First, a few scientific-sounding words to help them along:
“Don’t you understand? The thing existed in the Past. If you were in the Past, too, you could find it. It’s very difficult to make you understand things. Time and space are only forms of thought.”
Of course Nesbit had read The Time Machine. Late in the story, her heroes do dart briefly into the future (using the British Museum as a portal). They find a sort of socialist utopia—all clean and happy and safe and orderly, perhaps to a fault—and encounter a child named Wells, “after the great reformer—surely you’ve heard of him? He lived in the dark ages.” With that brief exception, their real adventures take them backward into the Past (always reverently capitalized). They find themselves in Egypt, where children wear no clothes to speak of and tools are made of flint, because no one has heard of iron. They go to Babylon and meet the Queen in her palace of gold and silver, with flights of marble steps and beautiful fountains and a throne with embroidered cushions. She takes time out from throwing people in jail to entertain the time travelers with cold drinks. “I’m simply dying to talk to you, and to hear all about your wonderful country and how you got here, and everything, but I have to do justice every morning. Such a bore, isn’t it?” Then it’s off to another ancient land, Atlantis: “Great continent—disappeared in the sea. You can read about it in Plato.” They find blue sea sparkling in sunlight, white-capped waves lapping marble breakwaters, and the people riding around on great hairy mammoths—not as mild looking as the elephants they were accustomed to seeing at London’s zoo.
Archeology catalyzed imaginative literature. Nesbit didn’t intend to invent a time-travel subgenre, because she couldn’t see into the future, but she did just that. Meanwhile, also in 1906, Rudyard Kipling published a book of historical fantasies called Puck of Pook’s Hill, with swords and treasures and children transported through the years by the magic of storytelling. C. S. Lewis read Nesbit’s Amulet when he was a boy in Ireland: “It first opened my eyes to antiquity, the ‘dark backward and abysm of time.’ ” The road that started here led fifty years later to Peabody’s Improbable History, the television cartoon series that began appearing on The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show. Mr. Peabody, the time-traveling beagle, and his boy, Sherman, take their WABAC Machine back to the construction of the pyramids at Giza, and also to visit Cleopatra, King Arthur, the emperor Nero, Christopher Columbus, and Isaac Newton, at the foot of his apple tree. Anachronism is rampant. The pedagogy is joyously imperfect.*4 Later still came the cult film Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure: history “rewritten by two guys who can’t spell.” Some time-tourists go to ogle, others to study history.
All these children—Cyril, Robert, Anthea, Jane, and the boy Sherman—want to go back and see the famous names enacting their famous stories. They serve as proxies for our desire to know what really happened. That desire seems to burn more fiercely when it is partially satisfied. The better that technology gets at capturing and representing our experience of the present, the more we suffer from the fog of ignorance that divides us from lost times. Progress in visualization shows us what we’re missing. In Nesbit’s time, statues and painted portraits were giving way to photographs. There was a magic in the way they froze an instant of time. Later, the dog Mr. Peabody was of course expert in the new medium of television. Nowadays every modern historian and biographer has felt the desire to send a video camera into the past—to Newton’s garden or King Arthur’s court—if an actual time machine is not available.
“I’ve always felt a wonder at old photographs,” says Simon Morley. He is a sketch artist, working in advertising in New York, and he is the narrator of Time and Again, a 1970 novel (illustrated with sketches and vintage photographs) by Jack Finney, a former New York ad man himself.*5 Simon deeply feels the inaccessibility of the past, once alive, now lost, taunting us with the few objects and images that survive.
Maybe I don’t need to explain; maybe you’ll recognize what I mean. I mean the sense of wonder, staring at the strange clothes and vanished backgrounds, at knowing that what you’re seeing was once real. That light really did reflect into a lens from these lost faces and objects. That these people were really there once, smiling into a camera. You could have walked into the scene then, touched those people, and spoken to them. You could actually have gone into that strange outmoded old building and seen what now you never can—what was just inside the door.
