The eminent neurologist knew nothing of Elena’s recent imbroglio with his colleague’s brothers, although the patient was of course keenly cognizant of William’s familial provenance. One might suppose that she would have balked at the prospect of any further entanglement with the family of the man who had so recently broken her heart; but Elena’s heart, as we have seen, was no uncomplicated organ. If nothing else, she had a dangerously high threshold for stimulation, and after a couple of weeks of moping about her father’s Lord’s Hill mansion, she was beginning to suffer, along with her other woes, an intolerable itch of sheer boredom. To Asa Hite’s uncomprehending yet profound relief, his despondent daughter seemed to perk up at the notion that she would be consulting with the brilliant Dr. James.
In the event, however, Elena was finding herself more than a little apprehensive. Face-to-face with the senior James brother, she became uncomfortably aware of the power he wielded over her as a physician: Might he declare her a madwoman? Make her undress? Pack her away to an insane asylum? Hypnotize her? (She had heard they were doing a great deal of that in Paris.)
We will most probably never know precisely what transpired between William James and Elena Hite that afternoon. The young doctor took no notes; or, if he did, they have long since gone the way of the mysterious twenty-one pages snipped from his 1869 diary. And there are passages in Elena’s journal jottings describing their session together in which she is uncharacteristically circumspect. Certainly the encounter could hardly have been a clinical interview in any sense that a modern-day psychiatrist would recognize. To begin with, William was not a trained psychiatrist, even by the relatively primitive standards of the nineteenth century. What was more, he was William James and doubtless would have been constitutionally averse to a rigid clinical protocol, just as he was loath to lecture from notes, stick to a course curriculum, or perform the meticulous measurements and rigorous routines of a laboratory experiment.
Nonetheless, he was a sensitive and discerning listener. “By a kind of admirable divination,” wrote the Swiss psychologist Theodore Flournoy, “he fathomed without disturbing them, minds that were very different from his own. Thus he was in touch with the moods and phases of the inner life of others, which to most of us are inaccessible, imprisoned as we are by the fixed barriers of our own egoism.” And, of course, the doctor was no stranger personally to “nervous breakdowns”: There had been his own ghastly crisis of seven years earlier, which he later presented as the case study of the epileptic patient in his Varieties of Religious Experience, as well as his father’s famous “vastation,” which had become a staple of James family lore. Perhaps even more germane to his present patient were the periodic “attacks” suffered by his sister, Alice, who, from late adolescence, had undergone a series of debilitating nervous episodes that, according to her biographer Jean Strouse, had been variously diagnosed as “neurasthenia, hysteria, rheumatic gout, suppressed gout, cardiac complication, spinal neurosis, nervous hyperesthesia, and spiritual crisis.” Symptomatically, Alice’s breakdowns took the form of fainting spells, mysterious physical pains, nervous prostrations, overwhelming anxieties, terrors, and suicidal thoughts, for which she had been subjected to the full, futile panoply of Victorian therapeutic maneuvers. As Leon Edel wrote in his introduction to her published diary, “All the remedies of the time were attempted: massage, visits to specialists in Manhattan for ice and electric therapy, special ‘blistering’ baths, sad sojourns to the ‘Adams Nervine Asylum’ near Boston—but they proved ineffective.”
Fortunately, Elena Hite’s case did not appear so grave or intractable as to call for Manhattan, baths, or galvanizing electric currents. Yet when William asked her to describe her symptoms, she became defensive: There was nothing “wrong” with her, she insisted, but only with this weary world, wherein it was so hard for one soul to know another under all the necessary and unnecessary guises that kept them apart. Her “big crime,” she complained, was merely that of seeking “the full expression of love.”
