Stealing Through Time: On the Writings of Jack Finney

by Jack Seabrook

  Finney's first story shares the characteristic of a first-person narrator with much of his later work, yet its subject of murder sets it apart from most of his writing. Still, there's no real murder in the story — only a lot of planning for one, and the twist ending is a trick he would use again.

  The first story of Jack Finney's to see publication was actually "Manhattan Idyl," which appeared in the April 5, 1947 issue of Collier's, a popular weekly magazine of the time. Collier's had been founded in 1888 and, during World War Two, its circulation had reached 2,500,000 ("Collier's Weekly"). By appearing in Collier's, Finney's work was assured of a huge audience.

  "Manhattan Idyl" is also notable for being the first appearance in print of the Ryans, a young married couple who would appear in eleven short stories, making them Jack Finney's busiest recurring characters. They live in an apartment in Manhattan and Timberlake (Tim) is often portrayed as a prankster. In this first tale, they combat boredom by taking a taxi to the Ambassador Hotel and dancing, then by taking a trolley ride down Third Avenue, and finally by walking along the East River and imagining they're the last people on Earth. This is a charming little story of a couple in love. Finney's prose is elegant and the dialogue is sharp.

  It is interesting to note that some of the themes that would recur throughout Finney's fiction actually get their start in this long-forgotten story. Eve Ryan recalls "the small Illinois town where she'd spent her childhood summers" (35), demonstrating that Finney's characters from the first were already nostalgic for earlier times. Eve also recalls a Hoot Gibson movie serial she'd seen as a child, and Tim fills in the details of the serial's final chapter, probably inventing them as he goes along.

  Tim also pretends to be a tourist pointing out the sights (and getting them all wrong) —St. Patrick's Cathedral, Wall Street, the Flat-iron Building — these would reappear almost fifty years later in Finney's last novel, From Time to Time.

  Best is the following paragraph, where Tim Ryan waxes poetic about the good and bad in the world:

  "So long, world," said Tim. "You were quite a place while you lasted. Noisy, dirty, and ugly most of the time. Mixed up and confused and afraid. Evil and vicious and callous. But pretty wonderful, too. There was a humanity in your people that could never quite be repressed no matter who tried it. There were mornings and evenings; there was snow at night, and sun that felt good —and unexpected moments of peace and happiness. People were alive and doing things —and we—"

  His wife Eve breaks the spell: '"You dope,'" said Eve, '"you'd just love to get a tear out of me, wouldn't you?'" (36). But the picture has been painted and, in this story published just two years after the end of the Second World War, Manhattan looks like a pretty nice place to be when you're young and in love.

  Finney's next story, "I'm Mad at You," also features Tim and Eve Ryan. This time, Eve is angry with Tim until she realizes she just wants him to court her a little bit more than he's been doing recently. The themes of "Manhattan Idyl" are repeated: Eve loves Tim and enjoys thinking about him; Tim likes to tease Eve and exaggerate. There is a good bit of humor and a light and wistful tone. Tim reads a book called Murderer's All and pretends to talk like a private eye (Finney would soon return to the subject of private detectives in a satiric way), and at one point he imagines buying '"...an eight-room frame house in Galesburg, Illinois. Built in the eighties; lots of fancy scrollwork on the eaves and front porch'" and moving it to the middle of Manhattan (17). He'll '"mow the grass and then sit out on the curbstone smoking my pipe. I'd be the living representative of what New York subconsciously yearns for'" (54). Tim goes on with his daydream until his friend Mrs. Mellett agrees that '"those were better days, I guess. Things were quieter. More peaceful'" (54).

  Tim concludes by remarking that '"For a moment, the steel and concrete would be blotted out and they'd remember the peaceful people everywhere for whom they should be working'" (54). In a way, this exchange involving the Ryans and their Manhattan friends the Mel-letts sets up one of the dominant themes of Jack Finney's fiction —we need to slow down, because progress has taken our focus away from the things in life that truly matter.

