The James Boys

by Richard Liebmann-Smith

  “A man of great bonhomie and charm,” wrote the British journalist Ben Macintyre, “Pinkerton could also be utterly ruthless, as many criminals had discovered at the expense of their liberty and, in some instances, their lives.” In the course of his assiduous Parisian reconnaissance, the detective had followed Henry out to Flaubert’s apartment and thus had a fair idea of where he might find the outlaw author on a Sunday afternoon. Determined not to let a James brother slip through his fingers again, he holstered a heavy pair of Colt revolvers and hightailed it out to the rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré.

  In this instance Pinkerton’s conjecture proved to be right on the money. At that very moment Henry James was on his way to Flaubert’s Parisian pied-à-terre with the firm intention of informing the cénacle that he would no longer be attending their gatherings. His experience at Versailles had brought him smack up against what R. W. B. Lewis called “the inveterate carnality” of the literary community of Paris, which, as Lewis wrote, always made the prim American author “somewhat squeamish.” Henry had come to sour utterly on Flaubert, a disenchantment that was to be reflected in his snarky assessment of his former idol’s later works in a review he wrote that winter for The Galaxy. Lumping Flaubert among the “minor” French novelists—along with such now all but forgotten writers as Charles de Bernard, Octave Feuillet, and Victor Cherbuliez—Henry cited his fallen hero as “an extraordinary example of a writer outliving his genius” and characterized all of the novels after Madame Bovary as “unmistakenly stillborn,” deriding their “fatal charmlessness.” Henry was particularly scathing in his assessment of L’Éducation sentimentale, of which he wrote, “the book is in a single word a dead one,” and the experience of reading it “like masticating ashes and sawdust,” adding, “There is no more charm in this laborious monument to a treacherous ideal than there is perfume in a gravel-heap.”

  By the time Henry arrived chez Flaubert, the regular coterie—Zola, Daudet, Turgenev, de Maupassant, and Edmond de Goncourt—was comfortably ensconced in the salon, thickening the air with their copious tobacco smoke and chatoyante conversation. Henry greeted the group with a nervous bow and took a place by the mantelpiece under the gilded statuette of the Buddha. In his most eloquent French, he launched into his valedictory philippic, informing the assembled authors that he could regretfully no longer, in good conscience, attend any of their future meetings, for reasons of which their not entirely esteemed host was perfectly well aware and upon which, as a gentleman, he felt no need to elaborate before the present company.

  Henry had a great deal more to say—“The longer I live in France,” he had written to William the night before, “the better I like the French personally, but the more convinced I am of their bottomless superficiality”—but at this point his impassioned diatribe was interrupted by a heavy knock at the door.

  When Flaubert, who always gave his servant Sundays off, went to answer the door, Billy Pinkerton, whose considerable avoirdupois was every ounce the equal of the sizable Frenchman’s, roughly shouldered his way past the great novelist and barged into the center of the fumous salon. Still huffing audibly from the steep stairs, the detective brandished his Colt revolvers and blasted a volley of warning shots into the ceiling, plunging the startled assemblage into an unaccustomed state of total silence.

  “Henry James!” Pinkerton barked, turning toward the chimney-piece and leveling his smoking pistols at the frightened novelist. “Put your hands in the air and get down on the floor! You’re under arrest!”

  The Pinkertons, of course, had no legal jurisdiction in France. (Indeed, being private detectives, they were technically without jurisdiction back in the United States as well; but on their home turf, they were accustomed to working hand in glove with local law-enforcement agencies whose confidence and cooperation they gained and maintained not only by relieving them of much of their tedious investigative burden but also by magnanimously stepping aside at the moment of arrest and allowing the glory—and, not incidentally, any applicable reward money—to accrue to those beleaguered public servants.) In Paris, however, Billy Pinkerton was on his own, yet he was confident that his six-shooters and handcuffs would supply more than sufficient authority to make up for whatever the niceties of international law failed to provide him.