It’s not just photographs. Someone appropriately sensitized, like Simon, can see the fingers of the past pressing through the cracks of all his existence. In a dense old city like New York, the past is in the stones and the bricks. The relic that triggers Simon’s time travels will turn out to be a residential building—not just any apartment house, but a famous one, the Dakota: “like a miniature town…gables, turrets, pyramids, towers, peaks…acres of slanted surfaces shingled in slate, trimmed with age-greened copper, and peppered with uncountable windows, dormer and flush; square, round, and rectangular; big and small; wide, and as narrow as archers’ slits.” This will be his portal.
The conceit of Time and Again is that time travel to the past can be accomplished with no machinery, no magic, but merely a trick of the mind, a bit of self-hypnosis. If the right subject, a sensitive person like Simon, can rid his memory and purge his surroundings of every trace of the past century, he can translate himself by an act of will into, for example, the year 1882. First he must get into the mood: “There are no such things as automobiles….There are no planes, computers, television, no world in which they are possible. ‘Nuclear’ and ‘electronics’ appear in no dictionary anywhere on the face of the earth. You have never heard the name Richard Nixon…or Eisenhower…Adenauer…Stalin…Franco…General Patton.”
Simon (and the reader) are also primed with the now-customary Wells-style pseudologic, to counter the commonsense knowledge that time travel is impossible. Once again, everything we think we know about time is wrong. Here, in 1970, the patter is updated to stand on the authority of Einstein. “How much do you know about Albert Einstein,” says Dr. E. E. Danziger, project director, in the role of learned gentleman. “The list of Einstein’s discoveries is a considerable one. But I’ll skip to this: Presently he said that our ideas about time are largely mistaken.” He explains:
“We’re mistaken in our conception of what the past, present and future really are. We think the past is gone, the future hasn’t yet happened, and that only the present exists. Because the present is all we can see.”
“Well, if you pinned me down [says Simon], I’d have to admit that that’s how it seems to me.”
He smiled. “Of course. To me, too. It’s only natural. As Einstein himself pointed out. He said we’re like people in a boat without oars drifting along a winding river. Around us we see only the present. We can’t see the past, back in the bends and curves behind us. But it’s there.”
“Did he mean that literally, though? Or did he mean—”
Good question. Did he mean it literally, or was he merely creating an effective mathematical model? No matter. We’re moving quickly now, because Danziger has done Einstein one better and invented a way to step out of the boat and walk back.
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.
The House on the Strand appeared in 1969, a year before Time and Again, and Dick describes the feeling of both books’ narrators when he says, “I had walked about that other world with a dreamer’s freedom but with a waking man’s perception.” They are interlopers in history. They can witness, but they struggle to find out whether they can belong, intervene, or alter the timeline of events. “Could time be all-dimensional,” Dick muses, “—yesterday, today, tomorrow running concurrently in ceaseless repetition?” Whatever that means. He’s a book publisher, not a physicist.
“Might it not be,” says W. G. Sebald in Austerlitz, “that we also have appointments to keep in the past, in what has gone before and is for the most part extinguished, and must go there in search of places and people who have some connection with us on the far side of time, so to speak?” This Past, into which so many travelers launch themselves, is a misty place, perhaps even more so than the Future. It can seldom be remembered, must be imagined. Yet here in our information-rich present, the past seems more with us than ever. The more vivid it gets, the more real it seems, the greater the craving. Feeding the addiction are Ken Burnsian documentaries, Renaissance faires, Civil War reenactments, history cable channels, and augmented-reality apps. Anything that “brings the past to life.” Under the circumstances, time machines might seem surplus to requirements, but the practitioners of time travel show no signs of slowing down—not in fiction or in film. Woody Allen has explored time travel several times—into the future with Sleeper (1973) and then, in 2011, with Midnight in Paris, he throws the lever to the past.
His hero, Gil Pender, is a blond Californian and the ideal of the backward-looking obsessive. His friends tease him about his nostalgia, his “denial of the painful present,” his “obsession with ‘les temps perdus.’ ” He is writing a novel, and its opening lines both celebrate and mock the very genre that this movie so self-consciously joins:
“Out of the Past” was the name of the store, and its products consisted of memories. What was prosaic and even vulgar to one generation had been transmuted by the mere passing of years to a status at once magical and also camp.
