Fair Play

TOVE JANSSON
(1914–2001) was born in Helsinki into Finland's Swedish-speaking minority. Her father was a sculptor and her mother a graphic designer and illustrator. Winters were spent in the family's art-filled studio and summers in a fisherman's cottage on the shore of the Gulf of Finland, a setting that would later figure in Jansson's writing for adults and children. Jansson loved books as a child and set out from an early age to be an artist. Her first illustration was published when she was fifteen years old; four years later a picture book appeared under a pseudonym. After attending art schools in both Stockholm and Paris, she returned to Helsinki, where in the 1940s and '50s she won acclaim for her paintings and murals. From 1929 until 1953 Jansson drew humorous illustrations and political cartoons for the left-leaning anti-Fascist Finnish- Swedish magazine
Garm
, and it was there that what was to become Jansson's most famous creation, Moomintroll, a hippopotamus-like character with a dreamy disposition, made his first appearance. Jansson went on to write about the adventures of Moomintroll, the Moomin family, and their curious friends in a long-running comic strip and in a series of books for children that have been translated throughout the world, inspiring films, several television series, an opera, and theme parks in Finland and Japan. Jansson also wrote eleven novels and short story collections for adults, including
The Summer Book
and
The True Deceiver
(both available as NYRB Classics). In 1994 she was awarded the Prize of the Swedish Academy. Jansson and her companion, the artist Tuulikki Pietilä, continued to live part-time in a cottage on the remote outer edge of the Finnish archipelago until 1991.

THOMAS TEAL
has translated Tove Jansson's
The Summer Book
,
Sun City
, and
Fair Play
, for which he was awarded the Bernard Shaw Prize for translation from the Swedish for the years 2007–2009.

ALI SMITH
is the author of seven works of fiction, including the novel
Hotel World
, which was short-listed for the Booker Prize in 2001, and
The Accidental
, which won the Whitbread Award in 2005 and was short-listed for the 2005 Man Booker Prize.

FAIR PLAY

TOVE JANSSON

Translated from the Swedish by

THOMAS TEAL

Introduction by

ALI SMITH

NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS

New York

THIS IS A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOK

PUBLISHED BY THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS

435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

www.nyrb.com

Copyright © 1982 by Tove Jansson

English translation © 2007 by Thomas Teal and Sort Of Books

Introduction © Ali Smith 2007

All rights reserved.

First published as
Rent spel
by Schildts Förlags Ab, Finland

This English translation first published by Sort Of Books, London, 2007

Cover image: Tove Jansson,
Portrait of Tuulikki Pietilä, Paris
, c. 1975

Cover design: Katy Homans

The Library of Congress has cataloged the earlier printing as follows:

Jansson, Tove.

[Rent spel. English]

Fair play / by Tove Jansson ; introduction by Ali Smith ; translation [from the Swedish] by Thomas Teal.

    p. cm. —(New York Review Books classics)

ISBN 978-1-59017-378-7 (alk. paper)

1. Female friendship—Fiction. 2. Women artists—Finland—Helsinki—Fiction. I. Teal, Thomas. II . Title.

PT9875.J37R4613 2011

839.7'374—dc22

2010044724

ebook ISBN: 978-1-59017-685-6
v1.0

For a complete list of books in the NYRB Classics series, visit
www.nyrb.com
or write to:
Catalog Requests, NYRB, 435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

Biographical Notes

Title Page

Introduction

Fair Play

Changing Pictures

Videomania

The Hunter

Catfishing

One Time in June

Fog

Killing George

Travels with a Konica

B-Western

In the Great City of Phoenix

Wladyslaw

Fireworks

Cemeteries

Jonna's Pupil

Viktoria

Stars

The Letter

L
ABORA
et amare
. Work and love: the motto Tove Jansson worked into her own personal bookplate design in the 1940s when she was starting out, a young artist. Fifty years later, internationally famous as one of the world's most enduringly imaginative and inspiring writers and illustrators, she still felt much the same. As she told an interviewer in 1994, “the most important thing for me has been work. And then love.”

The publication of
Fair Play
in its first ever English translation is a notable event and really cause for a celebration. Jansson published
Rent Spel
(its original Swedish title) in 1989, when she was herself in her mid-seventies (she died in 2001, aged eighty-six). It was the ninth of her eleven books written specifically for adults, of which, until now, only four have reached full English publication, most celebratedly her rich minimalist masterpiece
The Summer Book
(1972) —a story, in typical Jansson mold, about nothing much and yet about everything—about a child and an old woman who spend a long, light summer together on a tiny island off the coast of Finland.

Jansson has always been rightly feted for being the brilliant children's author she is. Her tales of the Finn Family Moomintroll and their extended alternative family, which cared for everyone and everything from a tiny anarchist to a hulking great Scandinavian melancholic monster, and survived by inventiveness all sorts of catastrophes and existentialities, made her justly internationally famous. But it is only now that we're getting the chance to see how very fine her fiction for adults is, too. It shares the clarity, the beneficence, the imagination, and the survivalist calm that made her writing for children unique. It also displays her particular versatility, which means a text by Jansson, whether meant for children or adults, can be read with great pleasure and satisfaction by pretty much anybody of any age.