  Henry hastily complied with the detective’s harsh command, dropping to his knees and reaching hard for the bullet-pocked ceiling. What Pinkerton had failed to foresee, however, was the presence in the salon of Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev, the colossal Nimrod of the North. Unintimidated by the interloper’s gleaming guns, the Russian giant sprang to his American confrere’s defense, pouncing on the detective from behind with the full weight of his gargantuan frame and sending him sprawling, mustache to the marquetry. As the stunned lawman’s revolvers clattered harmlessly across the floor, he tried gamely to struggle to his feet, but he was no match for the massive Muscovite and the furious horde of French realists who, emboldened by the courageous example of the author of Fathers and Sons, descended upon the lawman en masse and proceeded, in the common idiom, to beat the living crap out of him. Flaubert, who had studied the military arts as a lieutenant in the National Guard during the Prussian invasion six years earlier, leaped into the fray and held the startled private eye in an eye-bulging headlock while Alphonse Daudet kneed him sharply in the balls and Émile Zola, with his powerful oarsman’s arms, pummeled him repeatedly in the belly. Even the fastidious Edmond de Goncourt deigned to risk creasing his shiny patent-leather pumps by getting in a few crisp kicks to the intruder’s prominent derrière.

  During the dustup, Henry James managed to retrieve Pinkerton’s pistols from the floor and make his getaway. The badly shaken author scrambled out the door of Flaubert’s apartment, down the five flights of stairs, out of the Faubourg Saint-Honoré, out of Paris, out of France, and out of Europe—all the way back to quiet Quincy Street.

  It was all, as Edmond de Goncourt summed up the scene in his famous journal, “tellement Wild-West.”

  Chapter Ten

  Charles William Eliot served as president of Harvard from 1869 to 1909. During his unprecedented four-decade tenure at the helm of the nation’s flagship university, Eliot oversaw the most profound academic makeover in that institution’s history: He tightened admission standards, increased enrollment, revamped and expanded the curriculum, introduced a system of electives, abolished compulsory religious worship, beefed up the graduate schools, and brought rigorous biological science to the medical school. In the judgment of Louis Menand, President Eliot was nothing less than “the most important figure in the history of American higher education.”

  Yet for all the brilliance of his educational and administrative accomplishments, C. W. Eliot was far from scintillating in person. Trained in mathematics and chemistry, he had a methodical stoichio-metric mind and a spirit severely steeped in Yankee Unitarianism. “Eliot was the non-pareil schoolmaster to his age,—an age that worshiped the schoolmaster and clung to him,” wrote the political reformer John Jay Chapman, who attended Harvard in the early 1880s. He added that the university’s president “regarded cultivation somewhat as Michael Angelo [sic] regarded the painting of the Venetian school,—as a thing fit for women. Life was greater than culture. No ideals except ideals of conduct had reality for him.” According to another Harvard alumnus of the era, the theologian George Angier Gordon, “something in his look and bearing said plainly, ‘I am observing you, you must prove your worth.’”

  Even more daunting than Eliot’s “look and bearing” was his face: Born with a large nevus—a swollen, angry red welt that covered nearly his entire right cheek—he never allowed himself to be photographed except in left profile. “What all his intimates called his coldness,” wrote the literary biographer Edward Wagenknecht, “had been developed, at least in part, by his lifelong knowledge that a stranger’s first impulse at the sight of his face was to shudder, and his frequent failure to greet people was due at least in part to vision so defective that he c
ould not recognize a friend fifteen feet away.”

  Given their many differences in talents and temperament, it is hardly surprising that the long relationship between Charles Eliot and William James was not without its occasional strains. Eliot’s initial impression of William, formed when the latter was his student at the Lawrence Scientific School during the early 1860s, was that “James was a very interesting and agreeable pupil, but was not wholly devoted to the study of Chemistry.” (He also disapprovingly noted that William’s attendance at his organic chemistry laboratory had been “irregular.”) William, for his part, had been less than delighted when his former professor was appointed president of Harvard in 1869. As he wrote to Henry Bowditch on that occasion, “His great personal defects—tactlessness—meddlesomeness—and disposition to cherish petty grudges seem pretty universally acknowledged; but his ideas seem good and his economic powers first rate,—so in the absence of any other possible candidate, he went in. It seems queer that such a place should go begging for candidates….”

