THE FRIENDS OF THE FRIENDS: AN INTRODUCTION TO THE GHOSTS OF HENRY JAMES

“The Friends of the Friends” (originally titled “The Way It Came”) predates “The Turn of the Screw” by a year and yet it works as not only a preparation but also a key to understanding its successor. If “The Turn of the Screw” exemplifies the ghost story in the hands of Henry James, “The Friends of the Friends” offers a revealing insight into how the author thinks of ghosts.

“The Turn of the Screw” has fascinated readers for over a century and the debate over whether the ghosts are literal manifestations or products of the mind of a disturbed child and a sexually repressed governess rages on.

While “The Friends of the Friends” doesn’t offer a definitive answer to the question that has haunted literary scholars and fans of Henry James for decades, it does offer both the most relevant insight and the strongest clue in how to seek the answer.

“The Friends of the Friends” is a far simpler narrative than “Turn of the Screw”. Neither the main narrator, a woman of society, and her two friends, a man and a woman are named. Her two friends don’t know each other but allegedly share a gift, they can see the deceased loved ones. The young lady saw her father at the moment of his death while she was visiting a museum abroad while the other youth saw an apparition of is dead mother during his years in Oxford.

Whether or not the two actually saw spirits of the departed is neither answered nor explored. A definite answer is (and this is a reoccurring point not only in “Turn of the Screw” but, ultimately, here as well) is irrelevant in light of the consequences the belief in the reality of the ghosts brings on.

The narrator believes them, it seems, and is determined to introduce them to each other, their paranormal gift, she believes, will be a bond. But life has other plans and the two never seem to be able to meet, there is always an obstacle in the way.

Then, however, the narrator takes matters into her own hands and designs a meeting herself. But then, her mind haunts her. She second guesses her defiance of chance and convinces herself it will lead to disaster. On the way day she scheduled for the two to meet, she informs both her friends that the other cannot keep the engagement.

The rouse works but either by a vindictive law of province that has been tampered with or simply because of the narrator’s own irrational behavior tragedy strikes. Shortly after the time in which her two friends were supposed to meet, the narrator learns, the young woman died.

The narrator is convinced her mechanisms brought on her death and is grief stricken, even after learning from her housemaid that the young lady actually died of a heart problem she had been diagnosed with some years before.

This is a small but significant detail. So strong is the narrator’s belief in a divine punishment for her intervention that even after being presented with the facts of reality (her poor young friend was not long for this world anyway) she refuses to accept the rational explanation for the tragedy.

James wisely allows us to forget that the narrator may not be the most reliable narrator, despite the obvious signs of a highly suggestive mind. This, in turn, clouds the judgement of the readers, the facts of the case are clear, but could this narrator we have been following practically from the start really be wrong?

In here lies the secret to the deliberately ambiguous ending. Later, the narrator is visited by the young man, who she had become engaged to some months prior. She informs him of the death of her young friend that he never got to meet to which he replies with astonishment for he did indeed meet her, just around the time of her death, she having come to see him at his office.

James shifts gears in the final play between the two in what may be some of his best writing. At first the two are trying to make sense of it all. Did the young man see her ghost or confuse her with someone else? Eventually they arrive at the conclusion that the timeline checks out. Given the appointed hour of her death, and that the young man’s office was on her way home, it is possible for her to have stopped by (at the hour he gave) before her passing.

This would satisfy rational minds but the extent of the narrator’s tortured mind is finally made apparent. A more terrible scenario comes to mind. Her lover saw her friend in the flesh and was able to recognize her (true he never did meet her after all) because he was drawn to her. A flurry of questions come to her mind. How did he recognize her? Why did she recognize him? When he answers that physical details he learned about her gave her identity away, the narrator is astonished at how closely he had to observe her to notice such small details.

Her young friend could not have been alive, the narrator concludes, when she paid her fiancé a visit. Such a conclusion would be far more troubling to her and haunt her with more disturbing questions, than if she had visited him as a spirit. As it was for the governess in “Turn of the Screw”, reality is a frightening and dark place for the narrator, the ghosts are the comforting explanation.