But in her writing for adults Jansson was also, in her own quiet way, quite radical both with form and subject matter. Her preferred shape is an open form, in a language so tightly edited that its clarity makes for mysterious transparency. Her epics are almost transgressively, certainly anarchically, small and unexpected, and her books deal on the whole with people not usually included or given that much space in what we might call the extended family of literature.

On the backs of the Penguin Puffin copies of the Moomin tales, Jansson's biography used to say she lived and worked alone on an island; actually she lived, both on her island and in Helsinki, alongside her lifelong partner and traveling companion, the graphic artist Tuulikki Pietilä. The women spent over forty years together, working and traveling. “We always took our sketch books with us wherever we went,” Pietilä wrote later, in a beautiful piece called “Travels with Tove,” where she remembers, among other things, how on one trip Jansson jumped, full of typical enthusiasm, into the Atlantic in January for a bathe (and contracted her usual bronchitis afterwards), how they liked to avoid stuffy first class and would always sneak off to second class, where things were much more fun, how they shared a lot of unlikely adventures, once ending up bunking in a kind of youth hostel in Edinburgh even though they were quite old ladies by then—“but we looked young,” as she says—and how they always made sure, wherever they were in the world, that they had enough money for cigarettes, and film for Pietilä's Konica camera. “Tove was always my best subject.”

So what can happen when Tove Jansson turns her attention to her own favorite subjects, love and work, in the form of this novel about two women, lifelong partners and friends? Expect something philosophically calm—and something discreetly radical. At first sight it looks autobiographical. Like everything Jansson wrote, it's much more than it seems.

Is it a novel? Is it stories? It's both; it breaks the boundaries of both forms, in a series of linked vignettes about two women who live and work side by side in an equilibrium that's at once slight and revolutionary. “They lived at opposite ends of a large apartment building.” Mari is a writer and illustrator. Jonna is a filmmaker and artist. Once again, not that much seems to happen. Mari and Jonna work a lot, watch films together, make films together, spend time on an island, travel the world, relive their youth, argue about their parents, go sailing, get caught in fog. Their stories dovetail and intertwine. They know each other's sleeping habits. They know each other's living and working habits. They honor these habits. They know that things are often uncontrollable, out of their hands, even on the tiniest island. They fight. They get a bit jealous. Things and people come between them. When this happens, they sort it out. The aesthetic and creative urge compels them, always. They put off work. They get irascible. They refuse each other and irritate each other, and are kind and tough with each other, so that both love and work are revealed as made of the little refusals and agreements that happen mundanely in the course of a shared life.

A lot isn't said. “Don't tell me things I already know,” one says to the other, amiably. There's a lot that doesn't need to be said out loud. It's a novel with a profound sense of discretion at its core. But the flip side of silence is voice, and the flip side of nothing much happening, as always with Jansson, is that absolutely everything is happening. Take the first page of the first, typically unassuming story, “Changing Pictures,” where Jonna rearranges the art on one of the walls of Mari's apartment. This novel is about creativity from the very start—about how you take a day, the same as all the other old one-after-the-other days, and make it really new and fresh, no matter what age you are, what life you're in. It features an immediate challenge to vision—it is very much about how to shake off old ways of seeing, how to see things differently, get rid of what's “hopelessly conventional,” and replace it with something more hopeful. It is also a story full of the unselfish admiration of another, from the word go. Jonna is blithely uncompromising (as Mari will be, in other chapters), and in her art, or in her editing of Mari's living space, she makes something come alive with “a completely new significance ... almost provocative.”

The book opens, then, on a simple little story about letting someone change things, which becomes a story about the editing process, or about how to make art—and is for the length of the book a parable about how to renew mundane life. Its inference is also emotional. “Look, here's a thing of mine and here's your drawing, and they clash. We need distance; it's essential.”
Fair Play
is often an excellent handbook of advice and rules for the workings of art—but it's never just about aesthetic wisdom. It's also very much about emotional wisdom.

So many of its vignettes are about how to bring art and life together into a working relationship. And so much of it is about these concepts held in its new title, fairness and playfulness. The “blend of perfectionism and nonchalance” that Mari sees in Jonna is apparent all through Jansson's own writing style—perfectly caught itself by Thomas Teal, a luminous translator of Jansson's twin talent for surface and depth, simplicity and reverberation in language, and someone who knows exactly how to convey her gift for sensing the meaning embedded in the most mundane act or turn of phrase.

“Fog,” for instance, is literally a chapter about being lost in fog, and lost, too, to the fog of an old, old argument. It becomes a story about what's not sayable, a story that admits some things are veiled, fogged, not resolvable.
Fair Play
allows for life's unresolvables at the same time as being very much about aesthetic resolution and composition. The chapters are thoughtfully, deceptively casually, arranged to arise as if by accident out of each other. They seem like throwaway pieces of time. Of course, this is one of
Fair Play
's themes—the recording of haphazard life and what it means, at all, to record anything. The cumulative effect is to suggest that there's always more life, more possibility, another story, and that nothing is fixed or ended. There's always something new to know or see, even when you think you've seen it all. The openness of this book's structure, when you reach its end, is both liberating and moving.