Stealing Through Time: On the Writings of Jack Finney

by Jack Seabrook

  "I've read some of the stuff about Time with a capital T," he tells the reader, and then briefly explains Einstein's comparison of time to a river. "I wonder if we aren't barred from the past by a thousand invisible chains," he continues, and concludes that —because everything was just right that night—"we were free on the surface of Time" and "simply drifted into the time my Jordan belonged in" (194).

  Finney's narrator in "Second Chance" finds himself back in the 1920s after having put himself in a position to accept such a change. This marks a step forward from "The Third Level," where the narrator accidentally wanders into the past, toward the method that Si Mor-ley in Time and Again would use fourteen years later, where he is able to create a situation and mentally will himself into the past.

  The narrator in "Second Chance" drives back to Hylesburg and along Main Street, comparing what he sees to what he knows from the 1950s. Parking his car, he walks along Main Street, until a crowd comes out of the Orpheum movie theater and a young man hops into the narrator's car and begins to drive off. The narrator runs in front of the car and stops the driver momentarily before he drives off into the night. The narrator spends the night walking around 1923 Hylesburg and in the morning finds himself back in 1956.

  Time passes and the narrator goes back to school, where he meets and falls in love with Helen McCauley, whose father just happens to have an old Jordan Playboy in his barn. Mr. McCauley gives the narrator the car, and he soon realizes that it's the same one that was stolen from him back in 1923. Mr. McCauley tells of a night in 1923 when he had almost been killed while racing a train in the Jordan Playboy, and the narrator realizes that he had jumped out in front of the car and stopped McCauley on Main Street for just enough time to prevent the man's death.

  The story ends with a beautiful passage where the narrator explains that "it's an especial tragedy when a young couple's lives are cut off for no other reason than the sheer exuberance nature put into them" and that "when that old Jordan was restored" it went back to 1923 and gave them a second chance. The narrator confides to the reader that he will marry Helen McCauley and "we'll leave on our honeymoon in the Jordan Playboy" (199).

  "Second Chance" is as good a story as Jack Finney ever wrote. Michael Beard called it "perhaps Finney's most successful realization of the mystique of artifacts from the past" and argues that it "suggests that there is a redemptive power in connections with the past" (184). Kim Newman called it a perfect short story (197), and Mike Resnick pointed out that it (and "The Third Level") "may well have been the precursors of Finney's wildly successful time travel novels."

  Finney's next published work was the novella, "The House of Numbers," which will be discussed in the next chapter. His third story to see print in 1956 was the outstanding suspense tale, "Contents of the Dead Man's Pocket," which appeared in the October 26, 1956 issue of Collier's. This was to be Jack Finney's last story in Collier's, where his first published work had appeared in 1947. The magazine, which had been founded in 1888 and had reached a circulation of 2,500,000 during World War Two, had begun to decrease in popularity after the war and ceased publishing on December 16, 1956, less than two months after "Contents of the Dead Man's Pocket" was published ("Collier's Weekly" and "Crowell-Collier").

  Unlike "Second Chance," "Contents of the Dead Man's Pocket" is narrated by a third person, omniscient narrator, who tells the story of Tom Benecke, a resident of an apartment on the eleventh floor of a building in New York City. His wife Clare leaves to go to the movies by herself as he stays home to type a memo for his job. A sheet of paper suddenly flies out the window and sticks onto the wall by the ledge outside. On the sheet is all of the research that Tom has done to support "his idea for a new grocery-store display method"; Tom thinks, "of all the papers on his desk, why did it have to be this one in particular!" (85).

  Suspense begins to build as Tom climbs out onto the narrow ledge to retrieve the sheet of paper. He slides along, eleven stories above Lexington Avenue, panics when he looks down, and nearly falls, his body swaying "outward to the knife edge of balance" (86). After being frozen with fear, he begins to edge back along the ledge to his apartment window, but in the process of breaking another near fall he accidentally shuts the window.

