Stealing Through Time: On the Writings of Jack Finney (15 page)

All of Ben's tricks are for naught until he offers Custer the sum of $250,000 to call off the wedding. Custer agrees, validating Ben's belief that he is a cad, and Ben spends another Woodrow Wilson dime and returns to the alternate world, only to find that Custer has stolen his patent for the zipper. Ben then tries other schemes to get rich quick, but nothing works. Finally, he plans to steal the money from Custer, and a scene follows that rivals the conclusion of
Good Neighbor Sam
for pure slapstick fun.

Ben visits Custer's home in New Jersey and drugs his St. Bernard, then dons a St. Bernard suit that features mechanical controls for barking, tail wagging, and so on. Disguised as a dog, Ben gets inside Custer's house with Custer and, after some funny mistakes with the dog suit's controls, Ben grabs a clipboard, sheet of paper, and pen, and dives into Custer's backyard pool. Custer follows, and Ben handcuffs him to the underwater ladder. Ben, having brought a breathing tube with him, then negotiates with Custer by writing notes and finally gets the combination to Custer's safe. Ben gives Custer the breathing tube, leaves him handcuffed under water, and emerges to remove the money from the safe without Custer ever knowing who robbed him.

In the novel's final chapter, Ben finds a Roosevelt dime and returns to his own world. He gives Custer the money, but Custer remains true to form and tries to go ahead with the wedding to Hetty anyway. He is stopped at the last minute by a lawman who arrests him for using counterfeit money: it seems the paper money from the alternate world has President George C. Coopernagel's picture on it.

In the end, Ben and Hetty reconcile but, as in the short story, Ben concludes by telling the reader that he still switches worlds and wives whenever he gets bored.

The Woodrow Wilson Dime
was widely reviewed at the time of its publication. The Kirkus Service remarked that "Finney is a funny far-out man. The
Dime
is worth the price." Barbara Bannon, writing in
Publishers Weekly,
called it a "breezy, flippant novel" but complained that, by the end of the novel, "things start to go to pieces and the humor wears thin." Schuyler L. Mott wrote that it was "perhaps not the best-written fantasy, but it is a lot of fun," and Martin Levin of the
New York Times
added that "Mr. Finney's slick fantasy moves too swiftly to encourage examination."

Since 1968, the novel has received slight critical attention. Michael Beard, in his 1981 survey of Jack Finney's work, compared
The Woodrow Wilson Dime
to "The Love Letter" but noted that, instead of an "erotic link" with the past, this novel achieves a similar link "not by going back in time but by shunting laterally from one possible world to another" (184-85). Beard continues by noting that, often in Finney's works, "the artifact of one setting draws humans to its source" (185) and commenting that "the construction of the alternate world is one of Finney's most innovative creations" (185). He concludes, however, that

[t]he weakness of
The Woodrow Wilson Dime
emerges from the conflict between the strangeness of the alternate world and the gratuitous hallucinatory style with which the narrator comically describes both worlds.... Such a style may have seemed innovative in 1968, but the two kinds of strangeness — hallucinatory narrative style and alternate world — conflict with one another and ultimately blur the novel's effect [185].

The novel was slightly updated and revised for publication in the 1987 compilation volume,
Three by Finney;
for the most part, the changes had to do with updating popular culture references to make them familiar to readers of the late 1980s.

In 1996, Kim Newman wrote that Finney's "recurrent theme is of a lost past or alternate now where life and love are somehow better than in his tartly-characterized, body-snatched American present," and added that "
Time and Again
and
The Woodrow Wilson Dime
are vastly more complex versions of the theme" than were the author's earlier short stories (197).

The Woodrow Wilson Dime
was Jack Finney's first novel not to be made into a movie, but a copy of the book offered for sale in 2003 included a "letter from well known Hollywood production company to studio head" (Advertisement), so it is likely that Finney's agent tried to sell the film rights. Perhaps Hollywood in 1968 was no longer the place for this sort of slapstick. In any case, the novel was only reprinted in the three-novel collection
Three By Finney,
nineteen years later.