  As president, Eliot endured even greater frustrations with James than he had as his chemistry teacher. In the spring of 1873, he offered William a position teaching anatomy, which the latter initially declined, preferring, as he wrote to his brother Henry, “to fight it out on the line of mental science.” But when it became apparent that no offer was forthcoming in that field, William decided to accept the anatomy spot after all. Then he changed his mind yet again, thus engaging Eliot as his unwilling partner in a typical Jamesian waltz of vacillation that the stolid administrator could only have found exasperating in the extreme.

  But whatever grievances the president and the psychologist may have held against each other, all were forgiven (if not forgotten) in the fall of 1876, upon William’s delivery of the well-heeled Asa Hite to Eliot’s growing roster of the school’s benefactors—a list that would come to include such prodigiously fat cats as J. P. Morgan and John D. Rockefeller, and which would ultimately make Harvard the wealthiest private university in the world. With his “first-rate economic powers,” Eliot well understood the fund-raising function to be among the primary duties of a university president; or, as Frank James snidely put it, he knew perfectly well “which side his buttocks were buttered on.”

  Eliot also knew how to butter up his benefactors, few of whom were in the least reticent about having their generosity publicly acknowledged and applauded. It was thus that on the evening of Friday, December 15, 1876, the university’s leader played host to a lavish soirée in celebration of the funding of the school’s new Asa B. Hite Laboratory of Experimental Psychology. The gala event took place at the president’s residence, an imposing redbrick edifice with a massive slate mansard roof, situated near the Harvard Yard at No. 17 Quincy Street, directly across from the James family’s more modest abode at No. 20. Eliot pulled out all the stops in orchestrating this posh affair in honor of the laboratory’s eponymous donor, decking out his parlor and drawing room in the spirit of the season with potted poinsettias, sprigs of holly, ivy, and fragrant sprays of pine. All that afternoon a small army of servants in crimson livery, many of them scholarship students, bustled about lading the buffet tables with a sumptuous spread of goodies—ginger cookies, spice cakes, mincemeat pies, candied fruits and nuts—and strategically situating decanters of port wine and sherry all about the room, the centerpiece of which was a capacious cut-crystal punch bowl filled with a deceptively potent concoction of Jamaican rum, cognac, Madeira, lime juice, guava jelly, green tea, and simple syrup.

  The Harvard campus glittered that evening with a blanket of snow that had been falling throughout the day. By the time the guests began to arrive—many by horse-drawn sleigh—the president’s mansion was illuminated with the welcoming glow of dozens of gas lamps. The event brought together le tout Harvard: a number of department heads, including Francis Child of the English department and George Herbert Palmer of the philosophy department; Alexander Agassiz and his stepmother, Elizabeth (who was to become the cofounder and first president of Radcliffe College); Henry Bowditch and James Putnam of the medical faculty; and Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., of the law school, among other Cambridge luminaries—all of whom were scrupulously observed by William Pinkerton, who had arrived earlier in the day accompanied by a pair of armed and uniformed agency guards whose job it was to watch over a polished mahogany chest full of gold bullion that was to be ceremoniously presented by Asa Hite to an appropriately grateful President Eliot as the climax of the evening’s festivities. (Mr. Hite’s generous gift to the university was likely less an expression of any reasoned belief in the future of scientific psychology than of simple gratitude to William James for having delivered his daughter back to him from Europe a new woman—self-assured yet without the old strident political edge, eminently comfortable with herself and bursting with life.)

  As the guests filed in to the parlor to the mellifluous strains of a string quartet and a grand piano provided by faculty members of the nearby New England Conservatory of Music, Pinkerton, still smarting from the drubbing he had received at the hands (and feet) of Ivan Turgenev and his rabid gang of French novelists a couple of weeks earlier, stuck close by his security men and the chest of bullion. The detective did not feel it was his place to be mingling with such distinguished company. After all, he was on duty, and not merely as the guardian of Asa Hite’s gleaming largesse. Having let Henry James slip through his fingers at Flaubert’s cénacle, he was eager to size up the devious Dr. William James at close range, though he had not mentioned anything to Asa Hite of his dire suspicions concerning the psychologist, nor of Elena’s misbehavior with Henry’s pal Flaubert—either of which admissions would have entailed having to confess that he had once again failed to nab a James brother. In fact, Pinkerton had seen no need even to mention to his client that he had recently been in France.

