The James Boys Read online

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Introduction

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  Copyright

  For my brothers in blood and spirit,

  and for Joan and Rebecca

  Introduction

  During the winter and spring of 1998–99, the meticulously footnoted pages of The New York Review of Books crackled with a heated debate over the life of William James. At issue, along with such weighty matters as the existence of free will and the etiology of clinical depression, was whether or not the great Harvard philosopher and psychologist had been a compulsive masturbator. Evidence for this incendiary assertion was gingerly marshaled and reviewed by Professor Louis Menand, then of the City University of New York, who presented as Exhibit A this famous passage from James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience, describing a state of mind that James called “panic fear”:

  Here [wrote James] is an excellent example, for permission to print which I have to thank the sufferer. The original is in French, and though the subject was evidently in a bad nervous condition at the time of which he writes, his case has otherwise the merit of extreme simplicity. I translate freely.

  “Whilst in this state of philosophic pessimism and general depression of spirits about my prospects, I went one evening into a dressing-room in the twilight to procure some article that was there; when suddenly there fell upon me without any warning, just as if it came out of the darkness, a horrible fear of my own existence. Simultaneously there arose in my mind the image of an epileptic patient whom I had seen in the asylum, a black-haired youth with greenish skin, entirely idiotic, who used to sit all day on one of the benches, or rather shelves against the wall, with his knees drawn up against his chin, and the coarse gray undershirt, which was his only garment, drawn over them inclosing his entire figure. He sat there like a sort of sculptured Egyptian cat or Peruvian mummy, moving nothing but his black eyes and looking absolutely non-human. This image and my fear entered into a species of combination with each other. That shape am I, I felt, potentially. Nothing that I possess can defend me against that fate, if the hour for it should strike for me as it struck for him. There was such a horror of him, and such a perception of my own merely momentary discrepancy from him, that it was as if something hitherto solid within my breast gave way entirely, and I became a mass of quivering fear.”

  This harrowing vignette has long attracted the attention of James’s biographers because in 1904, two years after its original publication, he revealed to his French translator that the man whose terrifying experience of “panic fear” he had described was none other than himself. There had been no original translation from the French, no gracious permission to print; the psychologist had, he confessed, presented his own case history.

  As a result of James’s revelation, many students of his life have tried to fit the story of the epileptic patient into a crisis-and-recovery narrative according to which James had suffered, in the early 1870s, what might be described in lay terms as a kind of nervous breakdown. The notion that this crisis may have been precipitated by—or at least have been associated in James’s mind with—compulsive masturbation originated, Menand discovered, in an article published in 1968 by the historian Cushing Strout of Cornell. “Strout’s idea,” wrote Menand, “is that the vision of the epileptic occurred some time between 1866, when James returned from a trip to Brazil and decided he didn’t want to be a naturalist, and 1869, when he received his medical degree and decided he didn’t want to be a doctor.” Strout speculated that James was convinced there was a link between introspection (“speculation and contemplative Grüblei”) and masturbation, and between masturbation and insanity. The hideous figure of the epileptic patient, Strout concluded, was an objective representation both of William’s “self-punishing guilt” and of his dread at being stuck in a medical career—the only professional path that appeared open to him after he abandoned the field of natural history.

  Additional support for such an interpretation, Professor Menand went on, was provided by University of Chicago polymath Sandor Gilman. In his book Disease and Representation, Gilman suggested that James’s description of the epileptic might have been based on a portrait of a mental patient that had appeared in an 1838 treatise on insanity, Des maladies mentales, by the pioneering French psychiatrist Jean-Étienne Esquirol. Not only was this work written, as Gilman pointed out, in the language of James’s ostensible subject, but the patient depicted in Esquirol’s book—who bears a striking resemblance to the asylum inmate described by James—is explicitly identified as an idiot and a masturbator. To support his assertion that James had a fear of descending into madness as a result of his own behavior, Gilman cited an entry from James’s diary, dated February 1, 1870, in which he claimed James referred “in a direct manner” to his habitual masturbation: “Hitherto I have tried to fire myself with the moral interest, as an aid in the accomplishing of certain utilitarian ends of attaining certain difficult but salutary habits.”

