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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.
In occupied Denmark, the first illegal Danish-language edition of The Moon Is Down was translated by two young law students, Jørgen Jacobsen and Paul Lang. They had received a copy of the American edition shortly before Christmas of 1942, along with a request for a Danish translation from a student resistance group known simply as the Danish Students. Its members hoped that distribution of the novel in Denmark would embolden the resistance movement there. Jacobsen and Lang completed their translation in one week. They worked day and night with a concise Oxford English Dictionary in one hand
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Staffeldt hocked his life insurance policy to buy the mimeograph machine he used to crank out copies of The Moon Is Down in his bookstore. That bookstore, located on the town square, was on the bottom floor of the building which housed Gestapo headquarters for Copenhagen.
On several occasions when loyal Danish students came to his bookstore to pick up disguised bundles of The Moon Is Down and other forbidden titles for delivery to various distribution centers, Staffeldt stepped out of his store, summoned passing Gestapo officers, and enlisted their aid in loading the anti-Nazi literature. “Don’t just stand there,” he would scold; “help these kids!” The enemy’s secret police invariably responded by scrambling about in unwitting service to the Danish resistance.
The illegal Dutch-language version of The Moon Is Down was prepared by Ferdinand Sterneberg, who was a forty-three-year-old actor living in Amsterdam when the Nazis overran his country in May of 1940.
The French clandestine edition of The Moon Is Down was released in February 1944, six months before the liberation of Paris. Its printing of fifteen hundred copies was the largest of the entire war undertaken by a Parisian underground press aptly named Editions de Minuit (Midnight Editions). The translation was by Yvonne Paraf, a young woman who had adopted the nom de guerre Yvonne Desvignes.
In France, as in Denmark and Holland, sales of illegal editions of The Moon Is Down helped fund the resistance.
Today, at a half century’s distance from the controversy ignited by the publication of The Moon Is Down, it is clear that Fadiman, Thurber, and other critics who had prophesied its failure as propaganda were entirely wrong.
The French writer and philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre offers a theory that probably accounts for the critics’ divergence of opinion. In his postwar essay What Is Literature? he contends that we can have no true understanding of a literary work unless we know who an author is writing for. To illustrate his point, Sartre recalls a wartime literary controversy similar to that surrounding The Moon Is Down. Another highly popular work of anti-Nazi fiction published in France during the war was a short novel entitled The Silence of the Sea, written by Jean Bruller, a member of the French resistance
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During his visit to Norway in 1946 to receive King Haakon’s medal, he was asked on several occasions how he knew so well what the resistance there was doing. His answer was, “I put myself in your place and thought what I would do.” That reply explains more than the success of The Moon Is Down in occupied Europe; it reminds us what readers of Steinbeck all over the world had already recognized as among the writer’s major attributes: his sure sense of audience, and his empathy with the oppressed.
All are acknowledgments of the sympathy and the social intuition that John Steinbeck had already demonstrated in works of the middle and late 1930s, most notably Of Mice and Men, In Dubious Battle, and The Grapes of Wrath. The success of The Moon Is Down as propaganda, then, underscores Steinbeck’s signal literary strengths.
By ten-forty-five it was all over. The town was occupied, the defenders defeated, and the war finished.
Doctor Winter was a man so simple that only a profound man would know him as profound.
Joseph habitually scowled at furniture, expecting it to be impertinent, mischievous, or dusty.
Joseph was elderly and lean and serious, and his life was so complicated that only a profound man would know him to be simple.
He had been Mayor so long that he was the Idea-Mayor in the town. Even grown people when they saw the word “mayor,” printed or written, saw Mayor Orden in their minds. He and his office were one. It had given him dignity and he had given it warmth.
Kings and princes played at war the way Englishmen play at hunting.
Colonel Lanser turned slightly toward his companion. “I think you know Mr. Corell,” he said. The Mayor said, “George Corell? Of course I know him. How are you, George?” Doctor Winter cut in sharply. He said, very formally, “Your Excellency, our friend, George Corell, prepared this town for the invasion. Our benefactor, George Corell, sent our soldiers into the hills. Our dinner guest, George Corell, has made a list of every firearm in the town. Our friend, George Corell!” Corell said angrily, “I work for what I believe in! That is an honorable thing.”
“I am more engineer than soldier. This whole thing is more an engineering job than conquest. The coal must come out of the ground and be shipped. We have technicians, but the local people will continue to work the mine. Is that clear? We do not wish to be harsh.”
They will be in danger if they are rebellious.
“But you are the authority.” Orden smiled. “You won’t believe this, but it is true: authority is in the town. I don’t know how or why, but it is so. This means we cannot act as quickly as you can, but when a direction is set, we all act together. I am confused. I don’t know yet.”
