Return the Innocent Earth & Disillusionment
"The war had destroyed more than soldiers bodies and battlefield terrain, villages with strange names and the specter of the kaiser; it had demolished a way of life, an attitude of innocence, an anticipation for tomorrow. . . Jonathan saw the experience of war and its aftermath: cynicism and bitterness at the slaughter, confidence and brashness in the unconditional victory."[1]
So Jonathan Jr., son of the mentioned Jonathan, defines the first days after the first World War, the days the world was disillusioned to the belief that they all could be fine on their own, and so he defines an epoch America had remained in fifty years ago, one that perhaps has passed in recent times but retains its importance, as all epochs of the world do. Why is the world so bitter? Because truly have we all turned our backs to Christ, so comprehensively have we denied Him that He is present in neither our good times nor our bad. Jonathan Jr. feels the affects of this, even in his current time, and he recognizes that these feelings have persisted between ages and points to the symbols of their changing, how the entire Western Hemisphere brutally awakened to the nature of man apart from Christ and continued drifting away. Return the Innocent Earth focuses on Jonathan Jr. tracing the source of his personal disillusion, the canning company he is the vice president of, through his family, and shows us the pathway apart from Christ America has taken and the consequences of abandoning God, for this is the source of disillusionment, that life without Christ is truly destructive.
Jon's (as Jonathan Jr. is called) story begins in the late nineteenth century with a man named Elisha Clayburn and his wife Mary Clayburn. Elisha is moreso the upright righteous man, and Mary is the more devout but more faltering of the marriage, but both reflect the Biblical framework of sinful humans being made righteous for following Christ. The two live a typical grueling farm life, dealing with sickness and loans and taxes and the threat of their home being possessed. Mary is not the best mother. She is not abusive, but she is not completely straight, neither. Most striking is a scene with her chastening her son Daniel when he uses sexual terms to pick on his brother Joshua by making Daniel hit her with a switch:
"'All right. I'm holding out my hand. I want you to switch it with that birch limb as hard as you can.'
"'Mama!' The cry of startled protest echoed through the house. . .
"'If I have failed to make my children pure of thought and word and deed I should be punished. . .'
"'I know my boys are good, but snares lurk everywhere, and as you become men's bodies-' She broke off, stumbling on the word 'bodies.' Then she concluded, 'We'll have to trust the Lord.'"[2]
The ultimatum of this event, of Mary's entire life, is her trust in the Lord. Abraham fornicated and feared the world. Joshua's brothers hated humility. David and Solomon were only satisfied with carnal, fleshy pleasures. Jonah feared the extent of the Lord's grace. The bottom line for all of these figures is that they trusted the Lord. They were not worthy, but Christ loved them and they loved He. Mary is sinful, as sinful as Stull or Nat Lusk the drunkard salesman, who are Jon's godless contemporaries, but she trusts in the Lord and Christ is thus faithful to her. This alone is the difference. This alone is what her sons and grandsons would abandon and forget. This is what connects them to the land, to each other, that gives them fulfillment and purpose and direction and meaning and satisfaction despite their conditions seeming grueling to us today. In some ways, it is this grueling nature even that brought, kept and sought them after Christ. Life is arduous and short and bitter but life has completeness and conviction and credence. There is nothing notable about this life, and that is for the best. It is almost a specter, especially in retrospect from Jon's position. Jon wonders about how far away it all is. This life eventually changes when Elisha goes on a big hog drive with others in his community and is robbed and killed by bandits. It is at this point that Johnathan, not the oldest son but among the elders, finds himself taking hold of the household, finding the killers with the help of Janus Rathbone, one of those on the drive, and settling Elisha's financial issues, among other things.
