Stealing Through Time: On the Writings of Jack Finney

by Jack Seabrook

  To add insult to injury, the couples then go home, get high on marijuana, and take nude Polaroid pictures of each other. Unfortunately, chapter six of The Night People is one of the more embarrassing examples of Jack Finney's fiction, and it demonstrates why he was a much better writer when he was not trying to pander to the fashions of the times.

  In chapter seven, Harry's childish behavior continues. He reveals to Lew that he printed an enlarged photograph of Lew, Jo, and Shirley in the nude and hid it in a book in the Mill Valley Library. Lew must recover the photograph before the library opens the next morning and a student discovers it. The crime is planned, and that night Lew and Jo enter the library through an unlocked back door and begin searching for the book. Accidental exposure of Lew's flashlight leads to an investigation by the police, and of course one of them is Floyd Pearley, the target of Harry and Lew's invective on their last adventure.

  Lew and Jo hide from the police in a suspenseful scene and, as they escape to Harry's getaway car, Harry reveals that he has stolen the ignition keys from the police car. He tosses them out of the window into the road and a car chase ensues, but again the couples evade the police and retire to bed.

  Two thirds of the way through The Night People, its central problems are already clear. First of all, the characters are not particularly engaging or likeable. Lew is a spoiled adult, Jo is sketchily drawn, Shirley is essentially an object for Lew's lustful thoughts, and Harry is a childish boor. Secondly, there is no real motive for their actions, other than boredom or nastiness. One gets the feeling that these are not people that one would like to meet, and the cardboard manner in which their encounters with the police occur does not engender reader sympathy. However, the novel's big set piece is yet to occur, despite the fact that it was given away in the prologue.

  In chapter eight, Lew suggests climbing to the top of the Golden Gate Bridge. Before this is planned, however, there is another encounter with Officer Pearley, whose dialogue is embarrassing: '"You was the guy at the liberry, " he tells Lew. '"You flang the keys!'" (369). Though Harry and Lew walk away, the policeman arrests Shirley, leading to Harry's punching the policeman and stealing his gun. Though the couples think they have escaped and reached home safely, the police successfully track them down and Harry and Shirley are forced to evacuate their apartment and move in with Lew and Jo. Everyone decides that they will have to leave California and start life anew, but Lew and Harry vow revenge on Office Pearley and discuss Lew's plan about climbing the bridge.

  In chapter nine of The Night People, Pearley gets closer to finding Harry and Lew as they evade his search and plan their last and greatest prank. The preparation and gathering of materials recalls similar scenes in earlier Finney novels, such as 5 Against the House and Assault on a Queen, but by this point in the novel the situation has grown so ridiculous that it is hard to care about the fates of these characters.

  The novel concludes in chapter ten, where the scene in the prologue finally makes sense. The two couples drive to the Golden Gate Bridge, where Harry and Lew begin their climb to the top. Oddly enough, the suspenseful pages from the prologue are not repeated, which diffuses the sense of fear that the earlier section of the novel had begun to create. The men make it to the top and then descend like mountain climbers; Jo and Shirley send up supplies by rope. Their job complete, they rejoin the women and drive to the service station where they had first seen Officer Pearley. They do things to annoy him, such as jamming the coin slots on his favorite coffee machine, then steal his police car when he arrives.

  They drive to the Civic Center and use a ramp to park the police car on the building's roof, taking a Bonnie and Clyde style photograph together before leaving. The stunt makes the TV news, and the embarrassment of Officer Pearley continues as the Chief of Police makes fun of the situation, telling a reporter that Pearley '"was in hot pursuit. Of a stolen hang glider. Had him cornered up there on the roof'" (403). The comment recalls Finney's earlier story, "An Old Tune," but The Night People contains little of the lyricism of that earlier tale of a man reaching the top of the Golden Gate Bridge by balloon.

