Book Review: 'A Bell for Adano'

In 1981, shortly after my maternal grandmother died, my Mom traveled to Bogota, Colombia to help her brother and sister clear out my grandparents’ apartment and divide some heirlooms among themselves.

My aunt Martha and uncle Octavio ended up taking way more than two thirds of the apartment’s contents; they lived in Bogota and had definitely more kids than Mom, so it just made logistical sense for my mother to only claim two pieces of Grandma’s antique furniture for herself, some family pictures and a ring for my older sister and a few books – in English – from my grandfather’s library for me.

Though two of the books were paperback editions of tomes published before 1977 (the year of my grandfather’s death), one of them was a small and thin hardcover with no dust jacket.  It looked – as many of my grandfather’s books did – well-cared for and had that indescribable but pleasant “old book” smell, and on the spine it said A Bell for Adano – John Hersey.  (It is, as it happens, a wartime edition; it was printed in January 1945 and includes a note from the publisher informing readers that the book is smaller than prewar hardcovers due to rationing of paper and other materials.)

Although I had not yet read Hersey’s Hiroshima – his famous 1946 non-fiction account of the atomic bombing of that Japanese city – I knew who he was because I had read an excerpt of his book Into the Valley: a Skirmish of the Marines (1943) in an American Heritage book about World War II; Hersey, then a young war correspondent for Time magazine, had covered part of the 1942-43 campaign on the island of Guadalcanal, and Into the Valley described a minor battle between a company of Marines and a Japanese unit in vivid - if sparingly written - detail.

Like many war correspondents, Hersey reported from various theaters of operations, including the Mediterranean.  His experiences during the July 1943 invasion of Sicily and its aftermath inspired Hersey to write his first novel, A Bell for Adano, which was originally published in 1944 and won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction the following year.

Even though it begins on July 10, 1943 with a vivid description of the arrival of a small infantry unit at the fictional town of Adano, Sicily, A Bell for Adano is not a “men in combat” story.  Rather, Hersey’s focus is on the more mundane aspects of the military governance of former enemy territories such as Italy, and Major Victor Joppolo, his central character, is Adano’s de facto Army-appointed mayor and not a “gung-ho” infantry commander. 

Hersey makes his intentions crystal clear in his foreword:

Major Victor Joppolo, U.S.A., was a good man. You will see that.  It is the whole reason why I wrote this story.

He was the Amgot officer of a small Italian town called Adano.  He was more or less the American mayor after our invasion. 

After a brief – and drily humorous – explanation of what the Allied Military Government Occupied Territory did and his opinion that “(t)here were probably not any really bad men in Amgot, but there were some stupid ones,” Hersey writes:

That is why I think it is important for you to know about Major Joppolo.  He was a good man, though weak in certain attractive, human ways, and what he did and was not able to do in Adano represented in miniature what America can and cannot do in Europe.  Since he happened to be a good man, his works represented the best of the possibilities.

America is the international country. Major Joppolo was an Italian-American going to work in Italy.  Our Army has Yugoslavs and Frenchmen and Austrians and Czechs and Norwegians in it, and everywhere our Army goes in Europe, a man can turn to the private beside him and say: “Hey, Mac, what is this furriner saying?  How much does he want for that bunch of grapes?” And Mac will be able to translate.

The book, which was inspired by several real places, persons and events which Hersey covered during the invasion of Sicily in the summer of ’43, takes place mostly in Adano, a fictional stand-in for the town of Licata, a fishing port which also has a robust sulphur mining industry.  It opens with the arrival of Major Joppolo and his senior enlisted man, Military Police Sergeant Borth in Adano, which was undefended by German and Italian forces but has nevertheless suffered some collateral damage from the pre-invasion bombardment:

At the corner of the third alley running off the Via of October Twenty-eighth, the two men came on a dead Italian woman. She had been dressed in black. Her right leg was blown off and the flies for some reason preferred the sticky pool of blood and dust to her stump.

“Awful,” the Major said, for although the blood was still not yet dry, nevertheless there was already a beginning of a sweet but vomitous odor. “It’s a hell of a note,” he said, “that we had to do that to our friends.”

“Friends,” said Borth, “that’s a laugh.”

“It wasn’t them, not the ones like her,’ the Major said. “They weren’t our enemies. My mother’s mother must have been like her.  It wasn’t the poor ones like her, it was the bunch up there where we are going, those crooks in the City Hall.” 

“Be careful,” Borth said, and his face showed that he was teasing the Major again.  “You’re going to have your office in the City Hall. Be careful that you don’t get to be a crook too.”

“Lay off,” the Major said.

Borth said, “I don’t trust your conscience, sir, I’m appointing myself assistant conscience.”

“Lay off,” the Major said, and there was that echo.

The novel describes various incidents – some hilariously funny and some touchingly poignant – which take place during Major Joppolo’s stint as Amgot administrator of Adano, but its main story is centered on Joppolo’s efforts to find a replacement for the town’s 700-year-old bell, which was melted down by Benito Mussolini’s Fascist regime to make gun barrels.

As Hersey says in his foreword, Joppolo’s determination to undo the harm done to Adano by Mussolini and his black-shirted goons is a metaphor for America’s stated foreign policy during the Second World War.  A descendant of Italian immigrants, Joppolo wants to be the bridge between the people of war-torn Europe and the liberating forces from the New World.  He strives to be fair and just as Adano’s Amgot administrator, and his cultural heritage proves to be helpful whether he’s dealing with former Fascists such as town usher Zito Giovanni or his translator, Guiseppe Ribaudo, who proudly states that he’s from Cleveland, Ohio but was kicked out of the U.S. in 1940 because he was an illegal immigrant.

A Bell for Adano also chronicles Joppolo’s sometimes contentious dealings with the U.S, Army, especially the rocky relationship between the Major and General Marvin, the Patton-like commander of the 49th Infantry Division. 

Like the real-life commander (at the time) of the U.S. Seventh Army, Marvin is a brash, brusque and vain officer whose arrogance is only eclipsed by his spitefulness. After an incident involving a mule cart which was blocking Marvin’s armored car at a bridge near Adano, the Major’s humanitarian treatment of the Italians collides against the General’s “my way or the highway” command style.

My Take: Though A Bell for Adano is written in a light, almost comedic tone, Hersey tackles some very serious themes, such as the introduction of American-style democracy into a country which has been under a dictator’s rule for almost 21 years, the ties that bind the Old World with the New, the important role of non-combat Army personnel in administrating a war-torn continent and – whether his 1944 readers liked it or not – the concept that Allied victory in World War II  would determine that American isolationism in foreign policy was obsolete and incompatible with the postwar future.

The book’s central theme echoes Henry Luce’s famous Life magazine essay titled “The American Century,” in which the co-founder of the Time-Life publishing company (for which Hersey was a reporter at the time) stated that the 1940s marked the beginning of the nation’s destiny as a world power, not to conquer the world in the same brutal fashion as Hitler’s Germany, Mussolini’s Italy and Tojo’s Japan were trying to do, but to serve as a shining example of democracy and human liberty.

But where Luce’s idealistic “The American Century” sounds somewhat too jingoistic, naïve and somewhat arrogant, A Bell for Adano contrasts American altruism (as personified by the kind if somewhat imperfect Major Joppolo) with all-too-human weaknesses such as vanity, stupidity and the corrupting effect of authoritative power (as fleshed out by Gen. Marvin).  In the book, Hersey clearly tells the readers that though Americans are by no means perfect and will make mistakes, they can make a – hopefully positive – difference in Europe and the rest of the postwar world.

Until there is a seeming stability in Europe, our armies and our after-armies will have to stay in Europe.  Each American who stays may very well be extremely dependent on a Joppolo, not only for language, but for wisdom and justice and the other things we think we have to offer Europeans.

       

Though 21st Century readers – particularly Europeans who disagree with the notion that  U.S . foreign policy is altruistic in any fashion – may find A Bell for Adano’s “big theme” as hopelessly naïve and full of self-delusion, it is a novel full of optimism and hope and human foibles.  It’s funny and bawdy (for a book written in 1944, that is), and at times it can be heart-wrenchingly sad.  

It’s also a war story without too much violence; the emphasis of A Bell for Adano is, after all, on what Hersey calls “our after-armies” and their efforts to restore stability to an occupied country.  Yet, there are small Spielberg-like vignettes of war: the arrival of U.S troops in Adano – with tense and scared GIs scrambling for cover in the local cemetery – would easily have fit into Saving Private Ryan even though no shots are fired, and Hersey shows us that dead Italian woman in that Adano alley to remind readers that houses are wrecked and people get killed in  wartime.