The James Boys

by Richard Liebmann-Smith

  Hearing the bells of an approaching horse-drawn fire engine, the Jameses realized that a police wagon might not be far behind. They decided that in this instance, discretion might indeed be the better part of valor. Taking a page from Henry’s book, they all scrambled out of the coach. Of the James brothers, Henry, reliving the horror of the stable fire in which he had sustained his “obscure hurt,” was the first to escape, followed by William, Jesse, and finally Frank, hobbling on his bad foot. With flames beginning to engulf the car, everyone else fled the conflagration—Billy Pinkerton, his security guards, and Asa Hite, even the porter and the cook, who had been cowering under the dining room table.

  Only Elena Hite failed to emerge from her namesake coach. She had been shot dead in the cross fire.

  Epilogue

  In his famous 1884 essay “The Art of Fiction,” Henry James wrote that “the ‘ending’ of a novel is, for many persons, like that of a good dinner, a course of desserts and ices, and the artist in fiction is regarded as a sort of meddlesome doctor who forbids agreeable aftertastes.” Defending his own artistic notion of what a novel should be, Henry attacked his imagined critics:

  They would argue, of course, that a novel ought to be “good,” but they would interpret this term in a fashion of their own, which indeed would vary considerably from one critic to another. One would say that being good means representing virtuous and aspiring characters, placed in prominent positions; another would say that it depends on a “happy ending,” on a distribution at the last of prizes, pensions, husbands, wives, babies, millions, appended paragraphs, and cheerful remarks. Another still would say that it means being full of incident and movement, so that we shall wish to jump ahead, to see who was the mysterious stranger, and if the stolen will was ever found, and shall not be distracted from this pleasure by any tiresome analysis or “description.” But they would all agree that the “artistic” idea would spoil some of their fun. One would hold it accountable for all the description, another would see it revealed in the absence of sympathy. Its hostility to a happy ending would be evident, and it might even in some cases render any ending at all impossible.

  The historical biographer, unlike the novelist, has little to dole out at the end of his or her endeavors but death. Not only Elena Hite but everyone else portrayed in these pages has long since passed on and faded from living memory; and, as William James remarked in his eulogy for Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The phantom of an attitude, the echo of a certain mode of thought, a few pages of print, some invention, or some victory we gained in a brief critical hour, are all that can survive the best of us.”

  What survives Elena Hite, beyond a few paintings, letters, and snippets of her diary, are the reverberations of her encounters with the James brothers. We know her almost entirely through the impressions that she left on their longer, more storied lives. Despite the efforts of the James family and most of their biographers to expunge any hint of her presence in those lives, William, Henry, Frank, and Jesse, each in his own way, was profoundly affected by this uniquely fascinating young woman, and by her violent and untimely death, the details of which remain a mystery to this day.

  It seems unlikely that anyone intentionally shot Elena. A case might be made against Jesse, Frank, or even Henry, on the grounds that they may have had it in for her as a potential witness. Even farther-fetched would be the speculation that William could have chosen to euthanize his former patient in order to spare her what he may have seen as a fate worse than death, i.e., rotting away in an insane asylum. More probable is that Elena was gunned down accidentally, in which case the perpetrator could have been practically anyone in Mr. Hite’s coach that night. Given the darkness, smoke, and commotion, the possibility cannot be ruled out that no one present ever knew who fired the fatal shot, including perhaps even the gunman himself.

  In the absence of any hard evidence, some scholars have thrown up their hands, among them a prominent feminist historian who recently declared that Elena had been done in by “Victorian patriarchal hegemony run amuck—a virtual victim of the 19th century.” But centuries don’t kill people, guns kill people, and without the insights of modern ballistic forensic technology, it remains impossible to determine whose weapon brought Elena down—an enigma that would be immeasurably compounded by the fact that the pistols William and Henry James were toting that December night in 1876 were those that Henry had snatched up off of Gustave Flaubert’s floor, and which would have been identical to the standard-issue agency revolvers wielded by Billy Pinkerton and his security men.

