An astonishing thing happened [to me] in 1943. In the middle of the day in Oslo's main thoroughfare, Karl Johan Street, among uniformed people and civilians who might be dangerous, a man came up on the side of me and said, whispering, "Follow me. I have something for you. Something you shall distribute." I knew the face, but not the name. I said to him, "Why here, now?" He said, "I came this morning, and I leave tonight, when I have delivered what I have in the suitcase." "Back to Sweden?" I said. "Yes." Then we went from Karl Johan over to Stortengade, the next street, and went into a house with an elevator with seven stops and traveled up and down, up and down, until we were alone. Then this man gave me four or five packages and said, "Go straight home." And he put me out on the fifth stop and went down the elevator, and I've not seen him since. I went home and opened up one of the small packages and found the small copies of Natt uten mane [the Norwegian title of The Moon Is Down].
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, Jorgen 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.
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 indirec
tly 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 attache 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 Chin
a, 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
PRIMARY WORKS BY JOHN STEINBECK
"About Ed Ricketts." In John Steinbeck and Ed Ricketts, The Log from the Sea of Cortez. New York: Viking Press, 1951.