Stealing Through Time: On the Writings of Jack Finney (14 page)

I began to feel embarrassed, a dirty San Francisco slacker who had to be pressured into working late. In New York they obviously
like
to work late, they enjoy it. It's different in San Francisco; we like to
stop
work. Or better yet, don't start [145).

Sam finally decides to give in to temptation and sleep with Janet. That night, he drives home and climbs into Janet's bed under cover of darkness, only to find Min waiting there. Sam makes the mistake of saying, '"Oh, Janet, Janet,
Janet,
I've wanted this for a long, long time'" (152) and Min runs off, furious, to Howie.

Janet feels sorry for Sam and agrees to sleep with him, but before this occurs he remembers that there are billboards all over town that have to be vandalized, and he and Janet set out with paint supplies. Sam is truly a good neighbor — despite his lustful ideas, he always ends up doing the right thing.

Chapter fifteen, in which Sam and Janet paint over the names and change the faces on billboards, links
Good Neighbor Sam
to Jack Finney's earlier crime novels. As in those books, Sam and Janet have a plan and gather various supplies to carry it out, but the details of the plan are withheld from the reader.

Since this is a comic novel, the plan is mounted on a much smaller scale, but to readers of Jack Finney's works the pattern is familiar. Sam also paints an epithet on top of a police car when he and Janet are surprised but not discovered by patrolmen. Sam thinks, "The fact is that I don't like cops" (172), and he is thus a precursor to the characters in Finney's later caper novel,
The Night People,
who expend a great deal of effort in the San Francisco area to demonstrate their dislike of the police.

In a sense, all of
Good Neighbor Sam
can be read as a satire on Finney's earlier novels; here, the impossible task for Sam is to pretend to be Janet's husband while keeping his own marriage intact. As the novel comes to an end, Sam and Janet paint the last of the billboards, and each paints messages to their spouses begging forgiveness. Min forgives Sam and explains that Janet will not inherit the eleven million dollars, after all. Her grandfather, it seems, wrote another will and left all of his money to the Communist Party, '"on condition that they divvy it up and disband ... it'll drag through the courts for a hundred years'" (189). Sam's efforts have been for naught, but the novel provides good fun for the reader.

Good Neighbor Sam
was quickly turned into a movie starring Jack Lemmon. As always, Jack Finney had nothing to do with the film. According to screenwriter Everett Greenbaum, "Finney was a mystery. We never heard from him nor could we learn anything about his personal life." The film is very funny and sticks closely to its source. It is discussed in detail in chapter nineteen.

The novel itself received very little attention. In 1999, Jon Breen wrote "Finney handles the farcical events ... with a flawless comic touch and along the way presents some pointed satire on his former profession of advertising" (31). That same year, Fred Blosser remarked that, while the novel deals with a marital crisis, "don't expect the suburban angst of John Updike or John Cheever" (52).

Good Neighbor Sam
is a pivotal book in Jack Finney's catalogue. It was his first novel not to be serialized or adapted from a shorter work, and it was his last novel for over twenty years to be made into a movie. With
Good Neighbor Sam,
Finney synthesized elements from his earlier short fiction, featuring young, urban married couples in humorous situations, with elements from his big caper novels, and the result is a satisfying comedic work.

TEN

"The Other Wife" and
The Woodrow Wilson Dime

After the publication of
Good Neighbor Sam
in 1963, Jack Finney's productivity as a writer slowed considerably. He was not involved in the film adaptation of
Good Neighbor Sam
that was released in 1964. He published one short story, his last, in 1965, and he was not involved in the film adaptation of
Assault on a Queen
that was released in 1966. His play,
This Winter's Hobby,
had a brief run that year, and he published nothing at all in 1967.

In 1968, his sixth novel,
The Woodrow Wilson Dime,
was published. It was expanded from the short story, "The Other Wife," which had appeared in the January 30, 1960 issue of the
Saturday Evening Post
and which had been reprinted with very minor changes as "The Coin Collector" in
I Love Galesburg in the Springtime.