This assuming by Jonathan marks the start of his generation's influence. It is this fear of money and salvation from it that drives their lives now, and this prompts Jonathan to consider other ways of making money. This starts the Clayburn Brothers canning company. We can be certain Jonathan retains some of his religion at the least, as Jon remarks from his agnostic perspective "We are fearfully and wonderfully made, my God-fearing, church-going father and mother told me."[3] Jonathan, of course, is not quite so devout as Mary. Consider Jonathan and Laura Rathbone, a mixed blood Native American wonan, having sex in the field of dead quail from a hunting trip from one of the men Clayburn Brothers is selling canned foodstuffs to: "Many of the neat little birds lay in torn, bloody clusters. The blood – on feathers, grass, bare ground – was not bright and scarlet but a brownish crust spread in muddy ugliness. . . In the midst of the plundered field of birds Jonathan made love to Laura. And she made love to him."[4] This scene is important because it marks the first time any of the puritan-raised Clayburn family acknowledges sex at all, with the aforementioned exception and in spite of the many children. In the new life that the current generation has brought – apathy and amusement – Jonathan too is driven to amusement. Take note, however, that even in Jonathan's sin the Lord is gracious to set his heart towards higher things, the things of Laura's love of nature and the Earth. This scene is also important because it shows the affects of the slipping away from Christ succinctly: destruction of nature and neglect of body and person. Note too that Jonathan is an opposed exception, more pious than the others, only opposed a little at first, but towards the end of his generation’s reign on the family their disdain for him grows. It is only Jonathan who clings to old ideals in any meaningful way; the others are full steam ahead towards the abyss the hunting man has taken upon himself and the field of quail. This is shown most succinctly in the buying of the Rathbone's property while Jonathan is invalid with sickness, something Jonathan has opposed but something that would benefit the Clayburn Brothers company's productiveness. Their treatment of Laura in particular is quite ugly.
"Laura looked at her [Nora] and away and she spoke more quietly. 'I won't live on there without my woods. Josh might as well buy it all. Because I'll be moving somewhere else, somewhere farther in the mountains.'
"'That will be nice, Laura.' The relief on Nora's face was bold as print."[5]
Jonathan is devastated. There is a surface level devastation that his family would betray him so boldly, but internally Jonathan blames the natural order, the world at large, as well. Jon narrates, "It was not the way he wanted it. It was the way it was."[6] This event marks Jonathan’s succumb to the world. He finds himself powerless to stop the regress of his family. This life of making money for the family and "helping the South" is not quite what Jonathan envisioned, and he has not the agency to change the fabric of the world itself to make a better reality. Though his whole family is responsible, Nora and Josh are planning a particular plot. They feel robbed of being "number one," so they plan to seat themselves in the spot Jonathan will eventually leave vacant. This land purchase is the first real movement in this plan, their rebellion. This land purchase is the first time disillusionment sets in to the family. Jonathan truly thought he would be able to oppose the evils of the world by himself. He realizes now that he cannot, and that there is no going back with this knowledge; he will have to lead Clayburn Brothers of the world, not just in it.
The consequences of this go beyond Jonathan and Churchill, beyond the Appalachias, to the edges of the nation. The undercutting of Jonathan by Nora and Josh leads, after a long and complicated road, to the takeover of the company by their son Stull. Stull sells the company to interests in New England, buys out a couple of Midwestern canning outfits, most notably Durant, turning the company from Clayburn Brothers to Clayburn-Durant, a proper corporation. The only real players in the company of this third generation are Jon and Stull. Monty, Jon's brother, is around too, but Monty is quite passive and does not appear often, as he too hates the Clayburn company. Jon is extremely irreligious in his childhood. Through all of his family's varying bogus and political confessions, even Stull's, Jon never does give himself over to Christ. Ironically, this is because he is allowing Christ to work in his heart. The Christ Stull gives himself to does not exist. Stull says to Jon in Jon's youth, "Why don't you go [to the altar] then?. . .It's the smartest thing. . . I know you believe in God. . . After all, even if He isn't there is hasn't done any harm. . .So I say, might as well join up. The church can do good for you, too." Jon answer to Stull: "'I don't know' And that was a completely honest statement."[7] Jon is being honest, and Christ does work in his heart as he grows, and eventually, in his fifties, he has the long epiphany that makes up the novel, when Jon becomes disillusioned to the point of derealization and sees with clarity the truth of the sinful life Jonathan and company created. Stull believes in the American God, one who gives you money for praying hard enough and likes to do magic tricks on command sometimes. Of course, this is not to say Jon is pious by any means, but Jon has yet to deny Christ as Stull has and as such leaves himself amiable to the influence of the Holy Spirit. Jon and a man from the company, responsible for creating a preservative spray to make canning crops easier, go to Janus's cabin and find the landscape logged and the building itself assumed by violent bootleggers. The bootleggers kill a dog of theirs in front of the pair for the crime of being annoying. Jon will later reminisce through that moment, "I remember waking up early this morning, meeting Lex Morrison, encountering the men on the mountain in Janus Rathbone's old cabin. And I wonder if our lives did not take a different turn because the Clayburns never accepted or even faintly understood Laura Rathbone."[8] He talks not just of having been born through Laura, of course, whatever the specifics of that would even entail, but of the entire mindset of the family subconsciously. The Clayburns, their town of Churchill, America itself, had no longer any genuineness, any vulnerability, any sense of seeking. Jon himself seeks these things, but apart from Christ these things cannot be found. As he seeks to usurp Stull, and after confronting him directly, he talks with his Aunt Nettie Sue who is helping him with the coup.
