The Friend of Friends (or The Way It Came) is one of Henry James’s works that rarely I vibe with. I read a few stories from James; most of them just fell into the void of incomprehension. Not utter incomprehension. But I definitely missed the bit of appreciation that makes James a great writer.
This ghost story is no less about ghosts than jealousy and love. It surrounds the narrator who has two friends, the man and the woman, as we shall call them. At eighteen, the woman, the narrator’s friend, sees her father’s ghost in a museum; whereas the man sees his mother’s in his room during his stay at Oxford. The narrator is a keen matchmaker; she soon arranges meetings for the two. What are the odds? So they must meet.
Here is the rub. Every meeting fails to even take place. The ‘caprices of chance’, as James puts it, make it so. Either the man or the woman has some business that makes them absent.
We then know that the man, the narrator’s other friend, has proposed to her, friendship boiling into romance (we can see Victorian romantic escalation differs a lot from the modern one).
One day the narrator intentionally postpones the man’s (now her fiancee) arrival for the arranged meeting with the woman. His absence is expected, though the woman is in the dark, owing it to chance. Well, he hasn’t shown up once; why would he?
The unsettling ghost seems to be metaphorical as the narrator uses it. This extract shows the narrator’s thoughts about the recent death of the woman’s husband; more importantly, as the narrative shifts into the narrator’s mind, it reveals her jealousy of the woman. She feels insecure in her marriage. The possible intimacy between her husband and her friend haunts her.
It wasn't jealousy—it just was the dread of jealousy. I called myself a fool for not having been quiet till we were man and wife. After that I should somehow feel secure. It was only a question of waiting another month—a trifle surely for people who had waited so long. It had been plain enough she was nervous, and now she [the narrator’s friend] was free her nervousness wouldn't be less. What was it therefore but a sharp foreboding? She had been hitherto the victim of interference, but it was quite possible she would henceforth be the source of it. The victim in that case would be my simple self. What had the interference been but the finger of Providence pointing out a danger? The danger was of course for poor me. It had been kept at bay by a series of accidents unexampled in their frequency; but the reign of accident was now visibly at an end. I had an intimate conviction that both parties would keep the tryst. It was more and more impressed on me that they were approaching, converging. They were like the seekers for the hidden object in the game of blindfold; they had one and the other begun to 'burn'. We had talked about breaking the spell; well, it would be effectually broken—unless indeed it should merely take another form and overdo their encounters as it had overdone their escapes. This was something I couldn't sit still for thinking of; it kept me awake—at midnight I was full of unrest. At last I felt there was only one way of laying the ghost. If the reign of accident was over I must just take up the succession. I sat down and wrote a hurried note which would meet him on his return and which, as the servants had gone to bed, I sallied forth bareheaded into the empty gusty street to drop into the nearest pillar-box. It was to tell him that I shouldn't be able to be at home in the afternoon as I had hoped and that he must postpone his visit til dinner-time. This was an implication that he would find me alone.
The language is somewhat baffling; Jamesian readers would call it brilliant and of ‘psychological realism’. I do appreciate how James depicts the narrator’s complex feelings here. My concern is the word ‘ghost’. There is no mention of any ghosts before this complex if not long-winded paragraph (I omitted the first half). Then, what ‘ghost’ she wants to lay? Instead of a spooky figure, it refers to the narrator’s jealousy, her inner ‘ghost’. The narrator has already admitted that she feels ‘the dread of jealousy’. She is afraid of being stolen a husband.
After the futile waiting, the woman goes back home. Next day, the narrator finds her dead at home. The cause of death is never explained; nor do I find it necessary.
How the narrator and her lover react to her death is far more revealing; in this story, psychology haunts.
The man confesses he saw the woman last night as well, after the narrator had met her. Eerie enough, the man didn’t say a word to the woman; they just stared at each other.
Some emotional then drama begins. The narrator explicitly reveals her insecurity to the man, thinking he kisses her physically but, at the same time, the ghost of the woman metaphysically. The man denies his infidelity. They then break up.
The story ends with the man’s death which the narrator accounts for his metaphysical union with the woman.
As Luke Thurston, one of the leading ghost stories critics (also a brilliant lecturer), used to say in lectures, with his right hand rotating like he was holding a small globe, ‘the physical reality has got into the psychical reality’. The ghosts the narrator’s friends have met are the only spooky ones. The one that really hits is that in the mind.