  As the day ends, the Night People's final prank gets underway. Lew, Harry, and Shirley use three vehicles to block all four lanes of traffic on the Golden Gate Bridge. Harry hooks up a power source and Jo and Shirley pull on ropes to let down a huge white sheet that will serve as a screen. Harry then projects their life story onto the screen, to the enthrallment of those stalled in traffic on the bridge. The final shot is the one of Lew, Shirley, and Jo naked, and as the novel ends, Lew and Jo drive toward Santa Fe; she had almost decided to leave him but she has chosen to stay with him to see what will happen next.

  The Night People is a dated novel, filled with characters and situations of the mid-1970s that seem quaint and unpleasant today. It represents Jack Finney's most awkward attempt to keep up with the times, and it would be his last, since he would not publish another novel for 18 years.

  Upon publication in 1977, The Night People was not widely reviewed. Kirkus Reviews commented that "this scenario would work better as a Finney short story or as a frisky film; given too many pauses between bon mots and escapades, it's easy to find the night games resistible — to become disenchanted with the second-childhooding, suspicious of motives, and impatient for Finney to probe beneath the high spirits." A Publishers Weekly review called the novel, "nice jaunty escapism" (Bannon), and a Booklist writer referred to it as a "humorous novel attractive both as snappy entertainment and social commentary," but the novel faded quickly from view after a paperback reprinting and was never filmed.

  Critics writing in the decades since the novel's publication have barely mentioned it, but Finney himself referred to it in a 1995 interview, when he mentioned that he had not ever read to anyone at the Mill Valley Public Library, "not too surprising, when you consider that in 'Night People,' his 1977 novel, he explained how the average citizen could burglarize the place. 'I was concerned,' says Thelma Percy, 75, who was the head librarian then. "The instructions were explicit. We didn't want to encourage that sort of thing'" (Ickes 36). In 1999, Jon Breen wrote that "these characters ... are less endearing than the author's usual. It may be that Finney's decision (otherwise unprecedented in the novels) to write in the third person damaged the kind of tenuous reader identification needed to render his central characters likeable" (35). Fred Blosser was more impressed with the novel, writing that " The Night People may be most remarkable as a parable of anomie and angst in the comfortable white-collar middle class during the Ford and Carter era, comparable to the free-flowing, absurdist seventies movies of Paul Mazursky and Robert Altman" (55).

  Jack Finney was 65 years old when The Night People was published in 1977. He had not published a short story since 1965, and he would not publish another. Despite his impressive early record for having his novels made into films, his last four novels had failed to interest Hollywood, and no film adaptation of his work had been released since Assault on a Queen in 1966. He would not publish another book for six years, and one may safely assume that, after The Night People, he was in semi-retirement.

  FOURTEEN

  Forgotten News: The Crime of the Century and Other Lost Stories

  As the 1980s began, American society was changing. The 1970s had been a rime of upheaval, and Jack Finney's attempt to reflect the prevailing spirit had resulted in The Night People. The popular filmed remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, released in 1978, changed the tone of the original story so completely that it looked like Jack Finney's best work was out of step with the times. Yet his love of traditional values and his interest in America's past began to coincide with the return to the past being promoted by new president Ronald Reagan, and nostalgia was once again in vogue. Finney's 1970 novel Time and Again had continued to sell for a decade, and was well on its way to achieving cult status and popularity beyond anything else he had written. It is not surprising that his next published work would be Forgotten News: The Crime of the Century and Ot
her Lost Stories, a book that hearkens back to the era explored in Time and Again.

  Forgotten News was published in 1983 and is Jack Finney's only non-fiction book. It begins with a short essay entitled, "What Is This Book?" (vii-xiv). The essay immediately reminds readers of Time and Again because it includes 14 vintage illustrations from Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper, interspersed with Finney's tale about how he researched New York City history when writing Time and Again. It is interesting to note that the process Finney went through is exactly the same process that Si Morley goes through in the 1970 novel when he immerses himself in the details of an earlier age in order to prepare for his time travel.

