But William doubtless yearned for something more than a scientific psychology that would account for the feelings of human beings. Just as Elena had, in life, opened him to the exhilaration of eroticism, in death she drew him to the eerie embrace of spiritualism. His interest in the afterlife is often attributed to the tragic death in 1885 of his infant second son, Herman, though in fact it predated this traumatic filial loss, or even to the passing of his parents in 1882, when he was already a member of the newly founded British Society for Psychical Research. Though he never made it explicit, it is likely that his fascination with the occult was triggered by the death of Elena Hite, and that it was always she with whom he so desperately longed to communicate across the great divide. If Alice Gibbens believed that her late rival’s demise would mark the end of her husband’s obsession with his beguiling former patient, she was sorely mistaken: William was haunted—or at least yearned to be—by Elena, pursuing her specter in the séances of a comely young medium by the name of Leonora Piper, whose apparent ability to make contact with souls on the “other side” seemed to defy any rational or scientific explanation. As he wrote in The Will to Believe:
If you wish to upset the law that all crows are black, you must not seek to show that no crows are; it is enough if you prove one simple crow to be white. My own white crow is Mrs. Piper. In the trances of this medium, I cannot resist the conviction that knowledge appears which she has never gained by the ordinary waking use of her eyes and ears and wits…. As a matter of fact, the trances I speak of have broken down for my own mind the limits of the admitted order of nature. Science, so far as science denies such exceptional occurrences, lies prostrate in the dust for me; and the most urgent intellectual need which I feel at present is that science be built up again in a form in which such things may have a place.
Unfortunately, there is no evidence, either scientific or anecdotal, that William ever made contact with the shade of Elena Hite, but much of her spirit did find its way into the works of his brother Henry, who seems to have done a far better job of conjuring it up than the celebrated Mrs. Piper. While William continued to carry a torch for his departed patient, it was Henry who became the keeper of the flame. “I wonder how I shall appear in your novels, Mr. James,” Elena had mused at Versailles. The answer is that she lives on in the “bad lecture blood” of Verena Tarrant in The Bostonians; in the beauty, intelligence, and independence of Isabel Archer in The Portrait of a Lady; in the wealth and iron resolve of Milly Theale in The Wings of the Dove; and, of course, in the fatal indiscretions of Daisy Miller.
It is a commonplace among Jamesian scholars to cite Henry’s cousin Mary “Minnie” Temple as the model for the author’s audacious young “Americanas” but Minnie, who died of consumption in 1870 at the age of twenty-five, though a precociously free thinker on the subjects of gender and religion, was never particularly transgressive on the sexual front. Elena became, for Henry James, the embodiment of the erotic, especially of the demolitionary power of sexuality. “In Henry’s novels,” wrote Jean Strouse, “sex, though unnamed, often occupies a central place in the characters’ preoccupations and actions. It becomes more explicit in his later work (The Wings of the Dove, The Golden Bowl, The Ambassadors), but early and late it is nearly always associated with destruction, cruelty, corruption.”
Despite Henry’s lip service to his “utter disgust” with the “unspeakable horror” of Elena’s behavior, he must have secretly admired her sexual hubris. As a closeted and celibate homosexual, in later life he apparently came to feel that for all his smashing literary and social successes, he had never really lived, i.e., loved, i.e., laid—a theme that found its haunting expression in his 1903 tale, The Beast in the Jungle. (To the journalist Morton Fullerton, Henry once wrote of his “essential loneliness,” which he described as “deeper than my ‘genius,’ deeper than my ‘discipline,’ deeper than my pride, deeper, above all, than the deep countermining of art.”) Tragically truncated though it had been, Elena’s life had been filled with more romantic and erotic adventure than Henry’s much longer one, and he undoubtedly recalled with awe and pangs of envy the temerity of his erstwhile “wife” in coming to Castle James for the express purpose of seducing Jesse; her shameless liaison with Flaubert; and her reckless tryst with William.
After Elena’s death, Henry took it on the lam to London, where, on the heels of the international sensation of his Elena-inspired Daisy Miller, he became the toast of the town. (He reported dining out 140 times during the winter of 1878–79.) He stayed in the English capital for over five years before furtively returning to Boston twice in 1882, the year when both his parents died. The elder Jameses went to their graves believing that after President Eliot’s ill-fated party, their two youngest sons had vanished back down south or out west, still living under the shameful cloud of having deserted during the Civil War. Neither William nor Henry ever had the heart to tell their parents the rest of the brutal truth. It had been enough of a shock for the poor old dears to learn that Rob and Wilky were still alive; to have found out that their boys had become the most notorious American outlaws of the nineteenth century would only have hastened their passing.
That year was a dangerous one for Henry to be setting foot in the United States. With the assassination of Jesse, the heat was on for the James Gang. At the time of their father’s death, Frank was in jail in Independence, Missouri, awaiting trial, and Henry must have been terrified at what details might emerge during his brother’s interrogation or in sworn testimony before a jury. While most accounts of the raid on the Northfield bank described the perpetrators as a gang of eight men, there were persistent rumors, based on eyewitness accounts, of an additional bandit. The identity of this supernumerary gang member had never been established, and it was Henry’s lifelong fear that he would one day be fingered as the mysterious ninth man. After his father’s funeral, he wasted no time in beating it back to England, where he would remain once again in self-imposed exile, this time for nearly a quarter of a century.
