Dear Sir: I have written a great many letters vindicating myself of the false charges that have been brought against me…. Detectives have been trying for years to get positive proof against me for some criminal offence, so that they could get a large reward offered for me, dead or alive; and the same of Frank James and the Younger boys, but they have been foiled at every turn, and they are fully convinced that we will never be taken alive, and now they have fell on the deep-laid scheme to get Hobbs Kerry to tell a pack of base lies. But, thank God, I am yet a free man, and have got the power to defend myself against the charge brought against me by Kerry, a notorious liar and poltroon.
Elena found herself exhilarated by the freewheeling, rough-hewn cadences of their prose, and curiously excited at the notion of labeling Hobbs Kerry “a notorious liar and poltroon.” She had always wanted to call someone a poltroon; it was just the sort of histrionic and romantically archaic epithet her father liked to trot out when venting his spleen. (And neither she nor Jesse seemed to notice that this harsh characterization contradicted the outlaw’s earlier assertion that he had never heard of Hobbs Kerry.) After a detailed laying out of Jesse’s alibi, the conspirators moved on to leveling a resounding broadside against the Pinkertons while bolstering the outlaw’s Robin Hood bona fides:
What sense is there in spending so much money in trying to have us arrested? I am sure we have thousands of friends which can’t be bought, although the Detectives think they are playing things very fine. Poor fools they are…. If the Express Company wants to do a good act they had better give the money they are letting thieving detectives beat them out of to the poor. Now take my advice, express companies, and give your extra money to the suffering poor, and don’t let thieving detectives beat you out of it.
And once embarked on their rant against the Pinkertons, Jesse and Elena really cut loose:
The detectives are a brave lot of boys—charge houses, break down doors and make the gray hairs stand up on the heads of unarmed citizens. Why don’t President Grant have the soldiers called in and send the detectives out on special trains after the hostile Indians? Arm Pinkerton’s force, with hand-granades, and they will kill all the women and children, and as soon as the women and children are killed it will stop the breed and the warriors will die out in a few years.
Flushed with excitement over their collusion, the authors of this fanciful proposal, their heads now close together over the page, indulged in the first of what would come to be many lingering kisses.
Back in Cambridge, Henry’s letter continued to smolder in William James’s consciousness. He kept the incendiary document under lock and key in the top drawer of the desk in his Harvard office, never breathing a word of its contents to his sister, Alice, nor to their parents—especially to their father, who that spring had suffered a mild to moderate stroke. As a physician keenly attuned to the emotional component of the healing process, William would not have wanted to introduce any disturbing information that might have hindered the old man’s recuperation, tempted though he must have been every evening at the Quincy Street dinner table to blurt out his appalling news.
He had heard, of course, of the infamous Jesse James for years; it would have been impossible, even as far east as Boston, to pick up a newspaper without being assailed by headlines blaring word of the outlaw’s latest dastardly exploits. But until he received Henry’s letter, it had never occurred to William James that the notorious desperado with whom he happened to share a surname might have been distant kin, much less his own long-lost brother. The psychologist, who was in the habit of polling his emotions on all occasions, was forced to acknowledge that the shock and revulsion he was experiencing in response to Henry’s startling revelations were spiced with a guilty thrill at finding himself in such intimate association with unalloyed evil. William had always been intrigued by the dark side of human nature, which he saw as an inevitable, even desirable, aspect of moral life. “No one knows the worth of innocence,” he once wrote, “till he knows it is gone forever, and that money cannot buy it back. Not the saint, but the sinner that repenteth, is he to whom the full length and breadth, and height and depth, of life’s meaning is revealed.”
There was doubtless something more than abstract philosophizing or psychologizing behind William’s fascination with depravity. Since childhood, he had been subjected to his father’s lurid cautionary tales of relatives gone bad. The James family tree, according to Henry Sr.’s accounts, was laden with rotten fruit—a motley crop of drunks, suicides, wastrels, philanderers, thieves, and lunatics who had produced what Henry Jr. referred to in his autobiography as “a chronicle of early deaths, arrested careers, broken promises, orphaned children.” It was a sorry saga that no doubt informed the opening pages of the novelist’s late work The Wings of the Dove, in which his protagonist, Kate Croy, muses about her own fallen family—including, most tellingly, her “two lost brothers”: “Why,” she wonders, “should a set of people have been put in motion, on such a scale and with such an air of being equipped for a profitable journey, only to break down without an accident, to stretch themselves in the wayside dust without a reason?”