William, it hardly need be said, had accused her of no crime. The answer he had doubtless expected to his perfunctory clinical query was a familiar litany of complaints along the lines of headaches, fatigue, insomnia, and eyestrain. He must have been taken aback, then, not only by the vehemence of Elena’s response but by the unforeseen direction in which it wrenched the course of their consultation; in bringing up the torments of love, the patient had cut directly to the essence of William’s agonizing over his relationship with Alice Gibbens, thus threatening to undermine all of James Putnam’s noble intentions in making his referral. Elena, who often relished discombobulating her interlocutors, was not altogether displeased with the effect her reply seemed to have on William James. If she sensed, as she undoubtedly did, that he was upset by her outburst, such a perception served only to spur her on. In response to William’s chary request for elaboration, she proceeded not only to provide him with a skeletal (if spicy) account of her dalliances with George Stanley & Co., but also to divulge that she recently had been “deceived” by a married man. Even without dropping the bombshell that the scoundrel in question was the doctor’s own undeceased brother, she managed to visibly disconcert him with her revelation: He rose from his desk and stepped over to the sole window in the office, where he stood for a moment, pensively inhaling deep drafts of bracing Harvard air.
Though hardly unappreciative of what he once referred to as “the animal potency of sex,” William James was never to accord that subject the uniquely determinative stature to which Freud would elevate it. (Of the nearly fourteen hundred pages in his Principles of Psychology, James devoted a scant two and a half to the subject of love, with the bulk of that discussion being a description of the “anti-sexual” instinct.) And while never a knee-jerk Victorian bluenose, he was nonetheless something of a traditionalist in his views on chastity and the sanctity of matrimony: “That the direction of the sexual instinct towards one individual tends to inhibit its application to other individuals,” he wrote, “is a law, upon which, though it suffers many exceptions, the whole régime of monogamy is based.”
Elena Hite, apparently, was one of those vexing exceptions. In fact, William had gleaned from James Putnam that Mr. Hite had expressed concern about his daughter’s “penchant for indiscretion” yet the doctor was unprepared for either the extent of Elena’s transgressions or her unblushing candor. Indeed, Elena was surprised at how comfortable she was—under both the assured confidentiality of the doctor/ patient relationship and the encouragement of William’s intense and sympathetic attention—dumping the details of her sexual peccadilloes and predilections on him. (“I’m afraid I may have scandalized the poor man dreadfully,” she later reported somewhat disingenuously in her journal, “with these allusions to my—ahem—‘past.’”)
Returning to his desk, William scrutinized the exquisite creature before him as she insouciantly brushed a few errant strands of golden hair from her eyes. Like Henry on the Missouri Pacific Express two months earlier, he was taken by the sculptural perfection of Elena’s beauty—with an appreciation that, unlike his literary brother’s cool aesthetic assessment, was heated through an unequivocally heterosexual sensibility. Even in her present distressed state, the young woman radiated a freshness and openness that seemed disturbingly at odds with the corrupt history she had just recounted.
“Do you believe I suffer from a hopelessly unregenerate nature, Dr. James?” she coyly inquired.
“Do you?” William asked.
Elena considered, then replied that while she sometimes regretted her behavior, she could never be sorry for it—a distinction that must have struck William as being without a difference, until the patient explained that she believed much of her suffering derived from the attitudes and behavior of others toward her, rather than from any internal sense of her own guilt or “ruin.” She would forever refuse, she asserted, to apologize for the way she was. “Or do you propose that one ought to spend one’s life slavishly courting the
good report of others?” This was as much a challenge as a question, and it was perhaps then that William formulated his impression of Elena—which he later confided to his brother—as being less a woman who had fallen than one who had willfully leaped.
“So you like to feel that you’re the captain of your own canoe?” he remarked.
She answered that she did indeed, but perhaps in response to William’s unexpectedly colloquial tone, she relented from her hard-line stance and added that she had recently read of a class of persons who were morally blind—who seemed to have been born without free will. She trusted that she was not among them, but sometimes, she admitted, she did feel helpless to moderate her appetites and affections. She wondered, in such states of mind, how much of her behavior was the expression of her own choices or to what degree it might be driven by forces or passions beyond her conscious control—a feeling for which she had scant tolerance. (What she did not mention to William was that for all the colorful social and political bunting with which she liked to drape it, sex itself had often proved something of a disappointment to her.) “I wonder why,” she continued, “since they sometimes seem to cause me such unhappiness, I nevertheless feel compelled to persist on my evil courses.” Elena delivered this last locution with a peculiar half-smile that was, at the very least, ironic and, if William was not mistaken, may have bordered on coquettish. In any event, it had the effect of inflaming the young doctor, whose erotic juices, freshly primed during his summer idyll with Alice Gibbens, now threatened to flow freely—and perhaps to overflow.
