Stealing Through Time: On the Writings of Jack Finney

by Jack Seabrook

  In chapter five, Nick and Jan's relationship grows as she forgives him and admits that being possessed was both "'frightening'" and "'interesting'" (89). Nick discusses the 1920s with his father, who recalls them in a way that is consistent with similar passages in so much of Jack Finney's fiction. While Nick Sr. admits that '"we tend to remember what was good in the past and forget what was bad,'" he insists that '"It was just a grand and glorious time to be alive and young in'" (91). '"The people were different... nicer.... I don't remember the hatred there is now.... It was just a better time'" (91).

  Nick Jr. and Jan then go to bed together, after an awkward passage in which Nick uses the word "'fuck'" and then explains how he had to train his proper wife to use '"bad words'" (92). This passage (and similar ones in Finney's next novel, The Night People) show the author trying to be modern but sounding like an aging writer (Finney turned 62 in 1973, the year that Marion's Wall was published) trying to keep up with the times. Jack Finney's fiction is most enjoyable when he and his characters are longing for the past.

  At the end of this chapter, Marion Marsh returns to take control of Jan's body again, delighted to see a modern movie and excited by the advent of sound and color. The movie experience makes Marion change her mind about going away and leaving Nick alone. The next morning, he awakens to find her again possessing Jan's body and determined to pick up the pieces of her aborted movie career. She wants to visit Hugo Dahl, who worked as a prop boy on her only film, Flaming Flappers. His name is still in the telephone book. Marion entices Nick by telling him about an old friend who collected films. Nick explains to Marion the mania that infects collectors and reveals that his '"impossible dream'" is to find '"all forty-two incredible reels of Erich von Stroheim's lost masterpiece... Greed"' (107).

  Nick soon gets to experience ghostly possession, when he accompanies Marion to a screening of the silent film, The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. During the show, he is possessed by the ghost of Rudolph Valentino, the film's star, and feels "the hopeless yearning for what might have been" (111). This incident, coupled with Marion's insistence, convinces Nick to talk to Jan about letting Marion travel to Hollywood in Jan's body to try to break into the movie business.

  In chapter seven, Jan agrees and gives Nick and Marion two weeks to succeed. They drive to Hollywood (with Valentino briefly taking over Nick's body during the trip) and Nick convinces Jan to live up to her promise, despite her immediate dislike of the movie town. They go to a movie studio and meet Hugo Dahl, who believes Jan when she tells him that she is Marion Marsh's granddaughter and agrees to give her an audition. In a humorous passage, Nick is possessed by Rodolpho Guglielmi (the real name of Rudolph Valentino) and awakens in the middle of a dangerous stunt on the wing of a biplane flying above Los Angeles. The scene is quite a contrast to another scene, in Finney's short story, "An Old Tune," where the narrator calmly travels above Marin County in a hot air balloon.

  Both Nick's stunt work and Jan's audition are masterful, yet they and the spirits inhabiting their bodies are crestfallen when they see the footage used in television commercials advertising bottles of catsup. In the meantime, they locate the mansion where aged film collector Ted Bollinghurst lives, and Marion succeeds in landing a bit part in one of Dahl's films.

  In the conclusion of Marion's Wall, Jan/Marion finally gets her chance to shine in a movie. Marion lights up the room in her scene, which occurs at a party, but when the character disrobes, Marion soon becomes disgusted and tells the onlookers that '"this isn't the MOVIES at all " (153). Her brief career at an end, she stalks off of the set and takes Nick to visit Ted Bollinghurst. Now in his eighties, Bollinghurst lives in an opulent Hollywood mansion built in the heady 1920s and named Graustark. Nick and Jan/Marion get a tour of the house, which is home to an impressive collection of rare movie memorabilia. This sits in stark contrast to the portrayal of Hollywood of the 1970s that they saw at the studio. Here in the mansion, where time has stood still, the glory days of silent film live on. Bollinghurst, Nick thinks, is "a movie fan, an old-film buff, of which there are a lot of us — but with the money to take it just as far as he wanted to go" (165).

