A Bell for Adano
By
OCCUPIED TERRITORY is a term which for a long time had only one meaning in this war—land which had passed from a state of independence to the control of the Germans or Japanese. In this bright new novel by John Hersey, the author of Men on Bataan and Into the Valley shows us the reverse side of the medal. Occupation of Sicily was the first test of Allied intentions towards Europe, and A Bell for Adano is a reporter’s account of how we met that test.
Major Joppolo, the Amgot officer in charge of the seacoast town of Adano, is Hersey’s symbol of what is best in American character and perhaps in humankind. His one effort is to make the people entrusted to his care happy, but the obstacles to be overcome are enormous. They are both material and spiritual: problems dealing with food, which even a Congressman can understand, and problems involving imponderables like tradition, which only men like Joppolo can understand.
Skepticism in the shape of Sergeant Borth, snobbery in the form of Lieutenant Livingston, stupidity in a hundred varying forms and shapes — all these things were calculated to make a man less patient than the Major completely crazy or completely indifferent. But the biggest obstacle and the one over which Joppolo finally came a cropper was the positive evil embodied in the American General Marvin. Hersey pulls no punches in saying that the general “showed himself to be . . . something worse than what our troops were trying to throw out.”
The whole thing adds up to a study in the crucible of experience of “what America can and cannot do in Europe.” As such it is very interesting and very good. It is even good as a novel with dozens of amusing characters, some of them stylized, some of them real. Hersey is concerned with concrete observation rather than with theory, but if a credo does emerge from his book, it is one that is apt to be forgotten in the struggle of abstract slogans — that government, whatever its professions, can only be as good as the men who govern. Knopf, $2.50.
MILTON HINDUS