  We do not know, and pending any startling new information that may come to light, we likely never will. Such is the sort of ambiguity—forensic rather than “artistic,” in this instance—that Henry James cited as ruining the pleasures of his straw-man critics who would demand that all the mysteries of a story be neatly wrapped up and beribboned for presentation to the reader at its conclusion. What we do know is that there was clearly a cover-up of the real cause of Elena’s death. No formal inquiry into the incident was ever undertaken, and the official presumption was that she perished as another hapless victim of the notoriously combustive Pintsch gas with which the railway cars of the era were illuminated. The culprit behind this sweeping under the legal rug of the shooting was almost certainly Asa Hite: Weary of scandal and perhaps secretly relieved that Elena would never become yet another crazy burden on him, her father could have been contented to let the whole gruesome business slide. William Pinkerton would doubtless have been more than willing to collude with his client in hushing up the true nature of the affair, not only out of his well-documented deference to Mr. Hite, but also to avoid any further unfavorable publicity concerning his agency’s slipshod pursuit of the James Gang.

  The Dewey Square debacle proved something of a watershed in the Pinkertons’ quest to bring the James brothers to justice. Once again, “the eye that never sleeps” had been caught napping, and in light of the botched raid on Castle James and the fiasco in Gustave Flaubert’s Paris apartment, Billy Pinkerton must have felt that he could ill afford yet another major public embarrassment. Having scant desire to provoke his father’s wrath, he never reported the sordid occurrence back to the home office in Chicago, and no record of it can be found in the agency archives. But after Dewey Square, it appears that the detective had no further stomach for the pursuit of the James Gang, turning his attention to other, more tractable cases. His glaring failure to nab the most infamous outlaws in the country may have informed his subsequent reluctance to publish a memoir of his otherwise brilliant career. “I have always been opposed to crime reminiscences,” he claimed toward the end of his life, “and the reminiscences of the Pinkerton Agency will never be written.” According to historian Richard Wilmer Rowan, “He never retracted, refusing many publishing offers for his autobiography, and went to his grave like a gold mine defying its prospectors.”

  Yet even if Pinkerton had chosen to go after the Jameses, he would not have found it easy. He had no hard evidence against William for any actual crime, and the three others lit out early the next morning, with Henry hopping the first steamer he could book for England and the younger pair heading south to Tennessee, where they took up residence under the aliases Ben J. Woodson and John Davis Howard to begin making peaceful livings at farming, raising horses, and doing odd jobs. (Jesse’s paranoid fears notwithstanding, the Younger brothers never did squeal on the Jameses, serving out their sentences at the Stillwater Penitentiary in honorable silence.) Yet Jesse’s congenital antsyness came to the fore: After a couple of years of clean living, he felt compelled to put together a new criminal crew and to take up once again the only métier he and Frank had known in their adult lives.

  This reconstituted James Gang was but a pallid simulacrum of the band that had terrorized Missouri in the decade immediately following the Civil War. The former guerrillas who made up the core of that original unit had all been interred or imprisoned, and the younger, greener men who took their places—Charley a
nd Robert Ford, Clarence and Wood Hite (no relation to Elena), Dick Liddil, Ed Miller, Bill Ryan, and Tucker Bassham—were a far cry from the likes of those battle-hardened bushwhackers. None of the new gang members had fought in the war, and in terms of criminal credentials, the most heinous offense to which any of them could lay claim prior to hooking up with the Jameses was stealing a horse. What was more, the romantic Civil War mythos in which the first-string James Gang had cloaked their crimes had, by the late 1870s, begun to wear thin, even in those Confederaphilic enclaves of western Missouri that so often provided refuge and apology for the outlaws in the heyday of their postbellum marauding. Reconstruction had crumbled, and as T. J. Stiles noted, “Jesse and his comrades had symbolized secessionist resentments, but when the dust settled after the election of 1876, there was nothing left to resent.” Most ominously, some of the new boys lacked the fierce loyalty of their predecessors. Faced with the temptation of a promised bounty of ten thousand dollars for their legendary leader, they had little compunction about selling him out.

