“I could vomit over Moomintroll,” Tove Jansson confided in her notebook in the late 1950s. A decade after the hippo-like creature with low self-esteem made his debut appearance in 1945, Scandinavian homes had become versions of Moominvalley, with Moomin-themed aprons, curtains, wallpaper and crockery, while department stores stocked Moomins modelled in marzipan, ceramic and white leather (Jansson drew the line at Moomin sanitary towels). This world of whimsy bore little relation to the Finnish artist’s initial conception of the Moomintrolls.
The Moomins and the Great Flood, the 60-page picture book not translated into English until 2005 and now celebrating its 80th anniversary, was written during the Winter War in 1939, when Russia’s invasion of Finland left 300,000 Finns homeless. (The Moomin estate is marking the anniversary by partnering with Counterpoints Arts and Refugee Week to commission artists to create public artworks inspired by the book.) A tale of displaced people and dangerous predators and living on borders, the first of the nine Moomin books begins with Moomintroll and Moominmamma arriving, “late in the afternoon one day at the end of August”, in “the deepest part of the great forest”. August, Jansson believed, was “the border between summer and winter” and twilight “the border between day and night”.
Half-Swedish and half-Finnish, half-storyteller and half-illustrator, a lover of both men and women, and an artist appealing equally to adults and children, Jansson was a border-dweller herself. A scratchy ink illustration on page one shows two tiny dark shapes, which might be roots or rocks, suspended beneath trees the size of Giant redwoods. Mother and son are in search of somewhere “snug” in which to hibernate, but they are also in search of Moominpappa, who long ago disappeared with the “mostly invisible” Hattifatteners: it is striking how many of the characters in Jansson’s stories are searching for something, waiting for something, and in need of a home. The Moomins find another lost creature who will, in the later books, become Moomintroll’s best friend and foster-brother, Sniff. There was a time, Moominmamma tells the small boys, when Moomins made their homes behind the stoves in other peoples’ houses and did not need to “travel through fearsome forests and swamps in order to find somewhere to live”.
The Moomin stories were born, Jansson wrote to her friend Eva, “when I was feeling sad and scared of bombs and wanted to get away from gloomy thoughts… I would creep into an unbelievable world where everything was natural and friendly – and possible.” The first book “had to be a fairy tale” with a “happy ending”, and so when the Moomins find Moominpappa they move into his stove-shaped house, which a flood has transplanted, Ark-like, to the valley where they will live, we are told, for “the whole of their lives”. There were no illustrations in Jansson’s first draft of The Moomins and the Great Flood. She had trained as a painter but during the war she “stood still” as an artist and was no longer able to think in colour, so “it felt completely pointless to try to create pictures”. Putting the pages in a drawer, she forgot about them for the next six years until a friend suggested that they could, with pictures, be turned into a children’s book. The Moomins and the Great Flood, illustrated in sepia and black ink, was published only in Sweden, selling 219 copies in the first year.
The Moomins, at this point in their gestation, were broad-backed with trunk-like noses, horn-like ears, and flattish stomachs. Their waistlines increased with fame, but their characteristics remained the same: anxious, romantic Moomintroll, dependable Moominmamma, and Moominpappa, the reckless, self-absorbed melancholic whose longing for adventure threatens to destroy them all. Jansson had found her cast, her perfect length – short to medium – and the balance between words and pictures that would prove her genius. The writing is spare, weighed down with silences, the images saying what the words elide. The Moomins and the Great Flood ends with the creation of Moominvalley, the kind of place that the psychotherapist Donald Winnicott – in whom Jansson had a strong interest – would call a “holding environment” where we can be determinedly ourselves. United in solipsism and contained by the love of Moominmamma, the Moomins and their eccentric friends live out their philosophies, compulsions, obsessions, paranoias, and various neuroses.
