The Return of the Native.

I was assigned two books in my Lit class in my senior year of high school on which I bailed after 20 or 25 pages, reading the Cliffs’ Notes for one and watching the movie for the other. I eventually read both books in full as an adult, as both are on the Novel 100 and, to be honest, it bugged me that I’d never made a more serious attempt to finish them. One of them was Theodore Dry … er, Dreiser’s An American Tragedy, which amounted to 200 pages of shit in an 800-page novel. The other was Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles, which is one of my favorite novels ever written, a tragedy as well but a work of consummate beauty in prose and characterization, as well as the best example I have encountered of the use of irony in a serious novel.

The Bloomsbury 100 includes a second Hardy title, The Return of the Native, which doesn’t quite hit the heights of Tess but also doesn’t inspire the same frustrated outrage that that other novel does. Native instead focuses on the interconnections between a number of flawed characters in a tiny English hamlet, and how tiny choices create avalanches of consequences for all of them, with an ending that, in veritable Hardy-esque style, leaves no one truly happy.

The native of the book’s title is Clym Yeobright, a former resident who has found success in the Parisian diamond trade, but finds the work unfulfilling and has returned to Egdon Heath to embark on a scheme to educate the children of the poor. By the time Clym enters the scene, we have already met the other characters and seen their entanglements: Thomasin Yeobright, Clym’s cousin, is betrothed to the unstable Damon Wildeve, who himself is still in love with the local maiden Eustacia Vye, who had had an affair with Wildeve but generally disdains all of the local residents as beneath her. Thomasin returns home to Egdon Heath from a marriage ceremony with Damon that didn’t come off, as Wildeve lacked the proper license, by way of the reddleman (a traveling seller of the pigment red ochre) Diggory Venn, who also carries a torch for Thomasin. When Wildeve and Thomasin do marry, Eustacia throws herself at Clym, hoping he’ll enable her escape from Egdon Heath when he returns to Paris, unaware that he has no plans to do so. When Wildeve and Eustacia both find themselves in unhappy marriages, their liaison is rekindled, leading the four down a path into tragedy.

For a man somewhat estranged from his church, Hardy reflects a strongly moralistic worldview in his writing, more so here than in Tess, where he directs more of his ire at the chauvinistic Victorian environment that condemns his title character to a life of misery. Native takes more of a balanced approach to its subject, combining a frank look at sexual politics and the essence of human emotions with a plot where nature dooms the least morally sound characters over the more innocent ones. Hardy’s language makes it clear that Eustacia is the wicked seductress and Wildeve the feckless lover and husband, with Thomasin in particular receiving treatment as the victim of their maneuvers.

Basde on a small sample of two novels, Hardy might be my favorite writer of prose after the incomparable F. Scott Fitzgerald, as Hardy’s poet self pops up repeatedly in the text of his novels. He refers to the “black fraternization” of the “obscurity in the air and the obscurity in the land” to describe the desolate scene off the moors near Egdon Heath, and describes Eustacia examining her own dismal situation by thinking “what a sport for Heaven this woman Eustacia was.” Clym, after the last of his tragedies in the novel, declines to appear at an event for fear he “might be too much like the skull at the banquet,” which is a hell of a lot better than referring to something in a punchbowl. Eustacia says “I’d give the wrinkled half of my life!” to live in a cosmopolitan place where she could live like a lady, a throwaway phrase that becomes more meaningful when her life is in danger later in the book.

Hardy, always full of sunshine, has time to refer to Clym’s loss of innocence as

the stage in a youngman’s life when the grimness of the general human situation first becomes clear; and the realization of this causes ambition to halt awhile.

And he mirrors my own thoughts on the rising tide of darkness as autumn closes:

Moreover to light a fire is the instinctive and resistant act of man when, at the winter ingress, the curfew is sounded throughout Nature. It indicates a spontaneous, Promethean rebelliousness aganist that fiat that this recurrent season shall bring foul times, cold darkness, misery, and death. Black chaos comes, and the fettered gods of the earth say, Let there be light.

Of course, I doubt Hardy meant I should light my Weber kettle grill in response to the shortened days, but that’s the best I’ve got.

Two final side notes on The Return of the Native:

* A 1994 TV movie adaptation starred two then-unknown actors as Damon and Eustacia: Clive Owen and Catherine Zeta-Jones. I think it’d be worth seeing on that basis alone.

* I can’t hear the name of this novel without thinking of this sketch.

Next up: I’ve been lax at writing up books lately, but I’ve gotten through Middlemarch and Anthony Trollope’s The Warden, as well as David Goodis’ noir novel The Wounded and the Slain, and am now on the non-fiction The Land That Never Was: Sir Gregor Macgregor And The Most Audacious Fraud In History by David Sinclair. If anyone has a particular interest in either of those classic novels, drop a line in the comments.