I Don't Need Anyone Now, I've Got Teeth

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Tove Jansson, MOOMINVALLEY IN NOVEMBER.

If Ingmar Bergman had written a story for children, it would feel very much like this.

In the last of the Moomin books, the Moomins never show up. Instead, six people burdened (yes, burdened) by happy memories of time spent with the Moomins arrive in Moominvalley to find the family absent without explanation, without any hint of where the family might have gone.

Each of the six people carries the weight of a psychological problem to work out in secret; a few of them come to terms with who they are, the rest might -- might -- be on the way to some sort of private redemption. They hate each other; they need each other; over time they begin to understand each other and (perhaps, maybe) to understand themselves.

Then they leave, one by one; the light fades, the valley sinks into the dusk of winter. For the smallest and strangest of the characters, the story ends with a glimpse of hope. Or does it...?

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I should write about Toft, the most disturbed and disturbing character I've encountered in fiction for some time, but to do so, I will need to describe the ending of this book. Before I reach that point, I will post a warning about spoilers. Please, if you have not read MOOMINVALLEY IN NOVEMBER, do not continue beyond that warning.

Toft seems to be (seems to be) a child, by implication orphaned, and also by implication, severely mentally ill.

He lives inside his own head:

In the evening, when everyone had gone home and the bay was silent, Toft would tell himself a story of his own. It was all about the Happy Family. He told it until he went to sleep, and the following evening he would go on from where he had left off, or start it all over again from the beginning.

Toft generally began by describing the happy Moominvalley....

By describing this (apparent?) memory in detail, Toft is able to re-experience a (genuine?) memory of happier days that he spent with the Moomin family. Soon the memory fades; the details become unclear.

When he woke up in the dark he knew what he would do. He would... make his way to Moominvalley and walk on to the veranda, open the door and tell them who he was.

When Toft had made up his mind, he went to sleep again and slept all night without dreaming.

Toft arrives in Moominvalley to find the family gone without a trace. When other lost people arrive, driven by similar memories of happy days in the Moomin house, Toft again retreats within himself. He stares into the ornamental glass ball in the garden, which, he believes, has the power to magically reveal the true location of the Moomins:

He looked right into it, it was as deep as the sea and was flooded with a tremendous swell. Toft looked deeper and deeper and waited patiently. At last, deep down inside the ball, he could see a faint point of light. It shone and then disappeared, shone and disappeared at regular intervals, like a lighthouse.

What a long way away they are, Toft thought. He felt the cold creeping up his legs but he stayed where he was staring at the light which came and went, so faint that one could only just see it. He felt as though they had deceived him somehow.

At night, he spends most of his time reading a biology textbook that he mistakes for a storybook. He feels pity for what he assumes is the protagonist:

Toft had never known before that deep down at the bottom of the sea lived Radiolaria and the very last Nummulites. One of the Nummulites wasn't like his relatives... and little by little he was like nothing except himself. He was evidently very tiny and became even tinier when he was frightened.

When he imagines himself as a defender of the last Nummulite, the creature begins to grow within his mind. In the story that he tells himself, the Nummulite develops teeth:

One evening in the yellow light of sunset the Creature leant over the water and saw its own white teeth for the first time. It opened its mouth and yawned, then snapped its mouth shut and gnashed its teeth a bit, and thought: I don't need anyone now, I've got teeth.

It also develops "aggressivity." One of the other characters explains to him what this means:

'It's what one shows when one is angry.'

Like his fictional creature, Toft also becomes angry:

Toft suddenly exclaimed: 'That's what you think! What do you know about what Moominpappa likes?'

They all stopped eating and stared at him....

'Well, what do you know!' said Mymble in astonishment. 'Toft's baring his teeth!'

Toft has no idea what this anger means:

He wanted to be alone to try and work out why he had been so terribly angry at that Sunday dinner. It frightened him to realize that there was a completely different Toft in him, a Toft he didn't know and who might come back and disgrace him in front of all the others.

People disturb him:

'I don't want friends who are kind without really liking me and I don't want anybody who is kind just so as not to be unpleasant. And I don't want anybody who is scared. I want somebody who is never scared and who really likes me. I want a mamma!'

