Island for the Solitary and Free

Island mentality

In the summer of 1963, Tove Jansson and Tuulikki Pietilä spend their first night on Klovharun in a tent. It is a stormy night with crashing waves like cannon blasts. The outer rocks are hit by ominous flashes reminiscent of Bengal lights, far worse than inland, and strong gusts almost destroy their tent. Storms can be a positive force, encouraging people to stretch further and reach beyond their limits. It seems unfeasible to construct a cabin in such an exposed location, but their dream of building a house out here is only growing stronger.

Inland, where they have holidayed the last few summers, Tove Jansson’s mother Signe Hammarsten Jansson, Ham, mourns that things are changing. Tove Jansson is driven to great guilt, which threatens to destroy her and Tooti’s serene solitude on the island. Tove Jansson wants to make sure that everyone is happy, including Ham.

The first island Tove Jansson planned to inhabit was Kummelskär, where she wanted to become a lighthouse keeper, but that dream was dashed. She cannot define why islands have taken on such significance, but she has heard somewhere that ‘ghosts’ (as she calls lesbians) tend to have island mentalities because of an entrenched sense of isolation. The island is remote and bounded, completely private, surrounded by nothing but sea. It is satisfying to limit their environment by walking a complete lap around the island to form a perfect circle.

Love for an island

Construction on the island is carried out with the help of local residents Brunström and Sjöblom in 1964-1965, but when the cabin is ready, Tove Jansson and Tuulikki Pietilä still continue to sleep in their tent. Indoors, the single room becomes a combined study, living room and guest room. The tent in the yard is yellow and blue and requires regular patching and mending. They go fishing in their strong, beautiful boat Victoria, and catch plenty of cod, which is awkward and gets tangled in the net. When it is too foggy to fish, they set up cat nets close to land.

Seagulls and terns squawk. Harun has always belonged to them really. The smooth underwater stone slabs on the coast are reminiscent of happy childhood summers, and Tove Jansson overturns rocks to uncover the most beautiful stones, careful to return them to their rightful place after winter. Sometimes her relationship with the island is like unrequited love: the island doesn’t necessarily like its inhabitants, or perhaps it pities them. Jansson and Pietilä tidy the islands’ weeds to let stifled flowers bloom. The flowers fill the meadow in a beautiful abundance quite different from the land’s original untouched nature.

The significance of freedom

Why such an intense need for freedom? In 1972, Tove Jansson writes about the importance of freedom for the magazine PHP, and muses on the childlike, irresponsible freedom of Snufkin, which everybody has the capacity for deep down. Over the course of the Moomin stories, Snufkin’s conscience grows, and his state of solitude wanes in appeal. Nothing is immutable – one also needs the freedom to make mistakes, start again and try something new.

The idea of freedom also relates to creative work and the people one shares one’s life with. The greatest challenge is to maintain solitude and integrity when surrounded by other people. The Moomin family represents a sort of utopia in which everyone allows each other total freedom – freedom to be alone, to form their own opinions, and to keep secrets until those secrets are ready to be revealed. The Moomins don’t make each other feel bad.

Everyday life on the island continues gently and with enough quiet to occasionally verge on being boring. Then nieces come to visit, running around blowing soap bubbles and livening things up. All sorts of guests come to stay, both expected and unexpected: Moomin fans, researchers, interviewers, friends and family. A moonshadow can change everything in a heartbeat, and one memorable night a powerful tornado passes through, powerful enough to sweep the island’s buildings away entirely.

Everyday security

“When you’ve been alone for a very long time, you begin to listen differently, to feel the organic and the unexpected in your surroundings, and to see the incomprehensible beauty of the material world in everything.  

Old entrenched thoughts leap out in new directions, or they shrink and die. Dreams grow simpler, and you wake up smiling.

It is a fragile structure. You pay for it with fear of the dark and sudden panic—a rustling in the darkness, a boat on the horizon.

But at the same time, your calmly repeated, purposeful, everyday acts build a protective wall that grows higher and more stable. Pulling up your boat before a storm, lighting your lamp for the night, collecting and chopping wood.” (From the essay “The Island”)

The scurvy grass first blooms in spring and often causes problems when the wind blows from the south-west. The island has its own routines and cycles. Even the regular rise and fall of the water is significant and satisfying. Tove Jansson’s island poetry speaks of life and creation.

The city that made her 

In Paris, church bells toll and pigeons populate the parks. When Tove Jansson and Tuulikki Pietilä, Tooti, are in Paris, they start with a visit to one of the city’s oldest religious buildings, the church of Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre. The church is particularly significant because it was where Jansson’s parents got engaged and this is the city where she herself was conceived.

