Three stories by Tove Jansson

Stories by Tove Jansson from the 1960s-70s, Part 1 (Introduction to Tove Jansson, plus “The Spinster Who Had an Idea”)

Photo by SaiKrishna Saketh Yellapragada on Unsplash

“The Spinster Who Had an Idea,” “The Fillyjonk Who Believed in Disasters” and “The Squirrel”

Why write about them

Tove Jansson is so intelligent, but she wears it lightly.  You read her stories, think that they’re nice but simple, then look back and realize that they capture something that nothing else has captured so precisely.  Also, you notice that they are gentle, but with an unsparing quality beneath the gentleness.   That’s an interesting combination.

The three stories discussed here differ from each other in tone and intention, but all are about how we perceive others or are perceived by them.  Also in these three respectively: very funny takes on what is “real” art (“The Spinster”, which is a terrible translation of the title word, by the way),  life-long anxiety and how to get rid of it (“The Fillyjonk”), and insane one-way relationships (“The Squirrel”).

How I came across them

Imagine if Charles Schulz had drawn Peanuts in Finland in dark times during and after the 2nd world war, and also written novels and short stories for adults and children, some of them set in the same world as Peanuts and with the same characters.

That’s the closest I can come to describing Tove Jansson and her contemporary role in Scandinavian culture.  Her Moomin characters, from the comic strips and graphic novels (and prose novels and short stories) are as much part of popular daily life as Charlie Brown and Snoopy were when I was a kid, and just about everyone grows up watching classic animated versions on TV.

I tried reading the comic strips decades ago, when I first came across them on a visit to Stockholm, but never got more than a few minutes in.  Nothing about the odd shapes or the colour scheme or the basic storytelling — strange creatures in a family out in the woods somewhere? — felt as though it worked. I put people’s love of the Moomins down to unexportable cultural taste, like Marmite or root beer.

Later, a colleague at the university in the US where I was teaching pressed a copy of Jannson’s novel The Summer Book into my hands at the very end of the spring semester.  “It’s about a child and her grandmother spending a summer on a Finnish island.  It’s one of the most beautiful books ever written,” she said.  I tried.  It felt like one of those books that are almost perfect in their prose but leave one feeling sad for weeks afterwards (Rumer Godden’s books are like that for me).  I put it aside.

But a few years after being given The Summer Book, I was unexpectedly living in Sweden and had become restless while trying to write in the closest public library.  I wandered over to the English-language literature section and Tove Jansson’s name jumped out from the spine of a book under a different title: A Winter Book.  Now, everything was different: it seemed like a duty, being here, to read a Swedish-language writer (Jansson was part of the Swedish-speaking minority in Finland, and wrote in Swedish), and here was one that had come recommended by my colleague.  So I picked it up.

A Winter Book is a selection in English of Jansson’s short stories from a few of her different Swedish-language collections.  It was put together by a writer I had never heard of at the time, named Ali Smith, and so there was a bonus in that when the first of Smith’s Brexit Quartet books came out I recognised the name and bought it immediately.  If you haven’t read those yet, you must, and also check out Dwight Garner’s reviews of the four books (their titles are Autumn, Winter, Spring and Summer) in the New York Times;  the reviews themselves are a pleasure to read.

About the stories

First, a word about focusing just now on stories that are essentially about the individual experience of being human, in a time when it feels as though one should be focusing on the broader societal disasters all around us.  I’m honestly not sure whether choosing to write about these stories now is a way of trying to hide away from all of that, or a way of affirming on-going normal humanness in the midst of threat.  Perhaps another time I’ll write about life going on in the middle of catastrophe, about Auden’s take on that in “Musée des Beaux Arts” (“…and the expensive, delicate ship that must have seen/Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,/ Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on”), about refugees filling trains along with people doing their daily commutes to work, and more.  But for now, I’ll take comfort in the fact that some of Jansson’s own work, gently life-affirming but not sappy, was created during, and in response, to, the war going on around her.

Now, about the stories.

“The Spinster Who Had an Idea” in A Winter Book: Selected Stories by Tove Jansson, Sort Of Books, London, 2006, pp. 107-117.  Story originally published in 1968, translated into English by Kingsley Hart in 1969. (To read in Swedish, look for it in Bildhuggarens dotter or listen to a recording online, e.g. on Spotify.)

The original title of this story is “Tanten Som Hade en Idé.” Tant (tanten means “the tant”) is a hard word to translate from Swedish. At first I thought that it simply meant “aunt,” in the way that in many cultures one might refer to a woman the age of one’s mother as “aunt” whether she is related or not. Later I wondered, not least from reading this story in this translation, if it might not be more like “old maid,” though less pejorative. But lately I have noticed that a few folks in my little Swedish village, all married grandmothers and interesting people, sometimes refer to themselves, ironically self-deprecatingly, as tants, meaning, I think, simply “ordinary older women,” which carries perhaps the edge of an inherently slightly deprecatory concept (we can discuss all the implications of that at another time).

I think that if I were translating this story today, I might do it as “The Lady Who Had an Idea” or “The Woman of a Certain Age Who Had an Idea,” or “the Family Friend Who Had an Idea.” No, all of those are terrible. I don’t know what I’d do. But “spinster” is too unfriendly a word for the meaning of tant, which is used throughout the short story. I think that I might have to go with “lady,” in the way that one used to say things like “the lady next door,” and let the context convey the rest.