"The Other Wife" is narrated by 26-year-old New Yorker Alfred Pullen. His wife, 24-year-old Marion, complains that he does not pay enough attention to her, and he tells her that '"we've been married four years. Of course the honeymoon's over!'" (54). Al's poor choice of words ensures that he spends the night on the living room sofa.

Al and Marion are the unhappy version of Tim and Eve Ryan— young, urban marrieds whose life together has lost its spark. In this story, Finney gives the old theme a new twist by means of an unusual coin. At the beginning of the story, Al checks his pocket change and sees a Woodrow Wilson dime, thinking it is simply '"a new kind of dime'" (54). After his uncomfortable night on the sofa, he walks to work the next morning and unconsciously pays for a newspaper with the unusual dime. This simple act catapults him into a parallel universe immediately, without fanfare. He sees a sign advertising "Coco-Coola" and thinks it is just a sign painter's mistake. Yet he soon realizes that the world around him has changed. Cars look different, the Empire State Building is shorter, and the newspaper under his arm is the defunct
New York Sun.

Finney presents all of this in his best raconteur narrative style, with Al telling the reader what he sees and punctuating his tale with comments such as, "Do you understand now?" and "maybe you've figured it out too" (54). Al thinks about the big changes that could have been brought on by small alterations in the course of history (something every science fiction reader familiar with Ray Bradbury's short story, "A Sound of Thunder," has considered), and concludes that "There is every conceivable kind of world" and it is possible that "these other possible worlds actually exist; all of them, side by side and simultaneously with the one we happen to be familiar with" (56). This proposition had been explored in Fredric Brown's humorous 1949 novel,
What Mad Universe.
In Jack Finney's hands, though, the idea is used to turn the institution of marriage upside down.

As Al begins to understand that he has memories from his life in both worlds, he finds himself able to exist in this new world without much difficulty. He goes home to his apartment and is greeted passionately by his wife, a beautiful brunette with whom he had broken up years before in his other world. After a brief moment of worry that he is cheating on his wife Marion, he succumbs to his situation and realizes that, in this world, he is married to Vera and it is perfectly appropriate for him to enjoy life with her. "What a wonderful time Vera and I had in the months that followed" (56).

He delights in the subtle differences he finds in this new world, such as an additional book by his favorite author, Mark Twain, who (in this world) lived eight years longer and "died in 1918 in Mill Valley, California" (56), where Jack Finney lived. Al also enjoys other books, including "
The Third Level,
a collection of short stories by someone or other I never heard of, but not too bad" (56, 58).

Unfortunately, Al's personality in this world is the same as it was in the other, and after four or five months the novelty wears off and he is bored again. He deduces that the alternate worlds intersect at a certain point, "at a corner newsstand, for example, on Third Avenue in New York" (58), and occasionally something from one world will slip into another, as did the Woodrow Wilson dime. Al looks for and finally finds a Roosevelt dime; spending it, he returns to his original world and his wife, Marion, thrilled to see her again.

As the story ends, Al tells the reader that "sometimes I'm a little tired at night lately" and that he has found another Woodrow Wilson dime. He has it "safely tucked away" (58) and plans to use it to return to Vera's world when the time is right.

In "The Other Wife," Al Pullen advocates a form of bigamy that is only possible in a science fiction story. Like many of Jack Finney's forays into fantasy, the impossible elements of the tale are used to facilitate wry commentary on the everyday lives of his characters. When Al suddenly travels into an alternate world, he does not become involved in an exciting adventure, nor does he attempt to use his special knowledge for gain. Instead, he proceeds to live the same sort of mundane, workaday life that he lived in his prior world, going to work every day and returning home to his wife at night. For Al, boredom is the enemy and the solution is to make a simple variation in his surroundings. One finishes the story secure in the knowledge that Al will live out his life going from world to world every few months to recharge his emotional batteries.

