Henry James' The Way it Came (or, The Friend of the Friends): A Detailed Summary & Literary Analysis
- Michael Kellermeyer
- Sep 13
- 8 min read
Just months before he wrote The Turn of the Screw, Henry James penned its literary predecessor, a short story called “The Way it Came,” later (and more tellingly) titled “The Friend of the Friends.” Bereft of any supernatural terror, it is nonetheless intensely unsettling – a story that enlists the hereafter as an instrument to highlight the power of emotions which are no less mysterious and spiritual in nature: mistrust, jealousy, lust, fantasy, idolization, and that multilayered relationship which has come to be termed the “emotional affair.” The story is about what Goethe called “elective affinities”: the almost supernatural attraction, or constitutional magnetism, that can draw two people together in spite of impropriety, station, or circumstance.
The narrator is a literary prefiguration of the governess in Turn of the Screw – a woman whose supernatural interpretation of plausibly normal events is tainted by intense bias, a woman who may be emotionally compromised. Or, perhaps, she is emotionally perceptive – keenly sensitive to the indecorous reality that less astute people would deny or explain away. In any case, it is a story that – in typical Jamesian fashion – probes a commonplace situation that most people can relate to: the narrator (the “friend of the friends”) knows two persons of the opposite gender who have practically everything in common, two people who would be wonderful to bring together, but the timing is never right, and it seems impossible to unite them. They have uncanny similarities in tastes, idiosyncrasies, fears, and even friends, but they have never met.
What starts as a running joke, develops into a socially awkward and sexually intense anti-relationship: two people who are reminded over and over again of how well they would get along with a person they have never met. But when the friend of the friends becomes engaged to the male party, a fanciful desire to unite them becomes a neurotic urge to keep them separate. But what proved impossible in life seems to be transcended when one of them dies.
SUMMARY
The story unfolds through a narrator who has discovered a fragment of a woman’s diary, recounting a peculiar and tragic tale. The narrator introduces the woman as someone known for a supernatural experience in her youth—she had seen a vision of her father at the moment of his death, though he was hundreds of miles away. This event, witnessed in a museum abroad, became her defining reputation: “She was charming, clever, pretty, unhappy… but it was none the less the thing to which she had originally owed her reputation.”
Years later, the narrator introduces this woman to a man who had experienced a similar phenomenon—he had seen a vision of his mother at the moment of her death.
The narrator believes the two are “birds of a feather” and tries to arrange a meeting between them. Both are willing, but a series of bizarre and persistent accidents prevent them from ever meeting. These mishaps span years and become a running joke among their mutual acquaintances. “They were the buckets in the well, the two ends of the see-saw… neither by any possibility entering a house till the other had left it.”
Despite their shared experiences and mutual acquaintances, the woman and the man never cross paths. The woman lives quietly in Richmond with a disagreeable cousin, rarely venturing out. The man is constantly traveling for work and difficult to pin down. Their lives seem to orbit each other without ever intersecting. The narrator, who is close to both, grows increasingly frustrated by the failed attempts to bring them together.
Eventually, the narrator becomes engaged to the man. She jokingly demands his photograph as a condition of marriage, which he finally provides. When the woman visits to congratulate her, she gazes at the photograph and the narrator urges her to reciprocate with her own. But the woman refuses: “She would live and die unphotographed.” Still, she agrees to finally meet the man, saying, “Well, I’ll come. I’m extraordinarily afraid, but you may count on me.”
Just before the scheduled meeting, the woman sends a note: her estranged husband has died, but she will still keep the appointment. The narrator, however, is seized by a sudden panic—“It wasn’t jealousy – it was the dread of jealousy.” She fears the meeting might spark something between the two and decides to sabotage it. She writes a note to the man, asking him to postpone his visit until dinner, ensuring he will miss the woman.
The woman arrives, waits an hour, and leaves, believing the man failed to show. The narrator feigns surprise and disappointment, noting the woman’s mourning attire: “She had in her bonnet three small black feathers. She carried a little muff of astrachan.” The woman seems weary and subdued, but also strangely relieved. She jokes, “I shall never, never see him!” and departs.
Later that evening, the man arrives for dinner and expresses his disappointment. The narrator confesses her deception, expecting anger, but he is more concerned with how the woman perceived him. “She must think me a precious brute!” he exclaims. The narrator assures him that the woman showed no emotion, saying, “She doesn’t care so much as all that.” But the man replies, “Then why are you afraid of her?” The narrator admits, “It was not of her I was afraid. It was of you.”
The next morning, the narrator travels to Richmond to explain everything to the woman, only to be told by the maid: “She has left home for ever… She’s dead, mum, please.” The woman had died suddenly the night before from a heart condition. Her cousin recounts that she returned late, said she was tired, and collapsed before reaching the stairs.
