Review: "The Moon is Down" by John Steinbeck

 

The Moon is Down by John Steinbeck Penguin, 1995   John Steinbeck wrote The Moon is Down, as an anti-Nazi propaganda piece for the U.S. Foreign Information Service (FIS)—which means it is one of Steinbeck’s minor works but it is far from lifeless propaganda and very much worth reading as literature. It was rejected by the FIS because it believed its depiction of an American town occupied by a foreign power would demoralize American readers during the early days of World War 2. Steinbeck reworked the setting, placing it in a nameless town in a nameless European country, but—as Donald V. Coers wrote in his Introduction to the edition I read—a place “cold and stern like Norway, cunning and implacable like Denmark, reasonable like France.” It was published by The Viking Press in 1942, and clandestine editions—The Moon is Down was illegal in all occupied Europe—were distributed throughout the continent (including Norway, Holland, The Netherlands, and France) and in smaller numbers in China as it fought against fascist Japan. Steinbeck had intended The Moon is Down “as a celebration of the durability of democracy” and it succeeded. The Town is overrun by conquering soldiers with only a whisper—a Quisling-like businessman had arranged for its small contingent of soldiers and its mayor to be away at the precise time of the invasion. The townspeople are stunned into something like a stupor. No one knows what to do. No one talks. Rather they walk in the streets with their faces turned down, their minds numbed with shock. The invaders came for the town’s coal mine and it is imperative it speed up the processing and coal shipments for the war effort. But as days and weeks pass, the Town’s citizenry regains their balance and begin rebelling in small ways. They are always polite to the invaders, but never friendly; a strategy that intensifies the loneliness and misery of the occupying soldiers. Their work in the mine is intentionally slow and when they can, they make small sabotages. The Moon is Down—a title borrowed from MacBeth—truly is a celebration of democracy. The townspeople are rendered with realism—there are collaborators, cowards, profiteers, and resistors. Rather than dehumanizing the invading soldiers, Steinbeck paints them in a genuine manner, as simple men following orders with a mindless allegiance to an authoritarian system. A system with a single head and no room for its subjects to question their great leader’s portrayal of reality. The Moon is Down is as relevant today as when it was written so many decades ago. It has the power to build morale in our darkening world where fascism and authoritarianism are rising. It is a blueprint for quiet defiance. And it showcases fascism’s primary flaw—an inability for anyone other than the leader to think—which is the opposite of democracy’s greatest strength.

Find The Moon is Down on Amazon—click here for the Kindle edition and here for the paperback.