The Moon is Down (John Steinbeck)

112 pages
published in 1942

There is no attempt to hide the fact that "The Moon is Down" is a work of wartime propaganda. Steinbeck worked with the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) during the early days of World War II, and was asked, or decided himself, to write a piece of propaganda that would bolster resistance movements among U.S. allies. This was just after he had won the Pulitzer Prize for the Grapes of Wrath in 1940.

According to the forward of the edition I read, Steinbeck initially wrote his story of a resistance movement set in an American town (something like Red Dawn, I suppose), but was asked to revise it because the OSS did not want to demoralize Americans by positing the possibility of defeat. Steinbeck changed the setting to an undisclosed location, although it is pretty clear that it is meant to be northern Europe, maybe Norway.

Apparently the press in the U.S. did not like the book because it humanized the Germans too much, presenting them as people rather than the monstrous caricatures favored in most propaganda [as an aside, isn't it interesting that it was criticized as a piece of propaganda? As if there were an acceptable form for writing propaganda that was taught in university writing courses, "Propaganda 101".]

For his portrayal of German soldiers as humans he was called naive by some critics, and later wrote in response:

It was said that I didn't know anything about war, and this is perfectly true, although how Park Avenue commandos found me out I can't conceive.

Oh, snap.

Anyway, despite the somewhat negative reaction the book received here in the U.S., it became a very important work overseas in occupied Europe, where ordinary people went to great lengths to make illegal translations and distribute thousands of copies in Norway, Denmark, Holland, France and even Italy, where merely having a copy in your possession merited the death penalty.

I'd have to say, that up there with winning the Nobel and Pulitzer Prizes, this kind of reaction to a short story has to be about as good as it gets for an author.

The book itself is not widely considered to be in the top tier of Steinbeck's compositions, but in my opinion it was quite good. Its strength lies in Steinbeck's ability to lay bare human nature -- the motivation behind both the occupiers and the occupied. An example of this takes place early in the book when Annie, the cook at the Mayor's house, throws boiling water at some German soldiers who are standing on her back porch -- not as a premeditated act of defiance, but merely because she is irritated by them peeking in her window while she is cooking, and in fact she "would have thrown it on anyone who cluttered up her porch." Following this action Annie gains some notoriety, and ends up playing a significant role in the movement.

As a student of political science who was seriously studied military action and resistance movements from El Salvador to South Africa, I think that "Moon" provides about as sophisticated an understanding of the difficulties of occupation as I have ever read.

Like much of Steinbeck's works, the dialogue in "Moon" often reveals too carefully the point that the author was trying to get across, and seems to unfold somewhat artificially, as if the two people in the conversation both know where it is supposed to end up. As a literary device this may not be the most sophisticated, but it is well suited to a short-story meant to inspire the everyday person. It was especially effective in the exchanges between the Mayor of the town and the Colonel in charge of the occupation. In one such exchange the Colonel admits, "We have taken on a job, haven't we?" to which the Mayor replies, "Yes, the one impossible job in the world, the one thing that can't be done...to break man's spirit permanently." As the reality of this statement is realized among the German officers, one of them become so despondent with the enormity of the task of eternal occupation that he comments "Conquest after conquest, deeper and deeper into molasses...flies conquer the flypaper. Flies capture two hundred miles of new flypaper!"

The take-away message of the book is that superior planning, numbers and technology are no match for the power of ideas among a cohesive group of men, illustrated brilliantly in the story when hundreds of single sticks of dynamite are dropped by British planes across the countryside, ensuring that the occupiers can never be comfortable again, can never let their guard down, because no matter how many people they capture or kill, every town member is a potential freedom fighter. Due to the very nature of occupying enemy territory, the Germans had set themselves up for failure from the minute that they first "defeated" the enemy and attempted to rule over them, a germane lesson 66 years later.