Shocked and grief-stricken, the narrator visits the man to deliver the news. He is stunned and says, “Impossible! I saw her.” He insists she visited him the previous evening, stood silently before him, and then left. “She came just to see me… so that we should, after all, at last meet.” He describes her appearance in detail, matching the narrator’s earlier description: “She had in her bonnet three small black feathers. She carried a little muff of astrachan.”
The narrator is horrified and insists, “What you saw last night was death.” But the man replies, “It was life – it was life!” He claims she was physically present, not a vision. “She said nothing. She only looked at me as I looked at her.” The narrator challenges him: “You saw her in a dream!” But he maintains, “She was alive! she was, she was!”
The narrator’s jealousy intensifies. She begins to believe the man is seeing the woman regularly, even after her death. “You see her – you see her: you see her every night!” she accuses. The man initially denies it, then ambiguously admits, “Well, my dear, what if I do?” The narrator declares, “You must choose between me and her.” She believes he is “abjectly in love with her” and that “she rules you, she holds you, she has you all!”
Their engagement dissolves. The narrator cannot bear to share him with the dead woman. “I can renounce you, but I can’t share you.” The man tries to deny her claims, but she is resolute. “They had enjoyed a rare extension of being and they had caught me up in their flight; only I couldn’t breathe in such an air.”
Years pass. The man never marries, and when he dies suddenly six years later, the narrator sees it as confirmation of her theory. “It was the result of a long necessity, of an unquenchable desire. To say exactly what I mean, it was a response to an irresistible call.” She believes he chose death to be reunited with the woman, whose presence had haunted him ever since their final, impossible meeting.
ANALYSIS
James claimed to have remained chaste for life, calling himself “hopelessly celibate though sexagenarian” to his brother. This is a subject that scholars heatedly debate (many point to potential affairs with members of both genders), but regardless of the biographical reality, this is a tale stoked with sexual potency. The lifetime relationship between She and He amounts to little less than vigorous foreplay – titillating one another with the false promise of social congress. But once She dies, the social barriers that prevented them from meeting – her scandalous divorce, his engagement to her friend, their lack of a sanctifying marriage, and the pitfalls of fate – are wiped away clean.
The description of her appearance at his writing desk is a tableau straight out of an erotic novel: saying nothing, she slips into his private chambers without being cleared by any servants, or accompanied by his fiancée. She stands silently before him, and as he springs up to ejaculate (the word means “exclaim” here, but there is certainly a sense of entendre), she rests her finger coyly to her lips and smiles mischievously. Watching one another in silence for twenty minutes, the Friend wonders – perversely, she believes, though unstoppably – if they touched, and if so, how.
Their spiritual bond – represented by their paranormal, extrasensory experiences – can be seen as codified sexual chemistry. Everyone remarks on how wonderful it would be to bring them together – their similarities are uncanny, down to a fear of being “taken” in the form of a photograph – a bugaboo that can be seen as a symbolic aversion to being sexually possessed (a tantalizing power play that hints at the teasing of foreplay: “you can see me, but you cannot have me”).
II.
Ultimately, like the governess in Turn, we are called on to interpret the Friend’s suspicions of emotional infidelity. Her charges are wild and neurotic to be sure, but I believe they are grounded in a sensible awareness of the sexual tension that she and a plethora of mutual acquaintances have built up between the two. Ultimately, she is convinced that her fiancé is conducting a supernatural affair with a ghost every night. His denial at one point breaks down and he snarls “well … what if I do?” This may be a hypothetical dismissal, but the Friend reads it as a confession of a secret pattern of nocturnal fantasizing. Her dissolution of their relationship is – in any circumstance – apt: whether her accusations are founded or not, she at least has changed.
The meeting that she has for so long encouraged has built up a profound suspense amounting to emotional foreplay, and we must ask ourselves which would truly be the worse reality: if She appeared to Him as a ghost, or if (as he claims) She came to Him in life, stole into his chamber, and gazed on Him (in knowing defiance of her Friend’s deceptive machinations) in eroticized silence. Like “Sir Edmund Orme” and Turn of the Screw, this story is related by a third party who casts the writer as a potentially unreliable narrator, and like in those stories and “The Ghostly Rental,” we are forced to come to the conclusion that, nevertheless – neurotic or perceptive – seeing is believing.
Whether He was visited by Her ghost or whether She came to see Him in the living flesh does not matter; what matters is the Friend’s perception, and when she perceives infidelity, it becomes real to her regardless of its veracity. And once more, we are forced to wonder: which reality is really worse, the spiritual congress which the Friend suspects, or the highly erotic meeting that He dismisses as a pleasantry, but tellingly calls “wonderful”?