Stealing Through Time: On the Writings of Jack Finney

by Jack Seabrook

  FIFTEEN

  From Time to Time

  Jack Finney was 78 years old when an article entitled "At the Movies" by Lawrence Van Gelder was published in the May 25, 1990, edition of the New York Times. While the article was chiefly about attempts to film the author's 1970 novel, Time and Again, it also contained a brief note explaining that, according to Finney, he was working on a sequel to that novel. He provided some details of the plot and the article added that the book was expected to be finished "sometime in the next year."

  However, the sequel to Time and Again did not appear in 1990 or 1991. In 1993, the third filmed version of The Body Snatchers was released under the title Body Snatchers, and in 1994 the French translation of Time and Again (Le Voyage de Simon Morley) was awarded the Grand Prix de l'Imaginaire as best translated novel of the year ("The Locus Index to SF Awards"). Another New York Times article, "Is the Time Finally Ripe for "Time and Again'?" reported, on March 20,1994, that "Mr. Finney has completed a sequel, tentatively titled 'Time and Time Again,' which Simon & Schuster plans to publish next fall" (Hirschfeld 20).

  According to another article by Van Gelder ("Some Time Later, a Sequel to 'Time and Again'"), Finney had begun "thinking about a sequel set in 1912" six or seven years before and had been doing research for the novel, yet, as his agent Don Congdon explained, "At least five times he stopped writing." The novel, finally titled From Time to Time, was eventually published in early 1995.

  The novel begins with an "Author's Note," in which Finney briefly summarizes the plot of Time and Again and adds that "this book is the story of what happens when Si — out of simple curiosity — returns to the present just to see what's going on" (11). An epigraph follows, quoted from Allen Churchill's Remember When, and it sets the stage for Finney's last exploration of the good old days: "Historians say so: The years between 1910 and 1915 were the pleasantest this country has ever known..." (13).

  The novel itself begins with a prologue, told by a third-person omniscient narrator. This narrative style, which Finney had used only once before in a novel (The Night People), alternates in the thirty chapters of From Time to Time with Si Morley's first-person narration. The prologue is a fascinating story about a meeting of top-level officials who gather to discuss instances of what appear to be changes in the historical record. John F. Kennedy's second term is recalled, as is the arrival of the Titanic in New York. The group exists to catalog events that suggest "that occasionally two versions of the same stretch of time seem to exist. Or to have existed, one of them replacing the other" (22). The odd part of it is, people tend to have memories of both time streams concurrently.

  Si Morley's narrative takes over in chapter one, as he tells the reader about the Project (from Time and Again) and how he came to live in 1887. He is happily married to Julia, but she remarks that he has been singing strange songs from the 1900s. They discuss the possibility of his traveling back to the twentieth century, and he feels some guilt over preventing Dr. Danziger's birth with his action to change the future.

  The story switches back to third-person narration for chapters two through four, as we are re-introduced to Ruben Prien, whose memory has been changed by the alteration in history but who has a strange feeling that something is missing. He is inexplicably drawn to a moving and storage company (the reader knows that this was the headquarters of the Project), and he receives a call from Oscar Rossoff, who has heard from John McNaughton. Prien and Rossoff both have memories that they can't explain.

  Prien visits McNaughton in Vermont and learns that McNaugh-ton has not forgotten anything, since he traveled through time to the 1920s and managed to retain his memory. Prien realizes that Si Mor-ley wiped out Danziger and the Project by changing the past, and he and McNaughton decide to send the latter back to look for Si. In chapter five, McNaughton goes back to the day when Si had prevented Danziger's parents from meeting. McNaughton knocks Si down a flight of stairs, thus allowing Danziger's parents to meet and the prior series of historical events — culminating in the Project — to be reestablished. In the middle of chapter five, the narrative voice switches back to the first-person, as Si expresses his relief over what has occurred. McNaughton buys a one-way ticket to Winfield, Vermont, content to remain in the nineteenth century and never to be heard from again.

