The Moon Is Down (3 page)

Sterneberg, who used the nom de guerre Tjebbo Hemelrijk, also prepared a Dutch-language stage version of
The Moon Is Down,
from which he gave dramatic readings in Amsterdam, in The Hague, and in the countryside. According to Sterneberg, he presented his one-man show to audiences of between twenty-five and fifty people, whom he always prepared for the possibility of a Gestapo raid. Immediately before and after these readings Sterneberg and his friends sold copies of his translation. After more than fifty performances he was forced to quit. He had been hiding in his apartment two Jewish friends, a brother and sister. They lived with him throughout the occupation, and escaped discovery during those years only because of meticulous precautions. “Untrustworthy” neighbors lived in the apartment below, so Sterneberg's friends could not move around, use the bathroom, draw water, or even talk when he was gone. Sterneberg could not in good conscience continue leaving them in such danger and discomfort for the long periods of absence his readings required.

After the war Sterneberg and his fellow actors gave many performances of the dramatic version of
The Moon Is Down.
The Busy Bee also brought out a new edition of the novel. Ironically, because the publishers had access to better quality paper during the war than immediately following the liberation, the new edition was inferior to the one published secretly during the occupation. Several fine Dutch editions have been published since.

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. She was a childhood friend of the printer for Midnight Editions. Paraf worked from an English-language edition of
The Moon Is Down
published two years earlier in Sweden. She knew that a French translation had already been published in Switzerland in 1943, but she and other members of the French resistance wanted a new one, because Swiss officials had censored passages that might have offended the Germans. The Swiss had deleted Steinbeck's references to England, to the war in Russia, and to the occupation of Belgium by the invading army of the same country that had occupied it twenty years previously, all of which served indirectly to identify the unnamed country to which that army belonged. At that time the Swiss felt vulnerable to German invasion and were trying hard to avoid displeasing their powerful neighbor.

In France, as in Denmark and Holland, sales of illegal editions of
The Moon Is Down
helped fund the resistance. The money earned by Paraf's translation was turned over to the National Committee of Writers, which used it to support the families of patriotic printers and typographers shot or deported by the Nazis. According to the French patriotic press, the impact of
The Moon Is Down
in occupied France was “immense and incontestable.” Immediately after liberation, Midnight Editions published the novel in a volume identical in every detail to the clandestine version. It was included, in fact, as one of several works in a special collection constituting Midnight Editions' first public issue. The single printing of
The Moon Is Down
was of 5,325 numbered copies.

The Moon Is Down
also enjoyed unusual popularity in European countries that escaped German occupation. The expurgated French-language Swiss edition mentioned earlier was published in Lausanne in 1943 by Marguerat. A German-language Swiss edition appeared in Zurich the same year, published by Humanitas Verlag. Theaters in Basel performed the play version to enthusiastic audiences, and then the Schauspielhaus in Zurich produced a highly acclaimed run of approximately two hundred performances. In England, Heinemann published its first edition of the novel in 1942, following with a so-called “Middle East Edition” the next year. The English Theater Guild published the dramatic version in 1943, the same year the play opened at London's Whitehall Theatre. The Swedes brought out two editions in 1942 besides the one intended for distribution by the resistance in Norway: a Swedish translation published by Bonniers and an English-language version printed by the Continental Book Company—the edition Paraf used for her French translation. Soviet magazines serialized two different Russian translations of the novel in 1943: a complete version published in
Znamya,
and excerpts in
Ogonyok.
Despite the virtually unanimous disapproval of Soviet critics, who regarded it as vague and unrealistic,
The Moon Is Down
was the best-known work of American literature in the Soviet Union during the war.

There is also evidence that the novel was distributed within the Axis itself. During a visit to Florence more than a decade after the war ended, Steinbeck was approached by an Italian who had opposed Mussolini. He had translated
The Moon Is Down,
mimeographed five hundred copies, and then circulated them among fellow members of the resistance. They had been in great demand.

The Nazis were not the only fascists against whom
The Moon Is Down
served effectively as propaganda. Far to the east, a well-known Chinese professor of literature, Chien Gochuen, had obtained a copy of an English edition through the office of the British press attaché in Chongqing, China's wartime capital. Chien recognized immediately its potential propaganda value for his country, much of it then occupied by the Japanese. He completed his translation in 1942, and beginning early the next year it ran as installments under Chien's nom de guerre, Ch‘in Ko Chuan, in the first seven issues of
New China
magazine. Ten thousand copies of each of those issues were published—a remarkable number given the formidable wartime shortages in China. Shortly after the last of the installments appeared, the publishers compiled them in a single edition for circulation throughout China. Forty years later, a spokesman for the book company that published
New China
magazine remembered that the Chinese people were encouraged by “the patriotic eagerness of [Steinbeck's] characters to resist their conquerors.”