Five further Moomin books followed in quick succession: Comet in Moominland (1946), in which a fireball is seen “diving headlong” towards Moominvalley and the Moomins wait in a cave for extinction (a response to the Soviet bombing of Helsinki and the American bombings of Nagasaki and Hiroshima); Finn Family Moomintroll (1948), a celebration of Jansson’s first affair with a woman, the theatre director Vivica Bandler (“O, to be a newly awakened Moomin dancing in the glass-green waves while the sun is rising”); The Memoirs of Moominpappa, a parody of the life of the 16th-century Italian sculptor Benvenuto Cellini and of male pomposity (“When people read this book,” Moomintroll tells his father, “they are going to believe you are famous”); and Moominsummer Madness (1954), when another flood renders the creatures once again homeless.
The sixth novel, Moominland Midwinter (1958), written when Jansson was ready to “vomit” over her creation, contains the most devastating account of depression in 20th-century literature. Waking up early during the annual hibernation, Moomintroll finds himself snowed in and utterly alone in an alien world whose pleasure principle has disappeared. From now on in the books, things get darker. Family relations break down completely in Moominpappa at Sea (1965) when Moominpappa, realising that he is a failed artist, drags his family away from Moominvalley to an uninhabited rock in the middle of the sea that is “completely silent and terribly, terribly cold”. Here, in his attempt to control the waves, he loses his mind, while a desolate Moominmamma hides inside the mural of Moominvalley that she’s painted on the wall and Moomintroll, in love with a seahorse and profoundly depressed, finds a patch of earth on which to sleep. The island, meanwhile, shrinks with unhappiness.
The final book, Moominvalley in November (1970), a spin on Waiting for Godot, takes place during the family’s absence. Their friends, not knowing where they have gone or why they left without saying goodbye, wait in the Moomins’ abandoned house (the one in which they would live for “the whole of their lives”) for their return. There is no happy ending, and the readers who drank out of their Moomin mugs and slept beneath their Moomin duvet covers felt angry and cheated. But Jansson, aged 56, was at last free of her Frankenstein’s monster. A book in which nothing happens save the passing of time, Moominvalley in November is an absurdist masterpiece. There is an aesthetic satisfaction to the series, which begins and ends with disappearance. It is Moominpappa who vanishes in the first book, and the entire family in the last. One of the oddest aspects of the Moomin phenomenon is how these complex tales of apocalypse, breakdown and disfunction have been consistently misread as cutesy celebrations of domestic life.
Tove Jansson was born in Helsinki in August 1914. Her father, Viktor (known as “Faffan”) was a sculptor from Finland’s Swedish-speaking minority and her mother, Signe Hammarsten (“Ham”) was a well-known draughtswoman, the daughter of a Swedish clergyman. Faffan’s work did not sell and so Ham was the principal breadwinner. By the time she was 14, Tove was also contributing to the family finances by drawing cartoons for the satirical magazine Garm. In her early twenties, her satires of Hitler and Stalin were placed on Garm’s cover. Faffan, who had returned from the Finnish Civil War (January-May 1918) a broken man, now fervently supported Germany and so he and his daughter were at loggerheads.
The Janssons saw themselves as bohemians but there is nothing relaxed about the family portrait Tove painted in 1942, which shows five stiff figures in a cramped room, each locked in their own isolation and looking in different directions. Ham and Faffan are in white overalls, one of Tove’s two brothers is in military uniform, while Tove herself, standing in the middle in a black hat, coat and gloves, looks as though her suitcase is packed and she is ready to board a train. “Faffan and I have said we hate each other,” she told a friend during this same year. “It’s hell to be still living at home.”
Jansson had lived with Moomins since childhood, when her uncle told her tales about the trolls behind the kitchen stove who would, if she stole jam from the larder, rub their cold snouts against her legs until she froze. By the time she was in her teens the trolls had evolved in her imagination into frightening “house ghosts” who made their presence known by breathing cold air on her neck: “Terrified, I turned the key in the lock and jumped into bed like a shot, and all that night I could hear the Moomintrolls pulling my slippers backwards and forwards under my bed.” Jansson’s first Moomin illustration (“the ugliest thing I could think of”) was on the lavatory wall of the family’s island summer house, where it can still be admired by tourists.