  Biography, of course, is hardly an exact science, and Professor Menand, as we shall see, ultimately arrived at a very different—though perhaps even more disturbing—conclusion about the story of the epileptic patient. But do we, or should we, even care if William James (to use a more colorful, if less suitably Victorian, expression) was a major jerk-off artist? Or, for that matter, if his brother Henry, widely venerated as one of the greatest novelists in the English language, was as queer as the proverbial three-dollar bill—a proposition with which his biographer Leon Edel played literary footsie for five long volumes? William James himself, we must recall, once warned that the art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.

  Yet we cannot overlook such embarrassing or inconvenient possibilities, nor should we; for biographical probing in this instance transcends mere prurient interest in the private activities of private men. The Jameses, after all, present much more than a fascinating case study in psychopathology and twisted family dynamics. As Stanford historian Otis Pease once remarked, virtually the entire story of nineteenth-century America is encompassed in the saga of the James brothers—William and Henry in the East, Frank and Jesse in the West. Or, as the narrator of Peter De Vries’s comic novel Consenting Adults observed, “If America can be thought of as polarized between two sets of James brothers, Jesse and Frank at one end and you know who at the other, why, we dramatize to ourselves in this one configuration its infinite cultural variety.”

  Indeed, it would be nearly impossible to overstate the magnitude of the mark the James family has left on the American cultural landscape. The intellectual and literary achievements of “the scientist who wrote psychology like a novelist and the novelist who wrote fiction like a psychologist” (a commonplace even in their own lifetimes) were so influential that the critic Jacques Barzun was moved to designate an entire quarter century of our cultural history as “the reign of William and Henry.” Between them, the two older James brothers practically cornered the market of ideas in their age. In addition to the aforementioned Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), William’s groundbreaking writings include his magisterial The Principles of Psychology (1890) and such popular works as The Will to Believe (1897) and Talks to Teachers (1899). Henry James, of course, gave us a groaning shelf of novels, novellas, short stories, travel writings, and critical essays, highlighted by such enduring masterworks of fiction as Daisy Miller (1878), The Po
rtrait of a Lady (1881), The Wings of the Dove (1902), and The Golden Bowl (1904).

  The reign of Frank and Jesse, while briefer and based on only a single idea, was no less impressive: Their towering oeuvre includes the seminal daylight bank heist at Liberty, Missouri (1866); their ambitious (if failed) First National Bank job in Northfield, Minnesota (1876); and the storied robbery of the Glendale train (1879). To poet Carl Sandburg, Jesse James is “the only American bandit who is classical, who is to this country what Robin Hood and Dick Turpin are to England, whose exploits are so close to the mythical and apocryphal.”

  In recent decades, considerable scholarly attention has also been lavished on Alice James, the James brothers’ long-neglected sister, in whom such feminist writers as Jean Strouse and Susan Sontag discovered a paradigm of Victorian patriarchal hegemony run amuck. “To be a James and a girl,” wrote Strouse, “was a contradiction in terms.”

  Of course, it might also seem a contradiction in terms to be a James and a ruthless bushwhacker. Born Garth Wilkinson and Robertson James, and overshadowed in childhood by their gifted older siblings, the two younger brothers (not to be confused with the Younger brothers, with whom they were often professionally associated) were to demonstrate a peculiarly American genius for reinventing themselves, gaining national notoriety as the desperate border bandits Frank and Jesse. “While the older brothers came of age slowly under the protective cover of ill health and parental bounty,” wrote Cornell psychiatrist Howard M. Feinstein, “the younger pair was forced into premature manhood by battle, so that this minor theme in the lives of William and Henry became the central chapter, the climax of their work lives. Thereafter uncannily they reenacted the plot laid out in their father’s early stories. Like so many of the elder Henry’s boyhood friends, in spite of ‘brilliant promise’ and ‘romantic charm,’ both younger sons ‘ended badly.’”

