Stealing Through Time: On the Writings of Jack Finney (13 page)

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 architec
ture."

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 time 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).

That night, Sam becomes even more confused by his attraction to Janet, but when he kisses her after a dance she is grateful for his kindness rather than seduced by his charms. He sleeps in his own bed but awakens at dawn and is smuggled back to Janet's house in a laundry basket. Sam goes to work and hears from Min, his wife, who has discovered evidence in the hills above their house that they are, in fact, being watched by a private detective. Min met the man as he was trying to break into Jan's house; he told her that he knows that Jan is not married. Min convinces Sam that he must stay at Jan's house again that night to prolong the charade — he is tired of being tempted, and thinks that "I was beginning to feel like a guy standing around with his mouth open for hours wondering whether to bite into a wax apple" (86).

After dinner, Sam watches television and Finney slips in a humorous reference to his own novel,
The Body Snatchers:
"if I ever heard nostalgia for what is now on the air, I'd know the mutants had taken over and we were no longer human" (87). Sam then falls asleep, his wife goes home, and he is again left alone with his desirable neighbor. Sam's imagination runs away with him in chapter seven as he and Jan get ready for bed, but when he hears her breathing down the hall and knows she is fast asleep rather than waiting for him to burst into her bedroom, he realizes that "obviously she wasn't the least worried about me or herself" (97).

A new character joins the story in chapter eight to confuse matters even more, as Jan's husband Howie enters through the back door in the middle of the night, only to be tackled by the suddenly protective Sam. In chapter nine, Howie tells Jan that he still loves her and she realizes that she cannot throw him out because it would arouse suspicion in the private detective who is watching the house. Howie is jealous of Sam, who has done nothing to cause him to be jealous, and both men eventually realize that Howie will need to sneak next door to Sam's house and leave in the morning as if he were Sam.

Sam then grows jealous of Howie when Min pays extra attention to her new husband. That evening, the confusion of identities grows ever greater as the two couples play bridge and Sam makes another connection that recalls
The Body Snatchers:

the Germans have an interesting legend about what they call
Doppelgangers;
literally,
doublegoers.
Under certain circumstances, that is, a precise physical duplicate of a man is evoked, each one capable of being in separate places... [123).

Sam is still trying to think of a way to have his cake and eat it, too, but the suggestion of
doppelgangers
also recalls the duplicate bodies in Finney's earlier novel.

In chapter eleven, Sam finally meets the private detective who has been watching his neighborhood. The man's name is Reinhold Shiffner (recall that the Nazi in "The U-19's Last Kill" had been named Reinhold Kroll) and he, like everyone else in the novel, is mixed up about who is who. Instead of realizing the truth about the relationship between Sam and Janet, he is convinced that the two are actually married and that Sam is sneaking next door to have an affair with Min. He also suspects that Howie and Sam are trading wives, and he wants $10,000 in blackmail to prevent him from showing photographic proof to Sam's neighbors.

A very funny scene ensues as Sam drives through San Francisco with Shiffner and sees for the first time a billboard connected with the ad campaign he had been working on earlier in the book for the Nes-fresh account. Surprisingly, Sam and Janet's picture has been used on huge billboards all over the city and they are identified as "Mr. and Mrs. Sam Bissell" (136). Sam then drives frantically around the city, swerving whenever another billboard comes into sight, desperate to prevent Shiffner from seeing the billboards and learning the truth (though even that is wrong, as Sam's wife in the picture is Janet) that will cost Janet her inheritance.

Jack Finney provides some insight into his own move from the East Coast to the West Coast in chapter thirteen when Sam thinks