The Moon Is Down Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Introduction

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

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  THE MOON IS DOWN

  Born in Salinas, California, in 1902, JOHN STEINBECK grew up in a fertile agricultural valley about twenty-five miles from the Pacific Coast--and both valley and coast would serve as settings for some of his best fiction. In 1919 he went to Stanford University, where he intermittently enrolled in literature and writing courses until he left in 1925 without taking a degree. During the next five years he supported himself as a laborer and journalist in New York City, all the time working on his first novel, Cup of Gold (1929). After marriage and a move to Pacific Grove, he published two California books, The Pastures of Heaven (1932) and To a God Unknown (1933), and worked on short stories later collected in The Long Valley (1938). Popular success and financial security came only with Tortilla Flat (1935), stories about Monterey's paisanos. A ceaseless experimenter throughout his career, Steinbeck changed courses regularly. Three powerful novels of the late 1930s focused on the California laboring class: In Dubious Battle (1936), Of Mice and Men (1937), and the book considered by many his finest, The Grapes of Wrath (1939). Early in the 1940s, Steinbeck became a filmmaker with The Forgotten Village (1941) and a serious student of marine biology with Sea of Cortez (1941). He devoted his services to the war, writing Bombs Away (1942) and the controversial play-novelette The Moon Is Down (1942). Cannery Row (1945), The Wayward Bus (1948), another experimental drama, Burning Bright (1950), and The Log from the Sea of Cortez (1951) preceded publication of the monumental East of Eden (1952), an ambitious saga of the Salinas Valley and his own family's history. The last decades of his life were spent in New York City and Sag Harbor with his third wife, with whom he traveled widely. Later books include Sweeet Thursday (1954), The Short Reign of Pippin IV: A Fabrication (1957), Once There Was a War (1958), The Winter of Our Discontent (1961), Travels with Charley in Search of America (1962), America and Americans (1966), and the post-humously published Journal of a Novel: The East of Eden Letters (1969), Viva Zapata! (1975), The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights (1976), and Working Days: The Journals of The Grapes of Wrath (1989). He died in 1968, having won a Nobel Prize in 1962.

  DONALD v. COERS is Associate Vice President for Academic Affairs at Sam Houston State University in Huntsville, Texas. He is the author of John Steinbeck as Propagandist: The Moon Is Down Goes to War (1991) and co-editor of After The Grapes of Wrath: Essays on John Steinbeck (1995).

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  First published in the United States of America by The Viking Press 1942

  Published in a Viking Compass Edition 1970

  Published in Penguin Books 1982

  This edition with an introduction by Donald V. Coers

  published in Penguin Books 1995

  Copyright John Steinbeck, 1942

  Copyright renewed Elaine A. Steinbeck, Thorn Steinbeck, and John Steinbeck IV, 19/0

  Introduction copyright (c) Donald V. Coers, 1995

  All rights reserved LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Steinbeck, John, 1902-1968.

  The moon is down/John Steinbeck; introduction by Donald

  V. Coers.

  p. cm.

  eISBN : 978-1-44067413-6

  I. Title.

  PS3537.T3234M6 1995

  813'.52--dc20 95-14803

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  INTRODUCTION

  By the summer of 1940, a little more than a year after the publication of The Grapes of Wrath, the Nazis had engulfed much of Europe. John Steinbeck was by then a world-class author. He was also both a clear-eyed political realist who understood that U.S. involvement in the war was inevitable, and a patriot eager to contribute to the Allies' cause. That spring he had been in Mexico writing the screenplay for The Forgotten Village, and he had been troubled because it seemed to him that in Latin America the Nazis were outclassing the Allies in propaganda. He was so concerned, in fact, that on June 26, four days after France signed an armistice with Germany, he met with President Roosevelt to discuss the problem. There is no record to indicate that the president took any advice Steinbeck may have offered, but the writer's enthusiasm for fighting fascism was not dampened. Over the next two or three years he served voluntarily in several of the government intelligence and information agencies created between 1940 and 1942.

  Two of the organizations Steinbeck worked for were precursors of the CIA: the Office of Coordinator of Information (COI) and the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). Both were headed by Colonel William J. "Wild Bill" Donovan, a Republican New York lawyer who was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor during the First World War. Despite his political conservatism, Donovan was an open-minded administrator who encouraged fresh ideas and was willing to employ unorthodox techniques and outre people to achieve his goals. He was also particularly interested in civilian morale and, consequently, in propaganda.

  While Steinbeck was working for the COI, probably in midsummer of 1941, he and Donovan discussed the idea that Steinbeck might write a work of propaganda. At the same time, Steinbeck's duties at COI brought him into contact with displaced citizens from the recently occupied countries of Europe, among them Norway and Denmark (invaded in April of 1940), and France, Belgium, and the Netherlands (overrun in May and June). The refugees intrigued Steinbeck with stories about the activities of underground resistance movements in their native lands. Over twenty years later Steinbeck recounted in an article entitled "Reflections on a Lunar Eclipse" how the exiles' information helped him decide what kind of propaganda he would write.

