Bloom's Return of the Native

Book Reviews, Volume 32:1, 1988 essays, Herz is excellent on Pharos and Pharillon, though the book is perhaps slighter than she would be willing to admit. She argues, on the whole convincingly, for its crucial place in Forster's development and finds that in it private concerns have become transmuted into public ones, those predominating in the essays written in the 1930s and later. She also argues well for the vital presence of Montaigne, Voltaire , and Gibbon in Forster's discursive prose. Forster not only paid lip homage to these three men of letters, she contends, but assimilated their world views, their ethical predispositions, and their sensibilities into the very fabric of his nonfiction. There is no doubt of the thoroughness and the originality of Herz's readings of Forster's best shorter works. We attend to these readings as they enable us to understand more fully the Forsterean mind and sensibility. We are grateful for her careful and enthusiastic book, a book that represents the newest addition to first-class studies of this writer. Frederick P. W. McDowell _______________________________University of Iowa__________________ BLOOM'S RETURN OF THE NATIVE Harold Bloom, ed. Thomas Hardy's 'The Return of the Native'. New York: Chelsea House, 1987. $19.95 Included in Professor Bloom's gathering of interpretations of The Return of the Native, according to his title page, are D. H. Lawrence, From "Study of Thomas Hardy: The Return of the Native"; Irving Howe, "The Return of the Native," from Thomas Hardy; Jean R. Brooks, "The Return of the Native: A Novel of Environment," from Thomas Hardy: The Poetic Structure; David Eggenschwiler, "Eustacia Vye, Queen of Night and Courtly Pretender," from Nineteenth-Century Fiction (March 1971); Perry Meisel, "The Return of the Repressed," from Thomas Hardy: The Return of the Repressed; Ian Gregor, "Landscape With Figures," from The Great Web: The Form of Hardy's Major Fiction; Avrom Fleischman, "The Buried Giant of Egdon Heath," from Fiction and the Ways of Knowing: Essays on British Novels; and Bruce Johnson , "Pastoralism and Modernity," from True Correspondence: A Phenomenology of Thomas Hardy's Novels. Wary readers will, however, want to check the Acknowledgments page to learn the original titles of these papers, since Bloom has, in several cases, supplied new ones. Another liberty Bloom allowed himself limits the usefulness of this collection: all the essays have been stripped of their notes and references , both to secondary sources and, with a few exceptions, to Hardy's 106 Book Reviews, Volume 32:1, 1988 novels. I find this regrettable. Most people interested in "modern critical interpretations" of The Return of the Native would want the complete essays, in order to recognize and evaluate the relationship between the critical argument and the substructure of supporting citations and references. Despite the brilliance of some of the analyses, this is a disappointing book in other ways as well. Bloom's "Editor's Note" describes the book as a gathering of "a representative selection of the best modern interpretations of . . . The Return of the Native." Yet in his introduction he makes no attempt to share with us what criteria helped him choose these eight essays as the "best modern interpretations" or how, taken together, they comprise a "representative selection." The problem is compounded by the editor's abdication of a key responsibility: to use the introduction to set the stage for the separate performances to follow, in a word to introduce, to show relationships between his chosen critics' viewpoints and approaches. The bare one-sentence abstracts of the essays in his "Editor's Note" do not supply this lack of a sensitive appreciation of the several points of view represented in this collection. The introduction itself does not make a favorable first impression. It is marred by superficial, unsupported generalizations about Hardy and The Return of the Native. Hardy's turning to Schopenhauer, he tells us, was unlike Whitman's being inspired by Emerson: "A poet-novelist like Hardy turns to a rhetorical speculator like Schopenhauer only because he finds something in his own temperament and sensibility confirmed and strengthened. . . ."-a dismissal of both philosopher and poet-novelist . Clym is "a weak failure in characterization, and nearly sinks the novel...