Books, Design and Culture
At BBC News, Mark Bosworth looks at the life of artist and writer Tove Jansson:
Comments closedTove Jansson grew up in an artistic household in Helsinki. Her father, a Swedish-speaking Finn, was a sculptor, her Swedish mother an illustrator.
While her mother worked, Tove would sit by her side drawing her own pictures. She soon added words to the images. Her first book—Sara and Pelle and the Octopuses of the Water Sprite—was published when she was just 13.
She later said that she had drawn the first Moomin after arguing with one of her brothers about the philosopher Immanuel Kant. She sketched “the ugliest creature imaginable” on the toilet wall and wrote under it “Kant”. It was this ugly animal, or a plumper and friendlier version of it, that later brought her worldwide fame.
Jansson studied art in Stockholm and Helsinki, then in Paris and Rome, returning to Helsinki just before the start of World War Two.
“The war had a great effect on Tove and her family. One of her brothers, Per Olov, was in the war. They didn’t know where he was, if he was safe, and if he was coming back,” says Boel Westin, a friend of Jansson’s for 20 years and a Professor of Literature at Stockholm University.
Jansson’s first Moomin book—The Moomins and the Great Flood—was published in 1945, at the end of this difficult and nerve-wracking period, with Comet in Moominland following soon afterwards.
“Tove’s anxiety and grief are embedded in the first two books. She was depressed during the war and this is mirrored in those books because they are about catastrophes,” says Westin.
At The New Yorker, James Guida reviews Tove Jansson: Life, Art, Words: The Authorized Biography by Boel Westin, and Jansson’s memoir of childhood Sculptor’s Daughter (both published by Sort of Books):
Writing the Moomins afforded an escape at war’s end. After a quiet start, the series took off in the fifties, bringing welcome financial stability—but the success also represented a kind of detour. Jansson’s ambitions for painting never left her. Now free time was scarce, thanks to an unceasing flow of fan mail, the minutiae of merchandising, processions of visitors, and, until Lars, one of her brothers, took over, the arduous demands of the comic strip. For a while, there was no pleasure to be found in working. Thankfully, social media didn’t exist yet: “I could vomit over Moomintroll,” she wrote. “I shall never again be able to write about those happy idiots who forgive one another and never realize they’re being fooled.”
As with someone like Kafka, it is hard to know how literally to take Jansson’s obstacles. To some degree, her entrapment was avoidable: to be so involved in the products, to answer every letter, seem Moominish ideas—either that or, for a person who so prized being left free and alone, they’re plain masochistic. Were an analogous scenario to occur in the books, the hassles would be washed away by flood, to be followed by a celebratory picnic. As it was, Jansson believed that her nature didn’t give her a choice.
On related note, Montreal’s Drawn Quarterly have just published two new paperback books in their lovely series of classic Moomin comic strips reworked in full colour, Moomin and the Golden Tail and Moomin’s Desert Island (pictured above).
(NB: the Moomin storybooks, published by FSG, and the Moomin comic books, published by D+Q, are distributed by my employer Raincoast Books. Sorry I seem to be doing this so much lately!)
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By some strange coincidence, Mikey Heller’s Time Trabble strip is the second comic about Moby Dick I’ve seen recently. Here’s Roger Langridge’s version featuring Fred the Clown:
(Thanks Michel)
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In light of my previous post about how awful being a writer is, Tom Gauld‘s latest cartoon for The Guardian seems strangely appropriate…
By Roger Langridge. I’ve read reviews like this (except the bit about liking books usually comes at the beginning).
(My memoir will be largely myth-making, dubious memories, and bullshit. Maybe some artistic license too… )
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