The Moon Is Down (2 page)

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 naïveté. 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 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:

 

 

Such was the popularity of
The Moon Is Down
in Norway during the occupation that in the middle of June of 1945, just five weeks after the liberation, a new legal edition was in bookstores. At that time in Norway an average printing for a novel was between one thousand and two thousand copies.
The Moon Is Down
came out in two printings of ten thousand copies each, both of which quickly sold out. The play version was performed immediately after the Oslo national theater reopened, only four months after the liberation. A Norwegian critic hailed
The Moon Is Down
as “the epic of the Norwegian underground.”

A uniquely qualified witness to the novel's effectiveness as propaganda in Norway was William Colby, later director of the Central Intelligence Agency under two presidents, Nixon and Ford. One of the few Americans on the scene during the occupation, Colby served during the early spring of 1945 in a special operations unit of ski paratroopers attached to the Office of Strategic Services. He had read
The Moon Is Down
three years earlier and was “tremendously impressed” by how well Steinbeck had captured the Norwegian national mood.

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 and a glass of beer in the other, glancing over their shoulders for the Gestapo. An anonymous comrade in the Danish Students delivered it to another member for printing. A short time after that, other printers with connections to the student resistance were assembling separate clandestine editions of Jacobsen and Lang's translation. Perhaps the most productive of these printers was Mogens Staffeldt, a Copenhagen bookseller then in his late twenties who had been involved in resistance activities from the day the Germans invaded his country. 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. But the steady traffic of Gestapo entering and leaving the building twenty-four hours a day failed to slow Staffeldt's operations. At the time, the Nazis regarded Denmark as a “model protectorate” and were eager to mollify its citizenry. Staffeldt turned that attitude to his advantage. 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.

Staffeldt alone mimeographed fifteen thousand copies of
The Moon Is Down.
The Danish students delivered them to reliable contacts in other bookshops or in large businesses such as banks or shipping firms. These contacts in turn sold them to trusted customers or employees. The proceeds went to the resistance. Eventually the translation was in such demand that many citizens retyped it and ran off new mimeograph editions for further circulation among their friends. Each mimeograph master yielded a limited number of copies, so the entire novel had to be retyped again and again. Later in the occupation another Danish translation with a different title appeared. It too was widely distributed.

As in Norway, the appeal of
The Moon Is Down
in occupied Denmark was attested to after the war ended by the immediate publication of a regular trade edition. The first run was of five thousand copies. That was followed by a second printing of eight thousand copies in 1961, a third of ten thousand in 1962, and additional printings in 1974, 1976, and 1980—remarkable quantities for a country whose population today is only five million.

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. Early in 1944 a friend with ties to an underground publishing firm known as De Bizige Bij (the Busy Bee) brought him an English-language edition and asked him to translate it. Sterneberg, a longtime admirer of Steinbeck, agreed. The Busy Bee edition came out later that year in a run of over one thousand copies. These sold at a high price—today roughly equivalent to between two and three hundred dollars apiece—because the proceeds were directed to a resistance organization providing relief for actors and actresses thrown out of work for refusing to join the Nazi-sponsored cultural guild.