  At about six P.M. the James family—William, Henry, Alice, and their parents—arrived from across the way in a group, led by William in an elegant black swallowtail coat, white waistcoat, and stock tie. (Frank and Jesse, in the guises of Professors Franklin and Jessup, would show up separately a bit later, Frank in the company of his jolly mentor Francis Child and Jesse all by his cantankerous lonesome.) Always leery of large, formal occasions, William had been especially apprehensive about the evening, knowing that he might well be encountering Elena Hite for the first time since her precipitous return from the continent the week before, an anxiety against which he had fortified his spirits with a swift whiff of amyl nitrite before sallying out across Quincy Street. Under the influence of those potent chemical vapors, his face was flushed to a rosy glow, and the usual bounce to his step was pronounced to such a degree that he appeared to Pinkerton almost to be dancing a jig.

  The detective’s attention was so thoroughly riveted on the preternaturally buoyant professor that he failed to register the concurrent arrival of Henry James, who brought up the rear of the family contingent and who, upon entering the parlor, as was his wont, paused briefly to make a survey of the assembled guests. Alarmed to spot William Pinkerton among them, the author promptly detached himself from his clan and slunk off along the side of the room, keeping his back to the dreaded detective at all times and as much of the company as possible interposed between himself and his nemesis. In originally fleeing Minnesota for Europe, he had hoped to evade the consequences of his involvement with his outlaw brothers; but, as we have seen, the notion that being abroad might somehow have put him out of reach of the long arm of the law had turned out to be cruelly illusory. His brutal confrontation with Pinkerton chez Flaubert had so unnerved him that, rather than devising any ingenious scheme for continuing to avoid arrest, the panicked “native of the James family” had blindly responded to the primal pull of home—a move that had drawn him once again into perilous proximity to the trigger-happy private eye. To make matters worse, as Henry gazed back across the room toward the entryway, he cringed to witness the arrival of his erstwhile “wife,” Elena Hite, whom he had e
ffectively booted out of Paris, an act for which he was certain she would unlikely be inclined to look upon him fondly.

  The Hites, father and daughter, were making a grand entrance, Asa Hite sporting a double-breasted Prince Albert frock coat and gold-handled ebony walking stick, and Elena appearing exquisitely framed by the archway of the parlor in a princess-line sheath, dramatically fashioned by Charles Frederick Worth from a bolt of verdigris satin that brought out the striking hue of her eyes. The garment—only a small sample of the spoils of her recent couturial sack of Paris—was cut daringly low at the bodice, the audacious effect softened, if at all, by a modest tulle tucker. Standing before William James in the gentle glow of the gas lamps, she appeared even more radiant than he remembered her. He had often wondered during the months of her absence abroad whether he might not have come to overrate her allure, yet if anything, her beauty had burgeoned on the continent. Her Grand Tour, mysteriously curtailed though it had been—William’s sister had never satisfactorily explained the motivation for their abrupt return to the States—had manifestly fulfilled its intended sanative objective.

  The arrival of his former patient rapidly cleared William’s head of any lingering effects of the short-acting amyl, replacing it with a “high” of a different, though no less puissant, quality. In the months since their consultations in William’s Lawrence Hall office, Elena had come to fill a place in his heart that Alice Gibbens, the mate anointed by his father, seemingly never could. Years later, in his Varieties of Religious Experience, he would expound upon the distinction between what he called “once-born” and “twice-born” souls: The former were those healthy-minded individuals who seemed to sail through life secure in their sense of its meaning and richness, “developing straight and natural, with no element of morbid compunction or crisis.” The latter, by contrast, were “sick-minded,” having peered into the dark abyss of despair and disillusionment and become intimately acquainted with the reality of evil in the universe. William, not surprisingly, tended to side with the sick-minded over “mere sky-blue healthy-minded moralists,” whose view of life, he argued, was “inadequate as a philosophical doctrine, because the evil facts which it refuses positively to account for are a genuine portion of reality; and they may after all be the best key to life’s significance, and possibly the only openers of our eyes to the deepest levels of truth.”