Stealing Through Time: On the Writings of Jack Finney (16 page)

In chapter twelve, Si begins to get involved in the lives of the people he meets. He is intrigued by Julia Charbonneau, who shows him to his room in a boardinghouse, and immediately dislikes her fiance, Jacob Pickering, who is also the man whom he had watched mail the letter during his last trip through time. Another important character introduced in this chapter is Felix Grier, a young man with a new camera. Though Grier has little to do with the story, his camera allows Jack Finney to include numerous photographs of characters in the book, including Julia, Pickering, and even Si Morley himself, groomed in a fashion to fit the times. In all, chapter twelve features two sketches and eight photographs, all of which add immeasurably to the reader's enjoyment of the tale.

In chapter thirteen, Si and Julia get to know each other and tour New York City on foot. Later events in the novel are foreshadowed as the pair sees the arm of the Statue of Liberty, which had not yet been assembled. Finney also looks forward to the novel's sequel,
From Time to Time
(though he surely did not realize it), when Si remarks on the absence of "a still-nonexisting Flatiron Building" (176). This chapter features seven sketches, allegedly done by Si Morley, that depict various sights he sees on his way around the city.

The mystery begins to be solved in chapter fourteen, as Si hides behind a statue in City Hall Park and listens in on a conversation between Pickering and Andrew Carmody where Pickering attempts to blackmail the wealthy man with knowledge of fraudulent business practices. Chapter fifteen finds Si trying unsuccessfully to break into Pickering's office. He tells Julia that he has been called away suddenly, and this trip to the past ends with Pickering bursting in to the boarding house to display his new tattoo — Julia's name is etched across his chest. This chapter features a full-page sketch by Si of Julia, looking remarkably like Katharine Hepburn.

The story briefly returns to the present in chapter sixteen, as Si now begins to compare the world he knows with the world he has begun to explore. "
Today's faces are different
," he thinks, and adds that "there was also an
excitement
in the streets of New York in 1882 that is gone" (218).

Back at the Project, Si learns that others have also succeeded in time travel, but that the world was slightly different upon their return — one man can no longer find any trace of an old college friend from "Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois" (222), Jack Finney's alma mater. There is a dispute about whether the experiments should continue, and Professor Danziger resigns from the Project when the others decide that the work will go on. Si readies himself to return to the past, which he does in chapter seventeen.

A woodcut, a watercolor, and four photographs appear in this chapter, which mostly details Si's enjoyment of a snowfall in 1882 and his delight at the way the people of that time behave in the snow. Pickering reveals that he and Julia are engaged to be married, and Si decides to try to interfere, even though it may change the future. He rationalizes his decision by thinking that "there were always consequences to
any
future of every act in the past... the future which was my own time was going to have to take its chances" (255).

In chapter eighteen, Si borrows housemate Felix's camera and walks all over Manhattan, taking pictures that are then reproduced in the book. Finney uses twelve photographs of old New York sights in this delightful section, in which plot takes a backseat to period detail. Si walks across a catwalk above the Brooklyn Bridge, anticipating a similar stunt that occurs in
The Night People,
and tells Julia that he is a private detective investigating her fiance. The novel's climax occurs in chapter nineteen, which runs for forty-five pages, over ten percent of the novel's length.

Si and Julia break into Pickering's office, only to be forced to hide there when Pickering and Carmody arrive. From their hiding place, Si and Julia witness Carmody paying blackmail money to Pickering and then tying the man to a chair before searching his office. This continues all night and into the next morning, ending as Carmody sets fire to Pickering's papers. The fire quickly gets out of control in the old building, and Si and Julia must make a harrowing escape along the building's ledge (recalling Finney's earlier story of a man on a ledge, "Contents of the Dead Man's Pocket"). A huge fire ensues and Si heroically rescues a woman trapped on a high floor.

Part of the mystery is solved when Si learns that the building that burned used to house the newspaper, the
New York World.
He finally understands Carmody's suicide note ("
That the sending of this... should cause the Destruction by Fire of the entire World— 'Building'
was the missing word" [317]). Si also comprehends that his actions did not cause the fire and did not change history. The rest of the mystery is solved when Si sees Carmody's boot print in the snow and realizes that it matches the figure on Carmody's tombstone.

Besides being well written and very exciting to read, chapter nineteen of
Time and Again
features two pages of reproductions from the February 11, 1882 issue of
Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper,
showing sketches of the fire and of Si's daring ladder rescue. Clearly, Jack Finney was intrigued by this event and by its coverage in the paper, and his novel was at least partially plotted around this real, historical event.

Si and Julia are then taken to the police station, and from there to Carmody's mansion, where they meet Mrs. Carmody and a horribly burned Andrew Carmody, who identifies them as having started the fire. Finney's dislike of the police surfaces here, as it would again in
The Night People,
when Si wonders, "why,
why
do cops habitually and meaninglessly act nastily, as though it were a kind of instinct?" (332). The couple manage to escape and, after a chase through Manhattan, hide in the Statue of Liberty's arm, where Si reveals the truth of his background to Julia before willing them both back to the present. Two photographs are featured in this chapter, but they add little to the narrative.

Back in Si's world, the tables are turned, as Julia is now the one to experience life in another time. Finney's words are enough to describe New York this time, and once again, Jack Finney has a character think about why the modern world is so bad:

No, I won't let you stay here. Julia, we're a people who pollute the very air we breathe. And our rivers. We're destroying the Great Lakes; Erie is already gone, and now we've begun on the oceans. We filled our atmosphere with radioactive fallout that put poison into our children's bones, and we knew it. We've made bombs that can wipe out humanity in minutes, and they are aimed and ready to fire. We ended polio, and then the United States Army bred new strains of germs that can cause fatal, incurable disease. We had a chance to do justice to our Negroes, and when they asked it, we refused. In Asia we burned people alive, we really did. We allow children to grow up malnourished in the United States. We allow people to make money by using our television channels to persuade our own children to smoke, knowing what it is going to do to them. This is a time when it becomes harder and harder to continue telling yourself that we are still good people. We hate each other. And we're used to it [378-79].

