Stealing Through Time: On the Writings of Jack Finney (4 page)

'The narrator concludes that more and more people are longing for a simpler time, '"when you could bring children into the world and count on the future....'" He adds that "People didn't talk that way when I was young! The present was a glorious time! But they talk that way now" (81). He concludes the story by arguing that the overwhelming desire of people to escape their lives is putting pressure on the boundaries of time, and when the "clock of time" breaks, "I leave to your imagination the last few hours of madness that will be left to us..." (81).

In his article on Jack Finney in
Twentieth-Century American Science-Fiction Writers,
Michael Beard calls the conclusion to "I'm 
Scared" "uncharacteristic of Finney, but the portrait of an entire society straining semiconsciously to escape the present is a compact argument for the sensibility behind most of his writing" (184). Beard is correct; "I'm Scared" demonstrates Jack Finney moving into more serious areas with his fiction, areas that he would continue to explore for the remainder of his career.

He returned to light comedy with the ninth story about Tim and Eve Ryan, "Sounds in the Night." This time, they can't sleep and plan to go out on the town at three a.m. Tim leans his head out of the window and hears a woman across the street call out of her own window to a cop on the beat. Finney describes the cop as "irritable authority," with a "chilling, impersonal ruthlessness" (51). The woman dumps a bucket of water on his head. His description and reaction prefigure the portrayal of the police in Finney's later novel,
The Night People,
demonstrating that the questioning of authority in that book was not simply a nod to 1970s attitudes by the author.

Though Finney's early stories appear to have attracted no critical attention at the time they first appeared, two letters from the readers of
Collier's
were published in the January 5, 1952 issue and discuss this story. In the first letter, reader Ruth Crane writes that Finney "reminds me most of Somerset Maugham, American style. He writes about practically nothing, yet he does it wonderfully well" (4). In the second letter, reader Francis T. Bettack remarks that the story was "terrific" and recalls "another wonderful story ... My Cigarette Loves Your Cigarette" (4). Finney's work was beginning to be noticed.

It's odd that "Stopover at Reno" has never been reprinted or discussed, because it is one of Jack Finney's most exciting short stories. Ben Bennell (who shares the same name as the main characters in "Husband at Home" and
The Woodrow Wilson Dime,
as well as having the same last name as the main character in
The Body Snatchers
) and his wife Rose rent a room in Reno, Nevada. They've left Newark and spent four days on the bus, heading for San Francisco. They're nearly broke. While Rose sleeps, Ben visits the casino in the hotel where they're staying.

He is gradually drawn into betting at the craps table, and Finney brilliantly chronicles his agony and ecstasy as he compulsively gambles with nearly the last scrap of money they have. He almost loses everything, then wins his way up to $1500 before losing it all over again. At the end of the story he tells his wife that he lost a dollar.

In addition to the obvious parallels to Finney's life that were discussed in chapter one of this book, this is a tale of great psychological suspense that serves as a neat tune up for Finney's first novel,
5 Against the House.

A
Collier's
short short is how the magazine described "Obituary," co-written by Finney and C.J. Durban, about whom I have been able to discover absolutely nothing. In this spooky little tale, average guy Charley dreams every night that he's really successful Edward V. Car-mody. His wife worries that his dreams depict his desires, so she gives him sleeping pills and he sleeps well and dreamlessly for a month. She then sees the real Carmody's obituary in the newspaper —he resembled Charley but lived the life of the man in his dreams, and he'd spent a month in a coma before dying. The twist ending of this story puts it in the category of those found on the television series,
The Twilight Zone,
but it doesn't really fit well with Jack Finney's other writing.

More consistent is "Tiger Tamer," in which the narrator recalls an incident thirty years before in Galesburg, Illinois (there's that town again), when a boy named Charley hypnotized a tiger and attracted national media attention. "I remember that day, and all those long-ago, deep-summer days in Galesburg, Illinois, with a terrible nostalgia" (72) writes the narrator, and he proceeds to tell how Charley did the trick. He concludes that Charley (now an adult) would make a great president, adding: "I don't say his methods would always stand the full light of day, but ... His aims ... are right, and he usually achieves them..." (73). "Tiger Tamer" would later be reprinted in the collection,
I Love Galesburg in the Springtime
under the title, "A Possible Candidate for the Presidency."

"There Is a Tide" is a wistful tale set in New York City, where the narrator is a 28-year-old assistant at a "big candy and cough-sirup company" (50) who sees a ghost in his apartment on East 68th Street. Concerned about beating boss Ted Haymes out of his job, he is awake at three a.m. wrestling with his ethical dilemma when he sees a chunky, middle-aged ghost who also appears to be having an ethical problem. The experience makes the narrator decide to preserve his boss's job, but the same boss's behavior at work the next day makes the narrator change his mind again.

He decides that the ghost is that of Harris L. Gruener, the prior tenant in his apartment, and he tracks down Mr. Gruener in Brooklyn where he is an unhappy man in his seventies. Gruener explains that, when he lived in the narrator's apartment, he had pondered suicide for three nights in a row and now he regrets not having killed himself because he is a burden to his son and his son's family.

Gruener had looked for a sign on the third night but had received nothing. Gruener speculates that 

"a particularly intense human experience can sometimes leave behind some sort of emanation or impression on the environment it happened in. And that under the right conditions it can be evoked again, almost like a recording that is left behind in the very air and walls of the room"
[52]

and wonders if the narrator's experience "brought back the actual time itself..." (52). That night, the narrator looks up the title quote in
Julius Caesar
("There is a tide in the affairs of men..." [IV.iii.218]), sees the ghost, and thinks out loud the words, "Do it!" (53).