  Unable to break the glass and terrified by the knowledge that his wife will not be home for hours, he tries to send signals by dropping first flaming letters and then coins to the street below, but his attempts go unnoticed on the busy streets of New York. Finally, the only thing left in his pockets is the sheet of paper he had climbed out on the ledge to retrieve. He thinks of falling to his death and "[a]ll they'd find in his pockets would be the yellow sheet. Contents oj the dead man's pockets, he thought, one sheet of paper bearing penciled notations — incomprehensible" (90).

  Tom thus comes to realize that he has put his life in jeopardy for something worthless. He laments his wasted life, regretting all of the nights he stayed home working while his wife went out and all of the hours he'd spent alone. He resolves to make one final attempt to break the glass, knowing that if he fails the strength of the blow will cause him to fall to his death. As he puts his all into the blow, he speaks his wife's name and feels himself falling through the broken window into the safety of his apartment.

  He puts the sheet of paper on his desk and opens the front door "to go find his wife." Blown by a draft from the hallway, the sheet flies out of the window again, but this time, "Tom Benecke burst into laughter and then closed the door behind him" (91). The door that closes at the end of "Contents of the Dead Man's Pocket" is clearly both a literal and a figurative one, representing the end of a wasted life and the beginning of one that promises to have more meaning. One can read into this a parallel to Jack Finney's decision in the late 1940s to leave behind his life as an advertising man in New York City and move to California to devote his time to writing.

  Stephen King allegedly wrote his story "The Ledge" as an homage to Finney's "Contents of the Dead Man's Pocket" (Newman 197-98), and the latter stands as one of Jack Finney's most suspenseful short stories.

  Jack Finney also published a one-act play in 1956 entitled Telephone Roulette, which is discussed in chapter seventeen.

  Three short stories were published in Good Housekeeping in 1957; two were romantic comedies and none were chosen to be reprinted in either of Jack Finney's subsequent short story collections.

  "Rainy Sunday" is the second story to feature Benjamin and Ruth Callandar, who had first appeared in "Legal and Tender," published in February 1955. The Callandars and their friends, June and Charley Howser, banter by telephone about who should leave their San Francisco apartment to visit whom on a rainy Sunday afternoon. They conclude by having a party by telephone. Like the Tim and Eve Ryan stories, this lighthearted tale mainly focuses on the relationship between the young couple at its center. Unlike the Ryans, who live in New York, the Callandars live in San Francisco.

  "Expression of Love" again features the Callanders (now spelled with an "e"), who meet the Howsers at Union Square in San Francisco. Charley and Ben play pranks and drive Ruth and June to plan a few pranks of their own.

  "Fast Buck" recalls "Stopover at Reno" as it tells the story of a young couple named Sam and Laurie, who regretfully realize that the $2500 they've saved over four years is only half the money they need for a down payment on a house. Sam suggests that they drive to Reno, Nevada, to spend the night, and Laurie agrees. They then drive through the mountains to Reno, where Sam plans to wager on dice to win the rest of the money they need.

  Tension mounts in the casino as Sam bets their savings, winning and losing in turns but never getting very far ahead. At one point he loses all of his money, then begins to win it back on a desperation bet using a few dollars from his pocket. A winning streak brings him back to $2560; he and Laurie stop gambling, stay the night in Reno, and add $10 to the house fund.

  This suspenseful tale mixes the domestic concerns of a young, married couple with the excitement of gambling at a casino
.

  Between 1947 and 1957, Jack Finney published thirty-eight short stories, two serialized novels that were later expanded into book form, and a novella. It was clearly time for some of his best stories to be collected in book form and, in 1957, his first collection of short stories, The Third Level, was published. It collected eleven stories that had been published before and added "A Dash of Spring," for which no prior publication source has been found.

  The stories chosen for this collection were "The Third Level," "Such Interesting Neighbors," "I'm Scared," "Cousin Len's Wonderful Adjective Cellar," "Of Missing Persons," "Something in a Cloud," "There Is a Tide," "Behind the News," "Quit Zoomin' Those Hands Through the Air," "A Dash of Spring," "Second Chance," and "Contents of the Dead Man's Pocket." The back cover copy on the 1959 paperback edition of The Third Level sets forth the collection's theme: "Their subject is time... But time on a new level, a diverting, sometimes frightening level, where the Past, the Present, and the Future are all joined...." While not exactly true of all of the stories in The Third Level, this blurb shows that time travel tales were becoming a hallmark of Jack Finney's fiction.