  The experiences of the victim nations, while they differed in some degree with national psychologies, had many things in common. At the time of invasion there had been confusion; in some of the nations there were secret Nazi parties, there were spies and turncoats. [The Norwegian Nazi, Vidkun] Quisling has left his name as a synonym for traitor. Then there were collaborators, some moved by fear and others simply for advancement and profit.
Finally there were the restrictive measures of the Germans, their harsh demands and savage punishments. All of these factors had to be correlated and understood before an underground movement could form and begin to take action.

  By September 1941 Steinbeck had decided to write a work of fiction using what he had learned about the psychological effects of enemy occupation upon the populace of conquered nations. Because he "did not believe people are very different in essentials," he originally set his story in America:

  I wrote my fictional account about a medium-sized American town with its countryside of a kind I knew well. There would be collaborators certainly. Don't forget the Bund meetings in our cities, the pro-German broadcasts before the war and the kind of man who loves any success: "Mussolini made the trains run on time." "Hitler saved Germany from communism." It was not beyond reason that our town would have its cowards, its citizens who sold out for profit. But under this, I did and do believe, would be the hard core that could not be defeated. And so I wrote my account basing its fiction on facts extracted from towns already under the Nazi heel.

  Steinbeck submitted his "fictional account" for approval to another of Donovan's agencies, the Foreign Information Service. Officials there rejected it because they feared that postulating an American defeat might be demoralizing. Steinbeck's refugee friends, certain that his story would boost morale in their already occupied homelands, urged him to circumvent official objections by shifting the setting. He took their advice and placed the story in an unnamed country, "cold and stern like Norway, cunning and implacable like Denmark, reasonable like France."

  Steinbeck finished his revised version just in time for Pearl Harbor, and Viking Press published it as a short novel, The Moon Is Down, in early March of 1942. The next month it played on Broadway, and a year later premiered as a movie. Its title comes from the beginning of act 2 of Macbeth. Just before Banquo and Fleance encounter Macbeth on his way to murder Duncan, Banquo asks his son, "How goes the night, boy?" Fleance replies, "The moon is down; I have not heard the clock," foreshadowing the descent of evil on the kingdom. Steinbeck's allusion suggests that the Nazis had brought a similar spiritual darkness to Europe.

  The Moon Is Down appeared in bookstores during the bleakest days of the war for the United States. While Americans reeled from Pearl Harbor, the Japanese overran much of Southeast Asia and seized strategic islands dotting vast expanses of the Pacific Ocean until they were poised within striking distance of the northern coast of Australia. The Doolittle raids, America's first flicker of hope, were still a month away, and it would be three months before the first Japanese defeat, the Battle of Midway. The picture looked equally grim for America's allies in Europe. Hitler's crushing offenses continued unchecked, and the first shots in the watershed Battle of Stalingrad would not be fired for another nine or ten months. As U.S. factories frenetically retooled from consumer goods to war materiel, German U-boats lurked along the Gulf and Atlantic coasts, sinking Allied ships faster than they could be replaced and threatening supply lines to Britain. The Allies' great fear in March 1942 was that they might not be able to hold out long enough for American troops and industrial might to help reverse the course of the war.

  Understandably, when The Moon Is Down came out late that dreary winter, the critics were more interested in predicting its potential as propaganda than in weighing its merits as literature. But Steinbeck's method was far subtler than that of the overcooked rant customarily served up in this country at the time. His anonymous setting, for instance, is simply a peace-loving country, very much like Norway, which is invaded suddenly and without provocation by a much stronger neighbor, very much like Germany. To be sure, Steinbeck leaves no doubt whom he has in mind. Officers in the invading army allude to "the Leader" of their homeland and to his bringing a "new order" to Europe. There is a reference to the Leader's country's having fought Belgium and France twenty years earlier--an unsubtle reminder of Germany's repeat performance in the European theater. Beyond such hints, Steinbeck refused to adopt the contemporary Teutonic stereotypes. There are no heel-clicking Huns, no depraved, monocled intellectuals, no thundering sieg heils in his fable-like tale. Instead, Steinbeck depicts his putative Germans as human beings with normal feelings. They offer the citizens of the conquered country justifications for their invasion. They plead for understanding. They miss their families. They want their victims to accept them. Yet nothing can disguise their theft of freedom, and eventually the local patriots' desire to regain it impels them to resist. The militarily superior invaders retaliate, but the impression remains that ultimately the patriots will prevail because a society of free individuals is stronger in the long run than a totalitarian power dependent on herd men. In the mayor's words, "It is always the herd men who win battles and the free men who win wars."