They have both had long-term relationships with Paris – Jansson first lived there in 1938 and Pietilä in 1949. They hung out with their friends at the brasserie La Coupole in Montparnasse, and the city was a wonder, full of arty streets that zigzagged down to the river. They would watch a French film and emerge to find they were still surrounded by the Parisian dream.

To be changed and understand

The many European trips that Pietilä documents with her Konica film camera often begin with a visit to Paris. They experience the city differently now that they are together and after all these years. They reminisce and share anecdotes of old haunts. Pietilä helps Jansson understand and love the French, and develop a harmonious co-existence. It is probably not the French who have changed but Jansson herself.

The days are filled to the brim with exploring exhibitions, digging through bookcases, finding scintillating Picasso reproductions, going to the circus and visiting markets. Occasionally they take on a workspace in Paris for a few months, and everyday life transforms the city from a mere concept into a real home.

The final journey

In 1993, Tove Jansson and Tuulikki Pietilä are out on their very last trip. They potter around the aisles of Père-Lachaise – their favourite cemetery in the world. Pietilä films the graves, sculptures, flowers and trees. She films Tove. It is clear that this will be their last trip. She can’t walk like she used to and needs to sit down to rest. Cemeteries have so many stories to tell about a place.

Tove Jansson sits on a bench in a small park behind the medieval church of Saint-Sulpice where organ music plays in the distance. A few years later, she writes her last short story En gång i en park (Once, at a Park), about an older writer who sits on that particular bench.

In the short story, a French tramp, un clochard, goes around disturbing the tourists and seeking attention. The writer wants to write but doesn’t know what. She has already drawn upon love, middle age and the sea, and she doesn’t know how to write about young people. She doesn’t want to write about her current greatest fear: being second best and a bad loser. She is tired. The clochard intrudes and begins talking to himself…

“Eventually he started to talk, almost to himself, about those hopeless types with their hopeless languages, you don’t know anything, he said, you know shit about what happened to me and what I made happen … I could bring you back to life, I could shake you awake but you won’t listen … You’re boring!

He ran out on the grass and the flock of pigeons took off with fluttering wings and he screamed at them: Stupid creatures, damned cretins, I am terribly sorry but I can’t help you, you poor devils who have lost everything …

Shortly thereafter he left the park.” (Once, at a Park, translated by Hernan Diaz)

Maintained integrity and compassion

When Tove Jansson re-reads an interview conducted by writer Bo Carpelan in the sixties, she feels the urge to revise everything. She has changed, is practically a different person. She is more direct now, avoids sweet digressions. Previously she said that her writing is addressed to a Miffle, but that feels over-simplified, true though it may be. In a new interview with Bo Carpelan a couple of decades later, she says that accuracy and openness are key.

“It is a matter of continuous tidying. Take Hemingway for example – his ostensible nonchalance, his repetitions. Everything is meticulous.

And then it is important to be open. Someone I really relate to is Chekhov. To preserve one’s integrity, one’s compassion: I admire that honesty. Isn’t that commitment enough?” (Tove Jansson in an interview with Bo Carpelan)

Photographing Tove Jansson

When Per Olov Jansson photographs his sister Tove, he senses her inner turmoil. There is no picture where her face is completely relaxed and vulnerable, nor would such a picture be consistent with her as a person. The photographs are sharp and detailed, yet incomplete and enigmatic.

One might think that time passes more slowly with age. On the contrary, it goes faster than ever. Every little task takes a long time and as such there is never enough time for rest, for contemplation, socialising and relaxation. At the end of her life, Tove Jansson lives in Tuulikki Pietilä’s studio, which is more comfortable. It is in the same building as hers, but has a separate entrance from the Kaserngatan side. Tove Jansson dies at the age of eighty-six.

“I’m wandering through the forest in very early spring
The spring that I have missed and that I’ve longed for
The ground and skies are filled with the fluttering of wings
and tiny feet of creatures just awoken

I wander as I please in my worn-out greenish hat
I play my tunes all day – each and every night, at that
I wish for no possessions, for one must be wholly free

When seeking out new tunes and one’s own sweet melody

I want to sing a song to the brook that’s springing bright
A quiet tune for crescent moons of nighttime
My harmonica is playing for every bird in flight
An ode to wondrous solitude in springtime
But hours are passing faster, and twilight’s lasting long
I can’t seem to discover one single little song
of springtime melancholy in one’s own best company
of wandering alone and being truly free”

Snufkin’s Spring Song” translated by Sandra Forsell.