The complicated artist behind the Moomins

NEW YORK: Tove Jansson longed to be alone. As a child, she slept on a high shelf in her family's home in Helsinki. Her mother, a successful illustrator, piled books from floor to ceiling and her father, a sculptor, kept a studio that dominated the majority of the space.

The Janssons were part of the relatively affluent Swedish-speaking minority in Finland, a group stereotypically regarded as artistic. Magazine and newspaper articles were written about the Janssons bohemian home.

I want to be a wild thing, not an artist, the young Tove wrote in her diary. But she was an artist, ineluctably, just as her father had hoped she would be. She didn't create out of a desire for notoriety when fame hit in her late 30s, it only made her shyer, as Boel Westin, an emeritus professor of literature at Stockholm University, points out in her biography, Tove Jansson: Life, Art, Words.

Over the course of her life, Jansson would create political cartoons, still lifes, opera librettos, portraits, murals for public buildings, children's books, short stories, novels, syndicated comic strips, poetry, abstract paintings, essays, scripts for film and television, plays and, of course, the Moomins.

Oh, we are all Moomins, a Finnish person once said to me, by way of explanation for her offbeat personality. Today, Moomin Characters is one of Finland's most profitable businesses.

The Moomins are a nature-loving, philosophical family of long-snouted, rotund white troll-creatures, born during World War II in a period when Jansson was a leading political cartoonist. Jansson found herself at odds politically with her father during the war, but never wavered in her hatred of Hitler. It was the utterly hellish war years that made me, an artist, write fairy tales, she later wrote. The word Moomin was never given a clear etymology, though Jansson traced their lineage to the ghost stories of her childhood. Published and received as children's books, the Moomin series appealed equally to adults. Jansson never censored her stories out of a false sense of childhood's innocence. Most children, she believed, live in a world in which the fantastic and the matter-of-fact have equal value, and death visited the Moomins lives like any other.

The first several Moomin books received little fanfare in Finland and Sweden, where they were eclipsed by the contemporaneous appearance of Pippi Longstocking, yet Jansson was, characteristically, completely undeterred. She wrote the second book before the first was printed, and the third before the second was published. After the war, color rushed back into her work.

Despite their particular Finnishness, the appeal was international. The Moomins landed in America, were syndicated in newspapers throughout England, took Japan by storm. Academics debated Moomin philosophy. The Moomins grew larger and fatter as they grew more famous, and Jansson's anxieties about her celebrity became a subject in their stories.

It's going so well I can't help getting rich, even if they keep cheating me, she wrote to a friend. The Moomins, in their strange specificity, spoke to a near-universal audience, and Jansson's readers felt they knew her. She received approximately 2,000 letters a year, and sent a handwritten response to every letter she received.

Meanwhile, she dreamed of the tiny islands off the coast of Finland toward Estonia. She avoided the academies and turned down honors in favor of her solitude. She built homes on the remote islands, but friends and fans washed up unannounced. People come there to stare at me, she complained. I'll have to move back to town so I can work in peace. Jansson often found herself sleeping in a tent by the sea to accommodate visitors in her home. In her diary, she marked off the blessed days when she got to be alone.

The grueling business of creating ever more stories about the Moomins, especially as a syndicated comic strip, came to haunt her. She took to dating her letters to loved ones with the number of drawings she had reached (10,242). Her inspiration had run dry: I used to show the beautiful, abundant, profusion of the world. But how do you set about showing an empty room?

After seven years of newspaper strips, she celebrated her divorce from the Moomins with two bottles of Alsatian wine. I shall never again be able to write about those happy idiots who forgive each other and never realize they're being fooled, she wrote. But she was not through with them. She would continue writing about the Moomins until near the end of her life.

For decades, the back of the Moomin books stated that Tove Jansson lived alone on an island off the coast of Finland. The truth was more complicated. As a younger woman, Jansson referred jokingly to her suitors as male collars. She was more suited to what she described, in the coded language of the time, as the spook side or the Rive Gauche. She spent the second half of her life 46 years with a woman, the graphic artist Tuulikki Pietil, whom she called Tooti.

Soon after they began seeing each other, in the winter of 1955, a new character appeared in the Moomin universe: Too-Ticky, a sage and practical solver of problems, in a tam and striped shirt. Jansson and Pietil owned studios in the same apartment complex, connected through an attic hallway through which they visited each other. I love you, enchanted and at the same time at great peace, Jansson wrote to Pietil. She never mistook the serenity of their partnership for boredom.

In the later part of her life, Jansson took to writing literature for adults including several masterpieces, though one contemporary reviewer dismissed her as a great violinist who has grown tired of the violin and is now trying out her talent on the piano.

One of those books is Fair Play (1989), a frank and autobiographical portrait of her relationship. Within it Tove is Mari and Tooti is Jonna. In the final story, Jonna receives an offer to spend a full year in a residency in Paris. She suggests she ought to turn it down, though it is clear that Jonna secretly longs for the space and time apart to work, and so Mari tells her to take it.

The final lines of the book read: A daring thought was taking shape in her mind. She began to anticipate a solitude of her own, peaceful and full of possibility. She felt something close to exhilaration, of a kind that people can permit themselves when they are blessed with love. In the end, Jansson found what she had longed for, what every artist dreams of: a love so great that it permitted her to be alone.