Stealing Through Time: On the Writings of Jack Finney

by Jack Seabrook

  "Crazy Sunday" is a charming story with a happy protagonist; unlike the main characters in so many of Finney's tales, Victor Talburt is satisfied with his life and with the present and does not try very hard to recapture a time of past happiness.

  The same thing cannot be said for the narrator of Finney's next story, "I Love Galesburg in the Springtime." Oscar Manheim is a reporter for the Register-Mail who learns of several unusual events in the town of Galesburg, Illinois. The first involves E.V. Marsh, who has changed his mind about building a factory on Broad Street near the city limits. After a meeting with the town leaders, Marsh had walked the streets of Galesburg and liked them; Manheim agrees, recalling how he fell in love with the town the first time he saw it as a child. Manheim remarks that many of the houses "have the half comically ugly, half charming look, made of spaciousness, dignity, foolishness, and conspicuous waste, that belongs to another time" (183).

  Marsh tells Manheim that he was nearly run over by a streetcar at the end of his walk. He describes hearing the sound of an old phonograph being wound and seeing the old-fashioned outfit and grooming of the motorman. Yet when he told people about his near miss he was arrested for being drunk and disorderly and learned that the streetcar tracks had been torn up in the 1930s. The embarrassment of the incident made him change his mind about building the new factory in Galesburg.

  Manheim tells the reader that he never put the unusual details in Marsh's story when he wrote it up for the newspaper; he begins to think of Galesburg as a person, adding that it "laughs at me a little" and "once expected big things of me" (184). He explains that he turned down a scholarship at Harvard to stay in Galesburg and attend Knox College, because he has always been in love with the town.

  A second incident related to Manheim involves an old house that was saved from burning to the ground by a horse-drawn, steam-powered fire engine operated by men from the past. The third and final incident described by the narrator involves a man who changed his mind about selling his farm to developers after he received a telephone call on an old, disconnected phone from a boyhood friend who had been killed in France in 1918.

  Oscar writes, "I'm glad about that ... because here in Galesburg, and everywhere else, of course, they're trying —endlessly — to destroy the beauty we inherit from the past. They keep trying, and when they succeed, they replace it — not always, but all too often — with drabness and worse." He continues: "we're doing these things, to ourselves ... as though any feeling for beauty or grace or a sense of the past were a kind of sentimental weakness to be jeered down" (190).

  Manheim explains the strange events of the story by arguing that "Galesburg's past is fighting back ... when the need becomes desperate enough..." (190). The story ends with another example of the fight, as the past once more penetrates into the present to prevent the destruction of beautiful old trees.

  In "I Love Galesburg in the Springtime," Jack Finney plays around with the theme of time travel again, with the town where he attended college serving as the traveler. The people in the story do not long for the past; in fact, most of them are trying to eradicate it. Instead, the town itself becomes a force of preservation, perhaps because there are no people left to do the job in its place. This is a cautionary tale, one in which man's insensitivity to aspects of a place and its history eventually causes rebellion by the place itself. Unlike The Body Snatchers, where the deterioration of a town is due to alien apathy, this story puts the blame squarely on the residents of Galesburg, Illinois.

  "An Old Tune" is a gentle tale of a man who does not escape through time, exactly, but does use an old-fashioned method to float above the times in which he lives. The story begins with the mysterious line, "On the sixth day he was home alone, Charley Burke walked out onto the patio...." Recalling Genesis, Charley is portrayed as godlike, alone on the sixth day. Why is he alone? Has his wife left him? Finney does not tell us. Charley works in San Francisco and "was conscious of the emptiness of the suburban house" (113). Seeing a hawk, he wants to fly, too, and reads an article about the use of hot air balloons in the nineteenth century. "Men understood the things they used then; they were masters of the machines that served them." In contrast, Charley thinks that men of today are "no longer masters of very much at all" (230).

  Charley builds a hot air balloon and floats up in it, hanging above Marin County, where Jack Finney also lived. The next night, he is joined by a neighbor, Mrs. Lanidas, and they sing the old tune of the title, "Come, Josephine, in my flying machine," as they see San Quentin Prison and narrowly avoid the Golden Gate Bridge, each of which serves as a setting in novels by Jack Finney. "Charley felt godlike" (233) and bestows blessings on the community below.