  Of the assassination of Jesse James by Robert Ford in St. Joseph, Missouri, on the morning of April 3, 1882, little need be recounted here. That sanguinary episode has become an integral aspect of American folklore, immortalized—as Jesse doubtless would have been delighted to hear—in the popular ballad attributed to the otherwise unsung contemporary minstrel Billy Gashade:

  Now the people held their breath when they heard of Jesse’s death,

  And they wondered how he ever came to fall

  Robert Ford, it was a fact, shot Jesse in the back

  While Jesse hung a picture on the wall

  In a letter to William from London written after the shooting, Henry remarked that Jesse had died a “natural death.” This took William aback. He wondered if perhaps the English newspapers hadn’t mangled the story, to which Henry, in his subsequent missive, ruefully responded that what he had meant was that for a vicious outlaw, being shot in the back by a member of one’s own gang was a natural death.

  Frank James fared considerably better than his younger brother. After Jesse’s murder, he lay low for a few months, then arranged through the good offices of Major John Edwards to turn himself in to Governor Crittenden of Missouri in what some historians believe was a secret deal to assure a pardon in the event that he was convicted of any crime. He surrendered to the governor in early October 1882 and was tried almost a year later for the murder of a passenger named Frank McMillan during a train robbery at Winston, Missouri, in 1881, and in Alabama for an 1881 stagecoach holdup at Muscle Shoals. Acquitted in both cases—and never tried for his role in the Northfield robbery or any of his other earlier crimes—Frank spent the next thirty years as a minor celebrity, eking out a meager living as a race starter at county fairs, a horse wrangler, a shoe salesman, and a doorman at a St. Louis burlesque house. After the turn of the century, he took a crack at acting, appearing in bit parts with traveling stock companies in such tacky melodramas as The Fatal Scar and Across the Desert. When Cole Younger was granted a conditional pardon in 1903, Frank joined forces with his old comrade-in-arms to tour with The Great Cole Younger and Frank James Historical Wild West Show. Under the terms of his pardon, Cole was forbidden to perform, but Frank was able put his thespian (and outlaw) experience to good use, portraying a stagecoach passenger in the thrilling holdup finale of the spectacle.

  Following the death of Zerelda “Mamaw” Samuel in 1911, the former brigand moved back to Castle James, where he spent his final years tilling the land and palavering with Kodak-toting tourists and curiosity seekers. He never attempted to reestablish contact with his older brothers, though he did read Henry’s novels, enjoying The Bostonians and The Portrait of a Lady but abhorring the author’s late “third style,” which he found “unreadable,” perceiving in it, as he once complained to Cole Younger’s sister Henrietta, “the damnedest farrago of constipation and diarrhea.” After The Wings of the Dove, he lost interest and returned to his beloved Shakespeare and Milton.

  Frank died on February 18, 1915. In his last published interview, the year before, when asked about his criminal past by a reporter from Collier’s Weekly, he replied, “I neither affirm nor deny…. If I admitted that these stories were true, people would say, ‘There’s the greatest scoundrel unhung,’ and if I denied ’em they’d say: ‘There’s the greatest liar on earth,’ so I just say nothing.” He did, however—perhaps in a belated tip of his Stetson to Elena Hite—make a point of telling his interviewer that he believed women ought to have the right to vote. “Look at what we owe to the woman,” he argued. “A man gets 75 percent of what goodness is in him from his mother, and he owes at least 40 percent of all he makes to his wife.” In what may have been a sly dig at his brother William, he added, “Yes, some men owe more than that. Some of ’em owe 100 percent to their wives.”

  In the wake of December 15, 1876, William James manfully steeled himself to brave the consequences of his manifold misdeeds. But those weighty shoes never dropped. Indeed, the psychologist may have been the greatest beneficiary of Asa Hite’s Dewey Square cover-up. President Eliot remained mercifully ignorant of William’s pistol-packing role at the rail yard, which he would certainly have seen as grounds for dismissal from the university, if not for a lengthy prison term. As for William’s sexual shenanigans at the soirée, interceding with the head of Harvard on his behalf was Dr. James Putnam, who must have felt appreciable guilt over having gotten his old friend embroiled with Elena Hite in the first place. The distinguished neurologist attempted to convince President Eliot that the young lady whom he had personally examined prior to referring her to Dr. James was a certifiable madwoman. What his colleague had been attempting that night in the presidential bedroom, Putnam claimed, was not so much a selfish exercise in unbridled lust—as it might have appeared to a layman—but rather a desperate, admittedly unconventional, yet perhaps heroic new form of psychotherapy. Henry Bowditch concurred, and together he and Putnam stood behind their fellow Adirondack Doctor, even to the point of intimating that they would abandon their Harvard posts in protest should William get the sack.

