A colonel and a mayor sit in a drawing room on worn gilt chairs, in The Moon Is Down by John Steinbeck, and talk politely about hostages. The colonel is intelligent, exhausted and perfectly aware that his orders cannot succeed. The mayor is a mild man who has never been required to be anything else, and who is about to be executed.
Nobody raises their voice anywhere in The Moon Is Down by John Steinbeck, and that restraint is both the novel’s method and the reason it was once a hanging offence to own.
The Moon Is Down Never Names Either Country
The Moon Is Down by John Steinbeck was written in 1942, while the outcome of the war was genuinely in doubt, and it describes an unnamed northern town with a coal mine and heavy snow, taken in under an hour by an unnamed army with ranks and a Leader.
Readers at the time knew exactly which invasion was meant. Germany had taken Norway in a swift combined operation two years earlier, and the details line up. Steinbeck still refused to name anybody.
That choice looks like timidity and is the opposite. By declining to specify, he produced something any occupied people could read as their own, and that is precisely what happened. Underground presses translated it across the continent. In Fascist Italy, possession carried the death penalty. Copies were run off in Sweden under the title Natt uten måne and carried into Norway, where it became the most widely circulated illegal book of the occupation. After the war the Norwegian king decorated him for it.
The Charge Laid Against It at Home
American reviewers of The Moon Is Down by John Steinbeck were considerably less impressed, and a group should sit with their objection rather than dismissing it.
The complaint was that Steinbeck had gone easy on the enemy. Colonel Lanser is a veteran of the previous war, tired and courteous and clear about the futility of what he is doing. His lieutenants are a lovesick romantic who wants to die beautifully in battle and a young man who spends his off-duty hours fantasising about a colleague’s sister. The occupiers are lonely, bored, homesick, and in one case so starved of ordinary human contact that he is killed by a widow he has tried clumsily to court.
In 1942, with the result unknown, a good many readers thought that giving the invaders interior lives bordered on treachery.
The defence is structural. An enemy who is simply monstrous can be filed away as an aberration. An enemy who is competent and reasonable and proceeds anyway is a description of how occupation actually works, and it is far more frightening. Lanser is permitted to understand that he will lose, and to carry on, because that is what the system requires of him.
What the Town in The Moon Is Down Actually Does
There is no uprising in The Moon Is Down by John Steinbeck and no heroics, which is the second thing modern readers find surprising.
The resistance consists of slowed work at the mine, machinery that breaks for no traceable reason, and an atmosphere in which the occupiers stop sleeping properly. A message goes out asking the British not to send soldiers but to parachute in small explosives, dynamite for the rails, grenades, even poison. The reasoning is explicit: if the drop is wide enough, the invaders will never know which townsman is armed.
It is a portrait of resistance as attrition and refusal rather than glory, and it has aged much better than the heroic version would have.
The Traitor Is the Most Modern Thing in It
Mr Corell keeps a shop in the town at the start of The Moon Is Down by John Steinbeck. He is well liked. He has also spent months preparing for the
arrival, and the warehouse the invaders billet in is stocked with exactly enough cots and blankets
for the battalion, because he laid them in.
What a group will find uncomfortably current is what happens to him afterwards. He expects to be
rewarded with authority and discovers that the occupiers find him useful but contemptible, that
his own neighbours will never speak to him again, and that he now belongs to neither side.
Colonel Lanser, who is a professional, treats him with open distaste.
Steinbeck gives the collaborator no grand motive. There is no ideology in it, only ambition and
the ordinary wish to matter more than a shopkeeper matters. Of all the figures in The Moon Is
Down by John Steinbeck, he is the one who would be easiest to write today without changing a
line.
Where a Group Will Push Back
Several things in the book are open to real criticism:
- Characters arrive as positions. The poet, the lecher, the professional soldier, the traitor. The allocation is visible on the page.
- Only Molly Morden among the townspeople gets a genuine interior, and she gets it in a single scene.
- The free men and herd men argument is stated outright, repeatedly, by characters who already agree, which is the one place the propaganda purpose shows.
- Keeping both countries anonymous costs the town its texture, and some readers will find it a diagram rather than a place.
The Line Everybody Takes From The Moon Is Down
An officer, off guard, says that the flies have conquered the flypaper. Within days the town has made a song of it, and the colonel is told to his face that his side keeps no secrets.
That image carries the book’s whole argument. The invaders hold every building, the mine, the port and the law, and they do not hold the place. Mayor Orden puts it more directly near the end: free men cannot begin a war, but once one has begun they can go on fighting in defeat, and herd men following a leader cannot, which is why herd men win battles and free men win wars.
Reading It With the Rest
The obvious companion is our analysis of Of Mice and Men, the first of his play-novelettes and the better demonstration of the form. For the same impulse to write something that changes what readers do, see The Grapes of Wrath, which is angrier and far less disciplined. Travels with Charley shows the older Steinbeck turning the same moral attention on his own country.
Final Thoughts
Most propaganda is unreadable once the emergency passes, and that is the proper test here.
The Moon Is Down by John Steinbeck survives it because it declines every easy move available to it. The enemy is not grotesque. The townspeople are not noble. Nobody is rescued. The mayor goes to his execution trying to recall a passage of Socrates and getting it slightly wrong, which is a far better last note than defiance would have been.
A group will finish it in an evening and argue about it for two hours, mostly about whether understanding your enemy is a moral achievement or a luxury that people under occupation could not afford. Steinbeck plainly thought it was the former, and several thousand people risked execution to read him saying so.