Lieutenant Tonder was dressed in his great gray overcoat. He entered the room and took off his helmet and he spoke pleadingly. “I don’t mean any harm. Please let me come in.”
Molly said, “What do you want?” She shut the door behind him and he said, “Miss I want to talk, that’s all. I want to hear you talk. That’s all I want.”
“Are you forcing yourself on me?” Molly asked.
“No miss, just let me stay a little while and then I’ll go.”
“What is it you want?”
Tonder tried to explain. “Can you understand this-can you believe this? Just for a little while, can’t we talk together like people-together?”
The preceding excerpt is on page 126 and 127 of John Steinbeck’s 1942 novel, The Moon Is Down. A little farther down page 127 and continuing on page 128 the conversation between Molly and Lieutenant Tonder unveils surprising emotional depth I didn’t expect to find in a novel set in a war-torn setting.
Molly continued, speaking quietly, “Why you’re lonely. It’s as simple as that, isn’t it?”
Tonder licked his lips and he spoke eagerly . “That’s it,” he said. “You understand. I knew you would. I knew you’d have to.” His words came tumbling out.
“I’m lonely to the point of illness. I’m lonely in the quiet and the hatred.” And he said pleadingly, “Can’t we talk, just a little bit?”
Before I share a summary of John Steinbeck’s The Moon Is Down, allow me to explain why I highlighted the preceding excerpts for you. A month or so ago I came across a televised conversation between Heather Cox Richardson, an American historian author and professor currently teaching at Boston College, and Andrew Delbanco, a professor of American Studies at Columbia University, (Wikipedia). This past February they were speaking together at the New York Public Library. If you love history and literature, I highly recommend you make the time to listen to their conversation.
Professor Delbanco made a statement that resonated with me. Professor allow me to paraphrase here.
As a contrast to Richardson’s factual scopes of history, Delbanco iterated that literature has the ability to create an emotional story in an historical setting with a focus on the characters and how that setting shapes their personal stories.
With that in mind, I share Steinbeck’s empathetic creation of the character Lieutenant Tonder wearing his sadness like ill fitting clothes with a broken zipper. Searching pleadingly to find a person to have a simple conversation with, is Tonder’s apparent broken zippered solution to ridding himself of his sad clinging garments. Steinbeck’s recently widowed Molly has an unanticipated emotional solution to his problem!
The Moon Is Down is a war novel that never tells me, the reader, where the town is and what nation the invading and occupying soldiers belong to. Snow, a port and a coal mine, that is deemed necessary for the occupying army’s nation’s expanding war effort, suggests a northern European city as the location of the occupation. Professor Delbanco’s public library conversation alluded to literature’s gift of fleshing out cold facts of a story’s historical setting. In The Moon Is Down Steinbeck’s characters each blossomed from his literary husbandry. Each of his characters were colored by emotional fragrances that announced plots of tension, sadness, fear, anger, hope and finally grief. Most swayed, bent, moved and fell before the winds of war.
As is my habit in my monthly summaries I will not share too much detail in case you want to read Steinbeck’s The Moon Is Down. I will tell you that Steinbeck received the King Haakon VII Freedom Cross after his novel was published. It was illegally published in Nazi-occupied France. Other editions were secretly published across Europe. Note too that it was the best known work of US Literature in the Soviet Union during World War II. Again (Wikipedia) stated that it was written with the purpose of motivating resistance movements in occupied countries. The book has appeared in at least ninety two editions!
This month, as I relax before my metaphorical lighthouse, I am pleasantly surprised to witness the ever-present beam illuminate a calm, smooth surface of our ocean mistress. Her waves this morning gently caress our sand and rocks. Yes a kiss, not a wave goodby after a slap, or worse, a windy frothing crash. I am old enough to know that a calm ocean surface can hide colliding currents of clammy discord just below her surface. The rising sun peeks his golden eye just above that calm briny blanket; its head rising too from a feathery cloud of a pillow. That sunny peek, with the help of the calm salty mistress, builds a yellow path that reaches across her lapping bed to touch me and my extinguished lighthouse candle. A yellow brick road of hope? May be, but I know that if I follow that golden road there is a chance I will be led to wars that rage on now with possibly more tomorrow.
Steinbeck’s war time novel was looked upon as a motivational tool for people to resist the yoke of occupational armies. Unfortunately that tool is still needed in Ukraine, the Middle East and potentially Taiwan. During the last eighty-two years, since the The Moon Is Down was first published, it should have been recirculated in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, parts of Europe and Africa, Yes, this morning our moon is down but the dawning sunlight only illuminates how horrifically we still treat each other! I truly pray that we can accept the light within each of us that illuminates unconditional love. I ask myself to try harder. I ask of my family to join me in trying and I ask of you to try too!
Thank you for reading.
Be in peace and joy!
Mark