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    John Steinbeck Goes to War: The Moon is Down as Propaganda
    John Steinbeck Goes to War: The Moon is Down as Propaganda
    John Steinbeck Goes to War: The Moon is Down as Propaganda
    Ebook143 pages2 hours

    John Steinbeck Goes to War: The Moon is Down as Propaganda

    By Donald V. Coers

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    In March 1942, a desperate period for the allies in World War II, John Steinbeck published his propaganda novel The Moon is Down­—the story of ruthless invaders who overrun a militarily helpless country.  Throughout the novel, Steinbeck underscored both the fatal weakness of the “invincible” unnamed aggressors and the inherent power of the human values shard by the “conquered” people.

    The Moon is Down created an immediate sensation among American literary critics; fierce debate erupted over Steinbeck’s uncommonly sympathetic portrayal of the enemy and the novel’s power as a vehicle for propaganda.  Fifty years later, Coers continues the debate, relying heavily on unpublished letters and personal interviews with the lawyers, book dealers, actors, publishers, and housewives associated with the resistance movements in Western Europe.  Clandestine translations of The Moon Is Down quickly appeared and were widely circulated under the noses of the Gestapo.   Coers documents the fate of Steinbeck’s novel in the hands of World War II resistance fighters and deepens our appreciation of Steinbeck’s unique ability to express the feelings of oppressed peoples.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherUniversity Alabama Press
    Release dateJun 15, 2008
    ISBN9780817381769
    John Steinbeck Goes to War: The Moon is Down as Propaganda
    Author

    Donald V. Coers

    John Steinbeck, born in Salinas, California, in 1902, grew up in a fertile agricultural valley, about twenty-five miles from the Pacific Coast. Both the valley and the coast would serve as settings for some of his best fiction. In 1919 he went to Stanford University, where he intermittently enrolled in literature and writing courses until he left in 1925 without taking a degree. During the next five years he supported himself as a laborer and journalist in New York City, all the time working on his first novel, Cup of Gold (1929). After marriage and a move to Pacific Grove, he published two California books, The Pastures of Heaven (1932) and To a God Unknown (1933), and worked on short stories later collected in The Long Valley (1938). Popular success and financial security came only with Tortilla Flat (1935), stories about Monterey’s paisanos. A ceaseless experimenter throughout his career, Steinbeck changed courses regularly. Three powerful novels of the late 1930s focused on the California laboring class: In Dubious Battle (1936), Of Mice and Men (1937), and the book considered by many his finest, The Grapes of Wrath (1939). The Grapes of Wrath won both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize in 1939. Early in the 1940s, Steinbeck became a filmmaker with The Forgotten Village (1941) and a serious student of marine biology with Sea of Cortez (1941). He devoted his services to the war, writing Bombs Away (1942) and the controversial play-novelette The Moon is Down (1942). Cannery Row (1945), The Wayward Bus (1948), another experimental drama, Burning Bright (1950), and The Log from the Sea of Cortez (1951) preceded publication of the monumental East of Eden (1952), an ambitious saga of the Salinas Valley and his own family’s history. The last decades of his life were spent in New York City and Sag Harbor with his third wife, with whom he traveled widely. Later books include Sweet Thursday (1954), The Short Reign of Pippin IV: A Fabrication (1957), Once There Was a War (1958), The Winter of Our Discontent (1961), Travels with Charley in Search of America (1962), America and Americans (1966), and the posthumously published Journal of a Novel: The East of Eden Letters (1969), Viva Zapata! (1975), The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights (1976), and Working Days: The Journals of The Grapes of Wrath (1989). Steinbeck received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1962, and, in 1964, he was presented with the United States Medal of Freedom by President Lyndon B. Johnson. Steinbeck died in New York in 1968. Today, more than thirty years after his death, he remains one of America's greatest writers and cultural figures.

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      Book preview

      John Steinbeck Goes to War - Donald V. Coers

      John Steinbeck Goes to War

      John Steinbeck Goes to War

      The Moon Is Down as Propaganda

      DONALD V. COERS

      The University of Alabama Press

      Tuscaloosa

      Copyright © 1991

      The University of Alabama Press

      Tuscaloosa, Alabama 35487-0380

      All rights reserved

      Manufactured in the United States of America

      ∞

      The paper on which this book is printed meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Science—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials,

      ANSI Z39.48-1984.

      designed by

      zig zeigler

      Coers, Donald V., 1941–

          John Steinbeck goes to war: The moon is down as propaganda / Donald V. Coers.

