Elena looked up from her reading to catch Pinkerton’s expectant gaze. “I’m afraid my hair is hopelessly blond,” she said with a wry smile. “My eyes are green, and my feet are hardly small. Not even moderately.”
The possibility that Elena might have colluded with the Pinkertons in their war against the James Gang, either as a hired operative or a paid informer, has gained credence among some historians in light of her feminist agenda (“a woman can do anything a man can do”) and the supposition that as the daughter of a railroad magnate, she might have wanted to rid the rails of the gang’s wanton brigandage. But it seems more likely that the prospect of serving her father’s interests would have been anathema to the rebellious young woman, and that her subsequent “pursuit” of the Jameses was motivated more by her own lively curiosity than by any passion for advancing the cause of womanhood, pleasing her father, or serving the forces of law and order. If Pinkerton ever did make such a proposition, either on this occasion or subsequently, there is no conclusive evidence that Elena ever agreed to work with him. Nothing in the Pinkerton archives suggests such a deal was ever struck, and Elena’s diary is uncharacteristically mute on the subject (though she did once later refer to Billy Pinkerton in her journal as “that big old snoop”).
What is certain is that after concluding her interview with the detective that morning, and delivering her scheduled lecture in St. Louis that evening, Elena headed back out west on the Hannibal & St. Joseph line the very next day. Whatever arrangement she may or may not have made with Billy Pinkerton, in the weeks to come and throughout the summer, the Eye That Never Sleeps would be keenly focused on “Elena Phoenix.”
Chapter Three
For William James, the summer of 1876 was to prove a memorable one. The novice professor had just completed his first full year of teaching psychology at Harvard; the depression that had been plaguing him for years was finally beginning to lift; and—perhaps not coincidentally—he had recently made the acquaintance of a young lady named Alice Howe Gibbens, a relationship that was shaping up to be the first real love affair of his life, long overdue. For despite his trim good looks, piercing blue eyes, legendary conversational brilliance, and abundant charm, William James was, at the age of thirty-four, to the best of our historical knowledge (his putative compulsive masturbation notwithstanding), still a virgin. This was not just a manifestation of how notoriously difficult it was to get laid in the nineteenth century. Many of William’s contemporaries had long since managed to take the plunge into erotic manhood, even into marriage: His old friend Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., whose father’s essay on the criminal mind had so impressed Elena Hite, had tied the knot over four years earlier with Fanny Dixwell, a woman William once moonily described as “decidedly A-1” and “about as fine as they make ’em.” Granville Stanley Hall, William’s first graduate student in psychology, often regaled his professor with tales of his romantic exploits among the local fräuleins during his year of studying in Germany. Hall, who had trained for the ministry at Union Theological Seminary before turning to psychology, extolled his “loss of puritanical inhibitions” on the continent. “I learned how great an enlightener love is and what a spring of mind Eros can be,” he later wrote in his Life and Confessions. “Not only did these companions facilitate my use of German but, what was vastly more important, they awoke capacities hitherto unusually dormant and repressed and thus made life seem richer and more meaningful.”
But for William James—whose German was perfectly serviceable to begin with—the richness and meaning such romantic liaisons might have provided had remained perennially elusive. One of his biographers, Linda Simon of Skidmore College, described him in his twenties as having “no experience in treating women in any way except with condescension.” Which is not to suggest that he was a cold fish. On the contrary, according to Simon, William’s mother worried that he “was inclined to become carried away with emotion and would fall in love too easily and not wisely.” Once he even begged his sister, Alice, to find him “some spirited & romantic creature whom I can fall in love with in a desperate fashion.” During his own year of study in Germany, he had swooned over the enchanting mädchen at a boarding school across from his pension in Dresden, but he had never advanced beyond gazing wistfully at the objects of his desire through a telescope. Even earlier, on an exploratory voyage up the Amazon with the celebrated naturalist Louis Agassiz, William had experienced the hots for some of the beautiful native Brazilian women he encountered, whose “splendid soft black hair” and “most wildly melodious perfume” caused him to bemoan his inability to communicate “shades of emotion” to them. And for years, before Holmes finally claimed her, William had carried a torch for the pretty and flirtatious “A-1” Fanny Dixwell.
