Stealing Through Time: On the Writings of Jack Finney (24 page)

Finney would exchange three more letters with the people at Knox College in the early 1980s. The first, dated August 25, 1982, appears 
to be in reply to a letter from Douglas L. Wilson, an English professor there. While the professor's letter is not in the Knox College collection, Finney's response is:

Thank you very much for your nice note about my story, "I Love Galesburg," etc. It was written long ago, and it's very pleasant to know that someone has read it fairly recently. Not long ago I was in a discussion of sorts with friends, the subject of the moment being: What is your favorite city? And of course, Paris, Rome, Venice, etc., were prime candidates. I said Galesburg, however; my motive, of course, was simply to avoid the obvious answer, and to be mildly startling. But later I realized it had the merit of being true, besides. One of the shocks of my life was — some years ago now — to visit Galesburg and find the elms were gone, the streets naked between rows of giant stumps. Terrible. But my Galesburg was in the Twenties, visiting it every summer when I was a child, and it was a wonderful place. The elms shaded the streets, there were still horses and buggies, and medicine shows on Saturday night on the Square. And so on, and so on. I get out those memories every now and then, and run them through like old films.

It would be nice to know that my "papers," such as they are, were in Seymour Library. (Seymour? Was it called that when I was in college in the Thirties? Are you sure you're not Director of Seymour Hall?) My papers don't amount to much, and 1 really cannot imagine anyone studying them. He wouldn't learn much. Nevertheless, it would be pleasant, I expect, to know that there they sat, waiting for posterity. The only reason I don't offer to send them on is that, like many another writer, I am hanging onto them until Congress gets around to restoring the tax break we used to get for donating such papers. I'm sure that's an old story to you, but maybe they'll recognize in time that a lot of writers are doing the same, and allow a tax deduction. If so, and if Knox wanted them, I'd be happy to send them on, along with my Boy Scout merit badges, some snapshots of my kids, and color slides of our last vacation.

Meanwhile, your note was a pleasure, and I appreciate it. When you renovate the library, please restore it to precisely as it was in 1934, and the ghost in the corner will be me.

Finney must have kept up with the magazine for college alumni, because one of its articles seems to have led to his next letter, dated May 25, 1983, and addressed to E. Samuel Moon at Knox College:

I enjoyed reading the interview with you and Robin Metz, published in a recent
Knox Alumnus
. And liked what you both said; I think Knox is lucky in having both your classes.

I'm writing because you said, "I believe (the Knox writing program) started with Proctor Sherwin...." I'm sure you're right, but I'd like to suggest that any history, however informal or brief, of writing classes at Knox should include Albert Britt. I'm sure you know he was president of the college in the Thirties; but he also taught at least one (was it two?) writing courses. And they, or it, were fine; he knew about writing and how to teach it. Knew a lot about a lot, in fact.

Britt continued to write when he was in his nineties. Published a couple of books in his nineties, and they are first rate. No concessions to age by the author; good tight stringent stuff; and no concessions required of the reader. He was something special, Albert Britt; I suspect the college may not fully appreciate him. A lot of college people, and some idiot townspeople, certainly didn't at the time. I hope you'll include him when you write the definitive history of writing as taught at Knox.

No reply needed, incidentally; just wanted to make sure Knox remembers A.B.

Knox did remember Albert Britt, as Sam Moon replied in his June 10, 1983 letter to Finney:

I enjoyed your letter about Albert Britt very much. We have not forgotten him, I assure you, and it is my impression too that he was "something special."

You are right; he taught The Short Story from 1926 until he left the college in 1936, Advanced Writing from 1927 to 1936, and a course called Voluntary Writing from 1929 to 1933.

I looked up your record and find that you took Advanced Writing as a junior and The Short Story as a senior. You also took a course called Narration, taught, I believe, by Mr. Beauchamp, in your senior year.

You might like to see the catalogue descriptions of Mr. Britt's courses:

The Short Story:
A study of the short story with practice in the preparation of synopses and discussion of suggested story plots.

Advanced Writing:
Practical work in different forms of professional writing; news stories, feature articles, editorials, reviews.

Voluntary Writing:
The class meets on call to discuss whatever they may have written during the previous week. The instructor takes no responsibility other than that of leading the discussion.

This last course sounds like a marvelous experiment in freedom; it reminds me of a course I taught in the sixties, thinking it was quite new!

Thanks again, very much, for your letter. I'm turning it over to the Archives.

And with that, the collection of letters to and from Jack Finney held in the Knox College Archives comes to an end. What began in 1959 with a letter from Finney to the president of the college, asking for help verifying details of his story, "I Love Galesburg in the Springtime," developed over the course of almost twenty-four years into a more expansive discussion of writing, memory, and the way that the passage of time was affecting a small Midwestern town.

Internal evidence in the letters themselves suggests that Finney only visited Galesburg once, in early December 1959, and that that visit represented the one and only time he would return to his college town after having been graduated from Knox College in 1934.

Yet the town of Galesburg never seems to have lost its hold on the author. It pops up from time to time in his fiction, and the fact that he wrote the story "I Love Galesburg in the Springtime" and later titled his second collection of short stories after it suggests that the town was a strong influence on his thought and writing. In one of his last letters to the college, on August 25, 1982, he admits having come to the realization that Galesburg is his favorite city on Earth, and had been ever since he visited it regularly as a child.

