Baying at The Moon

John Steinbeck's The Moon is Down (TIME, March 9) has stirred up (as book and play) the year's liveliest literary fight. By now the battle has become a general war, involving book reviewers, theater critics, editors, people who write letters to the newspapers, diplomats, college professors and Dorothy Thompson. Two great questions are at issue: 1) Does Steinbeck put too much faith in the moral superiority of democracy? 2) Is Steinbeck wrong in portraying German soldiers as human beings? It has even been suggested that The Moon is veiled Nazi propaganda. In Manhattan the Belgian Commissioner of Information objected to Colonel Lanser, one of Steinbeck's Germans who recalls how, in World War I, an old Belgian woman killed twelve Germans with a long black hatpin. Said the Commissioner: "Mr. Steinbeck ... does a disservice to the Belgian reputation for dignity and fair play."

Prominent among those who think that the Steinbeck moon is made of green cheese are:

> New Yorker Critic Clifton Fadiman ("It seduces us to rest on the oars of our own moral superiority").

> Humorist James Thurber ("This little book needs more guts and less moon. . . If these are German officers ... I will eat the manuscript of your next play . . .").

> The pinko New Republic ("Don't think that Mr. Steinbeck's Nazis are the people who actually invaded Norway. If they were, the free nations wouldn't need planes, tanks and gasoline rationing to defeat them. The job could be done effectively with dynamite and bonbons.").

Warmest defenders of The Moon are Novelist Pearl Buck, Drama Critic Brooks Atkinson, Dorothy Thompson, Book Reviewer Lewis Gannett. Gannett called the "totalitarian crusade" against the story "a depressing example of wartime hysteria." Said Dorothy Thompson: "I know dozens of German officers who were thoroughly mature when last I enjoyed friendly relations with them, and they were just like [Colonel Lanser].... The enormous power in Mr. Steinbeck's drama is that it is not an attack on Nazis. It is an attack on Naziism." Meanwhile The Moon is Down is doing quite nicely. As a novel, it has sold 450,000 copies. As a play, it has entertained when it closed last fortnight, some 56,000 theatergoers. Producer Darryl Zanuck, who paid $300,000 for the film rights, is rushing production of the movie version.

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