Part of the explanation for his chronic romantic reticence may lie in the fact that intellectually and morally, William James truly believed in the virtue of abstinence. “No one need be told,” he wrote in The Principles of Psychology, “how dependent all human social elevation is upon the prevalence of chastity. Hardly any factor measures more than this the difference between civilization and barbarism.” He even went so far as to posit, in that same tome, the existence of an “anti-sexual instinct,” one of personal isolation, that he described as “the actual repulsiveness to us of the idea of intimate contact with most of the persons we meet.” He saw this countererotic force as a powerful antagonist to the sexual one, which was usually given pride of place among human drives. “Thus it comes about that this strongest passion of all,” he concluded, “so far from being the most ‘irresistible,’ may, on the contrary, be the hardest one to give rein to, and that individuals in whom the inhibiting influences are potent may pass through life and never find an occasion to have it gratified.”
On a more personal level, William was concerned that he may not have been cut out for love and marriage. To begin with, there were his recurring physical and emotional ills—the bad back, the bad eyes, the bad digestion, the periodic “pessimistic crises”—that he feared disqualified him from an intimate relationship. Even when not actively suffering from one (or some unpleasant combination) of these myriad ailments, he sometimes thought of himself as “feeble, egotistical, cowardly, hollow.” He was unable to imagine that any desirable woman could ever love the real him. On top of these perceived shortcomings was his shameful sense of lacking a career: While men like Holmes had charted their professional courses early in life and hewed steadfastly to them, James had drifted from art to science to medicine to psychology without ever steering by any visible vocational star. As a practical matter, he doubted his ability to support a wife and family.
So it must have been with considerable skepticism, if not outright alarm, that he greeted his father’s announcement one evening in the winter of 1876 when the elder James, upon returning from a meeting of the Radical Club in Boston, proclaimed that he had just met William’s future bride.
Playing Cupid was only the latest gambit in a long tournament of wills in which Henry James, Sr., had tried to mold the life of his oldest son to his own quixotic ideals. Practically from the moment William emerged from the cradle, his father had subjected the brilliant boy to a quirky educational agenda that entailed bouncing him from school to school and country to country, his younger siblings thrashing in his wake. When it appeared in William’s late teens that he had “prematurely” set his heart on a career in painting, his father adamantly determined that science was the only proper calling for a young man of his manifold gifts. William had gone along with all of this, even to the point of entering medical school, but as he matured, the two found themselves increasingly at odds. They disagreed especially on the subject of religion, with the father tending to see the hand of God in practically everything, and the son in almost nothing. Thus the Radical Club must have struck William as an especially unpromising hunting ground on which to bag him a mate. The group had been founded by Unitarian ministers and progressive-minded laypeople dedicated to purging Christi
anity of all vestiges of supernatural boogedy-boogedy in favor of emphasizing the spiritual and moral aspects of the faith. The agenda was often touted as “The Second Wave of Transcendentalism,” and while the club’s airy theological debates were doubtless meat and potatoes to the garrulous and God-obsessed Henry Sr., they would have seemed thin gruel to his rationalistic, agnostic son. William might well have balked at being “fixed up” with a young lady who would willingly subject herself to endless evenings of such sanctimonious palaver.
