The Moon Is Down by John Steinbeck
- Apr 19
- 3 min read
Last week, I wrote about the universal pull of moon stories in the wake of the Artemis II lunar mission. Now, on to the book I read recently that put me in a celestial frame of mind: John Steinbeck's World War II novella, The Moon Is Down.
I only came across this Steinbeck book recently and decided to read it because I was intrigued by the title. It comes from a chilling scene in Macbeth, when Fleance warns that "the moon is down" just before Macbeth murders King Duncan. For Shakespeare, a hidden moon meant more than nightfall — it signaled the absence of a moral force.
Steinbeck wrote this book in 1942 as a work of anti-Nazi propaganda meant to bolster the Allied cause. It is set in a small country that has been swiftly conquered in a single morning by an invading army, helped by betrayal from within. “By ten-forty-five it was all over," Steinbeck writes chillingly in his opening line. The country is not named, but it seems to be a stand-in for Norway, while the invaders are unmistakably Nazis.
The townspeople fight back in ways large and small. They include the mayor, whose unshakeable dignity unnerves the invaders, and a courageous young miner who refuses to work for the enemy soldiers and is sentenced to death after killing one of them. My favorite character is Annie, the mayor's irascible cook, who channels her bad temper into fierce resistance.
Steinbeck does not portray the invaders as caricatures or monsters. The soldiers who take over the town are at turns fearful and homesick, and some seem to recognize that they will never hold any moral sway over the place they now occupy. They are not presented positively, but they are depicted as human.
The Moon Is Down is only a little more than 100 pages and is written simply and directly. The dialogue often reads like that of a play, and Steinbeck quickly repurposed the book into a drama that ran on Broadway during the war.
While this book is undoubtedly a classic and served an important purpose at the time, it left me wanting something more visceral. I understand that Steinbeck's goal was to create a rather simple fable with archetypal protagonists that could serve as a rallying cry for democracy. However, its lack of any mention, even obliquely, of the intensifying persecution of European Jews during this period lessens its power for me. Only much later did the full extent of the Holocaust become known, but it's an omission that seems glaring to me as a contemporary reader. Yes, Steinbeck was writing in real time, and it made sense that he wanted to create a story that would appeal to the general reader, but the evils of the Nazis were very specific ones.
What interests me most about the book are the stories of how it was passed on clandestinely during the war. My edition features a long introduction by the Steinbeck scholar Donald V. Coers, who writes about resistance members who, at great risk to themselves, translated and disseminated the book. Simply possessing a copy could lead to arrest in fascist Italy, for example.
Coers recounts the story of a young Danish bookseller, Mogens Staffeldt, who sold his life insurance policy in exchange for a mimeograph machine to make thousands of copies of the novel in his bookstore. Incredibly, his store was on the ground floor of the same building as the Gestapo headquarters in Copenhagen. When Danish students came by the shop to collect copies of the book, Staffeldt would enlist the help of passing Gestapo officers to assist them in moving — unknowingly — boxes of the anti-Nazi book for distribution around the country.
I was fascinated by this story and found an oral history that Staffeldt recorded in 1981 about his role with the Danish resistance. He recounts that it was his wife who toiled night after night preparing the stencils to print Steinbeck's book. Later on, Staffeldt played a key role in helping smuggle Danish Jews across the sea to neutral Sweden to prevent them from being sent to concentration camps. More than 95% of Danish Jews survived the Holocaust, in what was one of the most successful rescue efforts of the war.
Returning to my moon theme, Staffeldt's story is a testament to how human beings can do extraordinary things to resist darkness.