  In chapter six, Finney includes a photograph and an illustration, which only serve to remind the reader how much this novel differs from Time and Again, which featured so many well-placed illustrations. In the first seventy-five pages of From Time to Time, there are only two photos and one drawing, and two of the three appear in chapter six. Si appears to let fate decide his path here, as he follows the choice of a bird held by the Bird Lady, whose bird will pluck from a box an answer to a question for the price of a nickel. Si decides to go forward in time, and withdraws an advance on his weekly salary. Finney makes an in-joke by having one of the bills drawn on the First National Bank of Galesburg, Illinois — Galesburg was Finney's college town and had figured in earlier stories, including "I Love Galesburg in the Springtime."

  Si returns to the twentieth century in chapter eight, but this time he does not go to his old room in the Dakota Building, since it has been rented. Instead, he walks to the newly-built Brooklyn Bridge (an excuse for another illustration), where he sits on a bench and lets his mind fill with thoughts of the century to come. As in Time and Again, this method is successful, and Si returns to the Plaza Hotel, where he looks up Dr. Danziger's number in a telephone book.

  Chapters eight through eleven return to the third-person narration of the novel's earlier chapters and pick up the story thread involving Ruben Prien. Prien brings Danziger back to the site of the now-abandoned Project and tries to convince him to restart it. When confronted with the evidence of changes in history that the reader saw in the novel's prologue, Danziger reasons that something must have happened around the year 1912 to cause the alterations. They discuss Si Morley's "published account, his book" (96), which included the erasure of Dr. Danziger from the face of the earth. Even though Dan-ziger realizes that something must have been done to make him exist again, he does not want to alter historical events.

  In chapter nine, Prien demonstrates to Danziger that there was an alternate historical world where the First World War never happened. Ruben wants to change history to eliminate the war in his reality, yet Danziger still resists. In chapter ten, Ruben tracks down Si and tries to convince him of the wisdom of eliminating the Great War. They meet in Central Park in the eleventh chapter and discuss a plan that had been developed by Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft; they had wanted peace and had sent an operative known only as Z to Europe to try to broker a deal with heads of state. Z did not return from Europe and was never heard from again, and the Great War occurred. Prien has researched his identity and learned that Roosevelt's daughter, Alice, knew the man. He and Si figure out the approximate day he left for Europe and Si agrees to return to 1912 to look for Z and try to prevent the First World War.

  The first section of From Time to Time is the setup, which comprises chapters one through eleven. Finney seems to have been trying to do many things at once here, because he takes a long time to get to the main part of the story and uses two distinct narrative techniques (first-person narration by Si Morley and third-person narration by an omniscient narrator) to tell the tale. The novel really gets going in chapter twelve, which returns to Si's first-person narration to explain how he prepares himself to return to 1912. He reads a 1912 newspaper at the New York Public Library in order to "look for what the people of 1912 had to tell me about themselves" (123). He then reads novels of the time, including "Truxton King: A Story of Graustark" (124), the title of which recalls the name of the elaborate Hollywood mansion that figured in the conclusion of Finney's earlier novel, Marion's Wall. Si watches old films at the Museum of Modern Art, looks at stereo views at the Museum of the City of New York, and sees models of clothing worn at the time. The process of soaking up details of
life in 1912 appears to parallel the research process that Jack Finney must have gone through in preparing to write Time and Again and From Time to Time. Si Morley is a fantasy projection of the author; in the novels, his research allows him to do what Jack Finney (and his readers) can only dream of— travel back in time.