Yet if he bridled at the old man’s matchmaking pretensions, his curiosity must have been piqued, for he dutifully attended the very next meeting of the club, where he was introduced to the paternally anointed Miss Gibbens. Though by no means a great beauty—she was short, “sturdily” built, and frankly plain of feature—the elder Henry’s choice was in many ways an apposite one: Alice Gibbens was a teacher at Miss Sanger’s School for Girls in Boston and, like William’s mother, Mary, radiated an air of being loyal, energetic, and eminently sensible. All of which virtues had been hard won and thoroughly tested: Her father, a physician who never practiced medicine, had struggled with alcoholism and depression throughout his daughter’s childhood and had died of a shot from his own revolver when she was only sixteen, leaving Alice and her two younger sisters to care for their delicate and distraught mother (yet another classic Victorian neurasthenic). Clearly, Alice Gibbens was a woman whose solidity ran more than skin-deep. Despite the somewhat dumpy initial impression she must have made on him, William would have appreciated that the twenty-seven-year-old schoolteacher was not without her share of physical charms: She was blessed with a crown of luxuriant soft brown hair, a “wild rose” complexion, an engaging smile, large dark eyes, and a lovely musical voice. (In fact, she had studied singing in Baden-Baden with Clara Schumann, widow of the great composer Robert Schumann and a world-class musician in her own right.) “As soon as she spoke,” wrote James’s biographer Gay Wilson Allen, “William felt the weight of his father’s prophecy.”
In the ensuing weeks and months, and throughout the spring, the weight of that prophecy had grown sweetly heavier on William James. However much they may have disagreed on theological matters—Alice was an active and devout member of the Congregational church—they found that they had numerous tastes and interests in common. They shared a passion for long brisk walks, Browning poems, and European literature. Both had spent considerable time on the continent. (Alice’s proficiency in German was equal to William’s own, and she easily surpassed him in Italian.) Better still, the high-minded schoolmarm turned out to have a deliciously irreverent sense of humor. In March she sent William a satirical poem that she had clipped out of The Boston Sunday Times, a wicked squib lambasting some of the more pretentious members of the Radical Club—Bronson Alcott, Julia Ward Howe, and Elizabeth Peabody (often cited as the model for the crusty old Miss Birdseye in Henry’s The Bostonians). Perhaps best of all, Alice Gibbens took a lively and sincere interest in William’s work at Harvard.
The graduate course he had been teaching that year was called The Relations Between Physiology and Psychology. Trained as a physician—the only academic degree he ever earned was his Harvard M.D.—William James, like Alice’s father, had never formally practiced in what he once termed the “flesh pots” of medicine. Even after he entered medical school, his view of the profession was notably jaundiced. “My first impressions,” he wrote at that time, “are that there is much humbug therein, and that, with the exception of surgery, in which something positive is sometimes accomplished, a doctor does more by the moral effect of his presence on the patient and family, than by anything else. He also extracts money from them.”
William’s interests had always been more deeply rooted in the less financially fertile pastures of psychology and philosophy, and long before receiving his medical degree, he had become caught up in the dream of a scientific psychology. (“It seems to me,” he once wrote, “that psychology is like physics before Galileo’s time,—not a single elementary law yet caught a glimpse of.”) During his student year in Germany, between taking spa cures for his depression and scoping out the lovely schoolgirls across the street, he had boned up on the work of such pioneers of the so-called new psychology as Hermann von Helmholtz and Wilhelm Wundt, who believed that the only hope of raising the field to the stature of a natural science lay in a program of rigorous experimentation that would wrest it down out of the lofty realms of metaphysics and ground it in the biological nitty-gritty of the nervous system.
William was largely self-tutored in this emerging discipline. (He once wryly remarked that the first lecture he ever heard on the subject was the first one he himself delivered.) What was more, he felt physically and temperamentally unsuited to the tedious and fussy demands of laboratory work, in which typical experiments of the era involved decapitating frogs and whirling them around on a special apparatus, or amputating their feet and applying acid to the remaining stumps, all the while carrying out and recording meticulous measurements of the poor creatures’ nervous responses. Nevertheless, it became his fondest dream to establish a laboratory of experimental psychology at Harvard.