The next day, a look in the phone book finds no entry for Gruener and a trip to Brooklyn reveals that he died twelve years before. The narrator realizes that his comment drove the man to suicide, and he thinks, "
I
don't know if time shifts sometimes; if events that have already happened can be made to happen again, this time in another way" (53). He concludes that "There is a tide, all right, but whether a man should take it or not depends on where he wants to go" (53).
Time and Again
is foreshadowed in this effective story, as present and past are both altered by the actions of the narrator.

After a ten-month hiatus, Tim and Eve Ryan returned for the tenth time in "Man of the Cocktail Hour." This uneventful story features a flirtatious actress named Ann Darrow, after Fay Wray's character in the film
King Kong.

Another mysterious co-author, this time named F.M. Barratt, was listed with Finney in the byline of his next story, "Diagnosis Completed," which appeared in the October 18, 1952 issue of
Collier's.
This mystery features an elderly doctor and a younger doctor solving the mystery of whether a woman died accidentally, committed suicide, or was murdered. This story has few Finney touches and it's tempting to think that he helped Mr. Barratt polish a story that the latter had written.

By the time "Behind the News" appeared in the November 1952 issue of
Good Housekeeping
, Jack Finney's name was well-known enough to sell magazines, since this is the first time it was listed on the cover. In this humorous tale, Johnny Deutsch edits the
Clarion,
a small-town newspaper, and is fond of composing phony stories that he never prints, such as "Police Chief Slain by Wolf Pack."

He recalls that his father, the former editor, once threw a chunk of lead into the Linotype machine and claimed that the rock was a meteor. Somehow, this type begins to make Johnny's fanciful story come true, and once he realizes that this is the case he begins to use it to his advantage. Stephen King's comment about Finney's technique of presenting an unusual situation and not explaining it is recalled when Johnny remarks that, in any science fiction story, "'the dullest part is always the explanation...'" (186).

This bit of fantasy or wish fulfillment features a small-town newspaper background reminiscent of science fiction/mystery author Fredric Brown, who was writing some of his finest novels at about the same time.

Jack Finney published twenty-nine stories from 1947 to 1952, then turned to novels and did not publish another short story until 1955. In these early stories one can see him finding his voice and experimenting with the themes that he would continue to explore for the rest of his career. He wrote many stories with a comedic flavor, something that he would return to in
Good Neighbor Sam.
The suspenseful "Stopover in Reno" clearly sets the stage for his first novel,
5 Against the House,
and his many fantasy stories dealing with aspects of time travel foreshadow
Time and Again.

Finney would not publish anything between November 1952 and July 1953, when "5 Against the House" began to appear as a serialized novel in the pages of
Good Housekeeping.

THREE

5 Against the House

In 1947, when "The Widow's Walk" was published, Jack Finney was a 35-year-old married man without children who had been working in advertising for over ten years. By 1953, he had divorced and remarried, and he had a baby daughter. He had published twenty-nine stories in magazines read by millions of people, and he was well-known enough to have his name on the cover. He had moved from the East Coast to the West Coast, and it was time for him to take the next step as a writer and begin writing longer works.

In July 1953, a big box on the cover of that month's
Good Housekeeping
announced, "The terrific suspense story of the year!" This was "5 Against the House," which would run as a serial in three consecutive issues of the magazine.

The story is told by 19-year-old college junior Al Mercer, who lives in a fraternity house at a college in Illinois (where Finney had attended Knox College). It is early June and he and his friend, Guy Cruikshank, are bored. True crime buff Jerry Weiner arrives and, after seeing a Brinks truck out the window, relates an armored car robbery that happened years before in Brooklyn. Al thinks, "There's a handful of moments scattered through your life that stick in your mind forever" (159).

A fourth fraternity brother then arrives — he is Brick Vogeler, older than the rest at twenty-two and an ex-football star. Jerry finishes his story and the four friends began to plan their own big crime as a way to pass the time.

This is how Jack Finney sets up "5 Against the House," which features the youngest group of protagonists to appear in any of his stories. They are about a decade younger than the urban married couples who peopled many of his early short stories, and their youth plays a role in the choices they make.

The foursome then drives to the Brinks office in town and observes the goings on while trading ideas for a robbery. They are interrupted and interrogated by the police, who provide a quick dose of reality that angers Brick but that the younger members of the gang take in stride, since they're still treating the idea of robbery as a lark.

The fifth member of the title group is introduced as Tina Grey-leg, a beautiful waitress whom Al is dating. The story then shifts back to the four men, who recall working in Reno, Nevada, the summer before. Brick dealt cards at an ornate casino named Harold's Club, while the others merely had menial jobs. Brick suggests that they rob Harold's Club, arguing that they would have a better chance at success because they already know the place and its workings. Jerry (the true crime buff) explains that the real trick is getting away with the robbery, because one can always be traced back to one's origins. Al realizes that Jerry is serious about planning the heist, and the foursome split up to think about how to arrive in Reno seemingly out of thin air.

Al takes Tina out to dinner and proposes marriage, but she hesitates, telling him that she wants a man with money and prospects for the future, not just a college student. Al tells her he'll have money soon, and this may be the first time that Al is serious about the robbery himself. His motives are thus suspect: the idea is hatched out of boredom but becomes more appealing when it may lead to Tina's taking his marriage proposal more seriously.

Al's ethics are questionable as he explains the plan to Tina: "'I think gambling is wrong. I always have; this isn't a new idea with me. I think it's vicious. As evil socially as narcotics'" (180).

For a nineteen-year-old junior in college, Al has strong feelings. He continues with this bit of ethical gymnastics: '"So I say [casinos are] fair prey. Harold's Club has only a technical legal right to that money, no more real right to it than I do.'" He continues: '"But this isn't stealing to me; by any standard I respect, that money doesn't belong to Harold's Club; and I'll take it if I can, and it will never bother my conscience for a moment'" (180).