  Whether or not he found Putnam’s case even remotely credible, faced with the potential defection of the two brightest stars of his medical faculty, Eliot warily welcomed William back into the Harvard fold. Despite the president’s alleged propensity for holding grudges, he went so far as to scrape together sufficient funding to launch a much attenuated version of the proposed laboratory of experimental psychology.

  Alice Gibbens proved a tougher nut to crack. If William’s courtship of the soprano schoolmarm had been something of a seesaw affair even prior to his appalling escapades at President Eliot’s soirée, it subsequently became more like a roller-coaster ride. For months after that distressing event, Alice refused to have anything to do with her former near-fiancé. (This was the period during which William later described himself as “a man morally utterly diseased.”) When summer came, she bolted Boston with her sister Margaret for an extended holiday in Quebec, where she received copious letters of abject contrition and squirmy self-abasement from William in Keene Valley. “Little by little,” he wrote to her on August 24, “time will perhaps give me something to think about but my own unspeakable impotence and culpability, and the outrages which they have wrought upon your thrice divine being.”

  Ultimately, Miss Gibbens relented, though probably owing less to the persuasive power of her suitor than to her own fear of impending spinsterhood and her recognition that whatever threat Elena Hite may have posed to their relationship had been effectively terminated with the younger woman’s demise. But she didn’t make it easy for her lapsed lover: Reminded once by her sister that she had made William wait two years to seal the deal, Alice acerbically remarked, “Don’t you think a woman has a right to take her time?”

  The on-again, off-again couple was finally married on July 10, 1878, much to the delight and relief of their friends and families—with the notable exception of Alice James. F
or William’s brickly sister, the wedding of her beloved brother precipitated a severe crack-up from which, by her own account, she never fully recovered, referring to it years later in her diary as “that summer of ’78 when I went down to the deep sea, its dark waters closed over me, and I knew neither hope nor peace.” Alice never landed a husband of her own (and at heart probably never wanted one), but she did settle in to a “Boston marriage” with her longtime friend and caretaker Katharine Loring, whom Henry once described as “the most perfect companion she could have found, if she had picked over the whole human family.” The allegiant pair of Yankee ladies moved to England, where Alice died of a breast tumor in 1892 at the age of forty-three, attended at her deathbed by her devoted brother Henry, whose secrets she took to her grave.

  William’s long, conventionally heterosexual marriage with Alice Gibbens has often been credited with sparing him from his worst self. “William suffered from nearly clinical depression during the 1860s and early 1870s, and his self-doubts about his sanity and his capacity for living seem possibly connected to his masturbation guilt,” wrote Yale comparative literature professor Peter Brooks. “He would find a solution in marriage, after a long and tortured courtship: a marriage from which he often sought escape but which he simultaneously figured as his salvation.” Under the stabilizing influence of matrimony, William’s professional life flourished, lending credence to Frank’s remark about some men owing 100 percent of their livelihoods to their wives. The man who had once feared that he might have no career at all turned out to have several, almost all of them illustrious. As a psychologist, philosopher, Harvard professor, and popular author, he reigned for decades as one of America’s leading public intellectuals; but in spite of establishing the nation’s first psychology laboratory, he never made much of a mark as an experimentalist. This lapse reflected more than sour grapes over Asa Hite’s withdrawal of his lavish support for the laboratory, or even William’s long-standing distaste for the rigors of bench science. Rather, he appears to have become disenchanted with the entire agenda of the new psychology, which he suspected would never be able to account for the slippery mysteries of consciousness. “Many persons nowadays,” he once complained, “seem to think that any conclusion must be very scientific if the arguments in favor of it are all derived from the twitching of frogs’ legs—especially if the frogs are decapitated—and that, on the other hand, any doctrine chiefly vouched for by the feelings of human beings—with heads on their shoulders—must be benighted and superstitious.”