He seized upon the opportunity to steer the conversation away from the rocky shoals of sex and out toward the deeper but, for him, far more comfortably navigable waters of philosophy. “Throughout the first two decades of his professional life,” wrote his biographer Gay Wilson Allen, “the philosophical subject which interested James most continued to be free will versus determinism.” For William, this classic conundrum was of more than technical interest: He had always felt the prospect of living in a wholly determined, clockwork universe to be viscerally depressing, so he was looking not just for an intellectual solution but for an emotional way out. Taking the flagrantly unpsychiatric tack of revealing something of his own troubled history, he confided to his patient that during the late 1860s and early 1870s, he had experienced a prolonged and distressing bout of doubt, debility, and depression so severe that it had brought him nearly to the brink of suicide. (If his condition at that time had been to any degree precipitated or exacerbated by his conflicts over masturbation, William demurred from mentioning this possibility to Elena.) During that disconsolate period, in which he later described himself to Henry as having been “melancholy as a whippoorwill,” William had despaired of ever being able to influence the course of his own life; and though he despised his tendency toward morbid introspection and sterile intellectualization, he had expended much of his depleted store of energy on obsessive rumination over the philosophical dilemma. Before he could exert his free will, he believed, he first needed to convince himself that such an entity existed.
It had been the French philosopher Charles-Bernard Renouvier, he told Elena, who had helped to usher him out from beneath the dark shadow of materialistic predestinarianism and into the sweet sunlight of self-determination. In April 1870, shortly after the period of the excised diary pages, he recorded: “I think that yesterday was a crisis in my life. I finished the first part of Renouvier’s second ‘Essais’ and see no reason why his definition of Free Will—‘the sustaining of a thought because I choose to when I might have other thoughts’—need be the definition of an illusion.” It had been at that juncture, William recounted, that he had exultantly declared: “My first act of free will shall be to believe in free will.”
To William’s undisguised delight, his patient appeared to hang on every word of his psycho-philosophical apologue with an attentiveness he could not have dreamed of eliciting from his blasé undergraduates. Elena’s shining green eyes remained raptly fixed upon his expressive face, and as she later confessed in her journal, it was all she could do to suppress a girlish urge to applaud the doctor’s oration, enthralled as she was not only by his resonant baritone and keen reasoning but by his arrant passion. (She no doubt also would have been tempted to applaud Leon Edel’s astute observation of a century later that “William was all idea and intellect warmed by feeling; Henry was all feeling—intellectualized.”)
Having happily ascertained that Elena could read French, William rose again from his desk and retrieved his precious volume of Renouvier’s essays from its place of honor on the bookshelf, ardently pressing it upon his patient, who clutched the unlikely prescription to her bosom with such a bright and grateful smile that he may well have found himself wrestling with an impulse to unload his entire library on her. That evening she made the following breathless entry in her diary: “Finally met Dr. William James today. What a real person he is! He is in nearly all respects head and shoulders above his brothers, having the largest heart as well as the largest head, and is thoroughly interesting to me.”
