While An American
in Paris transported me to post War II Paris, the glorious Gershwin music
brought me back to a New York of another time, a segue to the next novel I
selected from my “bullpen bookshelf,” Time
and Again by Jack Finney.
Compared to Fortune’s
Rocks, the novel I wrote about in a prior entry, this is lightweight as far
as literature is concerned but a compelling read nevertheless. It harkens back to the nascent roots of my
reading life. My parents were not
readers, so I had to fend for myself. As
a teenager I discovered science fiction, particularly H.G. Wells and his
classic, Time Machine. His novels ultimately led to other SF writers
such as Jules Verne, Ray Bradbury and Isaac Asimov (with whom I briefly worked early
in my career on a series of SF reprints).
Finney’s novel is science fiction, but it is also a mystery and romance novel
as well, and most prominently, an historical portrayal of NYC in the early
1880’s.
As some of the novel takes place around Gramercy Park,
and lower Manhattan, it is evocative of my early working life: 100 Fifth Avenue
during the summers of 1956 – 1964 for my father in his photography studio
during my high school and college years, and from 1964 – 1970 at 111 Fifth
Avenue, only three blocks from my father’s studio, my first job in
publishing. Those buildings were built
soon after the era described in Finney’s novel.
The novel’s protagonist, Si Morley, is an illustrator for
a magazine in 1970 (when the novel was written) and he is selected for a secret
government project involving time travel.
No complicated machinery involved, but instead a clever conceit
involving hypnosis and self-hypnosis, so the reader needs to merely suspend
belief.
Needless to say, there are the obvious themes such as the
danger of disturbing the past so as not to affect the present, and that is a
fine line Si has to walk. He makes
multiple visits and has follow up debriefings from his government overseers. His last visit becomes a more involved and
revelatory one, his becoming more a person of the late 19th century
and getting to know the people of the time, not as images of the long deceased,
but real, living people. When Finney
deals with that, it gave me the chills. These
are the New Yorkers who passed through Ellis Island.
Si catches a Third Avenue horse drawn bus, on a cold
winter’s night in 1882: Here in the Third Avenue car, my feet
ankle-deep in dirty straw but still cold, toes a little numb, I caught a
glimpse – through the window of the closed door ahead – of the driver as he
drew back on the reins to bring the car to stop. A middle-aged woman, her face as Irish as an
anti-Irish cartoon on a back page of most any “Harper’s Weekly,” climbed
aboard. She wore a heavy knitted shawl
over her gray hair that covered her shoulders too; she had no other coat; she
carried a basket on one arm. As she
opened the door, the cold air rolling in and stirring the straw in the aisle, I
heard the horse’s hoofs slipping and clattering for a purchase, heard the crack
of the driver’s whip, and just a the door closed I saw the driver’s body move
as he stamped his feet, hearing the muffled sound of it, and he suddenly turned
real for me as I understood how cold he must be out there on that open
platform.
And then the city,
too, turned real, this car no longer a quaint museum piece of the future, but
of the here and now: solid, scarred,
uncomfortable, dirty because the straw on the floor was stained with tobacco
spit driven by a harassed overworked man and pulled by a badly treated
animal. It was cold out on that
platform, I knew that, but I got up, walked up front, slid open the door, and
stepped out pulling the door closed behind me.
I had to talk to this man.
And indeed Si does, nearly freezing in the process,
learning of the man’s struggle to make a living at $1.90 a day to support his
wife and two children, working 14 hours a day.
The heart of the issue, which is also examined in Anita Shreve’s novel Fortune’s Rocks, is the extreme
differences in social strata, still rife in our modern times. Our families economic and class status still governs
much of our future working lives, hard work being secondary. As the driver
relates to Si: Nine tenths of the people
in New York find scarcely a moment in their lives which they can call their
own, and see mightily little but misery from one year’s end to the other. How is it possible for me to thank God in my
heart for the food he gives me for life, while every morsel I eat I earn with
my toil and even suffering? There may be
Providence for the rich man, but every poor man must be his own Providence. As for the value of life, we poor folks don’t
live for ourselves at all; we live for other people. I often wonder if the rich man who owns great
block of stock in the road and reckons his wealth in the millions does not
sometimes think, as he sits at his well-filled table and looks at the happy
faces of his children, of the poor car driver who toil for his benefit for a
dollar and ninety cents a day, and is lucky if he tastes meat twice a week and
can give the little ones a home, warm clothes and blankets for the winter. Could Dickens have said it better?
The guiding rule for Si during his time travel is
“observe, don’t interfere.” To do the
latter is to possibly change the present, perhaps substantially. Can the empathetic Si actually abide by the
rule? That is one of the mystery themes
running through the novel. I’ll leave the ultimate answer
to the reader, but suffice it to say, Time
After Time is a compulsive read, especially for an old Sci-fi veteran like
myself. I found it particularly amusing,
though, when Si finally returns to 1970 from his last round trip, the world he
describes, one from 45 years ago, seems as foreign to me now as the 1880’s did
to Si. Change, one of the few things one
can count on in life, in our hyper-cyber world seems to have taken on a
geometric construct.