  A note in the April 5, 1947, issue of Collier's reported that Finney was working in a Manhattan advertising agency at the time (Shane), and it is tempting to see the comments in "I'm Mad at You" as evidence of the frustration of a man feeling trapped in New York City and voicing nostalgia for his Midwestern youth.

  We must be careful not to assume too much, however, since the Ryans are very happy in their Manhattan apartment and Tim's nostalgic daydream is presented as part of his clearly farcical behavior in front of their friends.

  Finney's next story was the brief tale, "Cousin Len's Wonderful Adjective Cellar," published in the April 1948 issue of Ladies' Home Journal. Reprinted in his 1957 collection, The Third Level, this is a story about a columnist who buys what he thinks is a salt cellar in a Second Avenue pawnshop in New York City but later learns that it can be used to remove all of the adjectives and verbs from his prose, much like a literary vacuum cleaner.

  His prose improves and his readers notice the difference. He empties the cellar out of his window over Second Avenue, where the words sometimes float into conversations, but he remarks that they could never be enough to supply ad agencies. This short, humorous piece with a folksy tone has, at its center, a fantastic object whose existence no one questions. This is Finney's first published piece of fantasy, and it demonstrates what Stephen King called "[o]ne of Finney's great abilities as a writer ... his talent for allowing his stories to slip unobtrusively, almost casually, across the line and into another world ..." (236).

  So, by only his fourth published short story, Finney has introduced ideas of nostalgia, time travel, and fantasy, ideas that would inform much of the best of his writing for the next fifty years.

  He returned to Tim and Eve Ryan for his next story, "Breakfast in Bed," which appeared in the May 15, 1948 issue of Collier's. This time, the Ryans spend Sunday morning in bed, reading the newspaper and imagining a party at which they each meet interesting strangers. As in the later story, "Something in a Cloud," Tim refers to a miniature cloud forming above his head (42). To Tim, "'It looks, as on every other day, like a very depressing world. A good one to stay out of, if only for a day'" (47). By the end of the story, the Ryans never do manage to get out of bed. In an editor's note, Finney tells Collier's that he-has never had breakfast in bed himself (Shane).

  The "hilarious whodunit rib" (Shane) entitled "It Wouldn't Be Fair" came next, in the August 28, 1948 issue of Collier's. For this story, Finney won the first weekly Star Award, a $1000 bonus over the magazine's usual rate of payment and a great incentive for the new fiction writer to continue in this vein. Finney tells the editor that he plans to use the money to take a mail-order private eye course, because his wife always solves mysteries and he's always left confused (Shane).

  The story itself is a bit of fluff, satirizing detective stories as lovely Annie, who is good at solving murders she reads about in mystery books, shows the police that her mental skills apply to real life situations as well.

  Finney's next story, "Long Distance Call," was published in the November 6,1948 issue of Collier's, and again won a $1000 Star Award for what the editor called the "fourth of his domesticomedies" (Shane) to feature the Ryans. This forgettable tale finds Tim proving his fidelity to his wife while out of town by squiring a lovely young woman and then taking her with him to pick up Eve.

  "Something in a Cloud" then appeared in the March 1949 Good Housekeeping. This story is one of the most familiar of Jack Finney's pre-1950 pieces, simply because of its inclusion in The Third Level. The cloud of the title refers to a narrative device used to show the picture each character forms in his or her mind about the other before actually meeting them. The gimmick takes the place of interior monologues and quickly wears thin.

  Finney's next story to be published was the equally forgettable "You Haven't Changed a Bit," about a young, u
rban couple in love, not unlike Tim and Eve Ryan. Here, Charley and Ann Knowles attend the wedding of their old flames and conclude that the bride and groom have aged badly, unlike themselves. The twist at the end finds the bride and groom thinking the same thoughts about Charley and Ann.

  "The Little Courtesies" ended Finney's string of ten short stories published in the 1940s with his fifth tale about Tim and Eve Ryan. In this installment, they sit in their apartment and trade witty banter about movie stars Fredric March and Katharine Hepburn. Their humorous byplay makes this an entertaining entry in the series.

