Living life to the full

In 1971, Tove Jansson paid one of her many visits to London, where 1960s fashion hangovers made the whole city look like ‘one big fancy-dress ball’. When not partying to celebrate 20 years of British editions for her Moomin books, she and her life-partner ‘Tooti’ — the artist Tuulikki Pietilä — caught performances of Hair (‘a grand glorification of psychedelic hippiedom’) and the ‘racy’ Canterbury Tales musical. They also saw that ‘incredibly powerful’ film, The Trials of Oscar Wilde — ‘very unlikely to come to Finland, unfortunately’.

Foreign admirers sometimes presume that, in postwar Finland, Jansson found it easy to be both a saintly godmother of children’s literature and a (fairly) openly gay writer-artist. In fact, Lutheran conservatism meant that homosexuality remained illegal until that year: 1971. Cheerful, plucky, and free-spirited — the irrepressible Nordic mid-point between Joyce Grenfell and Frida Kahlo — Tove seldom dwells on the social risks she runs in these witty, shrewd and hugely entertaining letters. Yet she refers to same-sex love as ‘the ghost side’, to ‘ghost bars’ in Paris, even to ‘ghosts’ like her having ‘pronounced island complexes’. (She adored the two rocky outcrops in the Helsinki archipelago where she spent scores of summers.)

The mature Tove often comes across as an absolute brick — grounded, jolly, practical and level-headed, racing around ‘like a sheepdog’ to calm distraught relations and ex-lovers (‘Ye gods, what havoc!’). Her private ‘ghost’ code yields a rare glimpse of a more elusive, estranged, otherworldly self. Like the solitary island-dweller, ‘living alone with the sea’, Tove the lesbian ‘ghost’ could float away from the social scene and its insistence that she ‘maintain my image: gentle, cultivated, enraptured child of nature’. The kindly auntie who drew the Moomins might also sometimes need to be, as a friend once put it, ‘an asocial aesthetic snob’.