Return the Innocent Earth (review)

NEW APPALACHIAN BOOKS OPINIONS AND REVIEWS Wilma Dykeman. Return the Innocent Earth. Newport, Tenn: Wakestone Books, 1994. 428 pages. $14.95. Happy is the author who sees her words brought to life again in a new edition. Happier yet is she who calls this novel "the favorite book I ever wrote." Happiest of all are her many grateful readers throughout Appalachia and the nation. They admire and love this gifted woman, a most esteemed citizen of the region, one who is not in awe of her own brilliance and considerable accomplishment—a friend to all, generous, sensitive, perceptive, vigorous, encouraging and compassionate. This author is, of course, Wilma Dykeman. The novel is Return the Innocent Earth, first published in 1973, and now reissued by Wakestone Books, of Newport, Tennessee, a company owned and operated by her younger son, Dykeman $tokely. (One of his most valuable projects is keeping in print so many of his mother's books—almost all published originally by major New York houses and still sought by a new generation of readers.) It is impossible to say which of Dykeman's sixteen books is her best, or has had the greatest influence. All have been worthy and memorable, whether by her efforts alone or in co-authorship with her beloved husband , the late James Stokely. The point here is that Ms. Dykeman's favorite is Return the Innocent Earth. This is not mere sentimentality. She has her reasons, and, as always, she is clear, convincing, and on the mark: "I think it embodies or captures as much as anything the aspects of the South I've been writing about all these years." Throughout her fiction, and most certainly in this novel, Ms. Dykeman evinces a deep concern for family, the land, and the local community. Her characters are, in her words, "ordinary people," yet she sees them as the "extraordinary people who bind up a civilization." Because Ms. Dykeman had "married into" a Newport, Tennessee family renowned for its food-processing company, some read Return the Innocent Earth as thinly veiled autobiography. She has said this is not 56 so, although what she learned from her contact with the company enhanced her writing's authenticity. Fundamentally, Return the Innocent Earth is a meditation on the imperiled environment. It is a story of what happens when a growth retardant is used on plants. It is an agonizing problem, made more difficult because of the company's evolution. Once it was small and run by family members. Now it is vast and seems at times not run by people at all, caught instead in the grip of impersonal forces such as computers and the marketplace. There is nothing preachy in Ms. Dykeman's prose; still she offers a lesson for those who read and think. It emerges from an E. E. Cummings line that she cherishes: "A world of born is not a world of made." This is, ofcourse, a warning about the realm ofthe artificial, growing bigger and more complex as the world expands—more crowded and increasingly technological. It is an ominous development for the natural world. It forces one to ask, sadly, whether, and how much of, nature will endure. "I am not against finding ways in which we can improve crops and food," Wilma Dykeman once said, "but we cannot do it carelessly. We can't replace the earth. We can't replace the air. We can't replace the water." But Return the Innocent Earth is also a story of the ever morecomplicated human environment. The novel touches dramatically on conflicts that afflict us today, between and among families, genders, and races and within a region, as well as with nature. She has described her fiction as an effort to portray "the walls we build between ourselves and the way people overcome these walls." Return the Innocent Earth is a splendid opportunity for longtime readers of this author to reacquaint themselves with this moving and eminently readable work, not to mention a wonderful way for new readers to become introduced to this estimable author. Because this review appears in Appalachian Heritage, it is fitting to say a word about Ms. Dykeman's close association...