  Steinbeck's affirmative, toned-down approach to propaganda in The Moon Is Down touched off the fiercest literary battle of the Second World War. Many critics liked the novel, but some did not, and their number included such formidable names as Clifton Fadiman and James Thurber. In effect, the detractors accused Steinbeck of naivete. The creator of the savvy, muscular realism of The Grapes of Wrath was now being soft on the Nazis by depicting them as human beings and by infusing his story with a fuzzy, fairy-tale atmosphere. Doubtless well-intentioned but poorly conceived, Steinbeck's propaganda would surely demoralize the victims of Nazi aggression in occupied Europe--the very people he wanted to help. The proper way to raise a fighting spirit among a brutalized populace, one critic intoned, was with hard-hitting hype bearing a title like "Guts in the Mud," not with "soft and dreamy" stuff like The Moon Is Down.

  The controversy raged for months in major newspapers and magazines--most prominently The New York Times, the Herald Tribune, The New Yorker, The New Republic, and the Saturday Review. To be sure, The Moon Is Down had its defenders. In fact, more critics praised than criticized it. But the attacks blindsided Steinbeck. For years he had been praised as a skilled artist with socially enlightened views--a proletarian writer with polish. Suddenly he found himself savaged for a well-meaning contribution to the war effort. The criticism was corrosive, calling into question not only his artistic instincts, but, far worse, his political acumen, his credentials as an antifascist, and his very patriotism. Steinbeck was wounded, and his wounds were still tender over ten years later when he referred sarcastically to his detractors, chiefly Fadiman and Thurber, in an essay entitled "My Short Novels."

  The war came on, and I wrote The Moon Is Down as a kind of celebration of the durability of democracy. I couldn't conceive that the book would be denounced. I had written of Germans as men, not supermen, and this was considered a very weak attitude to take. I couldn't make much sense out of this, and it seems absurd now that we know the Germans were men, and thus fallible, even defeatable. It was said that I didn't know anything about war, and this was perfectly true, though how Park Avenue commandos found me out I can't conceive.

  The debate died long before the war ended, and after the war the political and philosophical issues it had spawned were moot. There were early indications that, as Steinbeck had intended, The Moon Is Down had found a receptive audience in Nazi-occupied Europe. King Haakon VII gave him a medal honoring the novel's influence in Norway, and European scholars occasionally mentioned its wartime popularity, but for nearly a half century the supporting details remained scattered and anecdotal. No one knew how effective Steinbeck's contribution had been.

  Over the last few years new evidence has emerged that documents the extraordinarily positive reception of The Moon Is Down in Nazi-occupied Western Europe, and confirms the novel's success as propaganda. Throughout Norway, Denmark, Holland, and France, it was translated, printed on clandestine presses, and distributed, sometimes under the very nose of the Gestapo. The underground operations involved lawyers, book dealers, retired military personnel, housewives, businesspeople, students, and teachers who took great risks to disseminate The Moon Is Down because it spoke so directly
to them and to their situation and so persuasively supported their cause. Their explanations of its effectiveness are remarkably similar: Somehow an author living thousands of miles away in a land of peace sensed precisely how they felt as victims of Nazi aggression. It never occurred to them that the novel was sympathetic to their enemy. In fact, they regarded it as far more effective than the prevailing formula propaganda, which struck them as comical because it was so absurdly exaggerated. And the Nazis certainly did not think the novel treated them favorably. They banned it wherever they were in control. A member of the resistance in Italy reported that mere possession of it meant an automatic death sentence.

  In spite of the Nazis' efforts to suppress The Moon Is Down, hundreds of thousands of copies of the Norwegian, Danish, Dutch, and French clandestine editions circulated during the occupation. It was easily the most popular work of propaganda in occupied Western Europe. The efforts put forth by the resistance and by ordinary citizens to distribute the novel within their respective countries, and the risks they took in doing so, bear witness to the importance they attached to it.

  The illegal Norwegian-language edition of The Moon Is Down was translated in Sweden by a forty-year-old exile named Nils Lie. Before the invasion of his homeland, Lie had been chief consultant for Gyldendal Publishers. Gyldendal had brought out translations of Tortilla Flat, Of Mice and Men, and The Grapes of Wrath in 1938, 1939, and 1940, respectively. Late in 1942, several thousand copies of Lie's translation of The Moon Is Down were printed by a Swedish press on tissue-thin paper, bound with soft covers, and smuggled into Norway. Some were spirited across isolated points along the thousand-mile border between Sweden and Norway, and a few were dropped from airplanes, but the bulk were cached in luggage carried by regular rail lines. Most of the small, easily concealed pamphlet editions got past the control stations; apparently, a few did not, because officials in the Nazi puppet government in Norway were almost immediately aware of the existence of the special translation. They were so uneasy about its possible effects on the Norwegian people that, in December, when thirty-six copies were confiscated in courier luggage shipped to Oslo from Sweden, six were sent immediately to the head of the state police and to the president of the puppet government himself--the infamous Quisling. Thousands of unconfiscated copies were delivered by the Norwegian resistance to reliable citizens, who passed them along to friends. Frits von der Lippe, a wartime employee at Gyldendal in Oslo, related nearly forty years later how he became a typical "distributor" of the novel: