June Classic Book Group Meeting

Next VML Classic Book Group Meeting is Tuesday, June 17, 2014 from 4:30 - 6 p.m. in the Ventress Library Historical Room. Book selection is "A Bell for Adano" by John Hersey, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Novel in 1945. New members welcome. Please contact Chris Woods at the library's Reference Desk if you need help obtaining a copy of the book or have any questions about the group. Light refreshments served! Library phone is 781-834-5535 or e-mail cwoods@ocln.org

_______________________________

STUDY GUIDE TO BOOK

A Bell for Adano

Author	John Hersey (1914-1993)
Type of Work	Novel
Type of Plot	Social realism
Time of Plot	1943
Locale	Adano, Italy
First Published	1944

Principal characters:

MAJOR VICTOR JOPPOLO, the American military governor of Adano

SERGEANT BORTH, Major Joppolo’s subordinate

CAPTAIN PURVIS, the head of the military police

GENERAL MARVIN, the commander-in-chief of the American invasion troops and Major Joppolo’s superior

The Story:

When the American army invaded Sicily, Major Victor Joppolo was placed in command of Adano. He set up his office in the city hall, rehired the janitor, and investigated the records left by the Fascist mayor, who had fled to the hills. Soon after his arrival, Major Joppolo summoned the leading citizens of the town and asked them, through Giuseppe, his interpreter, what they considered the most important thing to be done. Some answered that the shortage of food was the most pressing problem. Others insisted that what the town needed most was its bell, which had been removed by the Fascists. The bell, it seemed, had a soothing tone and it regulated the lives of Adano’s residents. The major promised every effort to recover the bell. Meanwhile, the problem was to obtain food and to have produce brought into the town. In order that his directives would be understood and carried out, the major issued proclamations that the town crier, after being silent for so long, hastened to shout in the village.

On Sunday morning, when the major attended mass at one of the churches, he noticed a blonde girl sitting in front of him. When he later asked Giuseppe about her, the interpreter assumed that the American’s interest had nothing to do with official business. Major Joppolo’s primary interest, however, was the girl’s father, Tomasino, owner of a fishing fleet. He had Giuseppe ask Tomasino to come to see him, but Tomasino, distrustful of authority, refused to come to the headquarters. The major therefore went to Tomasino, followed by practically all the townspeople. The old Italian was defiant, sure that the major had come to arrest him. Major Joppolo finally convinced him that he meant neither to arrest him nor to ask for a cut in the proceeds from the sale of the fish but rather wanted him to go out with his fishing fleet, despite the danger of mines.

The major and his policies had become the subject of much discussion among the people. The Fascist mayor provided a great deal of amusement because he had come out of hiding and been paroled into Sergeant Borth’s custody. Every morning, the mayor had to go to Sergeant Borth and publicly confess a Fascist sin. Giuseppe was astonished to discover that the major meant what he said when he told him to report for work at seven in the morning. Gargano, the former Fascist policeman, learned that he could no longer force the others to make way for him when they stood in line at the bakery.

While driving through Adano one day, General Marvin found the road blocked by a mule cart. The driver, having had his daily quota of wine, was sleeping peacefully. When the mule refused to budge, the general ordered the vehicle thrown into the ditch. Reluctantly, the soldiers dumped the cart, mule, and sleeping driver. Swearing furiously, the general drove to the city hall, where he confronted Major Joppolo and ordered that all carts be forbidden to enter Adano.

The next day, a group of townspeople besieged the major to explain that the carts were essential, for they brought food and water into the town. Major Joppolo countermanded the general’s order and telephoned Captain Purvis that he would accept full responsibility. Captain Purvis, anxious to keep out of trouble, ordered Lieutenant Trapani to make a memorandum and send it to General Marvin. The lieutenant, out of regard for Major Joppolo, put the memorandum among Purvis’ papers in the hope that the captain, who rarely looked through his files, would never find it.

Major Joppolo’s efforts to restore the bell were not successful, for it had been melted down by the Fascists. A young naval officer in charge of a nearby station promised to obtain a ship’s bell for him.

In the meantime, Captain Purvis had gone through the papers on his desk and had found the memorandum for General Marvin. He ordered it forwarded at once. Lieutenant Trapani mailed it, but addressed it to the wrong person at headquarters in Algiers. From there, it was forwarded to the general’s aide, Colonel Middleton. Every day the colonel met with General Marvin and went over important communications. Accordingly, he was halfway through Purvis’ letter before he realized what it was. He tried to go on to the next letter, but it was too late. The general had heard Major Joppolo’s name and that of Adano, and he remembered both.

The bell arrived in Adano. It was touched, prodded, sounded by the experts, and admired by everybody. When it pealed forth, the townspeople declared that its tone was even better than that of the old bell. The major was a hero. To show their appreciation and affection, the townspeople had him taken to a photographer. A local artist painted his portrait from the photograph. At the celebration that night, Sergeant Borth became very, very drunk. He refused to take orders from Major Joppolo, saying that the major was no longer in any position to give orders. Captain Purvis, said the sergeant, almost sobbing, had received a letter from General Marvin, ordering Major Joppolo back to Algiers. The next morning, the major said goodbye to Borth, who apologized for his conduct of the previous night. The major asked him to help his successor make the people happy. As he drove away from the town, he heard in the distance the tolling of a bell, the new bell for Adano.

Critical Evaluation:

John Hersey’s A Bell for Adano, which was published in 1944 and for which the novelist was awarded the Pulitzer Prize the following year, achieved enormous popularity in its day and was seen as a classic war novel. Because Hersey had experienced the war as a correspondent, the novel was thought to be considerably more realistic than it actually is. With some qualifications, the work can, however, be placed in that genre of American fiction called realism.

The situation of an Italian-speaking American officer, Major Joppolo, serving as administrator of the small Sicilian village of Adano allows Hersey to set out his beliefs about the primacy of democracy over Fascism, the duty of leaders to serve the people, the need for administrative control, and the disasters that result when people are left to their own devices. These beliefs coincided with the opinions held by many Americans at the close of World War II. It was consequently the perfect reading material for Americans who needed to believe that war was necessary and that the United States was helping the rest of the world by occupying Italy. It was also pleasant to believe that amid the difficulties of war there could be moments of humor and that one could encounter good simple folk. The novel is optimistic, often comic in tone, and ultimately romantic in its conclusion: When Major Joppolo is ordered by General Marvin to leave the town, he stops for one final time to hear the ringing of the bell that his efforts had brought the people. “It was a fine sound on the summer air,” the novel maintains, and the reader is left with the image of Joppolo as a decent man who has done his best. That the town has little future is immaterial; the residents of Adano will simply continue their bungling ways. The main conflict in the novel stems from the clashes between Major Joppolo, who believes in democracy and servant leadership, and General Marvin, whose selfishness and cruelty in shooting the mule and ordering carts out of the village make him the symbol of American arrogance and lack of consideration for the native population. There is additional conflict and satire in Joppolo’s struggles with postwar bureaucracy; his reaction to his “Instructions to Civil Affairs Officers,” which is to tear up the pages and use his own judgment, affords both humor and commentary on the unrealistic, theoretical approach to occupying a small town.

That General Marvin, who has the right to order Joppolo to leave Adano, is ultimately the victor, suggests that Hersey believes that it is important for individuals to do something good, even if it is only a small gesture. No one in the novel changes or develops; the soldiers continue to be superficial, the townspeople petty, the Army bureaucracy uncaring. Life goes on, but it is vital that individuals do good deeds and therein find satisfaction.

Most of the Italian villagers are depicted as foolish, nostalgic, and opportunistic. Hersey achieves some of his best humor at their expense, frequently using caricature and such tags as “lazy Fatta” and “formidable Margherita.” Hersey also gives some of the townspeople dignity, however. Old Cacopardo’s reproach of General Marvin’s lack of appreciation of the antique mahogany table on which the general and his aide are playing mumblety-peg shows the clash of cultures and allows Hersey to point out the inability of most Americans to realize the richness of other histories and cultures. This same theme is echoed in the earliest conversations about the village bell when “small Zito” maintains that the bell will be of greater significance than additional food would be. Zito rejects a replica of the American Liberty Bell: “I do not think the people of Adano want any liberty that has a crack in it.”

In his depictions of the soldiers Chuck and Polak, who seek only drink and sexual escapades and who destroy the art objects in the house where they are billeted, Hersey provides a biting commentary on the behavior of American soldiers abroad. Some reviewers in fact questioned Hersey’s accuracy, particularly regarding the language he ascribed to the soldiers, which was considered shocking at the time.

The novel is more a series of vignettes than a complex narrative; there is little if any interior action. Hersey is at his best in depicting isolated incidents: Major Joppolo’s arrival in Adano, the first visit with Tomasino and his family, the Hemingway-inspired dialogue between Chuck and Polak, the conversations about the crack in the American Liberty Bell, the final moments when Major Joppolo stops to hear the bell.

A Bell for Adano has an important history and keeps a secure place in American popular fiction and war literature. The novel eventually became both a Broadway play and a motion picture. Hersey’s subsequent publication of Hiroshima (1946) further solidified the critical reputation of A Bell for Adano and gave it additional credibility.

Bibliography:

Bradbury, Malcolm. The Modern American Novel. New York: Oxford University Press, 1984. A helpful summary of twentieth century American fiction, which places A Bell for Adano in the mainstream of conventional realism and naturalism.

Gemme, Francis. John Hersey’s “A Bell for Adano,” “Hiroshima,” and Other Works: A Critical Commentary. New York: Monarch Press, 1966. A brief survey for beginning students. Good cursory treatment of Hersey’s works and an overview of the initial reception of his novels.

Huse, Nancy Lyman. John Hersey and James Agee: A Reference Guide. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1978. Extremely helpful compilation of materials for research. Includes reviews from the time of initial publication.

Sanders, David. John Hersey. New Haven, Conn.: College and University Press, 1967. Excellent overview of Hersey and his work; traces significant themes and beliefs. Good treatment of Hersey’s life, with critical attention to his literary output.

Sanders, David. John Hersey Revisited. Boston: Twayne, 1990. A competent survey of Her-sey’s life and works, updating the previous information on the critical estimate of Hersey and of A Bell for Adano. Also includes bibliography.

“Critical Evaluation” by Katherine Hanley

A Bell for Adano

Author	John Hersey (1914-1993)
Classification	Social realism
First Published	1944
Locale	Adano, Italy
Themes	War, politics and law, social issues, and education
Time of Plot	1943
Recommended Ages	15-18

American Army Major Victor Joppolo is in charge of the contingent of troops occupying the Italian village of Adano shortly after the Allied victory there in World War II. This is the story of his success in helping the inhabitants replace Fascism with democracy.

Principal characters:

MAJOR VICTOR JOPPOLO, an American of Italian ancestry, the commanding officer of the American troops occupying Adano, Sicily, during World War II

SERGEANT LEONARD BORTH, Joppolo’s immediate subordinate, a much-traveled American citizen of Hungarian heritage

GENERAL MARVIN, the bad-tempered commander in chief of the American invasion forces, Joppolo’s superior officer

The Story

Major Victor Joppolo, accompanied by his next in command, Sergeant Leonard Borth, enters Adano just behind the American invading forces who have come to occupy the small Italian village. When Joppolo reaches the pier at Adano, he touches the ground with the palm of his hand in a symbolic gesture of homecoming. Joppolo’s loving acceptance of the language, habits, and culture of the people of Adano form the base for his successful efforts to start them on the road to democracy and freedom. This road, however, is no freeway. Obstacles appear at every turn, caused by the collision of a variety of human ambitions, transports, and jealousies.

John Hersey structures the novel as a series of episodes, each dealing with a problem for which Joppolo must devise an acceptable solution. Parallel to these episodes is the story of Joppolo’s hesitant courtship of Tina, a village woman. When finally Sergeant Borth, a much more aggressive lover, finds a means to devise a private meeting between Joppolo and Tina, their assignation is interrupted before Joppolo has had time to be unfaithful to the wife he left behind.

Another story line revolves around the search for a new bell for Adano. The previous bell has been removed by the Fascists, who sent it away to be melted and used for ammunition. After periodic references to and actions taken on behalf of the missing bell, Joppolo succeeds in finding a replacement and in having it installed before his own departure. Joppolo’s leave-taking takes place to the sound of the ringing of the new bell.

Throughout the story, General Marvin, a man of short temper and little compassion, acts as a foil to Joppolo. One day when Marvin is passing through Adano on his way somewhere else, he and a few of his soldiers are blocked by a mule cart whose driver has fallen asleep. Unable to get the mule to move, Marvin’s soldiers dump the whole vehicle, including the driver and the mule, into a ditch. Marvin then issues the edict that henceforth all carts are forbidden in Adano. Since without the carting of food and water the villagers would perish, Major Joppolo countermands the commander’s orders. There follows a series of actions instigated by various enlisted men who attempt to misplace or otherwise lose Joppolo’s countermanding order. This subterfuge succeeds for the time it takes for Joppolo to find a replacement bell for Adano and to set into motion the fundamentals of democratic government. Joppolo leaves Adano richer for his interaction with representatives of his own forebears, just as the people of Adano are richer for their interaction with Joppolo, who stands for one of their own sons returned home.

Providing novelistic length and a sense of the passage of time, various other episodes provide a comic perspective that counterbalances the occasional references to the tragic losses characteristic of war. For example, after Joppolo sets up his command post in the city hall he receives a series of visits by citizens of Adano, many of whom appear more like stereotypical comic characters from the commedia dell’ arte than like credible human beings. The people of Adano, with few exceptions, never discuss an issue calmly; they loudly assert positions. Their emotions are comically intense. Indeed, most of the Italian citizens of Adano are presented as simple but lovable people, like small children clustering around the knees of a good father come to rescue them from the giant monster of twenty years of Fascist rule.

Themes and Meanings

Victor Joppolo is a model American soldier who respects the traditional values of home and hearth, even extending across the seas to the lands of his European ancestors. Hersey comments on this aspect of the American invasion forces in a foreword to the novel, saying that it is a lucky thing for the United States to have “a fund of men who speak the languages of the lands we must invade, who understand the ways and have listened to their parents sing the folk songs and have tasted the wine of the land on the palate of their memories.” For Hersey, the American forces carrying messages of love and freedom from tyranny, along with a pragmatic “knowhow,” are the wave of the future, the world’s hope for peace and prosperity.

The conflict that develops between representatives of the “good” man Joppolo and the “bad” man Marvin is not simply a skirmish over leadership styles. Rather, it is an arena for the contending forces of democracy and Fascism, demonstrating clearly differing philosophical assumptions and belief systems. Joppolo, making use of his sense of moral behavior and precepts of good government, leaves the citizens of Adano ready to embrace the positive values of democracy. General Marvin has been bested by the very enlisted men he tyrannizes.

Yet Hersey does not leave the issues so simple. Paradoxically, the American General Marvin behaves like a Fascist, while there are former Italian Fascists who are shown to hold democratic ideals. Similarly, Joppolo must obey his military superior by one set of operational rules even when moral imperatives drive him to disobedience.

Context

In his various writings Hersey made a distinction between novels and his journalistic offerings. Novels he believed to be attempts to illuminate humans caught in events, while reporting attempts to illuminate the events.  A Bell for Adano is actually a reworking and expansion of a dispatch that Hersey in his role as war correspondent published in  Life magazine (August 23, 1943). Each person mentioned in the dispatch became a character in the novel; the character of General Marvin, for example, seems based on the American General George Patton, whose quick temper became legendary among the troops.

A Bell for Adano exhibits almost none of the modernist techniques and structural devices evident in novels by Hersey’s renowned predecessors such as William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, and John Dos Passos, or even those of his more immediate contemporaries such as Saul Bellow, J. D. Salinger, and Joseph Heller, whose  Catch-22 (1961) became emblematic of the postmodern period in fiction. A Bell for Adano was purported to be an example of realism in fiction and was accepted by most of his readers at the time as a realistic portrayal of the American invasion and of an Italian village and its inhabitants at a particular time in history. Contemporary reviews of the novel praised Hersey for his true and sympathetic rendering of believable characters using effective language and a narrative structure appropriate to the affirmative thrust of the book. Diana Trilling, in a review published in The Nation, however, asserted that the book could best be described as consciously contrived simplicity. Nevertheless, A Bell for Adano remains Hersey’s best-known work. The novel brought Hersey many awards and prizes and is the major reason for Hersey’s continuing status as an important writer of fiction.

Perhaps the interest in clarity and plainspokenness said to be representative of reporters led to Hersey’s selection of just the right details to cause his novel and the characters in it to spring to life and to be readily understood by everyone who read it. This characteristic of the novel may account for its continuing popularity among readers in their late teens.

Mary Rohrberger

A Bell for Adano

Author	John Hersey (1914-1993)
First Published	1944
Classification	Novel
Locale	Adano, Italy
Time of Plot	1943
Type of Plot	Social realism

Major Victor Joppolo (joh-POH- loh), the first military governor of Adano after the Americans have retaken Italy in World War II. He is sincerely interested in restoring the dignity of the people there, and consequently he is willing to suffer what many military men would consider a lack of respect for their position. He succeeds in replacing the bell, the town’s most prized possession, which the Fascists had taken.

Sergeant Borth, an outspoken aide to Major Joppolo. He is in complete sympathy with what the major is trying to do in the town, if not with the methods he uses.

Captain Purvis, the officer in charge of the military police in Adano. Adhering rigidly to military regulations, he is careful to report any infractions of orders, including the major’s countermand of General Marvin’s order to keep all carts out of Adano.

General Marvin, the overbearing commander-in-chief of the American forces in Italy. He cares nothing about the Italian people or their needs and is far too conscious of his own position and the respect he feels is due him.

Giuseppe (jee-ew-SEH-peh), Major Joppolo’s interpreter, who is quite proud of his position close to the major.

Tomasino (toh-mah-SEE-noh), a fisherman. He distrusts all authority and firmly believes in the dignity of the individual.

Gargano (gahr-GAH-noh), an ex- Fascist policeman whom Joppolo restores to a position of authority.

Lieutenant Trapani (trah-PAH- nee), Captain Purvis’ subordinate. He is not afraid of the military and is willing to take some liberty with regulations when the outcome may be helpful.

Colonel Middleton, General Marvin’s aide.

Bell for Adano, A (Juvenile Literature)

Bell for Adano, A (Masterplots Classics)

Author Biography