Fantastic Metropolis

There is something about James’ style that is very fitting for the story of a haunting. First, the quiet, reserved, almost suppressed, recounting of the physical detail of the event stands in stark contrast to the supernatural phenomena that transpire. Then there is the usual psychological aspect of all of his stories. To have a ghost story, you don’t really need a ghost, all you need is a haunting. In this sense, the majority of his stories are ghost stories in that his characters are haunted by their cares, their self-obsessions, their self-doubts. The horror is not one associated with murder or ghoulish phantoms, but an intellectual horror, a philosophical horror. The reader is never quite clear in some of these stories if there was even a ghost at all or if the haunted character has been his or her own ghost, projecting their inner demons onto the world at large. What intrigues me is the way that James manages to skate gracefully along a thin line of ambiguity between the supernatural and the natural.

One of the best of the ghost stories is “The Friends of the Friends,” a piece that James offers no explanation of but acknowledges is one he thinks is a true success in what he was trying to achieve with the form. It was written just prior to “The Turn of the Screw,” and could be seen as an early expression of the ideas that would soon manifest themselves in this later, longer masterpiece. “The Friends” begins with a narrator, unidentified, who has been going through the diaries and papers of a deceased woman. Someone has requested that he try to find something publishable in them, but the narrator attests that she is “fearfully indiscreet,” hinting at the fact that her view of others is often disparaging. The piece that he eventually finds and chooses to present, a separate little booklet containing the complete recounting of a personal tale, bears out the fact that the woman in question is both extremely judgmental of others and very insecure herself. Then the opening narrator steps back, and presents the tale as recorded by the woman in question.

One of the technical achievements of this story, if you could call it that, is the fact that none of the characters is ever named. Even the narrator who is going through the woman’s papers and the woman, herself, remain nameless. Whereas James carries off the sleight of hand flawlessly, never causing confusion, I might have a little more trouble with it. Please bear with my attempts to identify the pronouns. This odd effect adds to the ghostliness of the tale in a way, but if there is some other reason for it, I have been unable to figure it out. Perhaps if you read the story, you might be able to come up with an explanation for its use. If you do, I’d very much appreciate your writing in to Fantastic Metropolis.

The woman begins her tale in the following way: “I know perfectly of course that I brought it upon myself, but that doesn’t make it any better. I was the first to speak of her to him—he had never even heard her mentioned. Even if I had happened not to speak, someone would have made up for it: I tried afterward to find comfort in that reflection. But the comfort of reflections is thin: the only comfort in life is not to have been a fool. That’s a beatitude I shall doubtless never enjoy.” And so the female narrator marks herself as one whose greatest fear in life is to have been perceived as a fool. This, of course, is the way she perceives nearly all those she meets. Her sense of superiority is evident in her descriptions of the friends and the friends of the friends. This attitude in life signals a distinct lack of confidence, a fear of letting go, and ultimately a sort of death in life.

Following this introduction, she tells about a young female friend of her’s, who is beautiful, open and something of a fool for having married unhappily. The one thing that distinguishes this young woman is a story she tells about herself. When she was eighteen, she was traveling through Europe, and one day, in one of the old museums in an unnamed country, she entered a small out of the way gallery. There were two men in the room, one was a custodian of the museum, and the other was sitting on a bench in front of a large work of art. Upon noticing the man on the bench, she recognized it was her own father, who was supposedly back in England. She gave a start upon seeing him there, but as she moved toward him, he disappeared. When her aunt and cousins, with whom she was traveling, caught up with her in the small gallery, she told them of the incident. She then sent a message home to see if her father was well and learned that he had died of a seizure almost at the very moment she had seen him in the gallery. The narrator and all of their mutual friends told and retold this story about the young woman, and she finally became known as “the one, you know, who saw her father’s ghost.” The young woman went on from her youth to make a bad marriage that eventually ended in a separation.

The reader is then introduced to another friend of the narrator’s, a man, who when younger, had a strikingly similar encounter, but with the ghost of his deceased mother. The friends of the friends find this astonishing and neither the woman who saw her father nor the man who saw his mother could be spoken of without mentioning his or her counterpart. It is roundly agreed that the two should meet. Although the narrator and her friends make many attempts to get the two together, something always comes up to prevent the fateful meeting, and their inability to meet goes on for years and years, becoming something of an astonishing story itself.

Then the narrator informs the reader that the man who had seen his mother’s ghost has proposed marriage to her. She accepts and becomes his fiancée. At approximately the same time, the woman who had seen her father’s ghost finds out that the husband she has been separated from has died. She goes to see the narrator and during their visit, she sees the photograph of the narrator’s fiancée on the fireplace mantle. Whereas she had never had any real desire to meet her counterpart before, she now seems extremely interested in him. The narrator then sets up another meeting for them, and the woman swears she will be present.