  Perhaps it was this familial fear of “ending badly” that overtook William James in his frightening identification with the famous epileptic patient. If so, what, if anything, did masturbation have to do with it? The flap over William James’s putative propensity for “self-abuse” reveals not only the extent to which scholars have been fascinated with the minutiae of the Jameses’ private lives, but also the degree to which the Jameses were bent on protecting their privacy. Not surprisingly, there is no explicit reference to whacking the wand in any of the writings that William James left. (Those “salutary habits” to which he referred in the diary entry cited by Sandor Gilman were likely nothing more titillating than the routine of getting up early in the morning, according to Professor Menand.) Indeed, the reddest flag on the subject is not anything James left but what he didn’t leave. “The biggest impediment to getting a coherent crisis-and-recovery narrative out of the materials of his life between 1867 and 1873,” Menand explained, “is that large portions of the record are simply missing.” James, he noted, “was never a daily diarist, but the entries in the notebook he used for a diary are fairly regular from April 1868, when it begins, to February 1869. Then twenty-one pages (or as much as forty-two pages of writing) have been cut out, apparently with scissors.”

  Despite this suspicious excision, Professor Menand not only took issue with the diagnosis of William James as a compulsive masturbator, he went even further, questioning the veracity of the account that James had confessed to be his own case history. The story of the epileptic patient, Menand concluded, was a piece of “biographical flotsam,” unmoored to any known event in James’s life. “It can be interpreted,” he wrote, “as a precipitating crisis, as a psychological breakthrough, as simply one among many crises, most of which are now unrecoverable—or as a partial invention, a little work of semi-fiction.”

  These proclivities for writing “semi-fiction” and destroying documents—and William was by no means the only, nor even the worst, offender of the lot—bring us to the crux of the dilemma faced by any biographer of the James family: The Jameses were a notoriously slippery bunch who, as Jean Strouse put it, “grew adept at giving eloquently ambiguous voice to the way things were supposed to be: they learned to see and not see, say and not say, reveal and conceal, all at the same time.” The father, Henry James, Sr., wrote a version of his life story, Immortal Life: Illustrated in a Brief Autobiographical Sketch of the Late Stephen Dewhurst, hiding behind the wholly fictitious character of the title. Henry James, Jr., in his own autobiography, Professor Menand pointed out, “freely changed dates, suppressed facts, and rewrote passages from other people’s letters, and then often added injury to insult by destroying the originals.” According to Leon Edel, Henry had “a kind of rage of privacy and dealt in mystification to confound those who would treat his life.” In 1909, toward the end of that life, the master novelist went so far as to heap forty years of correspondence onto a roaring bonfire in his garden, in accordance with what he referred to as “the law that I have made tolerably absolute these last years as I myself grow older and think more of my latter end: the law of not leaving personal and private documents at the mercy of any accidents, or even of my executors!” Frank and Jesse, it goes without saying, had an abiding professional commitment to covering their tracks. Their recorded lives present a Gordian sheepshank of alibis and aliases in which, according to their biographer William A. Settle, Jr., of the University of Tulsa, “fact and fiction are so entwined that it is difficult—at times, impossible—to untangle them.” (Indeed, until the 1995 exhumation and DNA analysis of Jesse’s remains, there had even been lingering doubts that the body buried beneath the headstone bearing his name was in fact the outlaw’s.)

  None of which is to suggest that the Jameses were compulsive liars (except perhaps Frank and Jesse, whose mendacity was the least of their crimes). But they were all famously flexible in their notion of the truth. William, one of the founders of the pragmatic school of philosophy, claimed that “truth happens to an idea; it becomes true, is made true by events.” And Henry, who once remarked that “facts themselves are often falsifying,” justified altering documents in his autobiography by proclaiming, according to another of his biographers, Lyndall Gordon, that “what he had written was no common memoir; it was a work of imaginative, not literal, truth. The ghosts of the dead had his ear, his spirit had communed with theirs, and the result was a biographic truth that was truer in its suggestiveness, its closeness to the ‘unspeakable past,’ than figures nailed down by cast-iron facts.”