All of the letters to Galesburg bear the same address for Jack Finney, in Mill Valley, California, and just before he died he told a reporter that he had lived in that house for about 40 years (Ickes 36). His readers grew familiar with the southern California setting of many of his talcs, and the San Francisco area was one that he often explored in his fiction. But it was the small, college town of Galesburg, Illinois, that would remain closest to him, and it is likely that this town — which changed along with the rest of the small towns in America, so drastically — was one of the key influences on his body of work.

SEVENTEEN

Jack Finney on Stage

In his lifetime, Jack Finney wrote two plays. The first was a one-act play published in 1956 and entitled
Telephone Roulette.
According to
Play Index,
it was a romantic comedy in which a "telephone date with unknown young man is too much for Gloria but not for her roommate" (Fidell 103). The play featured roles for a man and two women and had one interior set. It ran only twenty-two pages. According to Gary K. Wolfe, it was an adaptation of a Finney story called "Take a Number," and the play was published by the Dramatic Publishing Company in Chicago (253). Research has revealed nothing further about this play or the short story upon which it was said to be based.

Finney may have chosen to forget about
Telephone Roulette
by 1966, when his second play,
This Winter's Hobby,
premiered, because he referred to the new play as his first (
Playbill
34). An undated, unidentified newspaper clipping in the clippings file at the New York Public Library's Lincoln Center Library for the Performing Arts reports that Finney was to come east for rehearsals, which were scheduled to begin on February 15, 1966. A press release dated March 22, 1966, reports that the cast and crew of the play left New York that day for New Haven, Connecticut, where the play was to open ("'Hobby' Leaves for New Haven").

This Winter's Hobby
opened in New Haven the next day, playing a Wednesday evening show at the famous Shubert Theater, where many plays had ironed out their problems before moving to Broadway. The play ran at the Shubert for four nights, from Wednesday, March 23, 1966, through Saturday, March 26, 1966, and there was also a Saturday matinee. Although the script has not been found, articles and reviews from 1966, along with a folder of dozens of black and white photographs of the play that are part of the Friedman-Abeles Collection at the Lincoln Center library and a copy of the
Playbill
from the brief run at Philadelphia's Walnut Street Theatre, allow for a reconstruction of the story.

This Winter's Hobby
was a play in three acts, with two scenes each. The first scene takes place on a Friday evening in early September, as respectable businessman Charles Bishop, played by E. G. Marshall, misses the connecting train home and steps into a bar in White Plains, New York. He gets into a fight with a drunken bigot outside the bar and walks the four miles to his house in suburban Westchester County. His wife, Duffy, hears a report on the radio that the bigot is dead and that the police are seeking his unknown assailant. Instead of calling the police, the Bishops decide to follow through with their vacation, which had been set the start the following morning. They go off together, assuming all will be forgotten when they return.

Scene two of act one is set on a Saturday morning, five weeks later, putting it in early October, presumably after the Bishops have returned from vacation.

It seems that the "winter's hobby" of the title becomes clear in scene one of act two, which is set on a Friday in early January, late at night. Although Bishop thinks he has gotten off scot free, it turns out that there was a witness to his fight outside the bar, and that witness was a sadistic young man named Arnold, played by William Hickey. (Hickey would play a memorable role years later in the film
Prizzi's Honor.)
Arnold and his friend Tommy, played by Michael Beckett, are two young homosexuals who decide to blackmail the Bishops. Instead of demanding money, however, they insist that Bishop perform outrageous stunts. The stunts are rather mundane, such as answering the phone at two a.m. and wearing funny clothes downtown. 'The rest of the play apparently consists of scenes in which the two young men "torture, embarrass and menace the businessman" (Johnson, Florence). Act two, scene two is set "the following morning." Act three has two scenes, set "that evening" and "late that night." The play ends with the line, "we haven't got a chance."

Reviewers of the New Haven production were not kind to
This Winter's Hobby.
Don Rubin, writing in the
New Haven Register
on March 24, 1966, remarked that the "complications are stock" and that the play is "not that strong to sustain itself for three acts." He added that it had "the subtlety of a sledge hammer and ... the naivete of a 10-year-old" and concluded his savage review by writing that it "never quite decides what it wants to be: a bitter-comic mystery, a suspense-ful melodrama or simply a dramatic study."

The most positive review was written by Florence Johnson, who commented that the play started well but ended badly. Despite the poor reception,
This Winter's Hobby
moved on to the Walnut Street Theatre in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to continue its planned eleven-city tour (Little).

"A new playwright will be introduced here Monday evening ... he is Jack Finney, a San Franciscan by way of the Midwest," wrote Barbara Wilson in the
Philadelphia Inquirer
on March 27, 1966, the day before the play opened. She had interviewed the author by telephone the week before, while he was in New Haven. He began in his usual, self-deprecating way, by telling her '"I can't understand why any one would be interested in what I have to say."' After telling the interviewer that his novels "have brought him monetary gains, primarily because of their screen sales," Finney added that 
"I think visually ... so 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.

"I certainly have enjoyed the success, but I haven't liked the pictures they have made of my books. That's one thing that directed me toward the theater. At least it will be my fault if the play doesn't work. I had no control over the films and I always felt like hiding when a friend would mention one of them."

Finney then relates an incident in a San Francisco department store that gave him the idea for
This Winter's Hobby:

"A man, obviously a tourist ... stopped at a counter to admire the display of jade jewelry. He asked about it, not realizing how expensive it was, and he was one of those unfortunates who are unable to admit that they can't afford something. They are compelled to make excuses.

"The clerk was perfectly aware of this. I watched his face as he toyed with the man. He was enjoying it thoroughly. He had an absolutely malicious expression. He possessed the most chilling type of malice."