  The new story, "A Dash of Spring," is a bit of fluff where real life is contrasted with life as it is presented in magazines or movies. The resulting romance that blooms between Louise Huppfelt and Ralph Shultz is presented in a humorous fashion and the story reads like one that Finney might have written in the late 1940s.

  Reviews at the time The Third Level was published were mostly favorable. The Kirkus Service called the book "amiable" and recommended it as "pleasant timepassing." John F. Moran, writing in the Library Journal, noted that "fantasy ... is the chief element" in the collection, but said that the theme of escape from the present "becomes fairly tiresome when it crops up time and again." P. Schuyler Miller wrote in Astounding Science-Fiction that '"if you want to know the kind of SF the general public wants, this [volume of short stories] is as good a sample as you're likely to get'" (quoted in Jones 75), and J. Sydney Jones commented that "all of these stories provide escapist reading in the most literal of its meanings: Finney's characters are escaping from their present predicaments" (75).

  The magazine Infinity Science Fiction selected The Third Level as the year's best short-story collection (Beard 183-84), and Damon Knight wrote that Finney re-invests the theme of time travel '"with all the strangeness and wonder that properly belong to it"' (quoted in Beard 184).

  Later critics have viewed the collection as a classic. Stephen King wrote in 1981 that, in The Third Level, "Finney actually defined the boundaries of [Rod] Serling's Twilight Zone" (236), arguing that the well-known television series that premiered in 1959 owed much of its success to groundwork that had been laid by Jack Finney. Finally, Mike Resnick, writing in 1997 in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, remarked that this collection was "the very best book [Finney] ever signed his name to."

  With the short stories he published between 1955 and 1957, culminating in the collection, The Third Level, Jack Finney secured for himself an honored place in the ranks of twentieth-century writers of fantasy. His next novel, however, would return to the genre of crime fiction that he had explored in 5 Against the House.

  SIX

  The House of Numbers

  The cover of the July 1956 issue of Cosmopolitan magazine advertised "The House of Numbers" as a "complete novel by Jack Finney, so gripping and fascinating you can't put it down." Inside, the "complete suspense novel" spans the course of 26 pages. In May 1957, an expanded version of the story appeared as a paperback first edition (Dell First Edition A139), and the back cover told readers that it was "soon to be an M-G-M movie starring Jack Palance." The movie, reti-tled House of Numbers, was released that same year.

  The House of Numbers is told in first-person narration by Benjamin Harrison Jarvis, a 26-year-old man whose brother, Arnie, is a prisoner at San Quentin Prison. The book opens as Ben and Ruth Gehlmann, Arnie's fiancee, view the prison from the vantage point of a small boat in the San Francisco Bay. They plan to help Arnie escape, and Ben tells Ruth to "'take a good look., because you're looking at the kind of place you'll end up in instead ... if anything at all goes wrong'" (7).

  Ben and Ruth met and rented a house together in Marin County (where Jack Finney lived) in order to plan Arnie's escape. Ruth is beautiful and from a wealthy, old San Francisco family. Arnie bought her an expensive engagement ring but paid for it with bad checks and was sent to prison for fraud. She feels guilty and Ben explains that Arnie also talked him into dropping everything to plan for the escape. Even though they agree that '"it's impossible to get a man out of there,'" (17), Ben suspects that they'll have to go through with the attempt at escape, and the thought frightens him.

  Finney uses some narrative trickery in The House of Numbers, switching points of view between different narrators. The second and third chapters are narrated in the first person by Arnie Jarvis, who is brought before a San Quentin disciplinary committee that is investigating an attack on a guard. An ex-convict who has been paroled is being brought back to the prison to identify the guard's attacker and, though Arnie feigns disinterest at the hearing, he thinks that he must escape within the next four days to avoid being identified as the culprit.