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. Evidence of its success in Nazi-occupied Europe and in China is compelling: the dedication of those who translated, printed, and distributed it at considerable risk; the impressive number of editions and copies published—during the occupation, on makeshift machinery and under taxing conditions, as well as after the war by recently liberated publishing houses; and the accounts of former members of the resistance and others who witnessed firsthand the force of its ideas.

But beyond the obvious conclusion that Steinbeck was right and his critics wrong about what would constitute effective propaganda, several questions arise. Why were the hostile American critics so mistaken, and how do we account for the difference between their reaction and that of the Europeans? Why did the American detractors fail to appreciate what so appealed to the Europeans? And finally, what does the stunning wartime European reception of
The Moon Is Down
tell us about the genius of John Steinbeck?

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 better known by his nom de guerre, Vercors. Like Steinbeck, Bruller portrayed the Germans as human beings, often intelligent, if misguided, and frequently polite and likable.
The Silence of the Sea
succeeded as propaganda within occupied France, but it found a hostile audience in French men and women living abroad, many of whom in fact accused Bruller of collaboration. Sartre's explanation for the mixed reception is that Bruller was writing for compatriots living under the Nazis. He was among them, sharing their feelings and the routines of their existence. He realized that to stereotype all Germans as ogres would have been laughable to those who had daily contact with the enemy and who knew better.

Like Bruller, Steinbeck revealed in his approach to propaganda not only a shrewd psychological perception of what would work and what would not, but also a respect for his European audience. The crude oversimplifications of most propaganda are, after all, patronizing. There is no such condescension in Steinbeck's approach. But Steinbeck's understanding of what would appeal to a European audience under the unusual conditions of the day is all the more remarkable because, unlike Bruller, who had the advantage of being on the scene and of writing about people he knew well, Steinbeck was a foreigner living thousands of miles away.

Steinbeck's own explanation for the perceptiveness that made his propaganda so effective is simple. 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. European partisans who ran considerable risk to publish and distribute
The Moon Is Down
because they believed it would help their cause agreed about the source of its power: a Danish publisher ascribed it to “Steinbeck's sincere sentiment ... a human quality which penetrates”; a Norwegian reviewer to his ability to capture “our feelings ... our problems, our hopes, our sorrows”; the Dutch translator to Steinbeck's insight, “especially into [our] reaction against the ones who took over the country”; and the French translator to the author's masterful understanding. 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.

Most works of propaganda do not survive the crises that produce them.
The Moon Is Down
is an exception. Since 1945 it has appeared in at least ninety-two editions in the United States, England, Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, Spain, Mexico, Hungary, France, Belgium, Turkey, Germany, Switzerland, pre-Communist Mainland China, Taiwan, Japan, Egypt, Sweden, Italy, Portugal, Brazil, Korea, India, Greece, Iran, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Burma. The novel's endurance suggests that while
The Moon Is Down
may have been conceived, written, and used as propaganda, it is probably best described as a work of literature that served as propaganda. Judged by purely artistic standards, it is not among the author's best efforts. Scholars and reviewers have most frequently criticized its wooden characters and transparent didacticism, flaws characteristic of novels of ideas. But few literary works in our time have demonstrated so triumphantly the power of ideas in the face of cold steel and brute force, and few have spoken so reassuringly to so many people of different countries and cultures. Against the fiercest assault on freedom during this century, John Steinbeck calmly reaffirmed in
The Moon Is Down
the bedrock principles of democracy: the worth of the individual, and the power deriving from free citizens sharing common commitments.

SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING

“About Ed Ricketts.” In John Steinbeck and Ed Ricketts,
The Log from the
Sea of Cortez. New York: Viking Press, 1951.

“Letters to Alicia.”
Weekend with Newsday,
December 11, 1965, 3W.

The Moon Is Down: Play in Two Parts.
New York: Dramatists Play Service, 1942.

“My Short Novels.”
Steinbeck and His Critics,
edited by E. W. Tedlock, Jr., and C. V. Wicker. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1957, 38-40.

“Reflections on a Lunar Eclipse.”
Herald Tribune
(New York)
Book Week,
October 6, 1963, 3.

Steinbeck: A Life in Letters.
Edited by Elaine Steinbeck and Robert Wallsten. New York: Viking Press, 1975.

Astro, Richard.
John Steinbeck and Edward F. Ricketts: The Shaping of a Novelist.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1973.

Benson, Jackson J.
Looking for Steinbeck's Ghost.
Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1988.

—.
The True Adventures of John Steinbeck, Writer.
New York: Viking Press, 1984.

Brown, Anthony Cave.
The Last Hero: Wild Bill Donovan.
New York: Times Books, 1982.

Coers, Donald V.
John Steinbeck as Propagandist:
The Moon Is Down
Goes to War.
Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1991.

Debû-Bridel, Jacques.
Les Éditions de Minuit: Historique et bibliographie.
Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1945.

Fontenrose, Joseph.
John Steinbeck: An Introduction and Interpretation.
New York: Barnes and Noble, 1963.

French, Warren.
John Steinbeck's Fiction Revisited.
New York: Twayne Publishers, 1994.