                         p.      cm.

      Includes bibliographical references and index.

          ISBN-13 978-08173-5328-5 (pbk.: alk paper)

          ISBN-10 0-8173-5328-3

        1. Steinbeck, John, 1902–1968. Moon is down. 2. Steinbeck, John, 1902–1968—Appreciation—Europe. 3. Steinbeck, John, 1902–1968—Political and social views. 4. World War, 1939–1945—Literature and the war. 5. World War, 1939–1945—Propaganda. 6. Propaganda, American. I. Title.

      PS3537.T3234M683 2006

      813’.52—dc20

      90-26583 CIP

      ISBN-13 978-0-8173-8176-9 (electronic)

      FOR MARY JEANNE

      Contents

      PREFACE

      1. AMERICAN RECEPTION

      2. NORWAY

      3. DENMARK

      4. HOLLAND

      5. FRANCE

      6. OTHER COUNTRIES

      7. CONCLUSION

      NOTES

      WORKS CITED

      INDEX

      Preface

      N EARLY March 1942, a scant three months after Pearl Harbor, John Steinbeck published his play-novel The Moon Is Down, igniting in this country the most heated literary debate of the Second World War. He had intended to celebrate the durability of democracy with this fablelike tale, in which a small, peace-loving country, rather like Norway, is demoralized after being invaded by a powerful fascist state, rather like Nazi Germany, but recovers from the shock of defeat and occupation to form a promising resistance movement. Steinbeck had been eager to lend his talents to the Allied war effort, and he had hoped that The Moon Is Down would boost morale both in his own country and in occupied Europe by proclaiming that free people are inherently stronger than the herd people controlled by totalitarian leaders, and that, despite the initial advantage of the militarily mighty dictators, the democracies would eventually win the war.

      Steinbeck’s optimism was not widely shared during the dark winter days of 1942, when the Japanese were still advancing in the Pacific and the Germans, having already marched through much of Europe, continued on the offensive in Russia and in North Africa. In fact, his faith seemed dangerously naive to some influential American critics who were convinced that Steinbeck’s message was bad propaganda because it made an Allied victory seem inevitable. These critics, who were led by Clifton Fadiman and James Thurber, believed that a superior propagandistic ploy would have been to present the bitter prospect that the war could very easily still be lost. Steinbeck’s detractors also objected to his depiction of the Nazilike invaders in his tale. He had done something unusual for a propagandist of this period. He had presented the enemy not as demons but as thoughtful and intelligent human beings committing evil. Steinbeck believed that the customary propagandistic hype would be ineffective among Europeans who were experiencing the occupation firsthand and who would know therefore that not all Germans were monsters. His critics, on the other hand, claimed that those Europeans would be baffled and even demoralized by such idealized Nazis.

      To be sure, Steinbeck had his defenders during the months in which the debate over The Moon Is Down was played out in American journals and popular magazines. Among them were sympathetic literary critics as well as interested readers and foreign and domestic observers who were confident that Steinbeck’s effort would inspire hope and stiffen resolve in occupied Europe. Not until after the war, however, did we know how the novel had actually been received there. Letters written to Steinbeck by former members of the resistance, along with the accounts of several European scholars and writers and the commendations accompanying an award given to Steinbeck by an appreciative Norwegian government in 1946, all suggest that The Moon Is Down was indeed popular reading as well as effective propaganda in much of Nazi-occupied Europe.

      But during the nearly half century since the end of the war, almost nothing has been added to the record about what actually happened to the novel in countries under German control—about how it was smuggled past the Nazis, translated into various languages, and illegally printed and distributed. Nor have we learned much about why it was popular in occupied countries, or, in fact, about just how popular it actually was. This study attempts to supply the missing details, as vital to our appreciation of Steinbeck the writer as they are to our understanding of propagandistic techniques and of the anti-Nazi resistance in western Europe. Those details are provided mostly through letters and personal interviews of people who were directly involved.

      I have incurred numerous debts during my research and writing. The earliest is to the National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Seminar Program, for giving me the opportunity to spend the summer of 1979 at Stanford University attending Ian Watt’s seminar The Historical and Sociological Criticism of Literature. I am grateful to Mr. Watt for his guidance of my major seminar project, later expanded into the present book, and for his comments on the completed manuscript. For early financial support I thank the South Central Modern Languages Association. Its overseas research award defrayed the cost of the European travel necessary for most of my interviews.