The creatures had turned, by her late teens, into what Jansson’s biographer Boel Westin describes as “ominous creatures associated with dreams, confusion and emptiness”, drawn in a series of “expressive landscapes of boulders, seas, dark islands and deserted roads, fenced around with agitation, uncertainty and anguish”. By her early twenties Moomintroll had become Jansson’s “angry signature character”. It is easy to overlook Moomintroll’s anger, which expresses itself largely as fear, but it comes to the surface when his amour propre is challenged, such as in the comic strip story Moomin on the Riviera, where his girlfriend, Snorkmaiden, runs off with the movie star Mr Brisk and Moomintroll challenges him to a duel.
The Moomintrolls were first introduced to an English audience in 1954 in the form of a comic strip in the London Evening News (circulation: 12 million) which by 1956 had been syndicated to 120 other papers in 20 further countries. These stories are funnier than those in the books and focus on what Jansson called “psychological moments” and Winnicott would call “nameless dread”. Jansson had inadvertently become the analyst of the postwar psyche, but it was her own psyche she was exploring. The Moomin stories were, she said, “abreactions”, a psychoanalytical term for catharsis (“I abreacted hugely through this book,” she wrote of Moominpappa at Sea), and Jansson distributed herself throughout her characters: she was as dutiful and unassertive as Moomintroll, as misanthropic and frustrated as Moominpappa, as empathetic and reliable as Moominmamma, and as wild as the furious urchin Little My.
She hoped that the income from the comic strips would allow her to return to painting, but it became clear by 1957 that this would never happen. As well as containing the world’s fears, Jansson now singlehandedly controlled the Moomin merchandise industry, which involved answering by hand each of the 2,000 letters she received every year. “We look forward to your valued reply soonest concerning Moomin motifs on toilet paper in pastel shades,” reads one letter.” “Hi, my name is Olavi,” reads another. “You write well but last time you did not make a happy ending. Why do you do this?” “What shall I do with my parents?” reads a third. “They’re becoming more and more hopeless. Write!”
Jansson, like the Moomins, wanted only to hibernate but instead she found herself snowed in beneath “an avalanche of things”, her world now composed, she said, of “newspapers, telephones, telegrams, post post post in heaps, stacks, avalanches, strangers, lectures, conversations, conversations, masses of words and myriads of children. And never alone. Never ever really alone”. One of the mysteries of Jansson’s personality is why she allowed the mass commercialisation of her delicate, subtle work; another is why, given the urgency of her creative drive, she didn’t employ a secretary to take over the administrative burden.
In 1969, around the same time that she completed the Moomin books with Moominvalley in November, Jansson drew her last comic strip and killed off her main character. Moomintroll is diagnosed by a psychiatrist, Dr Schrünkel, with numerous complexes, and prescribed medication which makes him shrink until he completely disappears. The following year, Jansson’s younger brother Lasse took over the cartoons. Moomintroll was now resurrected, after which the stories continued to run until 1975.
Tove Jansson is not the first writer to fall out with her characters. Arthur Conan Doyle tried to kill off Sherlock Holmes by throwing him down the Reichenbach Falls, and after 30 years of living with Hercule Poirot, Agatha Christie described him as a “detestable, bombastic, tiresome, egocentric little creep”. What distinguishes Jansson is that she detested her readers even more than her characters. They are satirised in her first cartoon, Moomin and the Brigands, as the hordes of uninvited guests who exploit Moomin’s generosity and, once they have eaten him out of house and home, eat the home itself: “It’s so difficult to tell your guests that you’d like your own bed sometimes,” Moomintroll confides to Sniff. “I must learn to say No”.
In 1963, Jansson and her partner, the graphic artist Tuulikki Pietilä, built a cabin on the “angry little skerry” of Klovharu, a rocky and isolated island which could be circumnavigated in four and a half minutes. Even here, where for the next 30 summers she did her best to disappear, she was pursued by boatloads of Moomin fans. “Seven strangers came… to have coffee, drinks and soft drinks and talk and ‘look at me’”, Jansson wrote in her diary. “Kiss my arse… Threw stones. Angry.”
Frances Wilson’s “Burning Man: The Ascent of DH Lawrence” is published by Bloomsbury
[See also: David Hockney writ large]
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