  Nineteen-fifty was an important year for Jack Finney, since it marked the appearance of his first story dealing with fantasy and time travel, "The Third Level." But first came four more light comedies, led by "Sneak Preview" in the April 29th issue of Collier's. Al and Debbie fill in for the Ryans here as another smart, young, urban couple facing the birth of their first child and getting a taste of things to come when they baby-sit a four-year-old girl.

  The Ryans returned for their sixth go round in "Week-end Genius," in which Tim is tired of working and wishes he were rich. He imagines inventing a panoramic camera that can take three-dimensional pictures of people's front and back (a similar invention will appear in Finney's 1968 novel, The Woodrow Wilson Dime), then decides it might be better to uninvent things. He remarks that '"Each invention makes life more unbearable: telephones, printing presses, bombs'" (57) and concludes that, if he can turn back the tide of progress, he could say that '"The good old days —are almost here!'" (57). Here again Finney is toying with ideas and themes that would later become central to his work.

  In "I Like It This Way," Charley and Ann Masik are the young, urban couple of the moment who talk a lot, just like the Ryans. The enticingly titled "My Cigarette Loves Your Cigarette" marks the seventh appearance of Tim and Eve Ryan. Eve refers to Tim's youth in Mill Valley, suggesting that Finney had moved to California from New York by the time this story was written.

  This story finds Tim and Eve feeling nostalgic for their youth (Tim is over thirty), and includes the following passage, where Tim tells Eve about how things were when he was single:

  "Oh" —he shrugged—"I met people in New York after I'd been here a while; I made friends and a lot of them, but even then I was lonely a lot of the time. I'm not kidding myself; I had fun, too, and there was a special exciting kind of feeling about those days that you never quite have again. But right along with it, there was strain and doubt and worry, too; people forget that" (54).

  Up to this point, Jack Finney's stories (with the exception of "The Widow's Walk") had been light comedies, aimed at the young, urban readers of slick, high-circulation magazines. With "The Third Level," published on a single page of the October 7, 1950 issue of Collier's, his writing began to change, as he veered into the realm of the fantastic.

  In "The Third Level," narrator Charley (aged 31, and thus a contemporary of Tim Ryan) tells the reader that he has discovered a third level at New York's Grand Central Station. His psychiatrist told him that it was a sign of wish fulfillment, due to his unhappiness with the pressures of the modern world. "Everybody I know wants to escape," he says. One evening, by mistake, he walked through a corridor and into the nineteenth century: "everyone in the station was dressed like eighteen-ninety-something..."

  He sees the front page of a newspaper (The World, which was no longer being published in 1950), and later confirms that its date was June 11, 1894. He goes to a ticket clerk to buy tickets for himself and his wife to travel to Galesburg, Illinois (where Finney went to college):

  Have you ever been there? It's a wonderful town still, with big old frame houses, huge lawns, and tremendous trees whose branches meet overhead and roof the streets. And in 1894, summer evenings were twice as long, and people sat out on their lawns... To be back there with the first World War still twenty years off, and World War II over forty years in the future ... I wanted two tickets for that.

  Charley's 1950 money isn't honored in 1894 New York, though, and even though he returns to the present and buys vintage money, he's never able to find the strange corridor to the past again. A twist ending reports that Charley's psychiatrist Sam managed to find his way back to 1894 through the same portal and invites Charley and Louisa to follow him.

  "The Third Level" is unlike anything Jack Finney had published before it. It is personal (both Charley the narrator and Finney the writer went to school in Galesburg, Illinois), and it goes one step beyond imagination by making nostalgia real. By dint of its being the title story in a 1957 collection, it has attracted some interest from critics; Stephen King, in Danse Macabre, discusses the story and calls the imaginary third level of Grand Central Station "a kind of way station in time, giving egress on a happier, simpler time ..." (236). He calls the story the precursor to the television series The Twilight Zone and adds that: "Finney's most important accomplishment ... is that Daliesque ability to create the fantasy ... and then not apologize for it or explain it" (236).