His time-slipping portal is not a machine or a house but Paris itself, the whole city, its past so exposed, at every street corner and flea market. To 1920 he goes, and there the modernists understand his sense of dislocation. “I’m from a different time—a whole other era—the future,” he explains. “I slide through time.” The surrealist Man Ray replies, “Exactly correct—you inhabit two worlds—so far I see nothing strange.” The film’s central joke is slowly revealed, and it is recursive, time slips within time slips. Nostalgia is eternal. If the twenty-first century yearns for the Jazz Age, the Jazz Age craves the Belle Époque—every age mourning the loss of another age. Woody Allen is neither the first nor the last to see it this way. “The present is always going to seem unsatisfying,” Gil learns, “because life itself is unsatisfying.”
Travel to the past begins as tourism in the extreme. Complications soon arise. The sightseers start tinkering. We barely learn to read history before we want to rewrite it. Here come the paradoxes—cause and effect going around in loops. Even Nesbit’s child heroes see this. When they meet Julius Caesar at his tent in Gaul, peering across the Channel toward Britain, they can’t resist trying to talk him out of dispatching his legions: “We want to ask you not to trouble about conquering Britain; it’s a poor little place, not worth bothering about.” This backfires, naturally. They end up talking him into it, because you can’t change history, and we have just witnessed the birth of a time-travel joke that will evolve into higher and higher forms. Thus, a full century after Nesbit, Woody Allen’s time traveler in Midnight in Paris meets the young Luis Buñuel and can’t resist trying to inspire the director with his own future movie.
GIL: Oh, Mr. Buñuel, I had a nice idea for a movie for you.
BUÑUEL: Yes?
GIL: Yeah, a group of people attend a very formal dinner party and at the end of dinner when they try to leave the room, they can’t.
BUÑUEL: Why not?
GIL: They just can’t seem to exit the door.
BUÑUEL: But, but why?
GIL: And because they’re forced to stay together the veneer of civilization quickly fades away and what you’re left with is who they really are—animals.
BUÑUEL: But I don’t get it. Why don’t they just walk out of the room?
When the future meets the past, the future has a knowledge advantage. Yet the past is not easily swayed. Mind you, we’re talking about our imaginations—the imaginations of professional imaginers, especially. “Time,” wrote the novelist Ian McEwan early in his career—“not necessarily as it is, for who
knows that, but as thought has constituted it—monomaniacally forbids second chances.” The rules of time travel have been written not by scientists but by storytellers.
—
WHEN THEY DID start trying to change history, so many of them came up with the perfect plan. They tried to kill Hitler. They are still trying, to this day. It’s easy to see why. Others have done great evil and caused great suffering (Stalin, Mao…), but one man looms above the others with his combination of monstrosity and charisma. “Adolf Hitler. Hitler, Hitler, Hitler,” says Stephen Fry, in his time-travel novel, Making History. If only Hitler can be unmade. The entire twentieth century gets a do-over. The idea arose even before the United States entered the war: the July 1941 issue of Weird Tales featured a story called “I Killed Hitler” by Ralph Milne Farley, pseudonym for a Massachusetts politician and pulp writer, Roger Sherman Hoar. An American painter resents the German dictator for several reasons and goes back in time to wring the neck of ten-year-old Adolf. (Surprise: the result, when he returns to the present, is not what he expected.) By the end of the 1940s, Hitler’s death at the hands of time travelers was already a meme. It is taken for granted in “Brooklyn Project,” a 1948 story by Philip Klass, publishing under the name William Tenn. The Brooklyn Project is a secret government experiment in time travel. “As you know,” an official explains, “one of the fears entertained about travel to the past was that the most innocent-seeming acts would cause cataclysmic changes in the present. You are probably familiar with the fantasy in its most currently popular form—if Hitler had been killed in 1930.” Impossible, he explains. Scientists have proven beyond doubt that time is “a rigid affair, past, present, and future, and nothing in it could be altered.” He keeps saying so, even as the project’s time-traveling “chronar” makes its way into prehistory and he and his listeners fail to notice that they are now slimy bloated creatures waving purple pseudopods.