  The ride over, Charley's wife and daughter return, although we are never told why they were gone or where they went. Charley sees Mrs. Lanidas at a P.T.A. meeting six months later, and they share a secret as the story ends with her saying '"Call me Josephine'" and him whistling the "old, old tune" on his way home (233).

  "An Old Tune" is a charming, wistful story that features many of Jack Finney's signature touches but never veers into outright fantasy.

  The title characters of "Where the Cluetts Are" find an even more effective way than Charley Burke did to escape into the nineteenth century. The story is told by an architect named Harry, whose clients, the Cluetts, commission him to design and build a house just as it would have been done in the 1880s. As the laborious process goes on, Harry tells Ellie Cluett that "'we're looking at a vanished sight. This is a commonplace sight of a world long gone, and we've reached back and brought it to life again.'" The house is finished and the Cluetts begin living a Victorian lifestyle — guests arrive by carriage and the house is lit by gaslight. "It was a scene lost to the world," Harry thinks, "a glimpse of another time and manner of living" (112).

  Eventually, the Cluetts retreat further into the past, having fewer visitors and recalling events from long ago that they should have no way of knowing. By the end of the story, the Cluetts live as if it is the 1880s, "as though the house existed in some other year." Harry concludes that the house is haunted by "its old self" and that its "ghost has captured the Cluetts— rather easily, (or I think they were glad to surrender" (113).

  "Where the Cluetts are" recalls "I Love Galesburg in the Springtime" in the way inanimate objects and locations work to recapture the past; this time, it is just one house instead of an entire town.

  Fantasy takes over in the weak story, "The Man with the Magic Glasses." In it, a New York office worker named Ted buys a pair of glasses in a joke shop that allow him to see through women's clothes. He ends up in love with frumpy co-worker Freida, who bought a love potion from the same shop. Finney's interest in the nineteenth century peeks through when Ted compares Freida's hair to that worn by "someone in an 1895 out-of-focus tintype" (94) but, other than that, there is little to recommend this story. Jack Finney appears to have realized its flaws as well, because he reworked it considerably before including it in his collection I Love Galesburg in the Springtime as "Love, Your Magic Spell Is Everywhere." It was reprinted in the collection About Time under a third title, "Lunch-Hour Magic."

  "Old Enough for Love" followed, in the May 1962 issue of McCall's. This is a clever and engaging comedy set in San Francisco, in which a young couple (like the Ryans or the Callandars) know Fred, a much older man who changes his appearance, name, and job in order to date a beautiful young woman. After marrying her, the older man tires of the act, but all is well when he admits the truth to his wife.

  Jack Finney's "Hey, Look at Me!" is a ghostly tale about writers and critics. Narrated by Peter Marks, a book editor at a San Francisco newspaper who lives in Mill Valley, it concerns the late Max Kingery, a writer with whom Marks had coffee every day. Max had been a young and serious man who had planned to be a famous writer. He died of pneumonia and nobody noticed. Six months later, he returns, and Peter sees him. Others in town see him, too, and Peter finds evidence in the writer's house that he had b
een using great effort to try to write but had failed.

  Marks surmises that Max was still trying to gain attention as a writer, even after death, like a child shouting '"Hey, look at me!'" by writing his initials on a rock by the side of the road. In the end, Max has the last laugh when he has "MAXWELL KINGERY, AUTHOR" carved in big letters on his own tombstone and the bill is given to Marks, who is, after all, '"just a critic'" (74).

  Like Fred, who pretends to be younger in "Old Enough for Love," the title characters in "The Sunny Side of the Street" represent an example of Finney's young, urban marrieds beginning to mature. David and Fran have two children and he ponders their sudden loss of freedom as parents. He and his wife hire a babysitter and set off across the Golden Gate Bridge and into San Francisco, where they register under assumed names at a hotel. Despite their seeming freedom, neither can stop thinking about their children, and each secretly calls home to check up on them. They head for home as the story ends, agreeing that children are worth the lack of freedom that they cause.

