Charles L. McNichols and Crazy Weather: A Reconsideration

R O B E R T L. B E R N E R Wisconsin State University, Oshkosh Charles L. McNichols and Crazy Weather: A Reconsideration A novel called Crazy Weather appeared in 1944, enjoyed favorable reviews, was selected by the Book-of-the-Month Club, and, except for the many who actually read it, was almost immed­ iately forgotten. It is the sole book-length work of fiction by its author, a former movie stunt-rider, Naval aviator, film researcher and scenarist, and freelance writer named Charles L. McNichols.1 It is seldom mentioned in literary histories or bibliographies of American literature; and though it has appeared in a variety of editions, the critical attention it deserves has unfortunately been deflected by a tendency to regard it as a juvenile.2 Crazy Weather is a juvenile in the same sense that such a term may be applied to Huckleberry Finn, and it is worth examining, not only for its literary merit, but because McNichols posed for himself a problem which few novelists have possessed the interest, the knowledge, and probably the ability to tackle: the translation of Indian experience into fiction. We have had many Indians in Charles L. McNichols, Crazy Weather (New York: Macmillan, 1944). Details on the life of McNichols may be found in a biographical note, not completely accurate, by Joseph Henry Jackson in Book-of-the-Month Club News (April, 1944), pp. 7-8, and in an anonymous note, accompanying a reprintel chapter from Crazy Weather, in Senior Scholastic XLVI (March 19, 1945), p. 22. The main elements of his biography, based upon these two notes as amplified by information generously furnished to me by Mr. McNichols in letters of April 15 and 26, 1970, are as follows: he was bom in 1895, got his first job in the movies in 1913, served in Naval aviation in the First World War, spent six years after the war in veterans’ hosiptals, and worked as a researcher for DeMille until a physical breakdown in 1931 confined him to bed. Then he began to write as a free-lancer for magazines, primarily in non-fiction; and though he wrote some short fiction he never considered himself a fictionwriter as such. He also wrote the text of Japan: Its Resources and Industries (New York: Harper, 1944), for which Clayton D. Carus, at that time head of the Department of Trade and Transportation at the University of Southern California and the source of the bulk of the research on which the book was based, was given credit as co-author. 2Mr. McNichols has informed me that the trade edition went through several print­ ings; that the novel was abridged in the now-defunct Liberty; that it was reprinted in paper­ back editions, including a widely-distributed Armed Services Edition; and that translations were published in Sweden, Germany, and Japan. The English edition was published by Victor Gollancz (London, 1945). Crazy Weather is still in print, in a Bison edition published by the University of Nebraska Press (Lincoln, 1967). Stanley Vestal calls it “ one of the best Southwestern juveniles” in The Book Lover's Southwest (Norman, 1955), p. 210. 40 Western American Literature our literature, and a few of them have actually borne some re­ semblance to historical Indians. But most of them have derived from American mythology rather than from history; and, in any case, few fictional treatments of the American Indian have taken account of what he was, as distinguished from what he did. As the hero or villain of the fantasies of literary artists, he has hardly ever been himself. The Indians who figure in Crazy Weather are the Mojaves, who lived from prehistoric times in the Colorado Valley of Cali­ fornia and Arizona. The Fort Mohave Reservation, which is the novel’s scene, lies along twenty miles of the Arizona side of the river below the southern tip of Nevada. McNichols was the son of a special agent of the Department of the Interior and was raised on various Indian reservations in the West, including that at Fort Mohave, where he was bom. His novel reveals a deep personal intimacy with the Mojave experience, but it also reveals...