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For The Paris Review, Sheila Heti has written about the magical world envisioned by Finnish illustrator Tove Jansson. Read an excerpt below, or the full version here.
One day my mother—who immigrated from Hungary forty years ago—was visiting my apartment. She noticed that on the fridge my boyfriend and I had taped a large picture of Charlie Brown, which we had torn from the pages of The New Yorker. It was just Charlie Brown standing there with his hands at his sides. Upon seeing the picture she stopped and said, “What a nice boy! Who is it?” The remarkable thing wasn’t only discovering that my mother had strangely never encountered Charlie Brown, but that upon seeing him for the first time, she immediately liked him, felt sympathy and tenderness. Until that moment, I had not fully understood the power of comics: I had never witnessed so starkly what a perfect line can summon. A line drawn with love can make us as vulnerable as what the line depicts. Whatever cynicism I had about how commerce creates familiarity creates conditioned responses creates “love,” it crumbled in that instant. An artist’s love for what they create is what creates love.
The first time I encountered Tove Jansson’s Moomin strips, I had the same feeling as my mother: what a nice boy! (Or whatever sort of creature Moomin is—a creature from a tender dream.) There is such vulnerability in his eyebrows, in his little round tummy, in the way he doesn’t have a mouth, in the babyish slope of the bottom of his face.
It was strange, then, to learn that Jansson’s first drawing of Moomin was an attempt to draw “the ugliest creature imaginable” after a fight with her brother about Immanuel Kant. (She sketched this proto-Moomin on the wall of their outhouse at a country cottage.) The creature became plumper and friendlier in time and his world filled out in such warm tones that it is hard not to be wistful for the life of a Moomintroll: What a sweet, happy family Moomin has! A mother who takes care of people in a quiet sort of way, a father who loves adventure, and a girlfriend with an ankle bracelet. There are friends and odd creatures always coming and going. Money is sometimes a problem for the Moomin clan, but never so much as when they have too much of it.
Competing boy creatures can also pose a problem, as Moomin’s girlfriend sometimes falls in love with one, but she never loves them for any longer than a few consecutive strips. Moomin is open like a child, jealous like a teenager, and fretful like an old man. He is curious and trepidatious. And it is hard not to feel open and fretful and curious and trepidatious when moving through his puzzling (and yet ultimately safe) world.
Tove Jansson was the most successful Finnish illustrator and writer of children’s books of her day, and she was the most widely read Finn abroad. She began her life as an artist early—she had her first drawing published at fifteen. She drew political cartoons for the lefty magazine Garm and published three Moomin books between 1945 and 1948 (when she was in her midthirties), hoping to write something innocent and sweet to counter the despairs of World War II. Around this time, she broke an engagement with a man and fell in love with the (female) artist Tuulikki Pietilä, who would become her partner and artistic collaborator for the rest of her life. In addition to her children’s books and comic strips, which have been translated into almost fifty languages, Jansson wrote eleven novels and story collections for an adult audience. She continued to live and work in Helsinki, the city of her birth, her entire life, summering with her partner on the island Klovharu. She died in 2001, at the age of eighty-six. Pietilä outlived her by eight years.
One of my favorites of Jansson’s long strips—which she drew for a London paper in the late fifties, finally handing the strip over to her brother because the daily grind left little time for her other work, and which are collected in the five volumes of Moomin: The Complete Tove Jansson Comic Strip—involves the Moomin clan visiting the Riviera, where all but Moominmamma fall in love with the high life. They temporarily become rich and everything feels glamorous. Mamma is the only one who knows that this is not a better life for them, and she makes a home within a four-poster bed, placing drapes around its sides, instead of letting them stretch out through the majestic hotel room; she then tries to convince them that the most suitable thing would be to live under a canoe, and sets up house there. A rich creature, a dilettante artist, is taken with their way of life and tries it out—“How wonderful! I’ve never before met REAL bohemians!”—and for a spell, he feels so free. But in the end, the chilliness of life beneath the canoe and the absence of warm coffee in the morning sadden him, and he returns to his wealth. “Anyway,” he says, “I have suffered for my art. How my friends will admire me.”