  This charming story foreshadows the restless couples of Finney's later novel, The Night People, as well as its San Francisco setting. Like Fred, in "Old Enough for Love," David fantasizes about being younger and having more control over his life. Unlike Fred, however, he realizes that he is satisfied with his situation without having to go to extremes.

  Jack Finney's last short story in this period was "Time Has No Boundaries," which appeared in the October 13, 1962 issue of the Saturday Evening Post. Narrated by Professor Bernard Weygand and set in San Francisco, this tale marks the author's return to stories about time travel, as Inspector Martin Ihren discovers that criminals are escaping back in time to avoid capture. He tries to convince Professor Weygand to bring the criminals back but the professor says he cannot; Ihren settles for sending incriminating letters back through time to a police chief in 1885. The professor gets the last laugh, however, and sends the policeman himself back to 1893.

  Once again, Jack Finney's characters do not respect authority figures. This theme will recur in Time and Again and will be central to The Night People. The time travel in "Time Has No Boundaries" is not really the wistful sort of so many of Finney's stories, though — this time, criminals retreat from the present to avoid capture.

  In 1962, Jack Finney published his second short story collection, I Love Galesburg in the Springtime. Like The Third Level, it featured mostly stories with fantastic themes, omitting the urban comedies in Finney's catalogue and thus consigning them to the dustbin of history. The stories in this collection included "I Love Galesburg in the Springtime," "The Man with the Magic Glasses" (retitled "Love, Your Magic Spell Is Everywhere"), "Where the Cluetts Are," "Hey, Look at Me!" "Tiger Tamer" (retitled "A Possible Candidate for the Presidency"), "Seven Days to Live" (retitled "Prison Legend"), "Time Has No Boundaries" (retitled "The Face in the Photo"), "An Old Tune" (retitled "The Intrepid Aeronaut"), "The Other Wife" (retitled "The Coin Collector"), and "The Love Letter." In addition to giving new titles to six of the ten stories, Finney updated most of them, added to "Time Has No Boundaries," and partially rewrote "The Man wilh the Magic Glasses."

  This outstanding collection has been out of print for decades, although several of the stories were collected in the 1986 volume About Time. Reviews of the 1965 British reprint of I Love Galesburg in the Springtime focused on its theme of nostalgia, which one writer found to be "a more attractive ingredient in these stories than the fantasy" (Young). Another writer, reviewing the book for the Times Literary Supplement, added that "Jack Finney certainly has a style of his own, but it is a cosy one, more after de la Mare than H.G. Wells, and he toys delicately with time-shift fantasies, haunted by an addiction to mid-nineteenth-century American provincial architecture."

  Finney published one more short story in his lifetime. Titled "Double Take," it appeared in the April 1965 issue of Playboy. The editor's introduction praised the author's "gentle touch with fantasy not quite like any other storyteller around" (293) and 26-year-old Jake Pelman, the dialogue director of a movie being made in New York, tells the story itself. He is taking the train from Hollywood to New York with beautiful starlet Jessica Maxwell, and his job is to help her prepare to film her last scenes, which are set in the 1920s. She is too immature at 20 to master the emotions of a broken heart, however, and his expectations for her performance are not high as they arrive in New York on a spring night.

  Regular readers of Jack Finney's work will suspect what is about to happen when the narrator states that lower Fifth Avenue had not changed much since the 1920s and they are filming with a vintage bus that still has its 1926 license plates. The cast and crew get into costume to take the bus for a test drive and various people board the bus as it has clearly been transported back to the flapper era. One of the new riders is a handsome young man who falls in love with Jessica at first sight — he speaks to her but she dismisses him coldly.

  The next day, Jessica has trouble getting the right emotion while filming her big scene until the actor playing an older man utters a phrase that causes her to realize he is the handsome young man from the bus, now years older. Jake suddenly understands that the bus had traveled back in time the night before, and Jessica delivers an Oscar-caliber performance once she realizes that she had broken the man's heart long ago.

