Looking for Moominvalley
“Tales from Moominvalley” is dedicated — with a line drawing of a little girl crouched by a small animal — “To Sophia.” I like to imagine it was written for me.
But it wasn’t. Sophia Jansson is niece of Tove Jansson, who wrote the Moomin series of books, perhaps the most famous books most Americans have never heard of
Tove Jansson (TOO-vay YANson), who died in 2001 at 87, is arguably Finland’s most famous author. Her books have been translated into 34 languages and sold in the millions of copies worldwide. Not so much in America, though.
In the 1960s, my parents bought my first Moomin book in London, where they were all the rage. I read them as a child, reread them as an adolescent, reread them still as an adult. My copies are tattered and falling apart.
Because Jansson’s books never gained traction in America, the Moomin world was my secret world, safe from the Disneyfication that, to my mind, tainted the Enchanted Forest. Jansson was an illustrator first and her delicate, slightly nervous, drawings are inextricably linked with the stories for me
The books’ hero, Moomintroll, resembles a small, blue hippo with a tufted tale. He’s a happy naïf, living in the bosom of his family — Moominmamma, a loving, bustling, ubermother never seen without her large black pocketbook, and Moominpappa, an affable, egotistical, charming windbag. Moomintroll’s love interest is the Snork Maiden, who resembles him but changes colors with her mood and has a carefully groomed fringe. His friends include her brother Snork; overexcitable Sniff; and Little My, who is tiny enough to sleep in a sewing basket but bold and mouthy. And then there’s Snufkin, an antiauthority nomad. He is a songwriter and philosopher who appears in Moominvalley at the beginning of every summer but hits the road with the first breeze of autumn.
As a girl, I had a crush on Snufkin. Actually, I still do.
Perhaps Americans are too optimistic for Moominvalley, where terrible things happen. The Ant-lion pulls Moomimamma into its pit. Moominpappa leaves home for a lonely journey with the ghostly, silent, electrically charged Hattifatteners, which look like fence pickets with fingers. A Hobgoblin’s hat makes all of Sniff’s big parts little and his little parts big, to terrifying effect. The Groke slides in and out of the Valley — a big, sad, slow-moving, living blancmange that freezes the ground on which she sits, like the long dreary Scandinavian winter. The series was also a comic strip for many years; one six-month-long storyline was titled “Moominvalley and the End of the World.”
The books are journeys into the psyche — the rosy and fraught memories of childhood, the fears and disappointments of adulthood. They capture the joy and angst that, even as a child, I recognized as reality.
I went to Finland in 2005 to find Moominvalley.
“Moominvalley in November,” the last of the Moomin books, is the only one devoid of any Moomins. In it, a small group, including gloomy Fillyjonk and sad little motherless Toft, makes its way to to Moominvalley, each traveler harboring private needs and hopes, only to find Moominhouse empty. This is a sore disappointment, a pilgrimage to a sacred place devoid of its heart.
I know how they feel.
The Finns are…complicated. Before my trip, I spent hours researching Jansson. Much of what I found was in Finnish, a language even Finns acknowledge is among the most difficult in the world. (Was English difficult to learn? I asked one multilingual Finn I met. She laughed. “Not like Finnish,” she said.)
I contacted Finland’s tourist board and got little useful information from them. I contacted the Tampere museum, which owns the Jansson collection, and pried a little from them, and I arranged a museum tour. Islands are a recurring theme in the Moomin books and Tove spent her most of her summers on islands in the Gulf of Finland, so I planned a few days in Porvoo, from where I would visit the islands. I contacted Porvoo’s visitor’s bureau, explained my interest in Jansson, outlined my itinerary, requested information. A day before I left home, they sent an e-mail informing me that it is impossible to visit the islands in autumn because the sea is too rough.