  Finney explains that, years after Time and Again was published, he went back to Leslie's, thinking of doing a book of short news items from the late 1800s. He had published an item on the op-ed page of the New York limes about an 1876 report of a helicopter prototype ("Man's First Flight: Over Manhattan, 1876"), and this led him to dig further into the old news sources. He discovered the stories that he would retell in Forgotten News, and the research and writing of the book took three years. Referring to the paper stock used in the old newspapers, he comments, "They generally used good material in the century before the world went bad" (xii).

  The first thirteen chapters (and 186 pages) of Forgotten News are devoted to telling the story of Harvey Burdell, a dentist who lived at 31 Bond Street in New York City in 1856 and 1857. Finney uses copies of illustrations from the New York Times and Tribune, as well as from Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper and Harper's Weekly, to enrich the tale. He also includes contemporary photographs of locations that occur in the narrative. Finney introduces Emma Cunningham, a widow with five children who works her way into Burdell's home and life. In a wry nod to his own work, Finney writes that "There has been some ridiculous fiction written about people traveling back in time to earlier days, but absurd though such books are, I wish they were true" (9).

  By using the news sources of the time, Finney tells of the events leading up to Dr. Burdell's murder, and of the murder itself, on January 30, 1857. Finney writes that he recalls a childhood memory of seeing "gaslight on new snow" near a railroad station in the Chicago suburbs while with his parents. Finney calls it "a nineteenth-century sight reaching out into the twentieth to take hold of me forever" (47).

  As the tale unfolds, the murder is discovered and the investigation begins with a coroner's inquest and the doctor's funeral described in detail. Finney surmises that faces then were different than they are now (in 1983): "Faces different because the people are different" (102). "I think that's why movies and television of other days are so often unpersuasive. They get the clothes right, sometimes, but the faces of the people wearing them are today's" (102).

  The inquest is followed by an indictment and then a gripping murder trial, told by Finney in a captivating style, with comments on everything as it unfolds. Finney has read every word of the old news stories and uses many tricks of fiction to keep the tale interesting — summarizing, quoting, developing characters, and foreshadowing. In Forgotten News, Jack Finney successfully takes 100 year old newspaper stories and breathes life into them, fashioning a novel of sorts. Most interesting is the end of the story, where Emma is acquitted of Dr. Bur-dell's murder and yet does not inherit his wealth when her pregnancy is discovered to be a hoax. Finney's greatest regret is that, when the story was no longer newsworthy, the papers stopped reporting it, so "I can't tell you what happened to these people" (185) afterward.

  Forgotten News then includes a fourteen-page "Intermission," in which Finney briefly presents several short bits of unusual news from the late 1800s, including a revised version of his earlier article, "Esprit de Postal Corp." (199-200). The next five chapters (and 74 pages) include the book's second long story, this time about the 1857 wreck of the Central America, victim of a storm off the coast of Georgia. As with the murder of Dr. Burdell, Finney uses illustrations and details from the 1857 news sources to bring to life this long forgotten story that was big news at the time it occurred.

  Forgotten News concludes with another thirteen-page section of shorter news bits from the 1800s, including more details on the 1876 helicopter (282-84). This is a revision of the earlier New York Times piece, "Man's First Flight: Over Manhattan, 1876." Two other articles are also presented in revised form: "Where Has Old-Fashioned Fun Gone?" (278-81) and "Getting It Right This Time" (285). Most interesting to Jack Finney's readers, however, is the final story in the book, told in its last five pages. Finney reveals that a February 1882 story from Leslie's was a source for one of the key scenes in Time and Again. The story in question, illustrated by a full page woodcut on the cover of Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper, detailed the heroic rescue of a woman named Ida Small by an anonymous man from the burning offices of the New York World. This incident, central to unraveling the mystery that drives Time and Again, turns out to have been a real one.

  Even better, he reveals that Ida Small's son had read Time and Again and had written to Jack Finney with the real story of his mother's rescue. In reality, the artist who drew the cover for Leslie's had invented the bearded man seen saving Ms. Small; she had told her son that there was no such man and that she was actually rescued by a fireman. Her son went on to share details of the rest of Ms. Small's life, providing the author with the rest of the story for at least one of the subjects of his research.