"I pick up a glove she has dropped. As she clutches it with her purse she looks at me from the wide wrinkle-crusted eyes and says 'You do think the company will have a good year, in the dividends and all-'
"My stomach knots ever so slightly. And I think: now it begins."[9]
Jon frames this as a sacrifice, a burden to bear, a necessary evil, all for turning Clayburn-Durant back on the right track. This is true, but it is also in its particular form indicative of the fruitlessness of the endeavor: no true pushback to the system of Clayburn-Durant can occur at all from a human perspective. Before he begins, Jon is already conceding to the system. In fact, even Christ has promised us all of these things will remain in our time, because there will one day come a Holy Epoch, where the Christ will establish himself on the face of the Earth and annihilate such things Himself.
Only Christ will give you any peace or direction. [Deuteronomy 28; 2 Chronicles 15:1-7, 20:1-30, 21:1-15; Philippians 3:12-21; Colossians 3; 1 John 2:1-17] Think of all the pilgrims going to Canterbury Cathedral. The countless feet climbing the steps to Saint Thomas, some on their knees the final few steps to humble themselves before him, the pain and inconvenience and sacrifice needed to come to this holy spot for nothing. They chose the world over the Christ because they liked doing it, because choosing the world over Christ made them happy, making pilgrimages for saints to show respect as opposed to Christ to build His Kingdom makes them happy, as it makes Jonathan and Stull and Jon and us happy. We are only happy in our darkest misery, in our most abstract dissociations. For nothing. Ye shall never be as gods. You will either cling to Christ as the world disintegrates you and arise with Him when he establishes His Kingdom on Earth, or you will cling to your dust eternally. Without Christ, we are not human, we are not ourselves but someone else, infinite abstractions of the image of God, submissive to total and honest randomness, garbled and unintelligible symbols inherently without meaning. Jon says about his venture to take over the Clayburn-Durant company, to save it from Stull's amoral wishes, "This is the memory I have come back to claim. My father. Shape of a world of love-honor-and-obey, of a man's-word-is-his-bond, of love-thy-neighbor-as-thyself, of something far and lost, abandoned."[10] Jon's judgment is accurate. Still, there is no difference, will be no difference, between Jon and Stull without Christ; this is neither threat nor warning but observation. Whether you value annihilation or perseverance is reflected on whether or not one submits to Christ. Jon looked often to Christ, but in truth he was, for the length of this novel, never willing to make that step over the line of his sinful life into pure and holy eternity. The world had cut him down, but ultimately it was this cutting down Jon preferred. He could have turned to Christ to any moment, but the fractal of his own sin was too appealing to him. Pray to Christ that your own heart may be melted and you not cling to this world but to the Lord. Christ is gracious to sinners, and the Holy Spirit is merciful to guide us even in our sins, to give us a way back to the Lord and a means to glorify Him throughout the ends of the Earth. It should also be noted that there are some people in the novel who do truly, genuinely cling to Christ beyond Mary and Elisha: Lottie and Penn. They are hardly mentioned because they go on foreign missions. By clinging to Christ in this way, they are able to sidestep most of the nonsense that happens in their secular family. We are all offered this freedom, regardless of our calling. May we all accept this freedom Christ offers us.