I found photographs of Jansson, usually in her later years. She had an interesting, soft, feral face with high cheekbones and round cheeks. When she smiled, her whole face — forehead to narrow chin — participated. She wore her hair at chin length with a deep side part. In several photos, she wore a Snork Maidenish crown of flowers
Jansson published an autobiography in 1969, “Sculptor’s Daughter,” which has been reprinted but at the time of my trip, was long out of print in English. Used copies were selling for hundreds of dollars but I found a copy online for $10 and snapped it up, considering it a good omen for the trip. The cover is a moody black-and-white photograph of Tove as a small girl in her father’s studio. She wears a dress with a white collar, her blonde hair is in a blunt cut with bangs, and she gazes away from the viewer, at one of the many ghostly sculptures of slender young nudes that surround her. The book is an impressionistic sketch of Jansson’s childhood among her bohemian family, and it wafts between plausible and fantastic.
Tove’s father was Viktor Jansson, whose sculptures and monuments may be found all over Finland, and her mother was graphic artist Signe Hammarsten-Jansson. The family belonged to Finland’s Swedish minority.
Jansson moved to Stockholm at age 15, where she studied art. There the name Moomintroll was first uttered, by an uncle who told Tove about a “moomintroll that lived behind the stove, in order to discourage her from midnight raids of the pantry,” wrote Soile Räihä in a 2005 research paper I found online. Räihä went on to explain that the figure of Moomintroll came a few years later, when Tove and her brother Lars (Sophia’s father) were arguing about Immanuel Kant. “Tove lost the argument, and in her frustration she drew the ugliest creature she could think of on the wall of their summer cottage’s privy,” Räihä wrote. That was Moomintroll.
The first book (a pamphlet, really) “The Little Trolls and the Great Flood” was released in Finnish in 1945 (it has yet to be released in English). “Comet in Moominland” was published in 1946 and 11 books followed. In 1952, the Associated Press approached Jansson about a comic strip, which started in 1954 and ran in newspapers worldwide — except America. Jansson lost interest in the grind of putting it out and Lars took over from 1959 until the strip’s demise in 1975. (Lars died in 2000.)
In the 1960s, the Moomins went anime and remain among the most popular cartoon characters ever in Japan. The cartoon also ran in many other countries, except America. An opera based on “Moominsummer Madness” opened in Helsinki in 1974; a Moomin puppet TV series debuted in the ’80s; Moomin World, a low-tech theme park in Naantali, Finland, opened in 1993. (I arrived in Finland a couple of days after it had closed for the season. Par for the course.)
Jansson lived most of her life with a woman, Tuulikki Pietilä, a graphic artist. Before leaving home, I e-mailed Sophia Jansson to ask if she could help me arrange an interview with Pietilä. She said many had tried, she explained, but none succeeded. (Tuulikki died in February 2009, a few months after my trip.) But Sophia agreed to meet with me herself.
Sophia is not so much magical as busy as the managing director of Moomin Characters, Ltd.. We met in the lobby of my hotel; she rushed up to me with a slightly flustered air. “Sophia?” she said, and we smiled with pleasure at our shared name. She is pretty, long-haired, blonde and wore a soft ivory-colored turtleneck sweater and pearl earrings.
The sidewalks of Helsinki were busy with Finns hurrying home from work as chill night fell. Sophia checked in by cell phone with her teenaged son as we walked. Then we settled into a booth at a large and nearly empty restaurant on Mannerheimintie. I told her how I’d pretended the dedication in “Tales from Moominvalley,” was for me. Did the drawing look like you? I asked. A little, she said, though she was not even born when the dedication was made.
Over dinner, Sophia put a light wash of color on my biographical sketch.
Moominmamma and Moominpappa were modeled on Tove’s parents: her efficient and homey mother, her grandiose and temperamental father. “He was an artist, with a capital letters,” Sophia said. “He was definitely the big artist and everyone else was lesser. He was the authority in the family, he had a touchy temper and I’m sure they had to deal with that.”
Tove’s mother worked steadily. (I thought of Moominmamma, when the family moves to a lonely island lighthouse, channeling her homesickness into elaborate murals.) She was a skilled networker and consistent earner who also took the time to make birch-bark boats for her children (Moominmamma again). Tove followed her mother into commercial art, selling her first illustrations as a teenager.