  In chapter thirteen, Si enters Central Park at dusk and, sitting down on a bench, slips back into 1912. The next twelve chapters (fourteen through twenty-five) depict Si's adventures in 1912, as he experiences another time period and tries to solve the mystery of Z. Si quickly learns that he "had come into a time worth protecting" (140) and, as he did in Time and Again, he buys a camera and uses it to take photographs of what he sees. Finney includes these photographs in the book, but this time, unlike in the earlier novel, much of it seems like filler or travelogue, and it does not serve to move the story along. Si meets Helen Metzner, whom he thinks of as the Jotta Girl, after a dance she was doing when they met. They watch Roy Knabenshue ascend above Central Park in a homemade blimp, and Si gets a ride in a hydro-aeroplane with Frank Coffyn above the city. This allows him to discover that the building shaped like a ship, where Z was to meet "that man whom of all the world I most admire" at eleven o'clock at night to receive "The Papers" (117), was in fact the famous Flatiron Building, which still sits at the point where Broadway intersects Fifth Avenue at 23rd Street in Manhattan. To readers familiar with New York City and its landmarks, this is a rather obvious mystery, since Z's letter refers to the building as looking as if "one might sail her up Broadway or the Fifth Avenue" (117). Certainly, it pales in comparison to the mystery in Time and Again involving the "Destruction by Fire of the entire World" (73).

  Si's trip in the hydro-aeroplane above Manhattan recalls similar trips by other Finney protagonists — most notably, that of the wistful narrator of "An Old Tune," who flies his balloon over Marin County, California, and returns to Earth with a new perspective. In From Time to Time, Si's search for Z is delayed when he and the Jotta Girl attend a play, which gives the author an excuse to include more 1912 photographs and details of the time. In chapter twenty, Si goes to the Flat-iron Building at the appointed time and climbs onto a ledge above the street. From this vantage point, he observes Z meet Teddy Roosevelt, but he cannot see Z's face.

  A subplot that runs through From Time to Time involves Si's search for the vaudeville act Tessie and Ted; the search concludes in chapter twenty-two. It turns out that Ted is Si's father, who would later become a drunk and die in his forties, before Si's second birthday. Si feels uncomfortable watching their act and is happy when it ends. This subplot parallels that of Time and Again, where Si searches for information about Kate's adopted family, but in the earlier novel this all works to move the main story along. It is interesting to consider Si's search for Ted in light of the fact that Jack Finney was born in 1911 and that his own father died when the boy was two years old.

  The story takes a nice twist when Si learns that Archie, friend to Helen and acquaintance to Si, is actually Z, and Archie manages to escape Si and sail for Europe on the Mauretania. Si meets Helen again and realizes that the song she had been singing — the one that caused him to think of her as the Jotta Girl — was from the 1920s, and she thus could not be who she says she is. She admits that she was part of the Project as well and that Dr. Danziger had sent her back to 1912 to stop Si from taking action that would prevent World War One. In short, all of Si's careful research failed to let him recognize an anomaly — the girl he spent all of his time with in 1912 was singing a song that had not been written yet! It is ironic that a mistake in research becomes a significant detail in a novel whose main character uses historical research as a method of achieving travel through time.

  Back in the present, Si visits Ruben Prien and regales him with tales of the past. Rube wants Si to try again to change history, and convinces him to return to 1911 to attempt to prevent the sinking of the Titanic. It seems Si's son by Julia was fated to die in the First World War, and Rube theorizes that the Titanic disaster somehow led to the Great War's being fought. The story moves very quickly here, and logic is not central to its success. Instead, Prien comes up with a way to get Si to travel through time again, and Si returns in chapter twenty-seven to May 1911, where he sails from New York City to Ireland on the Mauretania. He finds the Titanic, docked in Belfast and ready to set sail.

  The final section of From Time to Time suggests that Finney had some difficulty getting the novel to work as a unit. From the long initial section, which switches back and forth between first- and third-person narration, through the long middle section, which details Si's adventures in 1912, to the brief final section, which tells the story of Si's attempts to prevent the Titanic from sinking, the novel seems disjointed, resembling Finney's non-fiction work, Forgotten News, more than anything else. It reads as if the author had several ideas but never quite figured out how to meld them together (or edit them down) to make a coherent whole.

  In any case, Si spends months walking the length of Ireland, killing time until spring 1912 (making one wonder why he did not just target a later date for this trip back in time); he books passage on the great ship and is taken aboard. He finds Archie in the lounge, and tries to warn him of impending doom, but Archie argues that he would never try to save himself at the expense of women and children and denies knowledge of any secret government papers. The Jotta Girl appears, telling Si that she had come through time to see if he would succeed in his latest mission. She tries to change the course of the ship by distracting its driver with a smile and a scarf over his face, but the ship hits the iceberg and begins to sink, leading to the question of whether her efforts caused a change in course that led to the collision. Si awaits the sinking of the ship.