  In chapter three, Arnie grills fellow inmate Al about escape and Al recalls various failed attempts over the years. Arnie retires to his cell to think of a way out.

  Chapters four through ten are narrated by Ben. After visiting Arnie in prison, Ben returns and explains the predicament to Ruth, who has already packed her bags to go back to San Francisco. Ben explains that Section 4500 of the California Penal Code prescribes the death penalty for an assault with a deadly weapon committed by a prisoner serving a life sentence. Arnie is facing death, and Ben has a plan to help him escape. Ruth agrees to stay and help.

  In chapter five, Ben tells Ruth a good deal about Arnie's background, explaining some of the factors in his life that may have made him commit a crime. Ben explains that Arnie's identity is based largely on what other people think of him —'"he has no conviction inside himself about what he really is; it has to be supplied to him all the time'" (45). Arnie was greatly affected by his father's sudden unemployment when Arnie was in high school, and Arnie's repeated attempts to appear successful culminated with the fraudulent engagement ring purchase that landed him in San Quentin.

  After this bit of background, Ben and Ruth split up to spend the afternoon buying supplies to carry out their plan. Finney does not reveal the details of the plan to the reader, just as in 5 Against the House he held back details of the casino robbery plans in order to create suspense.

  Problems begin to emerge in chapter six, when Mr. Nova, a neighbor, approaches Ben and Ruth. He's an aging guard at San Quentin who tells Ben that he saw him at the prison. Nova offers to help Arnie, but Ben declines the offer from the unsavory man and returns home with Ruth to continue preparing. At two a.m., they drive up Highway 101 to the San Rafael ferry near the prison wall. Ben and Ruth's time together has sparked an attraction between them, and they kiss before Ruth drops Ben off at a preselected place.

  In chapter seven, Ben climbs over the prison wall and hides inside an empty furniture crate outside the building where the prisoners make furniture. He sleeps poorly and waits for morning, which arrives in chapter eight. The details of the escape plan begin to come clear at this point, when Arnie gives Ben his identification card and takes his place in the furniture crate. Ben is now Arnie, fading into the daily life of prisoners and living the life of a convict. After successfully making it through a search, Ben arrives at his lodging for the night: "I was locked in cell 1042 of San Quentin Prison" (83).

  Details of prison life dominate the next two chapters, as Ben learns about the various checks and counts that the guards use to keep track of the inmates. The first count completed, Ben knows that he has successfully replaced Arnie and that his brother will not be missed. Ben then follows the rest of the convicts into the huge cafeteria for dinner
. In this portion of the novel, Ben is the eyes and ears of the reader, experiencing first-hand what it is like to be an inmate of San Quentin and describing it all for us from the point of view of an innocent man.

  Finney's point of view here is interesting, especially in light of the book's dedication: "To my friend, Harley O. Teets, Warden of the California State Prison, San Quentin" (4). Despite having committed a crime in order to help his guilty brother break out of prison and avoid paying for a violent crime, Ben is portrayed as an innocent man, and his prison experience is a mixture of fear and awe. The awe is rather odd, and reads as if Finney were writing a public relations piece for the benefit of the jail. As Ben looks around the cafeteria, he thinks:

  It was a cheerful room, it occurred to me, the floor a rich red, tables of light wood, beautifully made and varnished, the walls a soft green and painted with murals. And it was immaculately clean. Not bad, I thought, and leaned back a little on my stool, comfortably; ... [99].

  Although this sense of peace does not last long and contrasts with what happens next, the reader gets the sense that Finney is laying it on a bit too thick here, as if trying to present a balanced point of view in order to please a friend.

  Ben's problems begin as he absentmindedly lights a cigarette after dinner. With this act, he unknowingly breaks a prison rule, and a guard yells at him. His identification is checked and he sees his neighbor, Nova, watching him. Nova follows Ben back to his cell and Ben resolves to kill Nova to protect his own secret —yet Ben's conscience prevents him from carrying out the murder. "I was willing; I could justify it; I knew I had to do it... But I could not kill him... I was incapable of the act of murder..." (105). Ben is not Arnie; he has an intact superego in place to stop himself from carrying out the desires of his id.