Tove wrote “The Small Trolls and the Great Flood,” during World War II, when she was about 30. “She wrote it because she didn’t feel like drawing pictures and partying,” Sophia said, a little impatiently. “This has been analyzed ad nauseam. She wrote it to distract herself, with no real aim in mind.” A friend suggested she publish it, and it was an immediate hit. Although Tove to her death considered herself a visual artist first and a writer second, the Moomin books made her famous.
Tove wrote every morning, longhand. She never used a typewriter and although her fantastic stories seem to have fallen to Earth like autumn leaves, they were the result of meticulous care and lots of rewriting.
Tove was in her 40s when she met graphic artist Tuulikki Pietilä and her life — real and fantasy — changed.
In “Moominland Midwinter,” published in 1957, we see Moominvalley in the snow, when Moomins traditionally hibernate. (An understandable inclination in Finland.) But Moomintroll awakens and can’t get back to sleep, so he wanders outside. It is a strange, bittersweet, and lonely book. In the transformed landscape, Moomintroll meets Too-ticky — wise, independent, creative, reassuring, a little round, a little squat, wearing a striped jersey and a hat with a pom-pom. Moomintroll finds Too-ticky compelling and irresistible, but he is depressed by winter and its strange denizens, which Too-ticky tries to explain.
“Well it’s like this,” she said. “There are such a lot of things that have no place in summer and autumn and spring. Everything that’s a little shy and a little rum. Some kinds of night animals and people that don’t fit in with others and that nobody really believes in. They keep out of the way all the year. And then when everything’s quiet and white and the nights are long and most people are asleep — then they appear.”
“Do you know them?” asked Moomintroll
“Some of them,” replied Too-ticky, “The Dweller Under the Sink, for instance, quite well. But I believe that he wants to lead a secret life, so I can’t introduce you to each other.”
Moomintroll kicked at the table leg and sighed. “I see, I see,” he replied. “But I don’t want to lead a secret life….”
“‘Moominland Midwinter’ was a turning point for Tove,” Sophia said. “She had just met the partner she was going to spend the rest of her life with and she was breaking away from her dependence on her family. In the book, Moomintroll goes through this thing — it’s never stated but he sort of becomes an adult and takes his own life in his hands.”
Sophia doesn’t make much of Tove’s coming out though. “Her work was her main love affair in her life,” she said, impatience slipping back into her voice. “She wasn’t too worried about gender. I don’t think she chose to be with a woman. I think she just happened to fall in love with a woman.”
At that, I admitted to Sophia my feelings for Snufkin and she smiled indulgently. He is very popular, she said, particularly in Japan. Perhaps Snufkin’s obstinate independence taps into something deep in Japan’s communal soul.
“I would like to be Moomintroll,” Sophia said wistfully. “He’s always positive and adventurous. Naïve is thought of as bad, now, but…”
Even as a child in the late 1960s, Sophia could tell that Tove felt oppressed by her fame, by the sackloads of fan mail she received. “People wanted things from her morning noon and night.”
Was she wealthy? I asked.
“On an American scale? No,” Sophia answered quickly. “But she reached a point quite early on when she didn’t have to worry about how to pay her bills.”
Tove hated the business of her art and created Moomin Characters, Ltd. so others could handle the boring parts of success for her. She also hated the first animated Moomins and forbade further attempts, but eventually let go and let the Moomins take on their inevitable life. After Tove’s death, Disney approached the company for rights to the character, but in deference to Tove, they were refused. Sophia sighed and her face took on the congested expression of second-guessing herself. “For better or worse,” she added.
Better, I assured her. Much better.
I asked about her personal memories of Tove.
“The nicest thing I remember about Tove is that she didn’t treat me like a child,” Sophia said. “There was no sense of authority. She worked constantly but in the summers, we did things that they do in the Moomin books: sailing and swimming and picnics, picking up stones and shells. She greatly enjoyed making theater plays, dancing — activities that weren’t traditional or” (here Sophia’s expression went sour) “educational. She did that until she was too old to move.” A wisp of melancholy entered her voice. “I miss having them around.”
