D'Arcy McNickle's The Hungry Generations: The Evolution of a Novel (review)

Birgit Hans's edition of this early draft of D'Arcy McNickle's first novel, The Surrounded, has been long in the making, but it provides a wonderful addition to Native American literature. As Hans notes in her comprehensive introduction to the volume, McNickle produced this version in the early 1930s; The Surrounded itself was published in the spring of 1936. So, it has taken over seventy years for it to come to public life, and we should be thankful for Hans's dedication to the project.

The manuscript is housed with many of McNickle's personal papers at the Newberry Library in Chicago. Hans has made good use of this resource and others for her introduction, which provides a good context for the novel and includes previously unpublished correspondence, diary entries, and photographs, as well as the biographical details of McNickle's life. For those not aware of McNickle's story, the Newberry's Center for American Indian History is named for him. In fact, since he had not arrived for the celebration to honor him with its naming, those attending called the Albuquerque police to have them check on him and thus he was found dead in his home. I share this tale because it seems to add an ironic postscript to a life both public and private, acclaimed and marginalized. He earned ample academic and activist accolades as a historian, anthropologist, and organizer, while his earliest love, literature, waited for equal recognition that came only after his death.

The manuscript in the Newberry is handwritten and, given McNickle's almost illegible handwriting, Hans's accomplishment should be acknowledged as remarkable. (To illustrate the point, she has provided several sample pages of it in the introduction as well.) In the mid-1980s on a fellowship at the Newberry, I read this manuscript, looking for markers that would allow for fresh insights about its transformation into the published version. It was not an easy read, and—limited by the time framework of the fellowship and by the need of going through the other materials in his papers—I was not reading it as we usually read a novel. Therefore, when allowed the opportunity to read Hans's edition of it, I was first thankful and then pleasantly surprised. It is a remarkable novel in its own right. It does not possess all the characteristics that have come to be associated with Native fiction—although the comparisons of this volume with its first published version may reopen that debate—but it certainly provides a satisfactory narrative of the life of a young Salish man finding his way. There is no doubt that scholarship will reexamine the differences between this version and the previously published one, but taken on its own merits, this novel amply documents McNickle's early literary talent in a time that produced the likes of William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Ernest Hemingway, and James Joyce.

The latter two authors are of note for The Hungry Generations, since a large section of it is set in Paris. The title, itself, is pulled from Keats' "Ode to a Nightingale," but it also alludes to the "Lost Generation" that Gertrude Stein named. The novel's protagonist, Archilde, spends years away from his Montana home, attending college and finally living the life of the expatriates in France. Here, Archilde reveals that—like McNickle, as Hans argues—he has "internalized the need for individualism and capitalism, two main values of the mainstream Euro-American culture" (11). These are certainly values that play throughout the text, including the battles between Archilde and his brothers over the family allotments. Unlike the published version, in which Archilde acts as mentor for his nephews Mike and Narcisse, here they are at odds. Communalism is present as Archilde settles his identity issues, but by book's end he fits comfortably in a Euroamerican community...