Stealing Through Time: On the Writings of Jack Finney (20 page)

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 & Schuster 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.

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.