  Bollinghurst's film collection is equally impressive and even includes the complete Greed. In his private screening room, furnished like a 1920s movie palace with an organ that Ted plays in accompaniment to the silent films he shows, they watch Daughters of Jazz, the film that Marion would have starred in had she not died. Ted admits to having been in love with her, having replaced all of Joan Crawford's scenes in his copy of the movie with clips of Marion.

  As the film begins. Jack Finney provides an in joke to long-time readers as the screen credits read, "From the novel by Walter Braden" (177), Finney's legal name. The novel's climax occurs as the film catches fire and burns down the mansion, with Ted Bollinghurst remaining at the pipe organ, playing like Lon Chaney in The Phantom of the Opera. Nick rescues Jan, but Marion's ghost stays behind, sitting in the front row of the theater as the house burns to the ground.

  The novel ends with Nick and Jan changed by their experience. They earn residuals from the commercials they made while in Hollywood, and Nick uses the money to buy some old movies. The one thing that does not change is the wall: "That hasn't changed, and never will as long as we're in this house. Marion Marsh lived here, it still says in that enormous, free-swinging scrawl of lipsticked letters across it, Read it and weep" (187).

  Reviews at the time of publication were positive. Kirkus called Marion's Wall "a pleasantly ensorceling story of a time that was down nostalgia alley at the corner of Sunset and Vine" and the Library Journal called it "a slick ghost tale with a humorous gimmick" (McCormick). Publishers Weekly added that the novel was "entertaining and suspense-ful fantasy, especially for old-time film buffs" (Bannon). The Booklist remarked that Marion's Wall was "unusually agreeable" with "an appropriate conclusion."

  Subsequent critics have not had much to say about the novel. Michael Beard's 1981 survey article compared Marion Marsh's appropriation of Jan Cheyney's body to the actions of an earlier class of Finney villains but explained that, this time, "the body snatching is benign: she stays only long enough to realize that she does not want a movie career in the film industry of the 1970s" (185). In her 1996 article, Kim Newman pointed out the novel's debt to Thorne Smith (author of Topper) and wrote that "Marion's Wall is as concerned with evoking the minutiae (and slang) of the past as Time and Again with a strong undercurrent of dissatisfaction with a plasticized present" (197).

  More recently, Jon Breen has pointed out that the setting of Marion's Wall "returns to the young, married suburban ambience of Good Neighbor Sam" (34) and, by extension, to the many early stories Finney wrote featuring characters like Tim and Eve Ryan.

  Finney followed Marion's Wall with three more short articles in the New York Times, all published in 1973 and following the pattern of the four earlier pieces he had published on that newspaper's editorial pages in 1970. "Getting It Right This Time" describes an 1871 plan to build an elevated railway above New York's Park Avenue. "Man's First Flight: Over Manhattan, 1876" relates an 1876 newspaper story of a successful test of a dying machine and asks a modern engineer if it is plausible. Finally, "Esprit de Postal Corp." describes the 1875 relocation of New York's post office from an abandoned church to a new building. Finney quotes favorite author Mark Twain's 1876 remarks about the inefficiencies of the postal service. Clearly, in the wake of Marion's Wall, Finney was still captivated by the subject of his prior novel, Time and Again.

  Marion's Wall has not achieved the success of Time and Again, although it was reprinted in a slightly updated form in the 1987 collection, Three By Finney. In 1985, the film adaptation of the novel, Maxie, was released, making it the first of Finney's novels to be filmed since Good Neighbor Sam. Maxie takes liberties with Marion's Wall, making Jan the main character and updating the story to the mid-1980s. Still, it is an entertaining film, and the gist of Finney's story remains. It is discussed in detail in chapter
nineteen.

  Marion's Wall is an entertaining novel that touches on Jack Finney's interest in the past and continues to explore some of the themes he had written about in Time and Again. His next novel, The Night People, would mark a return to the type of novel he had not written since Assault on a Queen.

  THIRTEEN

  The Night People

  Jack Finney's 1977 novel The Night People marks his return to the caper story, which he had used successfully early in his career but which he had not explored since 1959's Assault on a Queen. The Night People is similar to Five Against the House in a number of ways, since each book tells the story of a group of bored young people who decide to turn to crime to spice up their otherwise dull lives. Instead of the college students of the earlier book, however, the main characters in the 1977 novel are working adults.