“Tanten Som Hade en Idé” is autobiographical. The small child who will grow up to be the famous writer and painter Tove Jansson is spending the summer, like every summer, in a cottage on a Finnish island, along with her mother and father (both serious artists themselves, especially in this story the sculptor father) and one of her grandmothers. Also with them for part of every summer is the tant, who is her grandmother’s friend.

The tant is a difficult houseguest, awkward and alternately too obsequious and too demanding, trying to be grateful and helpful and yet constantly messing things up and getting in the way.

But she has to be invited to spend the summer with them, in their attic, because the grandmother wants her there.

…Granny liked her because she had been a good customer at the button shop and they used to read Allers’ Family Magazine together during the winter. (p. 113)

And the grandmother, we understand, is formidable:

Before the police came to the shop, Granny managed to rescue a lot of the button boxes, which she hid under her skirts just as she had hidden guns during the 1918 war. (p. 113)

The story is only 11 small pages long.  We see the tant — she is only ever referred to as the tant, so we know that that is what the child’s parents say when they speak about her — blundering through half-finished art projects, getting in everyone’s way, treated by the father with a combination of disdain and frustration and concern.

Then she started to cry and rushed up to the attic.  Daddy was left standing there and looking miserable, and said, ‘Oh damn.’ (p. 109)

It is evident that the child, partly through her own observations and partly through what she absorbs from her parents, sees the woman not as a full adult but as a different, immature sort of a creature who is not to be taken seriously.  A few lines:

I knew I wasn’t allowed to help her [with her art project] because she wanted to play on her own.  So I just stood and looked on. (p. 109)

And in the the winter the [project] froze at the bottom and the whole thing cracked. It was very difficult being a spinster [tant]. (p. 112)

Eventually the tant discovers a kind of art-making that works for her.  She is delighted, and makes pieces for everyone, not realising that they are pure kitsch, blundering into the father’s studio to ask for technical advice and use his materials just at the most sensitive moment of his work, with no idea that his art is real art and hers is junk.

The thing is that the child loves the tant’s new artworks, even though she understands everything that the tant does not.

“I didn’t know what to think. The plaster pictures were really the most beautiful things I had ever seen, but they weren’t Art.  One couldn’t respect them at all.  Actually one should really have despised them.  It was a terrible thing to do to make such pictures in Daddy’s studio and, what’s more, whilst a plaster cast was being made.” (p. 116)

Then the tant finally goes home.  The child waits and watches to see how the father will treat the art that the tant gave him and that, to the child’s amazement, he had stopped his own work in the studio to help with.  Will he throw it away, or not?  Is she betraying Art if she keeps hers?  The father’s decision, we understand, is going to be the answer to a central question in her life.

When I first read “Tanten Som Hade en Idé,” I was chiefly interested in it as an entry in a long line of literary writing, starting with Balzac’s “Le Chef-d’oevre inconnu,” in which beginning writers or artists encounter masters in their fields and speak with them about art or witness them as working artists.  I had become fascinated by this line of storytelling when I realised how often writers use the form to share their own thoughts or questions about art, life as an artist, or the artistic process.  In Tove Jannson’s story, the beginning artist isn’t the tant, but rather the child, and the master artist is the father.  The dialogue isn’t in direct conversation between the beginner and the mature artist, but rather in what the child observes and the conclusions she draws.   

Later, I came to see “Tanten Som Hade en Idé” as interesting in a different way, having to do with people’s perceptions of each other, and in particular perhaps of single people of a certain age when they find themselves alone on the margins of families. On the surface, the story shows the tant only as the child sees her, based on her own observations and on what she hears and sees of her parents’ actions and reactions. It’s not a pretty picture: the tant is genuinely unbearable, too unhappy and self-absorbed to realise how much she is disturbing the lives of everyone around her, but also, and painfully, vaguely aware of not being respected or needed, and attempting to solve that by thanking people too much and apologising too much, thus taking up even more unwanted room and losing even more respect, in an unvirtuous circle. We see a similar portrayal of the Maggie Smith character in the film adaptation of A Room With a View.

What makes the story interesting in this regard is that although we readers don’t doubt that the child’s perceptions are accurate, we are subtly offered hints that an alternative perspective is possible. The child witnesses the tant being rather admirable and persistent, if somehow silly, in her devotion to her projects. The formidable grandmother enjoys spending time with the tant.  And the tant, deeply engaged in a difficult even if soon-to-fail art project, doesn’t understand what the child means when the child refers to her artistic process as “play”; the tant does not see herself as childish, even if the child does and the parents do.  The child who is our narrator reads that at the time as lack of self-awareness and does not look farther, and quite possibly she is right; but it is not impossible, looking again with an adult’s eyes, that she is not.

Next: “The Fillyjonk Who Believed in Disasters” (life-filling anxiety)

and “The Squirrel“ (insanely one-way relationships).

Photo by Önder Örtel on Unsplash

Also, for a little more on the “tant” story, see The Radical Acceptance of Uncertainty I