In his own quest for an explanation behind what he once called his “in various ways dilapidated family,” William James tended to conflate notions of evil with those of psychopathology. “Evil is a disease,” he wrote in The Varieties of Religious Experience, “and worry over disease is itself an additional form of disease, which only adds to the original complaint.” To the extent that he saw evil as an illness, William, being a nineteenth-century physician, was inclined to view it as congenital, a kind of biological family curse. As Henry’s biographer Lyndall Gordon wrote, “William was convinced that he and his siblings carried a taint of ‘infirm health,’ an inborn ‘evil’ which it would be a ‘crime against humanity’ to propagate.”
Yet even acknowledging that the Jameses had been dealt a bad hereditary hand, William remained stuck with the immediate question of what to do. He was always a firm believer in action as a healthy-minded, masculine virtue, though in his own life, he often had trouble initiating it. (As Louis Menand pegged him in a chapter heading in his book The Metaphysical Club, William James was invariably “The Man of Two Minds.”) William must have felt that some vigorous response to Henry’s plight was called for, possibly along the lines of jumping on a train and charging out west to the rescue. But how effective, pragmatically speaking, could such a scheme have been? The cerebral Harvard don would have recognized that he was in no way equipped to stand down an armed band of ruthless killers, even (or perhaps especially) if a couple of them happened to be his own brothers. Then, too, upon deeper reflection, he would no doubt have come to appreciate that his arrival on the scene at Castle James might only have exacerbated the threat to his literary brother (not to mention posing a grave one to himself). Still further complicating William’s quandary was the fact that he had already committed himself to spending the month of August at Keene Valley in the Adirondack Mountains of upper New York State, a vacation that, for one so delicately constituted, offered the welcome promise of refreshing his “tone of mind and health of body.” (“The fact is,” he once wrote, “that every man who possibly can should force himself to a holiday of a full month in the year, whether he feels like taking it or not.” ) The Adirondacks were James’s private Arcadia, a region to which, according to James family biographer R. W. B. Lewis, he was becoming addicted. “I love it like a peasant,” he declared late in life, “and if Calais was engraved on the heart of Mary Tudor, surely Keene Valley will be engraved on mine when I die.”
With a small coterie of friends he called “The Adirondack Doctors,” William had recently chipped in to buy a camp in Keene Valley, a modest shack they nicknamed the shanty. The tiny cabin offered spectacular views of the majestic surrounding summits, along with truly primitive living conditions. (William’s sister, Alice, once tartly remarked that “the shanty lacks nothing in the way of discomfort.”) The group—comprising Wi
lliam James, Henry Bowditch, James J. Putnam, and his brother, Charles—had all been buddies since their student days at the Harvard Medical School, where James Putnam and Henry Bowditch were now distinguished members of the faculty. It was Bowditch who, in 1872, had recommended William for his first teaching post at Harvard, as a replacement instructor for his course in anatomy and physiology. The Adirondack Doctors thus figured prominently in William’s ambition to establish his laboratory of experimental psychology at Harvard—a project for which, he doubtless foresaw, the support of his old med-school chums would prove invaluable.
Even more than the comradeship of his influential Harvard hiking companions and the invigorating mountain air, what was most powerfully drawing William James to Keene Valley in the summer of 1876 was the prospect of visiting with Alice Howe Gibbens, who would be staying with a friend nearby. Throughout the spring of that year, the couple had been seeing more and more of each other. As they shared long sunlit walks along the Boston Commons and stimulating evenings at concerts and public lectures, their relationship began inexorably growing from a lighthearted friendship into a serious romance. One evening when he called on Alice at home, William found her alone and noticed, according to his biographer Linda Simon, “a certain enigmatic expression on her face that puzzled and captivated him.” Though relatively inexperienced in the rites and rhythms of courtship, William became aware that he was being swept more deeply into the whirlpool of passion than he had ever let himself be. The stakes could hardly have been higher, since what he was yearning for in a woman was not merely an object of affection but, in Simon’s phrase, a “source of deliverance.” William’s desire to spend more time with Alice was thus exerting a potent countervailing tug to his filial and fraternal obligations. His choices that summer: to spend a glorious month in the mountains—hiking, swimming, reading, relaxing with friends, and being near the woman with whom he was beginning to fall in love—or to go out west and possibly be shot dead.