A few days later I was ensconced in small hotel in Old Porvoo, a sweet and lovingly maintained 14th-century town, an artists’ community and popular shore excursion for cruise ships docked in Helsinki. I’d hoped to visit the islands that figure so prominently in Moomin life and hadn’t had time to change my plans when I learned they were inaccessible so late in the year. I stopped into the Porvoo tourist office hoping I could at least see the seashore and the alluring and dangerous sea and that rolls in and out of Moomin adventures. The ladies in the tourist office sweetly told me it couldn’t be done and gave me some brochures with photographs of the seashore. And that was that.
A local tour guide directed me to a couple of nearby sculptures by Vicktor Jansson. They are massive granite sculptures of father and son, mother and daughter — blank-eyed, stoic, devoid of whimsy. In the 16th-century Town Hall that houses a museum, I found a framed yellowed newspaper clip about a comet hitting in the area in the 1899 and immediately thought about “Comet in Moominland.” Though the comet doesn’t strike Moominvalley, ominous images of a star with a tail start appearing and compel Moomintroll, Snufkin, Snork Maiden and Sniff on a quest to learn its meaning from the chain-smoking scientists of Lonely Mountain.
I spent three aimless days in Porvoo, then traveled north to visit the Tampere Art Museum, which has a Moomin collection donated by Tove and Tooti (as Tuulikki was known) in the 1980s.
A small bronze of Moomintroll stands outside the museum. The walls of the spacious galleries are lined with drawings and paintings from books and comic strips. In cases throughout the galleries are meticulously detailed tableaus that Tooti (mostly) built.
Museum educator Mirja Kivi — warm and motherly, in her 50s — walked me through the museums. I peered at the drawings and cartoon strips but was drawn again and again to the tableaus. Moominhouse was the first one built. A good five feet tall, properly painted the color of a summer sky, and crammed with activity, it took Tove, Tooti and Pentti Eistola three years to build. “There were no plans,” said Kivi. “They just built it, floor after floor, during summers on the island.” Everything in it is handmade; the kitchen contains real dried mushrooms, real black bread, and it’s peopled with Styrofoam Moomins.
A small girl stood mesmerized in front of a tableau of the Groke outside the Moominhouse. “Every child likes to look at the Groke,” Kivi whispered to me. “’The Groke, the Groke, show me the Groke,’ they say. They are scared, but they can be safe when it’s in this box. They can understand the loneliness. She is a symbol of loneliness. Everything is frozen away when she comes. Why she decided to make her female, I don’t know…”
I asked Kivi about her favorite character. “I like Snufkin because I can’t be like Snufkin,” she said, looking almost shy. “I admire him to be so independent and selfish. I have to think about other people and then myself. I’m more like Moominmama.”
The only other people in the museum were three young Japanese. “Every day we see Japanese people here,” Kivi said. “Really, every hour.”
After my tour, I wandered into the gift shop. On my desk at home, I have a small plastic Moomintroll that I was stunned and elated to find in a Dallas thrift store. And I have a refrigerator magnet of Moomintroll and Snufkin that a Finnish friend brought me after a trip home. These are treasured possessions. But surrounded by Moomin tsotske, I was overwhelmed. I fondled expensive stuffed Moomins, Little My keychains, Snufkin mugs — but in the end, it was all too much. I felt oddly sad and bought nothing until I stopped into an airport gift shop on my way home and succumbed to a cell phone charm with a picture of Little My on one side, Moomintroll waving the Finnish flag on the other. It was an anticlimactic souvenir. Instead of the enchantment of Moominvalley, I found a small, overpriced piece of crap.
Back home, I sorted through all the information I had gathered. All the education I had garnered. All the Moomintrivia I had gleaned.
So now I know all this. What does it do for me? Moomintroll is everywhere in Finland but I never did find Moominvalley. I ended up nearly exactly where I started. Moominvalley is still most vivid in my imagination. I suppose that’s where it belongs.
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