  Forgotten News is a delightful book, where Jack Finney the raconteur uses his considerable skill to tell stories culled from long-neglected sources with a perspective that can be enjoyed by modern readers.

  The book was widely reviewed and praised. Kirkus Reviews called it "offbeat, vivid, and entertaining," and Barbara A. Bannon of Publishers Weekly noted that it was "all most enjoyable, the period illustrations and Finney's asides being a decided plus." Gwendolyn Elliot, writing in the Library Journal, deemed it "a delightful nonfiction book," and Phoebe-Lou Adams, writing in The Atlantic Monthly, remarked that the book was "a wonder of orotund and inventive journalism" and called it "a grab bag of engaging Americana." A negative review appeared in the Los Angeles Times Book Review, where John Ned Mendelssohn complained about Finney's style and wrote that "his prose, littered with unrelated phrases stuck together with plenty of semicolons and wishful thinking, reads like the former half of a before-and-after advertisement for a correspondence course called Five Weeks Toward More Comprehensible Syntax."

  The growing popularity of Time and Again led Simon & Schuster to issue a trade paperback entitled About Time in 1986. This book collected twelve short stories that had been collected previously in The Third Level and I Love Galesburg in the Springtime. The cover proclaimed "more time travel stories from the author of the beloved classic Time and Again," and the following stories were collected: "The Third Level," "I Love Galesburg in the Springtime," "Such Interesting Neighbors," "The Coin Collector," "Of Missing Persons," "Lunch-Hour Magic," "Where the Cluetts are," "The Face in the Photo," "I'm Scared," "Home Alone," "Second Chance," and "Hey, Look at Me!" "Lunch-Hour Magic" was the new title of "Love, Your Magic Spell Is Everywhere," which in turn had been reworked from the earlier "The Man with the Magic Glasses." "Home Alone" was the new title of "The Intrepid Aeronaut," which itself was a retitling of "An Old Tune." About Time is an entertaining short story collection that unfortunately does not include any commentary by the author at all.

  Reviews of the collection were positive, with most critics echoing the comment in the Washington Post Book World: "within their range, these stories are perfect." In a 1996 article about this collection, Kelly Rothenberg praised "the conversational way Finney invites the reader into his scenario and lets [him] explore along with the protagonist." She added that "Finney's writing is not stylish like Faulkner's or as distinctive as Hemingway's. It's very nondescript, conversational, sharing more in common with America's other most underrated writer, Rod Serling, than with anyone else (other than perhaps Stephen King ...)."

  Simon & Sc
huster followed About Time with another collection, publishing Three By Finney in 1987. This trade paperback reprinted the novels The Woodrow Wilson Dime, Marion's Wall, and The Night People, with minor revisions. Gone from Marion's Wall was the dedication page in which Finney listed a long series of Hollywood personalities. Finney also changed several of the dates in this novel in a clumsy attempt to update the story to the 1980s—1973 becomes 1985, making Marion Marsh 80 years old instead of 68 (1973: 60; 1987: 154). Hugo Dahl is now in his seventies, not his sixties (1973: 100; 1987: 183); Ted Bollinghurst becomes ten years younger in 1926 (1973: 105; 1987: 187), and is well into his nineties, rather than his eighties, when the story takes place (1973:156; 1987: 223). As Jon Breen later pointed out, the updates make "total nonsense of the chronology and the film-collecting references" (34). Reviews were once again positive, though; the Washington Post Book World's reviewer wrote that "each story is expertly written and well-made, told in a winning narrative voice, with moments of screwball comedy."

  In 1987, Jack Finney won the Life Achievement Award at the annual World Fantasy Convention held in Nashville, Tennessee. However, the World Fantasy Convention's list of guests at that convention does not include Finney's name, which suggests that the publicity-shy author did not attend to collect his award in person ("History of the World Fantasy Conventions"). His career was nearing its end, and he did not publish any new fiction between 1977 and 1995. He had one more novel left to publish, and it would not appear until just before his death in 1995.