The man of two minds chose the Adirondacks.
As a child of the city of Hartford, Elena Hite had seldom, if ever, spent any time on a real working farm. Her experiences of rural life while growing up had been limited to picturesque outings and pretty picnics along the banks of the Housatonic and Connecticut rivers. Yet, to her surprise, she discovered in the days following her arrival at Castle James that she actually thrived in an agricultural environment. She found the clucking, quacking, lowing, and grunting of the livestock unexpectedly soothing, and the pungent scents of the barnyard provided a bracing contrast to the cloying clouds of rose and lavender that had perfumed her lecturing life. By mid-July the corn was standing tall in the fields, with the pole beans that had been planted to climb up around the stalks ready for picking. Elena enjoyed pitching in on the interminable chores of farm life, displaying a knack for many of them and even managing to arrive at a kind of détente with the crusty Mrs. Samuel. As the two women toiled side by side, jarring berry preserves and “working up” tomatoes for the winter, Zerelda came to develop a grudging respect for the quick-learning, hardworking Yankee girl, while Elena, for her part, was impressed that the fiercely energetic and opinionated older woman had managed—without apparent benefit of formal feminist dogma—to be living, rather than merely preaching, the doctrine of female independence.
Still, for Elena, the principal attraction of the farm remained Jesse James. Whenever Frank and Jesse stayed there, they took the precaution of bedding down for the night out in the nearby woods rather than in the house, in order to be able to make a quick getaway or to get the jump on any intruders in the event of a raid. Henry had been included in this alfresco sleeping arrangement, but Elena was given a proper bunk in the family room on the east side of the farmhouse, from which she began regularly slipping away, after the others had drifted off, to join her lover in the hayloft of the barn or out under the stars.
Comparing these charged erotic encounters with the fumbling advances of what she now thought of as the “fresh-faced boys” of Hartford, Elena remarked upon the finely chiseled contours of the outlaw’s face, the steely sinews of his arms, and especially the “practiced, knowing” touch of his surprisingly delicate hands. As they explored each other’s bodies, she lightly fingered the scarred indentations of two bullet wounds on Jesse’s chest near his right nipple and kissed the blunt nub of his left middle finger, of which the first joint was missing. Her curiosity about his past was nearly boundless; but, like Henry, she was reluctant to pry too deeply into what he had been through, for fear of inadvertently setting off his trip-wire temper.
She did, however, tell him her own story—or at least a strategically bowdlerized version of it. Having apparently picked up some of Jesse’s self-mythologizing ways, Elena presented her disgrace back in Hartford as a feminist parable she hoped would resonate with the outlaw’s aggrieved sense of being misrepresented and misunderstood. In Elena’s imaginative rendition of her ruination, George Stanley had begged for her hand in marriage, a step she described herself as having been unwilling to take, on principle. Thus scorned, her rejected suitor had retaliated, she told Jesse, by inventing and spreading dreadful rumors, rendering her continued residence in Hartford untenable and driving her defiantly onto the lecture circuit to decry such weaselly masculine injustices on behalf of all womankind.
On the night following these revelations, Jesse told Elena he had something he wanted her to try on. For a moment she imagined he might produce the string of amber beads he had snatched from her neck during the Rocky Cut robbery, but instead, he presented her with his old guerrilla shirt, a loose-fitting, colorfully embroidered pullover with capacious front pockets designed to carry an ample supply of percussion caps and lead balls. As she playfully modeled the oversize garment for him, Jesse joked that the pockets had to be so large in order to “hold my heavy balls.” Rather than being offended by this raunchy humor, Elena delighted in seeing the outlaw so uncharacteristically relaxed. Her sensual ministrations seemed to bring out his lighthearted side. He even kidded about her supposed marriage to Henry and how terribly wrong it was for Jesse to be lying with his brother’s “wife”—a sin for which, he mock-solemnly intoned, he would surely burn in hell.