Alienated from his own emotions, Toft projects all of his anger and frustration onto the Nummulite creature. In his mind, it grows:

While the guests were honouring the Moomin family in silence, a faint thumping sound could be heard outside somewhere near the kitchen steps. It sounded as though something was groping its way up the wall... Toft raised his head, the Creature was outside now, a great heavy body rubbing along the wall by the kitchen door.

It has become too big, Toft thought. It's so big that it can't move properly.

In the garden, he confronts the Nummulite (within his imagination?), and tries to reason with it:

'It's no good... We can't hit back. Neither of us will ever learn to hit back. You must believe me.... Make yourself tiny and hide yourself! You'll never get through this!'

For Toft, the only solution to his problems must come from the Moomins. Without them, he is helpless:

Suddenly the crystal ball became overshadowed. A dizzy vortex opened in the heavy blue swell and then closed itself again, the Creature of the Protozoa group had made itself tiny and returned to its proper element. Moominpappa's crystal ball, which gathered everything and took care of everything, had opened up for the bewildered Nummulite.

Snufkin, a songwriter, senses intuitively the story-telling forces at work within the boy's mind, and tries to offer advice:

'You want to be careful not to let things get too big.'

This advice is lost on Toft because, for him, the stories that he tells himself are not imaginary reflections of his own psychological despair, but actual events that take place in the outside world.

SPOILER WARNING

SPOILER WARNING

SPOILER WARNING

His failure to distinguish between events within his mind and events in the real world give the final pages of the book a troubling ambiguity, even, perhaps, a cruelty.

At the end of the book, Toft is (quite horribly) left on his own when the other characters, one by one, leave the Moomin house:

That night the sky was completely clear. The thin ice crunched beneath Toft's paws as he walked through the garden. The valley was full of the silence of the cold and the snow shone on the hill slopes. The crystal ball was empty. It was nothing more than a pretty crystal ball. But the black sky was full of stars, millions of sparkling glittering diamonds, winter stars shimmering with the cold.

But then he catches another glimpse from the garden ornament:

That evening a tiny but steady light was shining in the crystal ball. The family had hung the storm-lantern at the top of the mast and they were on their way home to hibernate for the winter.

Things fall apart for him:

His dream about meeting the family again had become so enormous that it made him feel tired. Every time he thought about Moominmamma he got a headache. She had grown so perfect and gentle and consoling that it was unbearable, she was a big, round smooth balloon without a face. The whole of Moominvalley had somehow become unreal, the house, the garden and the river were nothing but a play of shadows on the screen and Toft no longer knew what was real and what was only his imagination.

He feels compelled to wander towards the sea:

Toft walked on through the forest, stooping under the branches, creeping and crawling, thinking of nothing at all and became as empty as the crystal ball....

Toft looked behind him and the valley was just an insignificant shadow below him. Then he looked at the sea.

The whole sea lay spread out in front of him, grey and streaked with even white waves right out to the horizon. Toft turned his face into the wind and sat down to wait.

Now, at last, he could wait.

The family had the wind with them and they were making straight for the shore. They were coming from some island where Toft had never been and which he couldn't see. Perhaps they felt like staying there, he thought. Perhaps they will make up a story about that island and tell it to themselves before they go to sleep.

Toft sat high up on the mountain for several hours looking at the sea.

Just before the sun went down it threw a shaft of light through the clouds, cold and wintry-yellow, making the whole world look very desolate.

And then Toft saw the storm-lantern Moominpappa had hung up at the top of the mast. It threw a gentle, warm light and burnt steadily. The boat was a very long way away. Toft had plenty of time to go down through the forest and along the beach to the jetty, and be just in time to catch the line and tie up the boat.

This might seem, at first glance, a happy ending, but the question remains: is all of this real? Or is it only taking place in the crystal ball of his imagination?

At the start of the book, Toft was abandoned, isolated, and living only in his mind. At the end of the book, there seems to be a hint that nothing has changed for Toft, that nothing will ever change for Toft.