The James Boys

by Richard Liebmann-Smith

  If my appraisal of M. Couture strikes you as unduly sharp, I hasten to confess it may be less in response to his work than to his deportment; for here I must record a shocking fact: As he was showing me about his gallery that horrid little man, to my huge disgust, had the cheek to press his attentions upon me in a most coarse and odious manner, which behavior upset me utterly. (No doubt in light of the candid revelations I made to you last month you may hold me—et bien pour cause, mon cher docteur—to be the very worst kind of fast; but pray permit me to assure you that I did in no wise seek or encourage that man’s obscene attentions. Without vanity, I confess that I am not unconscious of the effect that my visual aspect can have on certain members of your sex—even having shamelessly exploited it upon occasion to further my wicked purposes—but even a poor ruined wench like myself must nonetheless reserve the right to select the agent of her degradation, don’t you agree?)

  In any event, it was certainly an unsavory excursion for the lot of us—yet happily, I have chosen not to dwell on such unpleasantnesses, as your esteemed M. Renouvier would no doubt heartily applaud. Indeed, I have been feeling so well lately that I scarcely know what to make of it. I don’t remember ever in my life being in such good spirits. And you, sir, have been so very kind and friendly to me—you don’t know how much happiness your letters are giving me. I frequently return in thought to our encounters before that eerie audience of decapitated amphibians in your office, & I shall live in eternal gratitude for the comfort & guidance you provided me on those memorable occasions.

  A toute à l’heure, cher docteur (“toodle-oo” in the English!) Miss Elena Hite

  William could hardly have helped but be beguiled by the frisky and flirtatious tone of Elena’s correspondence; but notwithstanding her avowed desire to tell him “absolutely everything,” there were at least a couple of salient items that she seemingly thought better of mentioning. The first was that on her visit to Couture’s studio, she had brought along the sketch that William had rendered of her in his office back in Cambridge, believing that the famous art teacher would be delighted to see the work of a student of his own former protégé, William Morris Hunt. Couture, however, after taking a perfunctory glance at the drawing, had summarily dismissed it as a decent likeness, but artistically “minable.” (On the subject of Thomas Couture, Henry’s assessment was at least as harsh as Elena’s. In his own letter to William describing the episode, he wrote: “I paid with them a long visit to Couture, who is an amusing but a vulgar little fat & dirty old man—en somme (to me) peu sympathique.” And without going into prurient detail about the artist’s offensive behavior toward Elena, he added: “I hope it will at least have the effect of keeping her from returning to her detestable Couture.”)

  More significantly, Elena neglected to inform William of a circumstance that may well have been the effective engine of her manifest ebullience: namely, that she had embarked on a liaison with the “estimable” M. Gustave Flaubert—a Frenchman whose attentions she apparently looked upon with immeasurably less “huge disgust” than she did those of the “detestable” Thomas Couture.

  Chapter Nine

  If I were a woman,” Gustave Flaubert once remarked, “I wouldn’t want myself for a lover. A fling, yes; but an intimate relationship, no.” Yet the very quality in the Frenchman that Ivan Turgenev found so woefully reprehensible—his seeming inability to sustain a relationship with a woman that went beyond the carnal—was immensely (if perversely) appealing to Elena Hite in her present state of mind. Unlike Henry James’s Christopher Newman, this American in Paris was looking for not so much a spouse as an experience.

  In 1876 the great French author was fifty-five years old, over twice Elena’s age. That year he had lost two of the most significant women in his life—the novelist George Sand and the poet Louise Colet, with whom he had carried on a tumultuous affair thirty years earlier. “My heart,” he wrote, “is becoming a necropolis.” His own health—always fragile despite his robust appearance—was deteriorating precipitously, and age, he complained, had softened him to the consistency of “an overripe Edomite pear.” In four years he would be dead. Nonetheless, not long before Flaubert came into Elena’s life, the poet François Coppée had written of him: “He carried his head loftily. His whole bearing was that of the romantics…. One could still make out fine features in his florid, swollen face…and a truly Merovingian mess of hair hung in graying, tousled locks from his half-denuded pate. This old Gustave Flaubert was no longer handsome, but he was still superb.”