At the time there was not yet even a psychology department at the university—William was doing his teaching in the philosophy department of Harvard College and in the anatomy department of the Lawrence Scientific School—so he had lobbied Harvard’s president Charles W. Eliot to approve a curriculum in the field that would incorporate the latest findings about the nervous system (and, not incidentally, guarantee himself a job teaching it). “It is my firm belief,” he wrote to Eliot, “that the College cannot possibly have Psychology taught as a living science by any one who has not a first hand acquaintance with the facts of nervous physiology. On the other hand, no mere physiologist can adequately realize the subtlety and difficulty of the psychologic portions of his own subject until he has tried to teach, or at least to study, psychology in its entirety.”
President Eliot concurred. As the icing on William’s potential wedding cake, the head of the university asked him to return in the fall as an assistant professor with a promised hike in annual salary from twelve hundred to two thousand dollars, “which will be a sweet boon if it occurs,” William wrote to Henry. (A couple of thousand dollars was, of course, mere peanuts to what Frank and Jesse were raking in from a basic bank or train job, but William’s out-of-pocket expenses were considerably lower than those of his outlaw brothers, in part because he was still living at home with his parents and sister, Alice, on Quincy Street in Cambridge.) For the era, President Eliot’s offer represented a fairly decent living wage, with a promise of the financial independence and professional stature so crucial to William’s self-esteem. “As the term advances,” he wrote to Henry, “I become sensible that I am really better than I was last year in almost every way; which gives me still better prospects for the future.”
But William’s euphoria with his newfound professional and romantic vistas was severely dampened in mid-July by a letter he received from deepest Missouri. The envelope, which his correspondent had addressed to William’s Harvard office so as not to risk alarming the rest of the family, bore the postmark of Kearney, Missouri, and even by Henry’s daunting standards of prolixity, the missive it contained was a lengthy one. It began:
Dearest Wm.
I am afraid that I have neglected writing home longer than has been agreeable to you: but the delay has been inevitable, & when I describe the perfectly infernal circumstances that have stayed my pen, I fancy you will surely forgive my silence. Que vous en dirai-je? In brutal summary, our late soldier brothers Rob and Wilkie are neither late nor soldiers: They are very much alive & they are outlaws, having adopted the prénoms de guerre “Jesse” and “Frank,” while retaining our illustrious surname, wh. they drag through the mud at every criminal outing. Just how this sordid transmogrification occurred they have not as yet deigned fully to confide in me, & I must confess that I am little inclined to press them on the matter
. The natural ties of consanguinity notwithstanding, I feel but the feeblest of sympathetic vibrations with them. Excuse the freedom of my speech, which I shall not stint, but better, I daresay, that they had perished honorably in battle—as we had been led to believe—than that they should have survived to arrive at this disgraceful pass….
The Civil War, of course, is fabled in the annals of American history for having pitted brother against brother—a reference usually to those who fought for the Union versus those who fought for the Confederacy. But the war also sometimes engendered a more subtle yet no less pernicious rift: a deep and lasting enmity between those who sprang to the colors and those who never fought. In the James family, this internecine breach played itself out across a fault line between the older and younger sets of brothers that had already been established long before the outbreak of hostilities between the states. As Alice James’s biographer Jean Strouse observed, “Wilky and Bob formed a unit as soon as Bob left the nursery, and they remained paired in all the major activities of their lives. They shared as well a sense that they lacked the special qualities of mind that seemed to distinguish their older brothers.” Indeed, early in their teens, years before the younger pair went off to battle, William had already disdainfully written off Rob and Wilky as “destined for commerce,” effectively staking out the higher intellectual and artistic ground for himself and Henry. (Alice would always be the odd girl out.) Though much has been made of the supposed rivalry between William and Henry, the two older James brothers—both of whom managed to avoid military service—were exceptionally close. Their interests, if not always identical, were often parallel, overlapping, or complementary, and in a lifelong exchange of letters in which William once saluted Henry as “my in many respects twin bro,” they kept each other apprised of much of the minutiae of their intellectual, emotional, physical, social, and professional lives.
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