In 1955 Walt Disney showed a private screening of his new film Man and the Moon to President Eisenhower and his generals at the Pentagon. Three months later the US announced that they would be sending a satellite into space.
In 1950s America, the combination of Cold War paranoia and can-do democracy traded traditional frontier ambitions for a shoot at the Moon. In comic books and on TV, folksy history around the powerful symbols of the horse and rifle morphed into a new obsession with the rocketship and the ray-gun.
Walt Disney was a space enthusiast. His theme park laid out Tomorrowland next door to Frontierland, so as you strolled through, eating popcorn, all you had to do was swap your coney-skin cap for a space helmet. Progress was that simple.
In the American psyche, the words “science” and “fiction” were never clearly separated when it came to space, and this turned out to be an enormous advantage over Soviet materialism. Nothing happens without a story — it wasn’t that the US had the best technology — to begin with the Soviet Union was ahead in the space race — but the US had the best story — the age-old dreams of space and the Moon were powerfully grafted on to America’s postwar, post-nuclear need for a new narrative about themselves in the scheme of things. “One small step for (a) man, one giant leap for mankind” was exactly the “small-town hero saves the world” that was already embedded in their DNA. The Moon was the perfect surface for a re-write.
The sci-fi writer Arthur C. Clarke had already written about the colonised Moon in his 1955 novel Earthlight. He took his title from a strange 1638 fantasy by the Bishop of Hereford, where the Moon’s inhabitants sleep all day and move about in “earthshine”.
Clarke was so popular that in 1969, when the moon launch and landing finally happened, he was at Cape Kennedy for CBS TV. It was the sci-fi writer, not the scientists, that America wanted to hear, and Clarke did not disappoint. As Apollo 11 blasted into orbit, Clarke told America: “This is the last day of the old world.” Of course, Cambodia, Vietnam, Cuba, the Ku Klux Klan, the Cold War, the previous year’s assassinations of Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King, hadn’t gone away, but Moon was the best bedtime story ever; all the earth-bound problems were knocked out of the headlines, and a soothing narrative of a new world took over from the dirty mess down below.
When President Nixon called moon week “the greatest week in the history of the world since Creation”, he meant it literally, but his image unconsciously placed the whole extravaganza at the level of mythic narrative.
Which is where it began: the earliest written moon story is by Lucian, the Greek, in the second century AD, where he describes the Moon, not as a barren rock, but as “a great country in the air, like to a shining island”. Thomas More had this text in mind when he wrote his philosophical tract, Utopia, in 1515 — “the island of Utopia is shaped like a new Moon. . .”.
Most writers thought of the Moon as colonised by a race morally superior to our own. When Cyrano de Bergerac — he of the long nose and passion for Roxanne — went to the Moon in 1656, he found that Adam and Eve and St John the Evangelist had set up camp there. Daniel Defoe, author of Robinson Crusoe, wrote a political novel, The Consolidator, in 1705, in which it is possible to travel from China to the Moon, where his hero learns lessons in good government.
The Enlightenment no longer accepted the Medieval and Renaissance world view of the Moon as the Great Boundary — God on the far side, in perfect space, fallen creation in the sub-lunary sphere below, but the idea of the Moon as a Utopia of a kind, persisted. Just as Chaucer was able to whizz Troilus up past the Moon to look down at the futility of life on Earth — a trope used by Shakespeare and Dante, as well as Spenser in The Faerie Queene, so the 18th-century Baron Munchausen plays with the comedy effect of the aloofness of the Moon, away from earthly cares.
Later, Kafka, in his remarkable The Bucket Rider, is still using the idea of rising Moonwards as carefree space. Italo Calvino has a wonderful 1970s story — The Daughters of the Moon — where a troop of identical goddesses, modern day Dianas, have to rescue the Moon from a car-wreckers joint under Brooklyn Bridge. As they pull her free, she suddenly rises, and all the Dianas go with her — you can see them swinging in their hammocks if you look close enough. . .
There are so many folk tales: the Man in the Moon, the rabbit that lives on the Moon, the cow that jumps over it, the “wise men” who trap the full Moon in a well, only to find that she has disappeared two weeks later. Human kind has always been obsessed by the Moon, always made up a story about her. But it’s not until the 19th century that propulsion becomes the narrative dominant. In 1865, Jules Verne wrote his best-seller, From the Earth to the Moon, where a rocket ship is fired from Florida, reaches the Moon and eventually splashes down in the Pacific Ocean. Spot the exact match 103 years later. . .
From the prophetic to the bizarre: in 1869, an American Unitarian minister called Hale wrote Brick Moon, where a man-made Moon of bricks is launched into space via water-powered flywheels. Inside this moon men live without crime or drink and learn to colonise space.
President Ulysses Grant was so taken with Brick Moon that he looked into the feasibility of building it. Space travel was progress for the human soul. It even had a name — The Winged Gospel. Perhaps that wasn’t so far fetched — in 1969, the usual Christmas crib in the Piazza Navone in Rome had the novelty of an astronaut kneeling before the Baby Jesus.
Moon stories stretch on and on — H. G. Wells’s 1901 The First Men in the Moon uses an anti-gravity shield to get out of Earth’s orbit. Doctor Dolittle finds prehistoric man hiding out there in 1928. In the Fifties, Tin Tin and Snowy crash-land in a mysterious crater. Doctor Who meets his usual enemies. Paul Auster’s 1978 Moon Palace transforms a very ancient idea of the Moon as a piece of parchment where all the books written have been written already.
Alice Oswald’s wonderful new poem, A Sleepwalk on the Severn, (2009) draws down our long close relationship with the Moon; the Moon that even now, against the busyness of the day, nightly imprints herself on our imaginations.
And imagination is what the moon story is about. Everybody remembers the hominoid in Arthur C. Clarke’s, 2001: A Space Odyssey, dreaming of touching the Moon.
Clarke’s book is still the best known of modern moon narratives, and no doubt why conspiracy theorists believe that the whole thing never happened, and was filmed by Stanley Kubrick in the Nevada Desert. . .
But that’s another story.