  The novel opens with a prologue, much like a teaser opening for a television show. In it, Lew Joliffe and his friend Harry are climbing up the cables of San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge. Their excitement is mixed with fear, and Lew thinks back to how they began as the Night People. The story is told by Lew in third person narration, and this odd prologue serves as an introduction to the majority of the book, which thus becomes an elongated flashback. Oddly enough, the pages from the prologue are not repeated in chapter ten, in which the actual event takes place.

  One may speculate that Finney's publisher forced this opening onto the novel, perhaps thinking it needed a grabber to hook the reader's interest. It is not like the beginning of any other of his books and it is followed by chapter one, in which the story really begins. Of all of Jack Finney's novels, The Night People suffers most from dating, as many of the situations and attitudes expressed by its characters seem locked in the hedonistic 1970s era it portrays. Its events occur in Mill Valley, California (Finney's home at the time), and in surrounding Marin County. Lew Joliffe is a lawyer in his late twenties who shares an apartment with his lover, Josephine "Jo" Dunne, an architect. The story takes place in 1976, and Lew dictates a cassette tape for listeners 100 years in the future. Finney uses this method to provide expository details about the two characters. Lew is having trouble sleeping and dons a ski mask to go outside for a walk in the empty, suburban streets. Finney's running in-joke with his legal name appears again as Lew calls to one house, '"Hey, Walter Braden! Come on out, and play!" (259).

  Lew comes to a ballfield and pretends he is batting in the World Series, then sits on a porch swing and dares himself to complete six swings in the loud contraption. This awakens the resident of the home on whose porch the swing hangs, and Lew hides when the man comes out to investigate. Chapter one ends with Lew returning home, having completed his first nighttime act of rebellion.

  In chapter two, Lew drives to work with neighbor Harry Levy, and they share their boredom with their mundane lives and jobs. Before leaving home, Jo asks Lew why he is in a bad mood. He answers with sarcasm: '"Nothing. Nothing that isn't bothering everybody. The national debt. Corruption in high and low places. Decline in moral values. Blatant sexuality'" (266). But these modern, 1970s-era concerns are not really the problem. Instead, Lew and neighbor Harry are both examples of young, urban, successful men in Jack Finney's fiction who are bored with their lives and yearn for adventure. Lew says to Harry, '"I just mean is it okay with you if this turns out to be all you ever do?'" and, later, '"sometimes it bothers me that this could be more or less it from now on'" (269). Like Si Morley in Time and Again, like Hugh Brittain in "The U-19's Last Kill" and Assault on a Queen, like Tim Ryan in so many early short stories, the two men in The Night People appear to have good lives but are bored by their material success. Si Morley has his problem solved when he is offered a chance to travel back in time. Hugh Brittain escapes boredom by joining with his friend Vic DeRossier to rob the Queen Mary. Tim Ryan good-naturedly seems to find things to liven up his days. Lew Joliffe and Harry Levy continue this trend in the swinging seventies in The Night People, in which they experiment with sex and vandalism to manufacture entertainment.

  The use of casual obscenities that began in Marion's Wall continues in this novel, as Harry tells wife Shirley that she doesn't '"give a fuck'" and she replies that she does not '"like casual, pointless dirty talk'" (273). This leads to a discussion of wife-swapping, a 1970s phenomenon that truly serves to date the novel.

  In chapter three, Lew goes for another lonely walk late at night and is surprised to see that the freeway, which is crowded every morning, is completely deserted at night. Finney uses a very slow exposition in The Night People, and the story drags a bit as a result. The reader knows from the opening scene on the Golden Gate Bridge that something is going to happen, but the story of two self-absorbed young couples verges on being no more than a tale about spoiled adult brats. Lew tells Jo a colorful story of an event from his childhood that she immediately knows is untrue; she realizes that his trait of "occasionally spinning out a fantasy to her or others, making it as believable as he could" (283) is a sign of his uneasiness. Lew is also considering running for city council, which would not only make his place in the community even more stable, it would be another signal that he is growing up and becoming an adult. Finney implies that Lew's antics in The Night People are a reaction to this fear of maturity, something that many members of his generation were experiencing at the time.

