The James Boys

by Richard Liebmann-Smith

  His way out, Frank came to hope, might be in the guise of the academic “Will Franklin.” What had begun as a semi-facetious pose was showing promise of turning into something more. One of the regulars at Miss Upham’s table was Francis Child, the Boylston professor of rhetoric and oratory at Harvard, who had been taking his breakfast at the boardinghouse for over a decade. Professor Child, affectionately known as “Stubby” to students and colleagues alike, was a distinguished Chaucerian scholar most noted for his magisterial study English and Scottish Popular Ballads. He was a gregarious fellow, once described by William James as “a great joker” and by Henry as a “delightful man, rounded character, passionate patriot, admirable talker, above all thorough humanist and humorist.” The jovial rotund professor and the wiry phlegmatic outlaw hit it off immediately. Frank, with his fine musical ear and deep love of language, was drawn to the haunting archaic poetry of Child’s ancient troubadour tales of hardhearted maidens, ruthless pirates, rapacious highwaymen, bloody battles, and gory murders—all sweetly sanitized in melody and verse. Eighteen seventy-six was to be the professor’s last year of teaching at Harvard, and his magnum opus, which would remain incomplete even upon his death twenty years later, was still very much a work in progress. “Will Franklin” eagerly offered to assist his learned breakfast companion with the tedious tasks of cataloging and documenting the sources of the ballads. Seeing that Professor Child himself had never earned a doctoral degree, Frank was encouraged to imagine that despite his own unlettered condition, he might have a chance of making a new life for himself in the university and thus reclaim his birthright as an eastern James.

  “All had changed, changed utterly—and Frank was glad of it,” wrote T. J. Stiles of the outlaw brothers’ situation after Northfield. “For Jesse, on the other hand,” he added portentously, “a terrible boredom was born.” In Cambridge the younger outlaw remained unrepentant and unfulfilled. Barely wounded, he was still itching for action. He didn’t cotton in the least to the Harvard ambiance, which for him served only to stir up all the old childhood feelings of anger and resentment, the sense of being underappreciated. Out west he had been accustomed to being known and feared, even if not universally admired; but in the academic suburb, it grated on the bogus “Professor Jessup” that he could never reveal what he had come to feel was his true identity. Unlike Frank, he had neither the talent, the interest, nor the desire to try to make a go of it in university life. (Notwithstanding all of President Eliot’s radical curriculum reforms, Jesse understood that Harvard was hardly about to introduce courses in his specialties of bushwhacking and bank robbing.) And without his wife, Zee, or the stern “Mamaw” Samuel around to temper his excesses, he soon reverted to the unruly behavior that had set him on the path to desertion and outlawry during the war. He took to drinking and gambling, which, though they may have counted as only minor vices next to robbing and killing, were sufficiently disorderly to irritate Frank and alienate William. On more than one morning that fall, the psychologist arrived at his little Lawrence Hall office to discover the detritus of an all-night poker game that his wayward brother had been hosting for a crew of dissolute undergraduates—a stinking clutter of empty booze bottles, ashes, and cigar butts, some of them floating in the apothecary jar along with the decapitated frogs.

  It was not simply that William was vexed with Frank and Jesse, nor even that he was disturbed about feeling so unfraternally toward them as he did. More distressing was the way his outlaw brothers made him feel about himself. The presence on his home turf of these physically and morally damaged kinsmen was a constant and dispiriting reminder of the ancient “family taint” at a time when he was just beginning to entertain the hope of transcending it. For the first time in his life, William was allowing himself a modicum of optimism about his professional future, as his plans for a laboratory of experimental psychology were rapidly developing a far greater reality and momentum than he had ever dared dream. Asa Hite, delighted with the apparent progress of Elena’s continental “cure” (and unaware of her doctor’s more than clinical interest in his daughter), had offered to pony up the cash to get the project rolling and had even entered into talks with President Eliot about just how such a facility might be integrated into the educational and physical architecture of the university.