  In her previous relationships with men, Elena had been accustomed to reining in her intellect, her sexuality, or both; but she felt there was no way she could be either too smart or too raunchy for this brilliant and vastly experienced littérateur. Reading Madame Bovary that summer out at Castle James, she had been deeply impressed by the author’s empathy with the feminine psyche. Here, she sensed, was a man who truly appreciated not only a woman’s romantic yearnings and the stifling potential of a bourgeois marriage, but also the power of sheer female horniness. (“Madame Bovary, c’est moi,” he was reputed to have proclaimed.) And if Elena was attracted by Flaubert’s sensibility on the page, she found herself equally drawn to him in the abundant flesh. Though by rights he should have fallen into that category of oversize “prosperous walruses” to whom she liked to think of herself as erotically immune, she gushed in her diary that he was “a great bear of a man in whom a woman might easily lose herself. Everything about him is so BIG—his body, his voice, his mind, his talent, his appetites….” She found herself surprisingly aroused by the oldroué ’s “deliciously lascivious” ways, and just as she had measured Jesse’s “experienced” touch against the crude gropings of the “fresh-faced boys” of Hartford, she gave Flaubert’s masterful manipulations pride of place over the outlaw’s relatively coarse “sawing” motions. Apparently, the sophisticated Frenchman initiated Elena into the art of what the Victorians quaintly designated gamahucherie. (“I am like a cigar,” he once said, “you have to suck on me to get me going.”) In her journal she wrote of “blooming & blossoming” under Flaubert’s erotic tutelage, calling him, in a cross-lingual jeu de mots, her “Flower-Bear,” and expatiating upon the “exquisite private sensations” his attentions induced in her. (“Every Grand Tour requires a religious epiphany,” she exclaimed, “and now I’ve had mine!”)

  Happily, the blooming was mutual: Flaubert was surprised and delighted by the rejuvenating effect of this radiant paradigm of new-world womanhood. As he wrote to his niece Caroline Hamard, “I think I’ve been seriously and secretly ill without realizing ever since the death of our poor dear mother. If I’m wrong about that, why have all the clouds lifted for me recently? It’s like a mist clearing. And I feel physically restored.”

  Contrary to William James’s assertion that “the direction of the sexual instinct towards one individual tends to inhibit its application to other individuals,” Elena discovered that the sensual awakening she was experiencing with her “Flower-Bear” was intensifying rather than diminishing her infatuation with her “cher docteur.” Just as her own insinuation into William’s erotic consciousness had been lubricated by his nascent romance with Alice Gibbens, so Elena’s sentimental education with Flaubert seemed to be opening her up to a whole new appreciation of the possibilities of the male sex—especially of William James, who clearly offered more amatory potential for the long term than the aging Frenchman. In her letters back to Cambridge, she was properly reticent about the salacious details of her liaison with Flaubert, yet she came to feel compelled to at least allude to his presence in her Parisian life, if only to cover her flank in case Alice James was reporting back to her brother on the company she was keeping. Elena furnished William with a number of innocent vignettes concerning her acquaintance with the famous novelist, among them an account of a delightful late-morning déjeuner they had shared at a café on the avenue de l’Opéra, a repast that lasted well into the afternoon and throughout which her compani
on expounded colorfully and eloquently on everything from the barbarism of the ancient Carthaginians to the miraculous restorative powers of the sea salt of Guérande. Upon quitting the café, Elena reported, “we disported ourselves upon the trottoirs in a decidedly disreputable manner,” ending the day with a long, leisurely promenade along the banks of the Seine, highlighted by “a beautiful rose crimson glow over the water” and “a flock of beggar children with whining voices who sallied out upon us on the quai,” and to whom Flaubert, with touching generosity, dispensed a pocketful of copper sous. “At present,” she concluded, “I am in serene enjoyment of a good conscience and blistered feet,” coyly appending: “I don’t know why I have tried your patience by writing so about a person you have never seen; unless it’s to show you that I haven’t irrevocably given up the world, the flesh and the devil, but am conscious of a faint charm about them still when taken in small doses.”