When he finally dared hazard another voyage back to his homeland, in 1904—the year after Cole Younger’s pardon—Henry James found America a new country in a new century. At the request of his publisher, Charles Scribner, he embarked on a transcontinental train journey that must have promised the belated consummation of the aborted journalistic junket he had undertaken nearly three decades earlier. The trip, which he documented in a collection of essays published under the title The American Scene, took him all the way out to California, where he visited his nephew in San Francisco. “When Uncle Henry came to us, he found the west rather crude,” Ned James later recalled. “He was bored by the west, by the ‘slobber of noises,’ which we call our language, by the stream of vacant stupid faces on the streets and everywhere the ‘big ogre of business.’” The ascendancy of what Henry once scornfully referred to as “the rank money-passion” led him to fear that the emerging history of the country would inexorably be written by Asa Hite and his spiritual descendants—to the extent that a horde of rapacious entrepreneurs might be called spiritual. (Compared to the depredations of such profit-addled plunderers, those of the old James Gang must have struck the author as well-nigh quaint.) The explosive new American mania for commerce even threatened to encroach upon the ivy-covered walls of William’s venerated Harvard, where Henry observed that many of the young men in the Yard already wore a “business man” face. The philosopher George Santayana, who had been one of William’s outstanding students, accused President Eliot of turning education into preparation for “service in the world of business,” and William himself, with only the barest trace of irony, once wrote to Eliot warning of colleges becoming “training schools of crime.” (Asa Hite was to have revenge of sorts on all four James brothers: He died in 1907, leaving a substantial chunk of his fortune toward the founding of the Harvard Business School, which opened its doors in 1908.)
Having passed the milestone age of sixty, Henry was looking back, acutely aware that the b
ulk of his life and work was behind him. He convinced Scribner to publish a monumental compilation of what he designated as “all of the author’s fiction that he desires perpetuated,” to be known as the New York Edition, which he cryptically insisted should comprise precisely twenty-three volumes. As Leon Edel observed, “[t]he figure seems indeed to have a certain magical quality for James; when he needs a date, a youthful age, a general number, he often fixes on 23.” Twenty-three was the age at which Elena Hite died, and even if Henry was certain he had not fired the shot that killed her—as at Northfield, he never discharged his pistol—he may yet have suffered the guilt of knowing that by continually jumping to his left on that wild night, he might have taken himself out of the path of the bullet that found her. He must have feared that, like some hoary ghost in one of his many tales of the “supernatural and ‘gruesome,’” the sordid specters of his “marriage” to Elena and his attendant outlaw escapades could spring forth at any moment and threaten to “bite him in the ass,” as they soon did.
Following the death of William James from heart failure in 1910, his widow, Alice, imposed upon Henry to write up a few memories of his late brother, a project that, in the prolix author’s hands, soon ballooned into a full-blown autobiography. By 1914 the work had burgeoned to three volumes—the first entitled A Small Boy and Others, the second Notes of a Son and Brother, and the third The Middle Years—before Henry abandoned it, ostensibly owing to the outbreak of the Great War. More likely he was unwilling or unable to come to grips with what he would have been obliged to reveal had he continued. Faced with the classic Jamesian dilemma of “saying and not saying,” the autobiographer seems to have chosen dawdling and, ultimately, death. He succumbed to what he once called “the dusky pall of fatality” on February 28, 1916, the last of his generation to depart. The account of his life was left unfinished, but in what he did complete of it, the writer whose fiction is replete with “unreliable narrators” was to prove himself among the least reliable of all. “To the young,” he once told Edmund Gosse, “the early dead, the baffled, the defeated, I don’t think we can be tender enough” yet not only was he ruthless in his expunging of Elena from the James family history—the text ends abruptly in the mid-1870s, just before she made her appearance in the lives of the Jameses—but, more significantly, he had practically nothing to say about the history of his younger brothers after the Civil War, with the exception of this coy but telling reference in the second volume:
The story, the general one, of the great surge of action on which they were so early carried, was to take still other turns during the years I now speak of, some of these not of the happiest; but with the same relation to it on my own part too depressingly prolonged—that of seeing, sharing, envying, applauding, pitying, all from too far-off, and with the queer sense that, whether or no they would prove to have had the time of their lives, it seemed that the only time I should have had would stand or fall by theirs.
Along with Asa Hite’s concealment of the true cause of his daughter’s death, Henry’s bowdlerized memoirs were to become the fountainhead of a long cascade of cover-ups. In addition to fictionalizing and judiciously editing his autobiography, the author also attempted to cover his tracks by destroying thousands of letters, some of them undoubtedly containing references to Elena Hite and the criminal careers of his younger brothers. (According to William’s biographer Gerald E. Myers, “William’s letters to Henry from August 1876 to October 1882 are lost, with the exception of a single letter of 2 August, 1880.”) These missing documents most likely perished in the roaring bonfire that Henry set at his home in Rye, Sussex—his famous “epistolary immolation,” which uncannily echoed the fate that Elena had suffered at Dewey Square.