In the meantime, Finney was working on his masterpiece, the novel that would develop a cult following after its publication in 1970,
Time and Again.

ELEVEN

Time and Again

In 1970, at almost exactly the midpoint of his career as a writer, Jack Finney published his masterpiece,
Time and Again.
An illustrated novel, it has developed a cult following in the three decades since it appeared, receiving more critical and popular attention than any of Finney's prior or subsequent works.

The story is told in the first person by narrator Simon Morley, an artist in a New York City advertising agency. As the novel begins, Morley meets Ruben Prien, from the U.S. Army, who asks Si (as Morley is called) to join a secret government project. Si had been in the Army before but does not relish the idea of re-enlisting; he is twenty-eight years old and two years' divorced. Rube (Prien's nickname) knows many personal details about Si, including that he is "'bored and dissatisfied ... and time is passing'" (15). Like Hugh Brittain in
Assault on a Queen,
Si is open to the idea of adventure and excitement, and Rube capitalizes on this trait.

Also like Brittain in the earlier novel, Si has a girlfriend, Kate. She owns an antique shop on New York's Third Avenue, where Si likes to poke around and look at stereoscopic views of times past.

In discussing his relationship with Kate, Si tells the reader, "I don't like to and I could not reveal everything about myself.... So if now and then you think you can read between the lines, you may be right; or may not" (21). It is tempting to see a parallel with the author 
Jack Finney in these lines, since he shied away from publicity during his entire career.

After a pleasant weekend with Kate, Si surprises himself by quitting his job on Monday and calling Rube Prien. Si is told to go to an address that Thursday, which he does, only to find a moving and storage warehouse. He fills out forms and undergoes some tests, meeting Dr. Oscar Rossoff, who hypnotizes him. Si then meets the director of the project, E.E. Danziger, an engaging 68-year-old man, and mentions that he enjoyed
Huckleberry Finn,
recalling the narrator of Finney's prior novel,
The Woodrow Wilson Dime,
who was elated when he discovered more books by Mark Twain in a parallel world.

The nature of the project begins to be revealed in chapter three of the novel, as Si sees various rooms in the warehouse where people engage in acts from past eras: a U.S. soldier fights a World War One German soldier, a woman dances the Charleston, etc. From a vantage point above, Si sees a mockup of a street from a small town in the 1920s, where a man named MacNaughton sits on a porch, enjoying an uneventful afternoon.

Professor Danziger begins to explain Einstein's theories of time to Si in chapter four. Danziger extends the idea of time being a river in his own way and tells Si '"that a man ought somehow to be able to step out of that boat onto the shore. And walk back to one of the bends behind us " (52). He argues that our knowledge of the present stems from an accumulation of many tiny details that tie us to it, an idea that Finney had explored before, as in the story "Second Chance," where the driver of an antique car moves into the past when the conditions are right.

Danziger takes Si to the building's roof and they survey the Manhattan skyline; the professor reminds Si that there are fragments of earlier times scattered throughout the city. He and Si walk to the Dakota Building, which Danziger remarks '"is close to being a kind of miracle" (56). At this point,
Time and Again
becomes an illustrated novel, as Jack Finney adds photographs to illustrate the text. Chapter four features six photographs of the Dakota Building and its surrounding area, and they add a new dimension to the story. Finney had experimented with photographs in
The Woodrow Wilson Dime,
but in
Time and Again
they become central to the book's success.

Back at Danziger's office, the professor explains to Si that there are rooms in the Dakota that have views of Manhattan that have remained unchanged since the 1800s. Danziger wants to experiment with time travel "'just for the hell of it"' (64), and explains that all of the scenes Si has observed at the warehouse are merely preparation for the real thing — each of the participants will go to the real places and try to travel back in time. Although Danziger asks Si to travel back to 1901 San Francisco, Si replies that he would prefer to go back to New York City in January 1882 to watch a man mail a letter.