  Under the circumstances, William’s moods seesawed from an agitated despondency to an almost manic expansiveness. In prose that R. W. B. Lewis called “Whitmanian” and Linda Simon described as “some of the most clotted writing he ever produced,” the psychologist wrote to Alice Gibbens about his burgeoning ambitions: “The only single use for which my life was given me,” he grandiloquently proclaimed, “[is] acting for the deepest, widest most general good I can see and feel.” He rejoiced in the notion that he was “giving the moral universe a shove ahead; that I am baffling the powers of night; that I belong to the morning and the flowing tides of health and strength and good….” Still, the flowing tides on which William liked to fancy himself being buoyed were fighting a strong countervailing undertow. Besides the demoralizing presence of Frank and Jesse in Cambridge and the new academic responsibilities entailed by his promotion to assistant professor, William was being dragged down by concerns about his elderly parents, whose needs were weighing especially heavily upon him now that his dutiful sister was abroad—and, of course, by his crippling ambivalence over Alice Gibbens and his insidious preoccupation with Elena Hite. When William confided his growing obsession with his patient to James Putnam, the neurologist had tersely cautioned his old friend that the tantalizing object of his fantasies was “not a keeper.”

  All this turmoil was taking its toll on William’s delicate constitution, especially on his back, which Linda Simon called “the barometer of his emotional state.” In desperate pursuit of relief from his mounting burden of physical pain and emotional unrest, he began indulging in “experiments” with chloral hydrate, hashish, opium, mescal, nitrous oxide, and what Simon described as “other substances to expand his view.” One evening during this tense and tumultuous period, in which he later described himself as having been “a man morally utterly diseased,” William showed up at the Harvard laboratory of his old friend Charles Loring Jackson, a pioneering organic chemist. Jackson, who had recently returned from a two-year research stint in Europe, described to the psychologist an amusing incident that had taken place in Berlin, where he had been studying the properties of amyl nitrite. In the course of these investigations, an Englishman working in the laboratory had begun singing and laughing as if he were drunk, and by the end of the session, Jackson found himself in a similar state of intoxication. As the chemist later recounted:

  James was immensely interested and asked to try some of it. At first he very properly held the bottle at a distance, and waved the vapor toward himself; but when to his continual questions, “Is my face flushing?” we answered “No,” he at last put it against his nose and took a good sniff. Then he felt blindly for the table, put the bottle on it and said, “O! how queer I feel!” took up two battery-jars full of alcohol (two quarts if I remember) and started across the Yard.

  The man of two minds was in danger of going out of both.

  At about this time Henry James wrote to William from Paris: “My life runs on in an even current, very rapidly, but brings forth nothing very important.” This was an entirely disingenuous piece of posturing on the part of the fugitive author. He, too, was experiencing abundant agitation, generated no less by the ominous appearance of William Pinkerton in the French capital than by the scandalous behavior of Elena Hite. Henry was both appalled and fascinated by his errant countrywoman’s cavalier disregard for the rigid social mores of the continent. Shortly after finishing The American, he would begin writing Daisy Miller: A Study, the work that was to bring him his first taste of international acclaim. And for this celebrated tale of an ill-fated young American woman behaving badly in Europe, Henry drew heavily upon his observations of Elena, who struck him as the very archetype
of the “Americana.”

  Initially, he had been delighted with Flaubert’s interest in his brother’s alluring patient, not only for providing grist for his literary mill, but also because introducing her into the great novelist’s life had lent Henry considerable cachet in the eyes of the famous Frenchman and his circle. Flaubert, who had previously been polite and accueillant in his dealings with Henry, had become positively chummy. One unforgettable afternoon he even treated the American writer to a private recitation of Théophile Gautier’s haunting poem “Pastel,” which he read to Henry—and to Henry alone!—“in his own full tone.”