Elena Hite’s tragic entanglement with the James brothers began and ended with an assault on a train, that emblematic mode of nineteenth-century conveyance. Her gaslit life was cruelly extinguished before the era of the electric light, the telephone, the automobile, the motion picture, or female suffrage. In effect, like Jesse, she suffered a “double death,” having first been shot and then rubbed out of the history of the James family so thoroughly that for most biographers, it is as if she never lived. The present author would therefore, in Henry James’s phrase, be “ashamed, as of a cold impiety,” not to let her have the last word in these pages, which she provides by way of the singed leaves of what was to be the final entry in her diary, reclaimed from the smoldering interior of her father’s private rail coach:
Oh, tonight has been quite the most unpleasant I ever spent. Father is absolutely livid with me. He has threatened to shunt me off to the Retreat, though I do not, I will not believe it. Never before has he raised his voice or his hand to me, having borne in stolid silence whatever “disgrace” I may have heaped upon his cherished good name. Can I now appear so irredeemably wicked in his eyes as to deserve this most ungentle treatment? Fortunately he has always been more fuse than bomb, so I may yet foster the hope that by Sunday his ire will have fizzled. As I write this, he is engaged in a lively game of whist with that atrocious Mr. Pinkerton & his cronies & already his mood appears to have lightened. (From the bellows of triumph I hear emanating from the smoking parlor I gather that he is winning, a state of affairs which never fails to buoy his spirits.)
[scorched segment]
It was all a horrid muddle, the details of which are so thoroughly seared into my brain that I feel no need to recount them here, as they will certainly abide with me forever. But the fault, I would insist, was not entirely my own. Jesse & Frank James, I gather, were responsible for the introduction of firearms into the evening’s festivities, which comportment could only have been inestimably more disruptive of them than whatever my genial disporting with Dr. James upstairs may have contributed to the general havoc.
[missing page?]
I am so very weary of being the object of the world’s opprobrium, yet my every natural action seems to provoke the most unsparing obloquy, even on the part of those whom I know for a certainty to be no less deserving of it than myself. It distresses me beyond measure to find myself plunged afresh into the Slough of Despond. Perhaps I am more than usually subject to extremes of happiness and of depression, yet I suppose everyone must have moments, even in the most varied and distracting life, when the old questioning spirit, the demon of the Why, Whence, Wither?, stalks in like the skeleton at the feast and takes a seat beside her. At times like these I fear that my vaunted free will may not be nearly so free as dear Dr. James would have me believe. (Nor his own, for that matter! Perhaps it is all just a fragment [sic] of his imagination.)
I had been longing so very especially to see him again, but of course one would be utterly stupid to lay one’s hopes for happiness on this earth in the lap of another human being, even of one who happens to be a medical doctor. Dr. James—dare I say it? Yes, I dare say it!—has the most lovely penis. (Someday, I trust, such a frank reference to the sexual organs will no more cause the blush to mount to one’s face than a reference to any other part of the body!) Not that I maintain any fantasy of marrying the man. Too much is claimed for that shabby old institution & Liberty, I daresay, is a better husband than Love. Still, I shudder to imagine the poor fellow getting hitched with that smug singing sow, Miss Givins [sic].
[water-damaged page]
I go on, I know, as if I were crazy, and it’s a wonder I’m not, but sometimes I feel inclined to think that there is not a good man living; for if I follow my heart with them it seems unfailingly to be to my detriment. (If I were to follow my mind I should surely have nothing at all to do with the impossible creatures!) I welcome the day when all of this [scorched] will be behind me. I know it is unfashionable, perhaps even unthinkable, for a young lady to prefer the life of a spinster to that of a wife & mother, but I cannot help but imagine the serene pleasures of a life alone, perhaps in a humble cabin in the country with my dogs and my paintings. Or perhaps I might further my education. (I did, before all h*ll broke loose, have a most enlight
ening audience with President Eliot. The poor man is stiff as an umbrella and pitifully disfigured, but he—or, rather, his wife & the formidable Mrs. Agassiz—left me with the signal impression that I will yet live to see the day when Harvard deigns to accommodate women in its educational scheme. Won’t that be a wonder!)
[smudged and torn]
In spite of everything I cannot say that I regret having made the acquaintance of the James brothers. It thrills me to know that I hold so many of their secrets, though they, of course, in turn, hold so many of my own. They are such a company of characters & such a picture of differences, & withal so fused & united & interlocked, that I find them all infinitely fascinating & [illegible].
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
RICHARD LIEBMANN-SMITH was educated at Stanford, Columbia, the Yale School of Drama, and the University of Paris. A former editor of The Sciences magazine and at Basic Books, he is co-creator of The Tick, the animated television series, and has written for such publications as The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The New York Times Book Review, Smithsonian Magazine, Playboy, Harper’s, and The National Lampoon. He is the father of a daughter, Rebecca, and lives in New York with his wife, Joan, a medical writer. He is one of four brothers.
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