Major Hunter, a haunted little man of figures, a little man who, being a dependable unit, considered all other men either as dependable units or as unfit to live.
If Captain Bentick was too old to be a captain, Captain Loft was too young. Captain Loft was as much a captain as one can imagine.
Generals were afraid of him because he knew more about the deportment of a soldier than they did.
Captain Loft believed that all women fall in love with a uniform and he did not see how it could be otherwise.
Lieutenants Prackle and Tonder were snot-noses, undergraduates, lieutenants, trained in the politics of the day, believing the great new system invented by a genius so great that they never bothered to verify its results.
He longed for death on the battlefield, with weeping parents in the background, and the Leader, brave but sad in the presence of the dying youth. He imagined his death very often, lighted by a fair setting sun which glinted on broken military equipment, his men standing silently around him, with heads sunk low, as over a fat cloud galloped the Valkyries, big-breasted, mothers and mistresses in one, while Wagnerian thunder crashed in the background. And he even had his dying words ready.
These were the men of the staff, each one playing war as children play “Run, Sheep, Run.”
war is treachery and hatred, the muddling of incompetent generals, the torture and killing and sickness and tiredness, until at last it is over and nothing has changed except for new weariness and new hatreds.
He said, “Defeat is a momentary thing. A defeat doesn’t last. We were defeated and now we attack. Defeat means nothing. Can’t you understand that? Do you know what they are whispering behind doors?”
“I’m tired of people who have not been at war who know all about it.”
She always knew where to find a cigarette or a virgin.”
“We didn’t know her son had been executed,” he said. “When we finally shot her, she had killed twelve men with a long, black hatpin. I have it yet at home. It has an enamel button with a bird over it, red and blue.”
“So it starts again. We will shoot this man and make twenty new enemies. It’s the only thing we know, the only thing we know.”
“That is a great mystery,” said Doctor Winter. “That is a mystery that has disturbed rulers all over the world—how the people know. It disturbs the invaders now, I am told, how news runs through censorships, how the truth of things fights free of control. It is a great mystery.”
“Alex, go, knowing that these men will have no rest, no rest at all until they are gone, or dead. You will make the people one. It’s a sad knowledge and little enough gift to you, but it is so. No rest at all.”
And there was death in the air, hovering and waiting. Accidents happened on the railroad, which clung to the mountains and connected the little town with the rest of the nation. Avalanches poured down on the tracks and rails were spread. No train could move unless the tracks were first inspected. People were shot in reprisal and it made no difference. Now and then a group of young men escaped and went to England. And the English bombed the coal mine and did some damage and killed some of both their friends and their enemies. And it did no good. The cold hatred grew with the winter, the silent,
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a man can be a soldier for only so many hours a day and for only so many months in a year, and then he wants to be a man again, wants girls and drinks and music and laughter and ease, and when these are cut off, they become irresistibly desirable.
and gradually a little fear began to grow in the conquerors, a fear that it would never be over, that they could never relax or go home, a fear that one day they would crack and be hunted through the mountains like rabbits, for the conquered never relaxed their hatred.
Thus it came about that the conquerors grew afraid of the conquered and their nerves wore thin and they shot at shadows in the night.
This is a new kind of conquest. Always before, it was possible to disarm a people and keep them in ignorance. Now they listen to their radios and we can’t stop them. We can’t even find their radios.”
“And the girl,” Lanser continued, “the girl, Lieutenant, you may rape her, or protect her, or marry her—that is of no importance so long as you shoot her when it is ordered.”
And then Orden continued as though he had been talking. “You know, I couldn’t stop it if I wanted to.”
“A time-minded people,” he said, “and the time is nearly up. They think that just because they have only one leader and one head, we are all like that. They know that ten heads lopped off will destroy them, but we are a free people; we have as many heads as we have people, and in a time of need leaders pop up among us like mushrooms.”
“Do you remember in school, in the Apology? Do you remember Socrates says, ‘Someone will say, ”And are you not ashamed, Socrates, of a course of life which is likely to bring you to an untimely end?“ To him I may fairly answer, ”There you are mistaken: a man who is good for anything ought not to calculate the chance of living or dying; he ought only to consider whether he is doing right or wrong.” ’ ” Orden paused, trying to remember.
One of your men got out of hand one night and he said the flies had conquered the flypaper, and now the whole nation knows his words. They have made a song of it.
Free men cannot start a war, but once it is started, they can fight on in defeat. Herd men, followers of a leader, cannot do that, and so it is always the herd men who win battles and the free men who win wars. You will find that is so, sir.”
