The Moon Is Down

Table of Contents

 

 

 

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 © 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 : 978-1-440-67413-6

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 outré 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.

 

 

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:

 

 

 

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 matériel, 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.