Back out in Minnesota, from the far side of the Cannon River bridge, the surviving members of the James-Younger Gang galloped hell-for-leather out of Northfield until they reached Dundas, the village where they had met up that morning. There they stopped briefly to rest and water their steaming horses, bandage their wounds with shreds of clothing, and take stock of their situation, which was clearly dire. Bill Stiles, who was to have served as their guide out along the back roads and byways of the Minnesota countryside, lay dead on Division Street with a bullet through his heart. Clell Miller, his face riddled with birdshot and his subclavian artery severed, had also been killed. (The bodies of the two slain outlaws were unceremoniously dragged off the dusty thoroughfare and hauled into the local photographer’s shop, where they were stripped to the waist and propped up on a wooden bench, still oozing blood from their mortal wounds, to be photographed and gawked at by the townspeople.) The majority of the gang members who made it out of town alive had also been shot: Frank James, his arm still smarting from the bank vault door, had taken a bullet in the right thigh. Cole Younger carried at least five slugs in various parts of his anatomy, and Jim Younger held three. Charlie Pitts had a single bullet wound in his left arm. In the worst shape of all was Bob Younger, who was hemorrhaging profusely from his shattered right elbow and leg wound. Of the entire band, only Jesse and Henry James had managed to get through the melee unharmed (although Henry was obliged to endure the discomfort and embarrassment of riding wreathed in a clinging nimbus of his own stink). The whole wild affair had lasted under a quarter hour and had grossed the gang a grand total of—accounts vary—between $26.01 and $26.70.
And their nightmare was only just beginning. In the days and weeks to come, as news of the robbery and killings brattled across the telegraph lines of the state and the nation, the gang would become the quarry of what Jesse’s biographer William Settle called “the most widespread manhunt in Minnesota heretofore.” More than a thousand men were on their trail at various times, in posses composed of irate citizens, bounty hunters, curiosity seekers, fame-chasers, and professional lawmen, some from as far away as Cincinnati and including policemen and detectives from Minneapolis and St. Paul.
The gang’s first encounter with such a group took place late that afternoon in the town of Shieldsville. While watering their horses at a trough outside of Haggerty’s saloon, the bandits noticed a pile of rifles and shotguns stacked at the door of the establishment. When the owners of the firearms, a squad of men from nearby Faribault, exited the bar, they found themselves staring straight into the robbers’ drawn revolvers. Jesse ordered the posse members not to touch their guns on pain of death, then quickly led the gang out of town before any further bloodshed could be added to the already appreciable charges against them. But the posse, fueled by the Dutch courage of Haggerty’s brew, soon collected their weapons and lit out after the fugitives, catching up with them about four miles
out of town. After a sobering exchange of gunfire, the Faribault contingent apparently thought better of pressing their pursuit and allowed the desperadoes to slip away into the descending darkness.
The outlaw band took cover for the night in part of a dense forest known locally as “The Big Woods.” Wounded, famished, and demoralized, they had nothing to eat and dared not even light a campfire for fear of alerting any additional pursuers to their whereabouts. With banks of ominous clouds gathering in the night sky, they bedded down beneath the pines to the hoots of owls and the distant howls of timber wolves. Henry, still reeking mightily, was made to sleep well away from the rest of the gang—to the extent that he was able to sleep at all. Though his body was wracked with fatigue, the strain of the day’s events was beginning to take an even heavier toll on his psyche: It was distressing enough to have lost control of his horse and his bowels; now he may well have feared losing his mind, if not his life. While back in Missouri, his status as a wanted man had seemed merely theoretical—and perhaps even a trifle romantic—that day it had sunk in that there were real men with real guns and real bullets on his trail. Assuming they didn’t kill him outright, he realized, no posse would ever credit his outlandish tale of being held hostage by his own brothers. To steady his nerves, the writer tried to force himself to focus on a mental review of the works of Anthony Trollope, a novelist he had once admired as being “charged with something of the big Balzac authority.” He hoped to lull himself to sleep with a soothing reverie of that author’s quaint and cozy Barsetshire world of venial vicars and dotty dowagers, but—William’s felicitous philosophical epiphany notwithstanding—Henry found himself unable to steer his thoughts down the desired path. Instead, he ended up seething with resentment at the Englishman’s smug, self-satisfied approach to literature and, by extension, to all of life: Obviously, the genteel Mr. Trollope had never been obliged to retire for the evening on the hard, cold ground plastered in his own shit, with a bloodthirsty posse breathing up his ass. Henry wept himself into a fitful slumber.
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