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

2. Norway

2 0 American public. According to Life magazine, they were "trumpeted louder than any literary event of the season."35 (Prepublication sales of the novel version had surpassed those of The Grapes o/Wrath two to one, and this lead continued for several weeks.)36 The dramatic production played to packed houses for several months.37 Warren French has noted that the play garnered two votes for the New York Critics' Circle award for best play of 1942-43, although, as it turned out, no award was given for that season.38 After its run on Broadway, The Moon Is Down was sold to Twentieth Century-Fox for what was then a phenomenal $300,000. Directed by Irving PicheI, with a screenplay by Nunnally Johnson, the film version appeared in March 1943, one year after the publication of the novel. Like the novel and the play, the movie was popularwith the general public, although it also received mixed reviews. According to Joseph R. Millichap in Steinbeck and Film, "The propagandistic emphasis in both the novel and the play versions of The Moon Is Down is escalated in the film adaptation."39 NotwithstandingwhatMillichap perceived as a greaterpropagandistic emphasis, however, the OWl (the same organization Steinbeck erroneously recalled being associated with when he c()mposed The Moon Is Down) had, by the time the movie version appeared, become disturbed by Hollywood's frequent stereotyping of Germans and AMERICAN RECEPTION Japanese as heel-clicking Huns and slant-eyed sadists. In 1943 the OWl commended a number ofwhat it regarded as sophisticated movies which treated the enemy as a serious threat to basic institutions. Among them was the film adaptation of The Moon Is Down.40 Despite the general popular and commercial success of The Moon Is Down in the United States, and even though the number of critics who applauded the work was at the very leastroughly equalto the number ofthose who denounced it, Steinbeck was stunned by the kinds of attacks spearheaded by Thurber and Fadiman. Thurber's review in the New Republic was especially galling. According to Jackson Benson, the problem was his attitude. He is so certain and so terribly self-righteous. A book review is not just a book announcement or public evaluation; it is also very often a public trial of the author's worth, professional and sometimes personal, and it is a letter from critic to writer. Thurber takes great pleasure in holding up Steinbeck's book to public ridicule, mocking it as only Thurber can mock, and then sending a letter to the author saying, in effect, ccyou silly bastard."41 The Grapes of Wrath had established Steinbeck as one ofthe three or four best-knownwriters in the world. He had been hailed for his enlightened and humane 22 political views as well as for his skill as a writer. To a generation of liberal artists and intellectuals committed to the notion that art should serve social progress, Steinbeck had emerged as the preeminent proletarian novelist of his day. Suddenly the publication of his first novel since The Grapes of Wrath brought criticism which questioned not only his skill as awriter but alsoand far worse--his credentials as an antifascist, his political instincts, and his very patriotism. Over ten years later, in October 1953, Steinbeck referred to the affair in an essay entitled "My Short Novels." His sarcastic reference after so many years to those who had attacked The Moon Is Down shortly after its publication (chiefly Thurber and Fadiman) reveals how deeply he had been wounded by their attacks. The war came on, and I wrote The Moon Is Down as a kind of celebration of the durability of democracy. I couldn't conceive that the book would be denounced . I had written of Germans as men, not supermen , and this was considered a very weak attitude to take. I couldn't make much sense out of this, and it seems absurd now that we know the Germans were men, and thus fallible, even defeatable. It was said that I didn't know anything about war, and this was perfectly true, though how Park Avenue commandos found me out I can't conceive.42 AMERICAN RECEPTION A full decade after that comment, Steinbeck described once more his earlier astonishment when The Moon Is Down was "violently, almost hysterically, attacked by several powerful critics as being defeatist, unreal, complacent and next door to treasonable...