather, that he is not contradicting but reassuring Moomintroll.

It is a utopia that Jansson recommends, in which everyone is perpetually creating mystery, but it was the world she lived in, or at least created for herself.

Thomas Teal translated Art in Nature; Thomas Warburton did Moominland Midwinter.

They "had no idea what fun the whole thing was, which served them right" - Tove Jansson's catastrophes

Tove Jansson’s 100th birthday was  August 9.  Please see the pictures posted at the NYRB Classics Tumblr (sic) to get an immediate sense of who Jansson was.  I believe they will be putting up more Jansson stuff for the centennial.  Much of what I see on Twitter is just photographs of Moomin-related coffee mugs or Japanese Moomin restaurants.  This is not what I have found interesting in Jansson’s books, the opportunity to collect mugs.

No, there are two things I have found in Jansson that are unusual.  One or both themes run through all of her work that I have read.

The first is a strong sense of the sublime.  Her books are full of catastrophes – hurricanes, tidal waves, and floods, or even the destruction of the earth by a comet (Comet in Moominland, 1946).  The date of the latter suggests that she is, in part, allegorizing the external catastrophe of World War II, but there is something else at work.  Jansson’s books are set in coastal Finland, and on little rocky islands in the Gulf of Finland.  Readers of the novel The Summer Book (1972) are likely to remember the little girl who thrills in the massive August storm that hits them, but also fears that she summoned it, that it is her storm, her possession, which is exciting, but also her fault.

In Sculptor’s Daughter (1968), a memoir from the point of view of young Tove circa age six or seven, the storm is nothing but fun.

Everything lying on the slope below the house had floated out to sea and the off-shore wind was carrying it out towards the sound and the wind was getting stronger and stronger and the water was rising higher and higher.  I was shouting with glee, too, as I waded up and down and felt the floating grass getting tangled round my legs…

And the visitors hauled on the rope and were soaked to the skin in their nightshirts and had no idea what fun the whole thing was, which served them right…

Then Daddy went out again.  Mummy poured out tea for us all.  It was the best storm we ever had.  (“High Water,” 103-4)

For example.  Or see “The Tulle Skirt,” in which a little girl crawls around in a big black skirt which creates, in a mirror, a shapeless monster with its own frightening existence, at least until Tove tires of the game.  Or try “Snow,” where the girl and her mother are alone in a big house during a long blizzard.

The snow on the ground began to slither away.  It slid in an enormous avalanche which grew and grew over the edge of the world…  oh no! oh no!

I rolled backwards and forwards on the carpet to make the horror of it seem greater, and in the end I saw the wall heave over me and the pictures hung straight out on their wires.

What are you doing? Mummy asked.  (“Snow,” 163-4)

This is all just child’s play, but of a kind Jansson kept doing in her fiction.  The chapter in the memoir parallels the earlier Moomintroll Midwinter (1957) – the Swedish title, Trollvinter, is unimprovable – in which the young Moomintroll inexplicably awakes from hibernation and experiences, for the first time, winter, which from his point of view is a kind of catastrophe, unknown and frightening, but is really just an ordinary winter.

Thus, the sense of sublimity, the aesthetic pleasure that comes fear at a distance, from danger that is real but remote or controlled.

Kingsley Hart translated Sculptor’s Daughter.

Preparing for the Tove Jansson centennial - just a colossal delight at being alone

2014 is the centennial of the birth of Finnish writer and artist Tove Jansson.

Jansson wrote the Moomin books, which are in some important sense for children, and after retiring from them wrote novels and short stories for adults.  As a child I read The Exploits of Moominpapa (1950) many times, but never any of the other books, presumably because I never came across them.  Last year, preparing for the centennial, I read several more Moomin books as well as the three later novels published in the U.S. as NYRB Classics, The Summer Book (1972), The True Deceiver (1982), and Fair Play (1989), the latter all translated from the original Swedish by Thomas Teal.