"The Other Wife" spans four pages in the
Saturday Evening Post;
eight years after its publication, Finney published a greatly expanded version as the novel,
The Woodrow Wilson Dime.
In the meantime, he had published
Good Neighbor Sam,
another novel that uses humor to examine a man's desire for two beautiful women. In the midst of the sexual revolution, Jack Finney wrote two novels (his only two of the decade) that were essentially sexual farces featuring protagonists whose lives were firmly rooted in the establishment.

In the novel, Alfred Pullen becomes 29-year-old Benjamin Ben-nell, and his wife is now named Hetty. Bennell is a surname that Jack Finney used several times (recall Miles Bennell in
The Body Snatchers
and Ben Bennell in "Husband at Home" and "Stopover at Reno") and Ben, like Al in "The Other Wife," is stuck in an unhappy marriage and a boring job. He works for a company called Saf-T Products and thinks, "So that's what we do at my office; we fool around with paper while trying to hold insanity, raging and snapping at the edges of vision and mind, at bay..." (7).

Finney expands the story to novel length by exploring Ben's marriage and work life in detail, all narrated ironically by Ben himself. Ben speaks to the mirror in his bathroom and it talks back; a hand even emerges from the ceiling to stamp "FAILURE" on his forehead (3). Ben thinks about his old girlfriend Tessie (Vera in the short story) and is described as an unhappy, unpleasant person who (fortunately for the reader) is an entertaining narrator.

A new character is introduced in chapter three; he is Nate Rock-oski, a friend of Ben's who is always trying to invent something to make him rich. One Saturday morning, Ben and Nate fool around with a 360-degree camera that takes pictures of people from all sides. Two of the stretched-out photographs are reproduced in the midst of the text, making this the first example of the technique that Finney would use so extensively in his next novel,
Time and Again,
using photographs and other illustrations to complement the text.

In chapter four, Ben spends the Woodrow Wilson dime and is thrown into the alternate world; the novel takes four chapters to accomplish what happens on the second page of the short story. Ben realizes right away what has happened and tells the newsagent that he needs a Roosevelt dime to get back to his own world through the intersection point at the newsstand (32-33).

Ben takes a ride in a taxi cab and the driver tells him something that suggests that this world is more in keeping with one that author Jack Finney might prefer: "'I don't know where you come from, but in New York we don't believe in getting rid of everything the minute it gets a little old'" (34).

Ben goes home to Tessie and his life becomes more exciting. He's an executive at the advertising agency at which he works, and Finney again satirizes this industry (as he did in
Good Neighbor Sam)
by describing products such as Navel-O-No, a wax plug used to cover unsightly navels (46). Finney has some fun with the changes in this new world, and even the voice from Ben's bathroom mirror congratulates him.

It does not take long for Ben to get bored, however, and he visits friend Nate Rockoski, in this world a famous inventor. Ben realizes that zippers are unknown here and decides to invent and patent them. He visits Custer Huppfelt, another character not in the short story. He had known Custer since childhood in the other world; here, Custer is a patent attorney. Finney complicates matters by having Custer bring his girlfriend Hetty (Ben's wife in the other world) along for a game of bridge with Ben and Tess. Ben becomes jealous and his happy life turns somber as he struggles with his feelings about Hetty and Tess.

Custer and Hetty are engaged, and although Ben tries to stop their wedding, he fails. Custer sends Ben a message that a manufacturer wants to buy his zipper for $250,000, but Ben is so morose about Hetty's marriage to Custer that he spends a Roosevelt dime and returns to his original world, where he rushes back to his wife.

By this point in the novel, the story has diverged completely from that of the short story. Ben's return to his first world is an unhappy one when he discovers that he and Hetty have divorced and she is now engaged to none other than Custer Huppfelt. Ben then engages in a series of humorous acts in an attempt to win Hetty back. These include having his face printed on postage stamps, something Jack Finney himself had done way back in 1947 when his first short story had been published in
Collier's
(see discussion of "Manhattan Idyl" in chapter one).