  An article in volume 110 of Contemporary Authors refers to the "escape from the complex, harsh present to an idyllic past" ("Finney, Walter Braden" 182) and John Clute, writing in The Encyclopedia of Fantasy, uses the term "timeslip" to describe "an act of entry into something like Eden" (352).

  "The Third Level" also forms a bridge from the musings of Tim Ryan in "Manhattan Idyl" and "I 'm Mad at You" to the theme of From Time to Time, Finney's last novel, which opens with a quotation stating that the years before the First World War were the best time to be alive.

  Finney's next story, "Such Interesting Neighbors," is also in the fantasy vein. This time, the narrator tells of his new neighbors, who seem to be rather unfamiliar with current events and customs, even though they claim to have been born and raised in the United States.

  The Hellenbecks turn out to be fugitives from the future, where people live sick with fear of self-destruction. They were more than happy to return to 1951, where there are only bombs to worry about.

  The story is told with great understatement, and nothing is ever said straight out— most of what we learn about the future comes from an article that appears to have come from the future and that explains the history of time travel. Finney makes an in-joke when neighbor Ted Hellenbeck receives a book called The Far Reaches by Walter Braden (Finney's legal name) and says that it could be worth $5000 to $8000 in 140 years.

  At the end of the story, we learn that the future is so bad that everyone escapes to the past, "leaving an empty earth of birds and insects, wind, rain and rusting weapons" (47). "Such Interesting Neighbors" is filled with humorous touches that contrast with its serious message, and at the end, after the Hellenbecks move away, the narrator remarks that his new neighbors are "kind of dull" (47). This story was adapted twice for television, in 1955 and 1987. Both versions are discussed in chapter eighteen.

  Finney followed these two fantasies with another comedy featuring a young, married couple sitting around the house and trading clever remarks; Ben Bennell and wife Reagh in "Husband at Home" are interchangeable with the Ryans and the other couples that peopled such stories in Finney's early years.

  Similarly undistinguished is "One-Man Show," the eighth appearance of Tim and Eve Ryan. Playful humor makes this story breezy but forgettable. The rather odd "Swelled Head" followed; in it, office workers play a prank on a recently-promoted co-worker by changing his hats in order to convince him that he really has developed the title problem.

  "Quit Zoomin' Those Hands Through the Air" combines Finney's comedic side with elements of fantasy and time travel. In this story, an old man tells his grandson to stop bragging about his World War Two flying exploits. The old man recounts his experience in the Civil War with a Harvard professor who used a time machine to transport them both ninety years into the future to the 1950s. The professor brings the Wright Brothers' plane from the Smithsonian Institute back with him to 1864. They get the plane airborne and meet General Ulysses Grant, who scoffs that air power wil
l never replace the foot soldier.

  They scout out rebel forces using the plane, then return it to the 1950s museum '"before daylight or the space-time continuum will be broken and no telling what might happen then"' (48). The battle the next day is a disaster due to faulty intelligence — the narrator later learns that the plane got drunk when he used whiskey instead of gasoline for fuel. As a result, Grant and General Robert E. Lee decided that air power was a bad idea and never spoke of it again. The narrator concludes the story by telling his grandson that he was the first pilot.

  This story falls under the heading of "tall tales," serving as a precursor to Time and Again and From Time to Time in its use of time travel and the suggestion that it can be used to alter the course of history.

  "I'm Scared," published six weeks after "Quit Zoomin' Those Hands Through the Air" in Collier's, takes a much more serious approach to the theme of time travel. The narrator of this story is 66 years old, making him much older than Finney's usual characters, and he is scared by events he's been observing in the world around him.

  He heard a broadcast of Major Bowes' Amateur Hour on the radio, and then realized that Bowes had been dead for ten years. He then investigated a story about a house that had been painted gray but had begun to develop a white strip, where the house's prior color had gotten lost in time. He begins to catalogue and explore similar events, such as a man killed in a car accident who was dressed in 1870s style. The man had suddenly appeared in Times Square in 1950 and research showed that he had gone missing in 1876.