  Flaubert being Flaubert, the doses of “the world, the flesh and the devil” to which he treated his American paramour were anything but small. When not reveling in the delights of lovemaking à la française with her, the celebrated auteur squired Elena all around Paris, where he seemed to know everything and everyone. (He had even been an intimate of Napoléon III’s wife, the empress Eugénie, and of his cousin Princess Mathilde.) Especially thrilling to the girl from Hartford were their forays into the louche demimonde of the French capital—the colorful shadow society of artists, actors, poets, courtesans, and randy aristocrats that had flourished during the decadent days of the Second Empire and which persisted in faded form in the more austere atmosphere of the Third Republic. (Among the storied demimondaines to whom Flaubert introduced Elena was the aging courtesan Apollonie Sabatier, known as “La Présidente,” who, on one memorable visit to her salon on the avenue d’Eylau in Passy, extravagantly praised the younger woman’s classic “champagne-goblet” breasts.) For their sorties into the more respectable cultural establishments of the city—the Opéra Garnier, the Comédie Française, the art galleries and cathedrals—the lovers were often canny and considerate enough to invite Henry and Alice James. It was on one such outing, which found this oddly assorted quartet in the Salon Carré of the Louvre—coincidentally, the setting of the opening chapter of The American—that Elena discreetly directed Henry’s attention to the presence of a portly gentleman seated on the great circular divan in the center of the hall. The stout stranger sported a too floppy beret and a laughably bogus goatee and was making a great show of being deeply engrossed in the morning edition of Le Figaro. But he was wearing heavy American shoes—a dead giveaway to the perspicacious eye of Elena Hite, to whom the detective appeared no more convincing in his impersonation of a Frenchman in the ancient Parisian palace than he had as a Jewish peddler along the dusty roads of western Missouri. She gently nudged Henry, alerting her companion to the presence of William Pinkerton. To her unconcealed amusement, Henry blanched. The detective, he gasped, was tailing him!

  “Oh, don’t be such a worrywart,” Elena whispered. “He can’t possibly have a clue as to what you look like. He’s tailing me.”

  But Elena was wrong, at least on the first count: Having clandestinely observed Henry James on the moonlit night of her tryst with Jesse, Pinkerton had an all too vivid mental image of the author, even down to aspects of his anatomy that would not normally have been visible on a run-of-the-mill mug shot. On the second count, however, she was absolutely correct: It was indeed Elena and not Henry James whom the detective was following.

  As the trail had gone cold on the James brothers after the Northfield robbery, Billy Pinkerton had once again been summoned to Hartford to provide Asa Hite with an update on the state of affairs out west. The news he had been obliged to report was hardly encouraging: Despite the arrest of the Younger brothers and the killing of Charlie Pitts at Hanska Slough, the law was still no closer to bringing the Jameses themselves to justice. At one point during the pursuit of the bandits, Chief James McDonough of the St. Louis Police Department—Pinkerton’s archrival in the race to capture the fugitive outlaws—was convinced that he had located the wounded Frank James in Independence, Missouri, but as the private eye recounted to Hite with an unprofessionally delectable tingle of schadenfreude, the police chief had been embarrassed to discover that the suspect in custody was only a cattle trader from Louisiana named John Goodin or Goodwin who had shot himself in the knee while hunting squirrels four months earlier. The lamentable bottom line was that the James boys appeared to have eluded apprehension once again.

  Pinkerton had braced himself for a tongue-lashing from his host, but to his astonishment and relief, the detective found the previously irascible railroad magnate in excellent spirits. Over cigars and a congenial snifter or two of brandy in his library after dinner, Mr. Hite confided to his guest that the reason he was feeling so chipper was that his daughter, whom he had feared might have inherited her mother’s tendency to neurasthenic instability, was recuperating capitally in Europe from an episode of nervous prostration she had suffered out west that summer. (Here Pinkerton winced, knowing full well what the precipitating factor in Elena’s breakdown had been, but his host mercifully took the detective’s tortured facial gyrations as an expression of sympathy rather than guilt.) In his expansive mood, Mr. Hite went on to regale his interlocutor with an enthusiastic account of his daughter’s remarkable recovery under the care of one Dr. William James of Harvard, the doctor’s splendid sister, Alice, and even his brother Henry, a noted literary gent who had recently taken up residence in Paris.