  Yet as Flaubert’s flirtation with Elena flowered into a full-fledged affaire de coeur, Henry—though he may have been loath to acknowledge it—found himself experiencing an unseemly jealousy of his pretty compatriot for monopolizing so much of the older author’s attention and admiration, which he must have felt should rightfully have been directed toward himself and his novelistic efforts. What was more, he was becoming concerned that Elena’s increasingly public involvement with his literary idol might be reflecting badly on his sister’s reputation among the close-knit and gossipy expatriate American colony of Paris and, by extension, upon his own. Having reaped the benefits of encouraging Elena’s improper behavior as his “in” with Flaubert, Henry wasn’t in a position to castigate Alice James for failing to keep a tighter rein on her charge; yet without wanting to alarm William—nor to reveal anything of his own past association with the woman in question—the author felt obliged to give fair warning of the potential “complications,” especially in light of the windfall the psychologist was about to receive from Elena’s father. “This young lady,” Henry wrote, “appears to be afflicted with a congenital want of perception of certain rudimentary differences between the possible, for decent people, and the impossible.”

  It all came to a head on a gray Saturday at the end of November when Henry, Alice, Elena, and Flaubert boarded a train for an excursion out to Versailles, where they hired a brougham at the railway station for a tour of the famous château. Elena, having once posed for George Stanley as Marie Antoinette, had expressed a special desire to view the opulent palace where the famous queen had reigned and which had recently been designated as the seat of the French Parliament. But late November, Henry cautioned, was hardly the optimal time of year for such an outing, especially since the celebrated gardens would be lying fallow and the thousand exotic trees of the Orangerie arboretum would be leafless and forlorn. All of the author’s previous visits to that regal monument to aesthetic and financial excess had taken place in summertime, when, as he once wrote, “the fountains were playing, the avenues green, and the long polished floors of the gilded halls dotted with Paris holiday-takers or American tourists—looking like flies on horizontal mirrors.”

  By the time the little group arrived at the château, a chilly rain was falling and the sprawling grounds were nearly deserted. Flaubert and Elena took off in the carriage to view the Petit Trianon and the Queen’s Hamlet, that charmingly artificial Norman village that Marie Antoinette had constructed in which to play out her shepherdess fantasies. This left Henry and Alice to explore the stately sculpture gardens and the great shallow basins of the dormant fountains. For what seemed an eternity, the James siblings wandered among the forest of statues, taking in over and over again what Henry described as the “sallow nudities” of “the old Hebes and Floras and Neptunes.” It was a distant echo of that sunny day over twenty years earlier when the pair had been stranded all afternoon in their governess’s garden at Boulogne-sur-Mer—the unhappy occasion when Henry had made his famous remark about “pleasure under difficulties.” Only now, stuck out in the freezing drizzle, they were finding the difficulties more onerous and the pleasures less consoling. When at first they spotted the brougham in the distance, bouncing through the frigid mist, it seemed to Henry that Flaubert and Elena must have felt it was too cold and damp to be strolling around, preferring to survey the vast demesne from the relative comfort of their rented conveyance. But when the vigorously rocking carriage passed a second time, and then a third—and when Henry observed that the curtains were drawn over the windows—the shocking truth dawned upon him: The randy couple within was reenacting the scandalous scene from Madame Bovary in which Emma and her young lover Léon, after a tour of the Rouen Cathedral, spent the afternoon fornicating in a carriage as it jounced frantically up and down the thoroughfares of the city.

  On the way back to the Versailles railway station, Henry could smell the musky tang of sex in the stuffy confines of the coach. Elena snuggled contentedly against the offending Frenchman, who was blissfully dozing in his seat. Once, when she caught Henry scrutinizing her with his penetrating gaze, Elena muttered dreamily, “I wonder how I shall appear in your novels, Mr. James.” But Henry was hardly thinking literary thoughts at that moment. The idea that Elena would dare to carry on as she had, virtually under his sister’s nose, was the final straw: He determined that it was time to get his brother’s patient and her chaperone out of Paris.