      For information about Steinbeck’s work in government agencies at the time he conceived the idea for The Moon Is Down, I am indebted to John Houseman, Geoffrey M. T. Jones, Richard Helms, Archibald MacLeish, Thomas Troy, Kermit Roosevelt, Donald Morris, C. Brooks Peters, Joseph Persico, Norman Cousins, Pascal Covici, Jr., Richard Dunlop, David Schoenbrun, Alan Williams, Theodore White, Charles MacDonald, Richard Sommers, Larry R. Strawderman, and Roberta S. Knapp.

      A number of individuals assisted me in locating former members of the resistance and others with firsthand information about the translation, printing, distribution, and reception of The Moon Is Down in Nazi-occupied Denmark, Norway, Holland, and France and in wartime Sweden, Switzerland, Italy, and China. I am most appreciative of their time-consuming efforts. They include Per Hasselgärde, Gordon Hølmebakk, Magne Skodvin, Geert Lübberhuizen, Mogens Knudsen, Søren Baggesen, B. Munk Olsen, Jørgen Erik Nielsen, Antonio Carrelli, Giovanna Bernau, G. Debusscher, Henning Gehrs, Henrik Lundbak, Svein Johs Ottesen, Otto Lindhardt, Alan Williams, Charles MacDonald, Jean-Pierre Rosselli, Pierre Rosselli, Ingebjørg Nesheim, Kristin Brudevoll, P. J. Riis, Carl Wandel, A. F. M. van der Ploeg, and a spokesman for the Zhong Hua Book Company of Beijing.

      I owe a considerable debt to those who, with invariable kindness, granted interviews or otherwise gave me information vital to this book: Jacques Debû-Bridel, Jørgen Jacobsen, Frits von der Lippe, Bo Beskow, Mrs. John Steinbeck, William Colby, the Zhong Hua Book Company of Beijing, Yvonne Motchane-Desvignes, Ferdinand Sterneberg, Svein Johs Ottesen, Arne Skouen, Chien Gochuen, John Dahl, Gordon Hølmebakk, Mogens Knudsen, Pierre Rosselli, Mogens Staffeldt, Richard Dunlop, Kjell Larsgaard, Larry R. Strawderman, Veit Wyler, Oddvar Aas, Torbjørn Trysnes, Giovanna Bernau, and Piero Cecchini.

      For translating foreign newspaper articles, letters, passages from books, and other material, I thank Mary Gutermuth, Hanna Lewis, Don Stalling, Eva Van Hooser, Henning Gehrs, Henrik Lundbak, and Jørgen Jacobsen.

      Several librarians and archivists were especially helpful during the course of my research: Susan Riggs at Stanford; Ellen Dunlap, Ken Craven, and Catherine Henderson at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, The University of Texas at Austin; Erling Grønland at the University of Oslo; Leif H. Rosenstock, Henning Gehrs, and Henrik Lundbak at the Museum of Denmark’s Fight for Freedom, 1940–1945; Lotte Hellinga and Anna E. C. Simoni of the British Library; Synnøve Vervik and Hanne Mulelider of Gyldendal Norsk Forlag; Shirley Parotti of the Newton Gresham Library, Sam Houston State University; and the director and staff of the Éditions de Minuit in Paris.

      I am grateful to William B. Todd of the University of Texas at Austin and to several of my colleagues at Sam Houston State University who have read various portions of my manuscript and offered useful suggestions: Barbara Tyson, Rob Adams, Paul Ruffin, Hugh Meredith, Eleanor Mitchell, and my chairman, James Goodwin. Tetsumaro Hayashi of the Steinbeck Society of America at Ball State University also offered constructive suggestions. Special credit is due Gary Bell, Don Stalling, and my wife, Mary Jeanne, for their encouragement throughout the course of my research and writing as well as for careful commentary on the entire manuscript. I also express my appreciation to Elaine Steinbeck for her help and gracious support.

      I must acknowledge warmly the invaluable advice and the many courtesies of Acquisitions Editor Nicole Mitchell and the staff of The University of Alabama Press, the technical assistance of Jeanne Coers, who typed the final manuscript, and of Westin McCoy, Laura Howey, and Henry Howey, who helped prepare the final version, and the special help extended by Hank Conaway, Richard Allen, Ralph Cooley, Vikár László, Virginia Irvin, and Friedel Werner.

      Finally, I give heartfelt thanks to my wife Mary Jeanne, my daughter Jeanne, and my son John, for their

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