In a certain sense, Elena might as well have been Mrs. Henry James. As the languorous weeks of high summer glided by, she found herself spending almost as much time in the company of her putative husband as of her lover, who was frequently absent from the farm, sometimes for days at a time. During Jesse’s mysterious disappearances, Elena discovered that Henry, who once described “summer afternoon” as the two most beautiful words in the English language, could almost always be found sitting out under the shade of the coffee-bean tree, either reading or pushing his pen—perhaps composing another letter to William, perhaps working on the “aching fragment” of what would ultimately become The Portrait of a Lady. On these occasions Elena often brought out glasses of lemonade and joined the author for long, leisurely chats that at times turned into private literary seminars. Among the works from Frank’s library that they discussed was Gustave Flaubert’s scandalous Madame Bovary, which Elena responded to as a parable of stifled female sexuality and which Henry declared a masterpiece of the novelistic art wherein “the form was as much the essence of the subject as the idea.” (What Elena tactfully refrained from mentioning to her companion was that even through the cloudy lens of her admittedly imperfect seminary French, the characters in Flaubert’s book seemed infinitely more alive to her than the “dolls with names” that inhabited Roderick Hudson.) Despite having to endure Henry’s propensity to pontificate ad nauseam on the proper nature of literary fiction, and his bouts of “insufferable pomposity,” Elena felt that he had much to teach her. She appreciated that he seemed to take her opinions seriously, and she especially admired—even envied—the young author’s profound commitment to his work. (“I am that queer monster the artist,” he once wrote to his old friend Henry Adams, “an obstinate finality, an inexhaustible sensibility.”) Woul
d that she had ever been able to dedicate herself with such tenacity to her painting!
But the languid tenor of life at Castle James came to an abrupt end one evening in early August when Jesse returned from one of his extended absences in the company of Cole, Bob, and Jim Younger, along with Clell Miller, Samuel Wells, and William Stiles. The outlaw band was gathering for a powwow in the farmhouse kitchen, a war council from which Henry and Elena were pointedly excluded. Elena sensed that something big was up.
For the James-Younger gang, the Rocky Cut robbery had never been intended as a profit center in its own right; rather, the proceeds had been earmarked from the outset to fund a much grander, far more lucrative operation, the details of which the gang now embarked on a series of late-night meetings to hammer out. Among the issues on the table—along with the where, when, and how of their next strike—was what to do about Henry James. Hobbs Kerry’s capture and confession had set the Youngers on edge, and they made no attempt to conceal their strong misgivings about Henry and his “wife.” (The Youngers apparently had little trouble accepting Elena as Mrs. Henry James—the couple, after all, had been traveling together on the Number 4 Express—but Cole nonetheless joked that maybe they should all share her among themselves as part of the spoils of the robbery, a coarse jest that Jesse must have found less than amusing, though he held his tongue.)
There were few men Jesse James feared outright, but his respect for Cole Younger was considerable: The oldest Younger brother was built like a bull, and even among the brutal fraternity of former guerrilla warriors, he stood out for his unmitigated ferocity. Jesse once told Henry a famous anecdote from Cole’s days riding in the border wars. Cole had been given a new Enfield rifle, and to essay the merits of the weapon, he had tied up fifteen prisoners back-to-belly against a tree and blasted a shot into the line. The frontmost three victims fell immediately, but the remaining dozen survived. “Cut the dead men loose,” Younger was reputed to have ordered in disgust, “the new Enfield shoots like a popgun!” It had taken, Jesse said, half a dozen more blasts for Cole to complete his macabre product test. What rendered this gruesome vignette doubly disturbing to Henry was that his outlaw brother had recounted it to him not as an indictment of Cole Younger but of the Enfield rifle.
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