Casual Shorts: Jack Finney, Of Missing Persons (1955)

Finney, Jack. "Of Missing Persons." Good Housekeeping, March 1955.

• First published in Good Housekeeping, March 1955.
• A publication history of "Of Missing Persons" can be found at the ISFdb
• The full text is available online at 101bananas.

I read the short story, this time, in the anthology Suspense Stories (Mary E. MacEwen, editor. Scholastic Book Services, September 1963). I believe I first read the story (ca. 1990) in the excellent anthology Fantasy: The Literature of the Marvelous (Leo P. Kelly, ed. McGraw-Hill, 1974). The story was also included in Judith Merrill's annual S-F: The Year's Greatest Science-Fiction and Fantasy (NY: Dell, 1956).

Rating:     7/10

From a stranger in a bar, an average and unambitious bank teller learns of the Acme Travel Bureau. If selected by the bureau's staff, a visitor can purchase a ticket to a colonial paradise whose inhabitants have no worries, and their true passion, whatever it may be, is their contribution to society. The cost for such a ticket is whatever the visitor happens to have on their person. And the ticket is one way only.

"Of Missing Persons" is very much a product of its period, and the same type of story, of an escape from one's mundane existence and of the problems of the world, was all-too-common at the time. The concept was depicted famously in Rod Sterling's Twilight Zone screenplay, "A Stop at Willoughby," in which an average working stiff gets off the train from his daily commute at the town of Willoughby, where the townsfolk live in an era of the past, and can go fishing at their leisure. Finney himself specialized in stories and novels of escape, including the popular Time and Again (1970), and his most recognized short stories: "The Third Level" (1952) and "Of Missing Persons" (1955); in all three the protagonists find unusual methods of leaving present-day New York City for some kind of utopia, be it in the past with a lovely girl, or in some faraway place.

Cold War anxieties, post WWII trauma, nuclear threat and other worries of the period, alongside the protagonist's insignificance amid the large urban landscape, are highlighted as elements that lead these common men from wanting a more comfortable life. Our bank teller here has no ambitions of greatness, of bettering a world that is crumbling away, but rather to leave that world and all its inherent anxieties. The utopia in "Of Missing Persons" that Finney has created is a fairly simple planet named Verna. It is a true utopia, as nothing appears to mar its fantasy and there is no illusion that can be broken. The story culminates in an ending which essentially solidifies the idea that 1950s New York City is a world from which one is best off escaping. Our protagonist has mounting doubts of the truth of Verna, and these doubts leads him to abandon, at the last minute, his voyage. He is left, sitting in a bar, miserably recounting this adventure to anyone who would listen.

Along with a simplified utopia, Finney gives us a simplified explanation of speedy space travel, and stock characters in both the narrator and the alien travel agent. Despite these simplicities, the story closes with strong effect, as the overarching idea itself is well presented.

The technical strength of the story lies in its circular narrative. The story is a monologue aimed at the reader. We meet this stranger in a bar, who tells of meeting a stranger himself in a bar, heeding him to listen to his story. The narrative comes full circle, as the bank teller is warning us of our anticipated visit to the Acme Travel bureau, giving us the same warnings he received from the stranger he had some time ago met in a bar.

For more of this week's Wednesday's Short Stories, please visit Patricia Abbott's blog.

Jack Finney, The Woodrow Wilson Dime (1968)

Finney, Jack, The Woodrow Wilson Dime, New York: Simon & Schuster, April 1968
___________, Three By Finney, New York: Simon & Schuster / Fireside Books, August 1987




The Woodrow Wilson Dime at ISFdb
The Woodrow Wilson Dime at Goodreads
The Woodrow Wilson Dime at IBList

Rating: 7/10

For more Friday's Forgotten Books, please visit Patti Abbott's blog.
And for more Vintage Science Fiction, please visit The Little Red Reviewer.

Discontented advertising clerk Ben Bennell finds himself in an alternate reality after purchasing a newspaper using a Woodrow Wilson dime. Unhappy with his work and his wife, in this new reality he finds himself married to an old flame and riding high in a great advertising career. Though there is nothing deep or challenging about The Woodrow Wilson Dime, the novel is a great read, genuinely funny and highly entertaining, and with Finney's many scripted stories, I am surprised this one hasn't yet made it to mainstream cinema as a romantic comedy.

Though often referred to as science fiction, The Woodrow Wilson Dime is more appropriately fantasy. The fantastical element is made up of time travel and an alternate New York, yet the time travel method to this alternate landscape is pure fantasy with no allusions to science whatsoever. Bennell stumbles upon the portal uniting the two realities by using a coin from the other world to purchase a paper in this one, and logically the way back is the same, by substituting the Wilson dime with one from his own New York. The alternate New York is almost identical to our narrator's New York but with gaps in technology, such as the absence of motor bikes and zippers, along with gaps in culture, such as the music of Cole Porter. The alternate world is on a different course from our own, with different former presidents occupying the face sides of coins (though we know Wilson was president in both universes), and people pursuing different steams and obtaining different levels of success.

Finney has written a variety of genre pieces, mystery and science fiction, and many deal with time travel. His most popular novel is the 1954 multi-adapted and referenced The Body Snatchers, yet achieved much success and cult status with his New York time travel novel Time and Again. While this latter approaches time travel with a more serious and (semi-)scientific approach than The Woodrow Wilson Dime, he has produced other time travel fantasies, such as the early and oft-anthologized short story "The Third Level" (Collier's, 7 January 1950), where the third level of Grand Central Station carries our protagonist to 1894 New York. Finney clearly had an interest and love (as witnessed in Time and Again) for New York history, and likely imagined himself wandering the streets of its past, and manages with varying success to allow his readers to walk those streets as well.

The main flaw in the novel, if we were to look at through a serious lens (as opposed to its clearly playful approach, only partially interested in the finer points of the co-existing realities), is what happens to Ben Bennell Two when Ben Bennell One enters his world? When Ben I enters World II, his counterpart is nowhere to be seen, and the logical assumption is that Ben II transfers over to World I whenever Ben I enters World II. This is evinced by the fact that we learn Ben I's relationship with Hetty progressed while he was away. Further deductive assumptions would lead us to believe that no matter where Ben II is at the moment Ben I transits into his world, he in turn is tele-ported to the other, so that the Bens can never co-exist in the same reality. And yet there is no concern for this Ben II and his plight from successful ad executive to measly ad clerk. No suspicions from Hetty who must've been freaked out by a Ben II claiming not to belong to this world, appearing at her doorstep wondering who she is, likely having discovered Ben I's address as Ben I discovered his. Moreover, Ben I does not even consider the implications of flip-flopping between realities, likely sending Ben II into a crazed whirl, driving him to all levels of madness.

The novel is a pleasure because of its original ideas, the zany concepts Bennell devises, the constant scheming to not only win his wife back, but in obtaining capital. The novel is fresh, energetic and charmingly silly, and though the characters are two-dimensional as they would be in most romantic comedies, the writing is genuinely funny.

Based on Finney's short story "The Coin Collector," originally published as "The Other Wife" in The Saturday Evening Post, 30 January 1960. The novel was first published in 1968, and was updated for the 1987 omnibus volume, Three By Finney. The updating was done (sadly) in an attempt to make it more accessible to contemporary 1987 readers, which becomes completely absurd since our narrator from 1968 references the likes of Cindy Lauper and quotes prices astronomical to the late sixties, where a newspaper is still worth a dime. If you can, hunt down a copy of the original, and you'll have that great cover, the images on which make sense once you've read the text.