  Back in the city, at the entrance to the Hôtel Lorraine, Henry caught Elena by the elbow and pulled her sharply aside. “You have behaved abominably,” he scolded her. “You must leave immediately.”

  Elena yanked herself free of the author’s grasp and responded with a derisory elevation of her eyebrows. “Oh, and this from the man who stooped to spying on me in my most intimate moments with his own brother?”

  Henry, who had never suspected that Elena had been aware of his presence on that torrid occasion, was taken aback momentarily. Nonetheless, he must have felt that whatever opprobrious acts one might perform in the dark of night out behind a barn in Missouri, one should never commit in broad daylight at the Palais de Versailles, the very seat of the French government.

  “I was not spying on anyone,” he snapped. “I was merely heeding, as the common expression has it, the call of nature.”

  Elena shot him a scornful smirk. “Well, it must have been a very long call indeed, n’est-ce pas?” she retorted.

  It occurred to her that she had more on her former “husband” than a bit of nocturnal voyeurism. There was, after all, still a price on his head back in the States, and she could have, if she wished, turned him in as a suspect for his role in the Northfield robbery. Yet Henry had plenty on her as well: Her affairs with Gustave Flaubert and Jesse James were more than enough to scuttle her prospects with William and perhaps even to get her disinherited. “I fear I am a good deal of a baby—in the sense of not wanting the reproaches of my friends or relatives on this or any other subject,” she wrote defensively in her diary that night.

  But in her heart she knew her Grand Tour was over.

  The next morning William Pinkerton decided that the moment had arrived for him to make his move. From the fetid confines of a conveniently situated pissoir, he had surreptitiously observed the heated exchange between Henry James and Elena Hite the previous evening outside the Hôtel Lorraine and had concluded that he might be able to take advantage of whatever rift had developed between the two to approach his client’s daughter and get to the bottom of what the Jameses were up to. Having spent all that day tailing his quarry around Versailles, and having drawn the same sordid conclusion that Henry had about what Elena was doing in the carriage with Flaubert, the detective felt himself securely in position, should the need arise, to inform Asa Hite that his daughter’s vaunted “cure” had fallen far short of what the railroad baron had been led to believe. Though her mood may have improved markedly in Paris, Elena was still up to her old “wild ways,” and Mr. Hite’s esteemed Dr. William James was at the very least a quack and quite possibly a master criminal.

  Before having to resort to so drastic a measure as presenting Elena’s father with such disturbing intelligence, Pinkerton elected to pursue the potentially more productive tack of confronting Elena with these hard home truths. Armed with his arsenal of incriminating information, he would take one last crack at trying to recru
it her as an ally in his cause. Did they not, after all, have a common enemy in the perfidious Jesse James? And would she not appreciate being disencumbered of the meddlesome Henry? If only she would cooperate with him, he would tell her, he could spare her father the disillusionment and ire of learning about her swelling dossier of misdeeds, while simultaneously liberating her from the clutches of the nefarious James brothers. In Asa Hite’s eyes, then—and perhaps even in Elena’s own—the detective would appear a hero rather than a snitch. And although he never mentioned it in his dispatches back to the home office, Pinkerton may well have been nurturing the fantasy he had developed when Elena had “stripped for him” in her St. Louis hotel room in July—the dream of making her into his own incarnation of his father’s detective/mistress, Kate Warne. Perhaps he even entertained the hope of gaining the hand of the young beauty—and a handsome dowry—as a reward from her grateful father. If, after all, she could tumble for an ancient plumper like Flaubert, could she not be at least equally attracted to his own much younger and firmer bulk?

  But when Pinkerton showed up at the hotel on Sunday morning to present Elena with his ultimatum, he was curtly informed that les mes-demoiselles américaines had already checked out, leaving no forwarding address. This was an unexpected setback that the detective found troubling in the extreme. It suggested, among other distressing possibilities, that Henry James might have gotten wind of Pinkerton’s presence in Paris.