Si Morley decides not to tell Julia any of this, but the fact that he thinks it shows that he is a product of his times. When
Time and Again
was published in 1970, anti-establishment sentiment was widespread. Si Morley fits into the line of Finney characters who long for escape from the world in which they live; his description of what is wrong with that world is rather different than that provided by Miles Bennell in
The Body Snatchers,
but the feeling of dissatisfaction is the same.

The mystery gets a twist in the tail in chapter twenty-one, as Julia deduces that the burned man she and Si met at Carmody's mansion was not Carmody at all, but rather Pickering, who would spend the rest of his life impersonating the man he had tried to blackmail. Julia walks back into the past, using the unchanging Brooklyn Bridge as her location for time travel.

The final chapter of
Time and Again
finds Si back at the Project, resisting all efforts to have him continue with the time travel experiment. He says goodbye to Kate and writes
Time and Again
as a journal of his experiences, hiding it in the New York Public Library where it will be found by "a friend, a writer ... the only man ever to look through a great decaying stack of ancient religious pamphlets in the rare-book section" (393). That writer, of course, is Jack Finney, who spent years researching New York history to write this novel.

The final pages of the book tie up the last thread left dangling, as Si promises Professor Danziger that he will stop the project. He returns to 1882 and prevents Danziger's parents from meeting, thus erasing the future scientist and his work from the course of history. As the novel ends, Si heads for 19 Gramercy Park, and Julia.

The book concludes with a page-long footnote in which Jack Finney addresses the reader. "I've tried to be factually accurate in this story," he begins, but "I haven't let accuracy interfere with the story" (399). Most interesting are his admission that the Dakota Building was not built until 1885 (thus removing Si Morley's main spot for time travel) and that the photographs used in the book "couldn't all be strictly of the eighteen-eighties. Before 1900 things didn't change so fast as now — one more reason why Si so wisely decided to stay back there."

In an advance review published in the March 9, 1970 issue of
Publishers Weekly,
Barbara A. Bannon wrote that the novel is "delightful, clever and imaginative" and correctly pointed out that "the actual blackmail plot is almost incidental. The real fascination of the book lies in 
Morley's discovery of the New York of that period...." She added that "Finney has the gift of making his time travel perfectly believable, largely through the smooth use of authentic details."

The week before,
Kirkus Reviews
had called the novel "a fully illustrated fascinator" and remarked that "the time transitions are seamless." The novel was published by Simon & Schuster in May 1970, and subsequent reviews were mostly positive. The
Washington Post
called
Time and Again
"one of the most original, readable, and engaging novels to have come along in a long time" (Blackburn). Thomas Lask wrote a long piece about the book for the
New York Times
on July 25, 1970, and W. G. Rogers followed this with another long review in that same newspaper on August 2,1970, calling the novel "a most ingenious confection of time now and time then." This glowing review set the tone for reviews that followed, in numerous magazines and journals.

Yet
Time and Again
sold only modestly upon first publication (Hirschfeld 13). Finney appears to have been captivated by the subject matter, though, because he wrote four lighthearted articles for the
New York Times
during the next year. The first was titled, "Where Has Old-Fashioned Fun Gone?" and described a Christmas celebration on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange in 1882. Finney ends the article with these wistful remarks: "Maybe, just maybe, New York has begun reaching back toward a day when it would have been possible to say 'Fun City' without sneering."

Next came "Off to the Golden West," which relates a coast-to-coast trip by train circa 1890, and ends with the following editorial comment: "Jack Finney, author of "Time and Again,' is in love with yesterday." Finney's third
New York Times
piece was titled "St. Nicholas Monthly's Xmas List" and reproduced sketches and advertising copy from an 1875 periodical. Finally, he published "When Felony Had Style," which featured mug shots and information about criminals from the late nineteenth century. Some of the information came from "the testimony of Thomas Byrnes, famous nineteenth-century head of the New York cops" and a character in
Time and Again.

In the decades that followed, Jack Finney's novel attracted a "cult following" (Hirschfeld 13) and was the subject of a considerable amount of critical discussion. After the initial flurry of reviews, the first writer to look seriously at
Time and Again
was Richard Gid Powers, in his introduction to the 1976 Gregg Press edition of
The Body Snatchers. 
Powers calls
Time and Again
Finney's "most important novel" and comments on the author's "acute and aching sense of what was lost when the world grew up and became 'modern.' Finney's heroes are romantic traditionalists so much in love with the past that they are able to wrench themselves
into
it by an overwhelming act of will" (vi).

In a 1977 discussion of the novel, Quentin Gehle points out numerous instances of Finney's use of irony, "which at some times is far more subtle than at others" (7645) and comments that "even though the novel suffers from disunity, that disunity does make available the appeal of a detective story, a love story, and a science-fiction tale" (7646). Two years later, Anne Carolyn Raymer's piece on the book explained, in comparing the hero of
Time and Again
to that of Edward Bellamy's
Looking Backward,
that "Morley can appreciate that era because, unlike Bellamy's hero who escapes from it, he is not a Utopian but an ordinary man capable of enjoying the simple delights of a less hectic and complicated era." She adds that "Finney's handling of character ranks among his most important contributions" (2285). Unlike Jack Finney's other novels (save
The Body Snatchers
which, it can be argued, received attention because of the popularity of the films it inspired),
Time and Again
rather quickly became a novel of interest to literary critics.