In chapter five, Si explains the reason for his strange request. His girlfriend Kate was adopted as a child by the Carmody family. Her stepfather Ira was the son of Andrew Carmody, a financier and advisor to President Grover Cleveland. Andrew Carmody killed himself, according to Si, after moving his family to Gillis, Montana, in 1898. After his death, his wife erected an odd gravestone with a nine-pointed star in a circle. Ira Carmody photographed the stone and Kate shows it to Si, along with a letter postmarked January 23, 1882.

The letter sets up the central mystery of the novel. It appears to have been partially burned and missing words, but it refers to a meeting at the courthouse and the '"Destruction by Fire of the entire World'" (73). The letter, the suicide, the gravestone — all fascinate Si, and he tells Danziger that he wants to be present when the letter is mailed so that he can try to unravel the mystery. In the tradition of all of the great time travel stories, Danziger warns Si that '"there cannot be the least intervention of any kind in events of the past'" (73), at which point the reader knows that Si will have to do exactly that before the book is through.

Danziger also tells Si that his own parents met on February 6, 1882, at Wallack's theater and that he would love a sketch of their meeting. Finney has thus set up the story in the first five chapters of
Time and Again;
Si is another of the author's young, urban characters whose life is about to change because of an opportunity that arises at a time when he is dissatisfied with his life.

In chapter six, the time travel experiment begins. Si meets everyone in the Project (as it is called) and immerses himself in the details of life in the 1880s. Kate is also introduced to the Project and helps Si, who moves into a room at the Dakota that is just as it would have been on January 5, 1882. In this chapter and the next, Jack Finney slowly adds details of the past to enrich Si's experience, such as having him read the
New- York Evening Sun
and
Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper.
Si grows accustomed to looking down at Central Park and thinking it is the year 1882; he is gradually getting used to the idea, even though he knows he is still in the twentieth century. Another photograph is used here, of a snowy Central Park, and it is difficult to figure out if it is from 1882 or 1970.

Si finds himself drifting mentally into 1882 when Dr. Rossoff arrives and hypnotizes him once again. Si goes outside for a walk in 1882 and sees a horse-drawn sleigh being pulled through the snow. In chapter eight, Si returns to the site of the Project and is probed to see if he really traveled back in time. One of his memories recalls an earlier Jack Finney novel: '"the
Queen Mary
— the ship, I mean — was sold to a town in southern California'" (105). Soon after, Kate joins Si and they both travel back to January 23, 1882, by means of self-hypnosis. In chapter nine, Finney begins to give the reader a tour of old New York, as Si and Kate board a bus that takes them down Fifth Avenue. An old photograph illustrates the scene outside the bus, while a sketch by Si himself shows what the people inside the bus looked like. The tour continues in chapter ten, as Si and Kate get off the bus and observe the mysterious letter being mailed at the post office. The mystery deepens as they follow the man who mailed the letter and see that his boot leaves an imprint in the snow that is the same design as that on Andrew Carmody's tombstone. After returning to the Dakota, they agree that they are back in 1970 and confirm it by looking out of a window at the modern world below.

The narrative of
Time and Again
cleverly draws the reader into the past bit by bit. In the early chapters, we learn that Si is not happy with his life in the present. He is presented with an offer to return to the past and shown tantalizing glimpses of different times that have gone before. A method of time travel is suggested to him and he is put in a place where he can attempt to accomplish it. He at first travels back only briefly, then for a longer time in the company of Kate. The stage is now set, ten chapters into the novel, for Si to do something more, and in chapter eleven the people at the Project ask him to go back to 1882 and follow the man who mailed the letter to see what he can learn. This ends the first part of
Time and Again;
though the book is not formally broken into parts, Si's return in chapter twelve to 1882 New York begins a much more extensive visit to the past.