  “What makes partial biographical information generally worse than no information at all,” Professor Menand complained, “is that speculation fills the gaps and eventually becomes indistinguishable from ‘the facts.’” Faced with all these scissored diaries, doctored documents, incinerated correspondence, multiple aliases, and horses with their shoes on backward, a biographer of the Jameses could well be forgiven for speculating that an entire Halloween of skeletons might yet be found lurking in the family closet. (To further fan the flames of such suspicions, even today—nearly a century after Henry’s death in 1916—many of the family papers still remain sealed to scholars.)

  Certainly the numerous histories of their lives available now leave many crucial questions unanswered: How, for example, was William James (compulsive masturbator or not) able to consider establishing the first laboratory of experimental psychology in America—“raising the money himself,” according to his Harvard colleague George Herbert Palmer—on an assistant professor’s salary of only twelve hundred dollars a year? And what exactly did William mean when he confessed to his wife long after their 1878 wedding that for two years during their courtship, he had behaved like “a man morally utterly diseased”? How could the younger brothers, Garth Wilkinson and Robertson, Union officers once so deeply committed to the abolitionist cause that they volunteered for service in the first black regiments of the Civil War, have metamorphosed into those Rebel icons Frank and Jesse? And what drove Henry James to take it on the lam from the United States in the early 1880s and hole up in Europe until after the dawn of a new cen
tury?

  The account that follows, though by no means a thorough cradle-to-grave biography, may help shed some light on these vexing conundrums. It focuses on only a single year (1876) in the long saga of the Jameses, but that year, as we shall see, was a crucial one indeed, involving perhaps the strongest extrafamilial link among the brothers in their adult lives—a young woman named Elena Hite. Alluring, impetuous, free-thinking, by turns vivacious and sullen, this errant daughter of the minor Hartford railroad baron Asa Hite likely served among the real-life models for some of Henry James’s most celebrated fictional heroines, including the scandalous Daisy Miller, the histrionic Verena Tarrant of The Bostonians, and the high-spirited Isabel Archer of The Portrait of a Lady. Miss Hite was herself hardly a prolific diarist, but neither was she so swift with the scissors and flames as the Jameses. Through the unique prism of her surviving journals and letters, in conjunction with recently unearthed material from the archives of the Pinkerton National Detective Agency, we are privileged to view the James family in a new and revealing—if sometimes painfully embarrassing—light.

  That curmudgeonly critic H. L. Mencken once wrote that in choosing to live and work in Europe, Henry James had gone in the wrong direction. “What he needed,” contended Mencken, “was intimate contact with the life of his own country…. The West would have amused, intrigued and finally conquered him.” But Mencken was wrong on at least two counts: Henry James did indeed visit the West, and it neither amused nor intrigued him. It did, however, in a sense conquer him, and here our story begins.

  Chapter One

  At four-forty-five on the afternoon of July 7, 1876, the Number 4 Missouri Pacific Express, made up of two sleeping cars, three day coaches, and two baggage cars, pulled out of Kansas City, headed east for St. Louis. Among the passengers aboard that day, along with the usual contingent of rough-clad farmers, itinerant preachers, and high-collared Chicago drummers, was Henry James, who was completing a tour of the western states and territories he had embarked on six weeks earlier at the behest of John Hay, editor of The New York Tribune. Such journalistic journeys had become all the rage ever since the great linkage of the nation’s eastern and western rail lines in 1869, opening the continent for commerce, settlement, and an exotic new brand of tourism that the railroad companies and newspapers hoped might appeal to wealthy Americans jaded with the fashionable Grand Tour of Europe.