I thought they were all terrific, Moomin and non-Moomin, in their own ways.  What caught my attention – what fit in with some of my other reading – was Jansson’s attention to art and creativity, a central subject The True Deceiver and Fair Play, a running theme of The Summer Book, and a surprisingly important part of several of the Moomin books, as when Moominsummer Madness (1954) ends with an impromptu amateur theatrical performance strangely resembling A Midsummer Night’s Dream, or when the free spirit Snufkin has trouble capturing a song in his head because of his irritating fans (“The Spring Tune” in Tales from Moominvalley, 1962).  But of course everything works out all right:

He stretched out on his back and looked up into the spring sky.  It was a clear dark blue straight above him and sea green over the treetops.  Somewhere under his hat the tune began to move, one part expectation, and two parts spring sadness, and for the rest just a colossal delight at being alone.  (16)

The end of this story returns at the end of the adult novel The True Deceiver, which features an artist who creates highly specialized books for children.  It is again spring, early this time:

Anna sat and waited for the morning mist to draw off through the woods.  The silence she needed was complete.  And when every bothersome element had departed, the forest floor emerged, moist and dark and ready to burst with all the things waiting to grow.  Cluttering the ground with flowery rabbits would have been unthinkable.  (181)

Rabbits covered with flowers here rather than big-snouted Moomintrolls.  Fair Play is about a mature lesbian couple, one a writer, one a painter.  Given the emphasis on silence, it is hardly surprising that the women keep separate, adjacent apartments, or that the book ends with this:

Mari was hardly listening.  A daring thought was taking shape in her mind.  She began to anticipate a solitude of her own, peaceful and full of possibility.  She felt something close to exhilaration, of a kind that people can permit themselves when they are blessed with love.  (100)

The Summer Book does not end with an artist treasuring silence, so Jansson does not always end this way.

A number of other books, mostly collections of short stories, are available in England.  A lot of them are also about art and artists.  Jansson was the daughter of two artists; her brothers both became artists.  One of them helped her create a Moomin comic strip (which is, no surprise, pretty good).

Someone should do a proper book blog event for Jansson this year, perhaps in August around her birthday, with graphics and giveaways of books supplied by her publisher and whatever else it is people like, all of the things that I refuse to do under any circumstances.  The event would be popular and widely celebrated.

I do plan to host an event, possibly the least popular event in the history of book blogs.  Tomorrow for that.

The wonderful photo is borrowed from the Moomin wiki.  That is Moominpapa in the top hat.  Jansson is the one with a watch.

I wish you all an absence of those ill effects which sometimes attend upon the consumption of rich viands.

The oldest extended description of Christmas in fiction that I have read is in Washington Irving’s Sketch-Book (1819), which describes a classic English Christmas:

There was now a pause, as if something was expected; when suddenly the butler entered the hall with some degree of bustle: he was attended by a servant on each side with a large wax-light, and bore a silver dish, on which was an enormous pig’s head, decorated with rosemary, with a lemon in its mouth, which was placed with great formality at the head of the table.  The moment this pageant made its appearance, the harper struck up a flourish…  (“The Christmas Dinner”)

The running joke, despite all of those servants and the harper, is that the country squire laments that he is overseeing the decline of the great English tradition – that the pig should be a boar, that the pheasant pie should be a (vile, inedible) peacock pie.  How sad for him; how lucky for Irving.

One clever serial number of Anthony Trollope’s Orley Farm (1861-2) contains four Christmas chapters that sweep up all of the novel’s plotlines and characters.  “Christmas at Noningsby,” full of jolly games (see the Millais illustration to the left), or “Christmas in Great St. Helens,” where is uttered that great line about a roast turkey tasting “[l]ike melted diamonds.”  An all-time champion 19th century fictional food scene.

The characters in the previous chapter, “Christmas at Groby Park,” are not so lucky, since the lady of the house is a cheapskate and a hoarder, keeping food in her own room that she denies to her family and guests:

And over and beyond the beef there was a plum-pudding and three mince-pies.  Four mince-pies had originally graced the dish, but before dinner one had been conveyed away to some up stairs receptacle  for such spoils.  The pudding also was small, nor was it black and rich, and laden with good things as a Christmas pudding should be laden.  Let us hope that what the guests so lost was made up to them on the following day, by an absence of those ill effects which sometimes attend upon the consumption of rich viands.

"And now, my dear, we'll have a bit of bread and cheese and a glass of beer," Mr. Green said when he arrived at his own cottage.  And so it was that Christmas-day was passed at Groby Park.

That’s the spirit, Mr. Green.

The Moomins, who are Finnish and apparently pagan, prepare “juice and yogurt and blueberry pie and eggnog” the one time they are accidentally awakened at Christmastime from their usual winter hibernation.

“At least I am not afraid of Christmas anymore,” Moomintroll said.

From “The Fir Tree,” Tales of Moominvalley (1962) by Tove Jansson.  Well said, Moomintroll.

Wuthering Expectations is about to enter its own Christmas hibernation.  It will awaken on January 2nd if I have recovered from those ill effects alluded to above.

Merry Christmas; happy New Year!