  From Time to Time ends with a brief thirtieth chapter, in which Si writes: "I'm home now. For good" and he means back in 1888 with Julia and their son. He thinks of old Mr. Bostick, who has just died, and how he had been born in 1799, "the year George Washington died.... Now he's gone, a thread to the past broken. But they break every day, don't they, the past ever receding, growing stiller and stiller in our minds" (302).

  Jack Finney's last published work ends with this lament about the way that links to the past are disappearing constantly, just as he, too, would soon disappear. The novel was published in early 1995, the year he died, and it was greeted with more publicity and interest than any of his prior writings, probably because by then Time and Again had become a favorite among readers and critics alike.

  The first review of From Time to Time appeared in Publishers Weekly on November 28, 1994. In it, Sybil Steinberg wrote that the novel "lacks the magic and urgency of its predecessor but is diverting nonetheless." An unsigned review in Kirkus Reviews agreed that the novel "fails to live up to the original" and called it "zestless." The publicity barrage for the book began in February 1995, around the time of its publication. Reviews appeared in the Wall Street Journal (February 1), the Washington Post Book World (February 12), the Library Journal (February 15), the New York Times (February 19), and the Christian Science Monitor (February 28). The reviews were often lengthy and, while praising Jack Finney's writing and recalling his long career, they invariably criticized some aspect of his new novel. Michael Dirda wrote that "structurally the novel is ramshackle," and Suzanne MacLachlan added that it "doesn't quite measure up" to Time and Again. Most enthusiastic was Frank Rich, who argued that the pleasures of the novel's evocation of old New York outweighed the fact that "Mr. Finney barely pretends to meet the obligations of fiction, science or otherwise...."

  Even more surprising than the numerous and lengthy book reviews were the interviews and photographs that appeared in various newspapers and magazines, allowing readers a glimpse into Finney's life that he had studiously avoided providing, with few exceptions, for decades. Vanity Fair published a two-page article about the novel with a picture of the author in its February 1995 issue. Entertainment Weekly published a two-page spread in its February 24, 1995 is
sue, with a photograph of the author, concluding that "You just wish the novelist in him had occasionally throttled the popular historian" (De Haven 109). Bob Ickes published a four-page article in the New York Times on March 19, 1995, in which he interviewed both Jack Finney and his wife and summarized prior interviews. Finney tells Ickes, '"I wish people would stop assuming I want to live in the past. I don't! It would be a lousy place to live'" (37).

  Another brief interview with Finney appeared in the April 10, 1995 People magazine, along with a review of From Time to Time. The writer admitted to having had problems writing the novel, but "after persistent prodding from his agent, he decided to 'struggle through and finish it'" (Sheff-Cahan 32). While he told Bob Ickes in March 1995 that he would not want to live in the past, he admits here that a visit would be nice: '"it would be fun to walk down Manhattan's West 74th in the 19th century ... and see if Edith Wharton would walk out of her house'" (32).

  A new trend in book publishing led to Time and Again and From Time to Time being issued in abridged versions on cassette, with each novel read by actor Campbell Scott. A May 1995 review by Jean Palmer in Kliatt remarked that the abridgements concentrated on plot and left out "much of Finney's expertly detailed (and realistic) evocation of time and place."

  Critical attention to the novel began with a long article by Robert J. Killheffer in September 1995. In short, he recommends the book based on the pleasure it brings, noting that it may not qualify as "serious literature" but that it is "serious fun" (23). Cynthia Breslin Beres compared the two Si Morley novels in an essay that appeared in Mag-ill's Guide to Science Fiction and Fantasy Literature in 1996; she concludes that the themes of the earlier novel are "somewhat blurred" in the later novel "by the generally thin plot." In 1999, Fred Blosser suggested that the novel's ending was Finney's way of "saying his own farewell to a full career of exploring the mundane and the marvellous" (56).