  For Pinkerton the lights flashed on: There was more to this James Gang, he queasily surmised, than had previously met “the eye that never sleeps.” And his consternation turned to outright alarm as Asa Hite ebulliently went on to describe Dr. James’s plans to establish a laboratory of experimental psychology up at Harvard. It occurred to the detective that this brilliant professor might well be the “evil genius” behind a complex criminal conspiracy that appeared to have not only an East Coast component but perhaps an international one as well. Pinkerton knew from his considerable sleuthing experience that in the face of such an unlikely assortment of characters and circumstances, no hypothesis—however bizarre—could prudently be ruled out. Was it possible, he speculated, that the ambitious psychologist was bent on developing some kind of nefarious mind-control scheme with which to enslave an unsuspecting populace? Perhaps William James had gotten his brothers under the sway of his powerful intellect, employing Frank, Jesse, and Henry as tools to bring in the loot to fund his grander plan, whatever that might prove to be. And could the mad doctor have already begun “experimenting” on Elena Hite, somehow mesmerically transforming the hapless feminist into an unwitting puppet of his wicked will? (Had Pinkerton fancied himself Sherlock Holmes—the accounts of whose adventures were not published until a decade later—he would have just discovered his Professor Moriarty.)

  “These Jameses,” he later remarked in his report back to the home office in Chicago, “are a boundlessly depraved family, in which this impressionable young woman has become piteously ensnared. Having recently been coerced into presenting herself as the wife of Henry James, while concurrently—according to an unimpeachable source—fornicating with Jesse James, she has now fallen into the clutches of the senior member of this felonious fraternity, William James, a brainy but doubtless deeply deranged psychologist who appears to have somehow gained control of her mind.”

  The detective refrained from sharing these baleful suspicions with his cheery host. But he did make a point of worming out of Mr. Hite the whereabouts of Elena in Paris; now, in addition to hunting down the James brothers, he felt duty-bound to rescue the daughter of the agency’s star client, lending special urgency to the venerable French maxim cherchez la femme.

  Despite his fascination with the grand mysteries of the human psyche, William James was finding himself uncharacteristically incurious about the history and pathology of Frank and Jesse. Over the course of that autumn, the
outlaws provided their oldest brother with a cursory (and predictably self-serving) account of their lives from the time of the Civil War to the present, but it was all—quite literally—too close to home for William to maintain his customary intellectual objectivity. Much as he may have felt he should have been intrigued and concerned, all he really wanted was for them to go away.

  Had he been paying closer attention, he would have observed that the bond between the two outlaws was beginning to fray. As Henry noted in his autobiography, his younger brothers were “so constitutionally different,” not only from the rest of the Jameses but from each other, and that fall their dissimilar talents and temperaments, which had complemented each other with such deadly synergy over the course of their criminal careers, were driving them in drastically divergent directions. While following newspaper reports of the imprisonment and trial of the Younger brothers, Frank was coming to the conclusion that the time had arrived for him to sever ties with his felonious past. The wounds he had received during the Northfield robbery and its aftermath had left him in chronic pain and incapacitated to the extent that he found it difficult to imagine ever again negotiating the rigors of outlaw life. At a deeper level, he was haunted with having killed the bookkeeper Joseph Heywood, who had appeared to be a serious, well-spoken, scholarly fellow about his own age. There but for the grace of God, Frank couldn’t help but feel, went he. And try as he might to convince himself that he had acted in self-defense or out of some vestigial loyalty to his former Confederate comrades, he knew in his heart that what he had committed out in Minnesota was nothing less than cold-blooded, first-degree murder. He was hungering for some form of redemption, and as he wrote to Henry in Paris: “I am tired of this life of taut nerves, of night-riding and day-riding, of constant listening for footfalls, creaking twigs and rustling leaves and creaking doors; tired of seeing Judas in the face of every friend I know—and God knows I have none to spare—tired of the hoofs and horns with which popular belief has equipped me. I want to see if there is not a way out of it….”