  Lew's slow metamorphosis into a risk taker continues in the novel's fourth chapter, as he goes for his third nighttime walk. This time, he walks out onto the empty freeway and lies down in the middle of the road. Harry's wife Shirley is out walking her dog at the same time and joins Lew in the road. They kiss and he admits that he desires her. They then try to scare a passing car before going home. Lew's sexual fantasy is dashed when Shirley excitedly tells him that she wants Harry and Jo to join them on their next outing; she coins the term '"the Night People'" (291) and Lew feels a pang of sorrow at the realization that "the solitariness of his night-time walks" (291) is gone.

  In chapter five, Lew tells Jo about his nighttime walks, and admits that he has '"always liked the notion of some secret way to walk off into another world'" (293), recalling the actions of the narrator in Finney's early story, "The Third Level." Living in California, he misses the snowy winters of his Illinois childhood and tells Jo that one Christmas he flew back to Chicago and went to see his parents' house. It looked different than he had remembered, however, and even though he did not go in, he was satisfied at having seen it (293-94). This attempt to return to the past puts Lew even more squarely in the line of Jack Finney's fictional characters who have done (or tried to do) the same thing; the incident also recalls a similar one in the short story "Crazy Sunday," where a young father travels to Paris on a whim and learns "that his youth wasn't still here waiting to be returned to" (246). For her part, Jo also shares an affection with many of Finney's characters in that she "'always liked the idea of a summerhouse ... the little lath and scrollwork places you'd go off to by yourself on a long 1890 kind of summer afternoon'" (294).

  That night, the foursome goes for their first nighttime walk together. They end up frolicking on the freeway until a police car passes. They are concerned that he may have seen them and they observe him park at a nearby service station and get coffee. In true 1970s fashion, Harry is angry at the power the police wield over innocent citizens — '"answer questions; produce identification, for crysake. All that shit — I hate it'" (302). To give Jack Finney credit, though, the anti-police expressions and acts of the characters in The Night People, while they may seem dated and pandering to popular feelings of the 1970s, are actually extensions of behavior common to Finney's characters as far back as Tim Ryan (see "Sounds in the Night," a 1951 short story).

  Although Harry fantasizes about vandalizing the police car, nothing is done and the Night People go home peacefully. Starting the next day, everyone goes back to their normal lives. Chapter six includes another scene reminiscent of an early Finney story; this time, Lew and Harry refuse to get up and visit each other o
n a rainy Monday night, so their wives facilitate a party by telephone. In 1957, Finney had published the story "Rainy Sunday," in which the same thing happens between two other couples, the Callandars and the Howsers. A comparison of the scene in The Night People with the earlier short story makes it clear that Finney had the story in hand when he wrote the novel; the entire scene is rewritten and updated, but the events and many of the words are repeated verbatim. Of interest to Finney's readers is the change that occurs when Lew sings his high school song. In "Rainy Sunday," Ben and Charley sing '"Revere old Courtland, dear old Courtland, " which earns this reply: '"their high-school song,'June murmured to Ruth. 'Can you tie that?'" (307). In The Night People, it is changed to '"On Proviso, on Proviso,/Fling your colors high!'" to which this reply is given: '"Their high school song,' Shirley murmured. 'Can you tie that?'" (312). The change is interesting because Jack Finney attended Proviso High School.

  A close examination of The Night People reveals that it is an amalgam of many things that Jack Finney had done before in his fiction, with a rather clumsy attempt to update its events to the 1970s by means of casual obscenities, radical attitudes, and frank discussions of sexuality. Another Night People outing occurs in chapter six, and this time it is wilder than the last. While dancing in an empty shopping center parking lot and drinking champagne, the two couples are surprised by Floyd Pearley, the same policeman they had seen on their last outing. Pearley is portrayed as a reactionary, his behavior and speech a caricature of an ignorant policeman in contrast with the smooth, well-spo-ken Lew Joliffe. Harry is belligerent and lectures the policeman about his behavior, but Lew calms Harry down and they almost walk away before Harry's childish behavior forces a confrontation. The couples are forced to run away and escape after Pearley pulls his gun and threatens them.