  The story ends with Jessica crying with the knowledge that "love will not wait" (313). She asks Jake to accompany her back to Hollywood, again by train, and he thinks that his chance at love is at hand.

  "Double Take" is a lovely, nostalgic tale in which another trip back in time occurs when the setting is just right. New York is the place, the 1920s the time, and lessons are learned about seizing the day when love comes to call.

  After "Double Take," Jack Finney wrote full-length books almost exclusively for the rest of his life, with one exception. In the spring of 1966, This Winter's Hobby premiered in Philadelphia, after having had a tryout in New Haven, Connecticut. It was a full-length play by Jack Finney, and it was headed for Broadway. It never got there, as will be explained in chapter seventeen.

  For the rest of his career as a writer, Jack Finney was mainly a novelist, and he never published another short story or had another play performed after 1966. In fact, his fifth novel, which had been published in 1963, was a marked departure from the novels that had come before it.

  NINE

  Good Neighbor Sam

  In 1963, Jack Finney published Good Neighbor Sam, his fifth novel. It was his first novel not to be serialized or based on a prior magazine work; however, it shares so much with his prior work and foreshadows aspects of his subsequent work that it fits perfectly into the middle of his writing career.

  In a 1966 interview, Finney commented that "'when I write a book I really am thinking about a movie. With "Good Neighbor Sam," I had Jack Lemmon in mind from the very beginning'" (Wilson). The filmed version of this novel was released in 1964 and starred Jack Lemmon; nevertheless, the novel is much more than a blueprint for the movie, and it bears close examination in relation to the author's other works.

  The story begins with a takeoff on the famous opening line of Moby-Dick; here, the narrator tells the reader, "Call me Sam" (7). He is 29-year-old advertising man Samuel L. Bissell, married to 25-year-old Minerva Bissell and living in Sausalito, California, in the heart of Marin County, also home to Jack Finney. He works at the Burke and Hare advertising agency in San Francisco. Burke and Hare were grave robbers who rose to infamy in nineteenth-century Scotland by stealing corpses to sell to doctors for medical research, much as Bissell and his colleagues use bits and pieces of ideas to create their advertising campaigns.

  Sam has a hobby that involves building a mobile from junk on his patio; again, creating something out of the garbage he finds around him. Sam also has a distraction named Janet Ebbett, a beautiful young woman who lives alone in the house next door and who stands to inherit eleven million dollars when her grandfather dies. The catch is that she has to be married at the t
ime he dies, something complicated by the fact that she is now divorced and without prospects.

  In chapter two, Janet's lawyer informs her that she may still be married, since her final divorce papers have not yet come through. Sam's amorous daydreams of Janet are interrupted in chapter three by the arrival of Janet's greedy cousins, Irene Krupp and her brother, Jack Bailey. Finney makes a wry comment on a name shared by himself and the intended star of the movie version of the novel when he has Sam think: "any guy calls himself Jack as though it were a name and not a nickname couldn't be trusted not to steal a wet cigar butt" (32).

  The comedy of identities begins as Janet introduces Sam as her husband, Howard Ebbett, to her suspicious cousins. Sam is forced to go home with Janet and continue the charade until the cousins leave. A private detective then takes up surveillance outside the house in a poorly disguised truck, and Sam spends the early morning hours sleeping uncomfortably on Janet's sofa so that he can leave for work that morning from her house, as would her husband.

  Sam's problems mount in the fourth chapter, when Janet drives him to work and his boss, Mr. Burke, thinks she is his wife. The silly ad campaign that Sam works on—'"When liver bile doesn't flow just right, BELS for the belly make the world seem bright!'" (52)—suggests that Jack Finney knew the ins and outs of the world of advertising well, since he worked in a similar agency in New York in the 1940s before turning his hand to writing fiction. Another account, for Nes-fresh eggs, is Sam's particular specialty, and a funny scene ensues in which Sam convinces his colleagues that the best way to advertise Nes-fresh is to use the tried and true method of testimonials. Speaking of the photographs of "real" people to be used on the billboards, Sam remarks, '"Fake them up to look honest and real'" (61).