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.
It’s also a novel very much about “unexplored territory”, something Jansson will have been very aware of in the writing of these stories about friendship between women, and something which so fascinates Jonna in her love of B-movie Westerns and their repeating of clichés about endless honourable “friendship between men”. But the keys to this particular new territory are the opposite of cliché. Openness, playfulness and space are concepts which come up repeatedly through the novel. “Give these ladies some space!” yells a barmaid in Phoenix on one of the explorative adventures Mari and Jonna have. “They’re from Finland.” It’s as if Fair Play knows it’s a kind of foreign territory in itself. So many of these stories are about the giving of space to another person, the kind of space that only someone who loves properly and openly can give. “There are empty spaces that must be respected — those often long periods when a person can’t see the pictures or find the words and needs to be left alone.” There’s also crucial space between Mari and the narrator, which is what gives this book its essential meditative nature.
But it is, too, a piece of writing about time running out, about the end of living space, about inevitable ends. The chapter called “Cemeteries”, for instance, examines how we helplessly think we can order things and control our fates; Fair Play never ignores real bleakness. Part of its analysis of art knows that art makes a killing in the same way as a pin will through a butterfly. Part of its radicalism comes from the repeated admittance that its main characters are simply getting older. Yet the form of the book suggest there’ll be no stopping. There’s only the journey, the open travelling companionship, the long-running aesthetic argument and agreement between Jonna and Mari, “doing all right”, from the start of the book to its finish.
Consider the gentleness of this work, the twinned humility and understatement in what it actually means to be “doing all right”. Jansson deals with its relationship with care, humour and, above all, affectionate discretion. Fair Play is, in the end, a huge, yet astoundingly discreet, declaration of a good-working love, a homage to the kind of coupledom that rarely receives such homage, and at the same time a homage to the everyday weather, the light, the skies, the countless bad movies and good movies of living and working well with someone for the length of an adult life.
Labora et amare. “They sat opposite each other at the table without talking.” Kindness passes between them unspoken. It’s a relationship that works. Its final chapter, in which one, without so much as saying it, grants the other the necessary space to work — in other words, to be herself — reveals not just the size and truth of the love but the revolutionary freedom that comes with such love.
Fair Play is a very fine art.
Fair Play
A NOVEL
Changing pictures
JONNA HAD A HAPPY HABIT OF WAKING EACH MORNING as if to a new life. which stretched before her straight through to evening, clean, untouched, rarely shadowed by yesterday’s worries and mistakes.
Another habit — or rather a gift, equally surprising — was her flood of unexpected and completely spontaneous ideas. Each lived and blossomed powerfully for a time until suddenly swept aside by a new impulse demanding its own undeniable space. Like now this business about the frames. Several months earlier, Jonna had decided she wanted to frame some of the pictures by fellow artists that Mari had on her walls. She made some very pretty frames, but when they were ready to hang, Jonna was seized by new ideas and the pictures were left standing around on the floor.
“For the time being,” Jonna said. “And for that matter, your whole collection needs rehanging, top to bottom. It’s hopelessly conventional.” Mari waited and said nothing. In fact, it felt good having things unfinished, a little as if she had just moved in and didn’t have to take the thing so seriously.
And over the years, she’d learned not to interfere with Jonna’s plans and their mysterious blend of perfectionism and nonchalance, a mix not everyone can properly appreciate. Some people just shouldn’t be disturbed in their inclinations, whether large or small. A reminder can instantly turn enthusiasm into aversion and spoil everything.
Pursuing her work in blessed seclusion, free from interference; moulding and playing with all sorts of materials, a game that all at once, capriciously, could become irresistible and crowd out all other activity. Enjoying a sudden burst of practical energy and repairing everything broken in the house and in the apartments of her completely impractical friends — mending things or making them beautiful, or simply, to everyone’s relief, discarding them. Periods of nothing but intense reading, night and day. Periods of listening to music to the exclusion of all else. To name just a few.
And each and every one of these periods was sharply defined by a day or two of extreme unease and boredom, irresolute days in search of a new course. It was always the same; there was no other way. To encroach on those empty days with suggestions or advice was utterly unthinkable.
Once Mari happened to observe, “You do only what you like.”
“Naturally,” Jonna said, “of course I do.” And she smiled at Mari in mild astonishment.
And now came the day in November when everything in Mari’s studio was to be rehung, rearranged, renewed, and given a completely new significance — graphics, paintings, photographs, children’s drawings, and all sorts of precious small objects reverently pinned up on the walls, which as time passed had lost all memory and meaning. Mari had assembled hammer, nails, picture hooks, steel wire, a level, and several other tools. Jonna had brought only a tape measure.