Time Travel. A History

The reader will discover that what powers this book is the author’s raw love of history—for a special time and place, 1880s New York. Time and Again has a twisty plot involving blackmail and murder, as well as a time-traveling love triangle, but you sense that what Jack Finney really cared about—drawing it so painstakingly in words and sketches—was the texture of the time: the mortised cut stone that lines Central Park, a gown of wine-red velvet, the New York Evening Sun and Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, hitching posts and gas jets and carriage lamps, silk-hatted men and women carrying muffs and wearing button shoes, the astonishing profusion of telegraph wires, in bunches, darkening the downtown sky. “This was the greatest possible adventure,” Simon thinks, and you know that Finney thinks so, too.

I was like a man on a diving board far higher than any other he’s ever dared….However cautiously and tentatively, I was about to participate in the life of these times.

Longing for the past resembles the sentiment (or disorder) called nostalgia. Originally, before our newly heightened sense of past and future, nostalgia meant homesickness: “the longing for home which the Physicians have gone so far to esteem a disease under the name of Nostalgia” (Joseph Banks, 1770, per the Oxford English Dictionary). Not till the end of the nineteenth century did the word have anything to do with time. But Finney and other writers are not just nostalgic. They are running their fingers through the fabric of history. They are communing with its ghosts. They are reanimating the dead. Long before Finney, Henry James, too, used a redolent old house as a gateway. Just past the turn of the century, while his brother William, the psychologist, was so fascinated with Proust and Bergson, Henry was struggling with a novel he never managed to finish, published after his death as The Sense of the Past: a young, fatherless historian, an inherited London house (“a piece of suggestive concrete antiquity”), and a door. There is something special about James’s hero, Ralph Pendrel. He is a “victim of the sense of the Past.”

“I’ve been ridden all my life,” he says, “by the desire to cultivate some better sense of the past than has mostly seemed sufficient even for those people who have gone in most for cultivating it.” He pauses at the fateful door, James tells us—

perhaps with the supreme pause of the determined diver about to plunge just marked in him before the closing of the door again placed him on the right side and the whole world as he had known it on the wrong.

Ralph finds himself in another of those bicentury love triangles, fiancée in the present and a fresher, somehow more innocent woman of the past. He is not called a time traveler—not in 1917—but now we know that’s what he is.

Old houses were good for the kind of inspiration that sends a person mysteriously into other times. They have attics and basements, where relics lie untouched for ages. They have doors, and when a door opens, who knows what lies beyond? T. S. Eliot, who particularly admired The Sense of the Past, saw this: “I am the old house / With the noxious smell and the sorrow before morning, / In which all past is present.” In Daphne du Maurier’s novel The House on the Strand, the house alone is not enough. Time travel requires a drug—a potion comprising equal parts mumbo-jumbo and hocus-pocus: “It has to do with DNA, enzyme catalysts, molecular equilibria and the like—above your head, dear boy, I won’t elaborate.” When she wrote the story, du Maurier had recently moved to a house called Kilmarth, on a hilltop near the coast of Cornwall, and she remained there, mainly alone, till the end of her life. Kilmarth is the house on the strand. In the novel, it is said to rest on fourteenth-century foundations, and the fourteenth century is the destination of her fictional hero, an unhappily married book publisher named Dick Young. His trip through time (nausea, vertigo) lands him in a landscape of scrubby moor and young, harsh soil. He is stunned by the clarity. There are hooded ploughmen, wimpled ladies, robed monks, and knights on horseback, and Dick finds himself embroiled in a bloody adventure: adultery, betrayal, and murder. Not only that, he knows, because he has consulted the Encyclopaedia Britannica, that the Black Death is about to arrive. Yet he is never so alive as in the past.