Jesse, Frank, William & Henry James
Rob James
Novels of European-American manners, and discussions of psychology and pragmatism, go down more smoothly with tales of bank robberies.
April 13, 2025
It may seem a light hardship as hardships go, but it has been at least a bit of a burden to be “Robert James,” with a first name for a last name. My high school German teacher kept calling on a student named “Jimmy Roberts.” To this day I receive many emails and letters beginning “Dear Jim.” I let it slide but make sure to reply “Rob,” which works about half the time. In settings when someone apologizes, I brush it off. These days, I quickly say “it’s like Lebron James or Jesse James.”
By now, I am aware of many other Jameses (note the awkward plural form, and the still more awkward possessive forms James’s and Jameses’)—there are a bandleader, a jazz pianist, several blues singers, a comedian, an actor, and now even a Bronny James. But it was not always so. My father had an uncle Jess, and since the whole family had Biblical names it is pretty clear he was coping with being “Jesse James” around the time of the more famous fellow and his brother and partner-in-crime Frank. In college I encountered the philosopher William James and the novelist Henry James; I even read some of each. (Their prose styles have provoked the comment that William was the natural novelist and Henry the natural philosopher!) Only later in travels with my good friend John Hansen around the American West did I learn much about Jesse, Frank, and other outlaws.
What better way to get to know more about all four of these Jameses than in a mixtape? As Mary Poppins might have said, just a spoonful of bank-robbery sugar helps the literary-philosophical medicine go down. In any event, here I go.
The four of them lived at about the same time. There is no proof that William or Henry met Jesse or Frank. Then again, there is no proof that they didn’t. There is a funny novel imagining them as a team called The James Boys, which I won’t attempt to recreate. Instead, I will tell the story of William in roman face (told straight), Henry (father and son) in indented italics (mostly told in the form of episode names of the television series Friends), and the infamous outlaws in boldface (told in the exaggerated style of an ole-timey dime-novel Western).
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Henry James Sr. (1811-1882) was a weird chap. Born to New York wealth, he dabbled in spiritualism and was captivated by the ideas of Emmanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772), a Swedish psychic and mystic who claimed to speak with angels and demons and who said the Last Judgment had already occurred in a parallel universe in 1757 (William Blake was also inspired by his visions).
Henry Sr. wrote a very obscure book The Secret of Swedenborg (1869). In one of the all-time great critical put-downs, a reviewer congratulated James on “keeping the secret”!
Elder son William (1842-1910) wended a wayward path through travels and education in Europe and Latin America, pursuing then discarding interests in painting, medicine, mystical spirituality, and various hallucinogens (he said that inhaling nitrous oxide allowed him to understand Hegel). He came to the Harvard faculty in 1872 and practiced physiology, leading to the new field of psychology. He was a member of the Transcendental Club with C.S. Peirce (1839-1914) (extra points for spelling it correctly and pronouncing it “purse”) and Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. (1841-1935). Then William took a new direction…
Allow the younger brother to have his early day, dear narrator.
Henry (1843-1916) was a novelist from the very beginning, as a child lecturing a bemused Louisa May Alcott on the art. He suffered an “obscure back injury” in 1861 that kept him from military service, and he never married. He likewise made many European journeys, building up ammunition for his life’s output. As he set out on his life’s career, he…
Now wait just a goldurn minnit, you fancy Yankees! Lemme get me a word in.
Frank James he was borned in 1843 and his brother Jesse four years later. They was raised in Clay County, Missouri, the most confederate-leaning durn county in the most whole durn border state in the War of Northern Aggression. You think Kansas was bloody—well sir, you shoulda done seen Clay County in those days when everbody’s dander got riled up. Southern sympathizers caught up with Union soldiers in massacres in Lawrence and Centralia.
Frank he up and joined the Missouri Guard in 1861, and then both of the two of them hitched up with the irregylar guerilla-like Bushwackers run by Bloody Bill Anderson and William Quantrill. They made quite a noise during the war, got theyselves bloodied up as well, and by Appomattox they had theyselves quite a long list of people they was pining to git revenge from.
They probably done the first daylight bank robbery in Liberty, Missouri in 1866, and then joined Cole Younger’s gang two years later. In 1869 there was a bank robbery in Gallatin, Missouri where they done rode right through the clutches of a posse. That fired up the public into thinking they was some kind of Robin Hoods, though the only poor they gave to was theyselves.
In 1874 the express company hired that man out of Chicago—what was his name, the one with the agency? Oh yeah, Allan Pinkerton. He took on Jesse and Frank as his personal assignment. Pinkerton bombed the James home and maimed their momma, which stirred the public up something fierce in favor of the James boys.
Things was going mighty fine. In 1873 they robbed them a train outside of Adair, Iowa, and that is still the biggest thing that ever happened anywheres near that town—they have a big road sign commemoratin’ it and everthing. Then the 1876 Great Northfield, Minnesota bank robbery went south, when the local citizenry took advantage of the gang’s lousy lookouts, killing a couple and capturing one of them Youngers. Jesse he formed a new gang in 1879 and lifted some coin from a train in Glendale, Missouri, but it tweren’t the same…
Ahem. Charming.
The novels of Henry James are situated somewhere between realism and modernism, leavened by impressionism. He wrote them out in longhand, but partway through his career he started dictating them to a “typewriter” (a woman who transcribed his sinuous sentences).
The plots are formulaic—they feature practically every possible combination of American v European, rich v poor, healthy v sickly, innocent v scheming, U.S. v European locales, and a limited number of other variables. The action, if action it be, takes place in the vocabulary of the narrator and the brains of the characters—the writings are elaborate works tending toward streams of consciousness. H.G. Wells compared the prose of Henry James to the act of a hippopotamus laboriously trying repetitively to retrieve a pea that has rolled into its cage. Read Max Beerbohm’s The Mote in the Middle Distance for a pitch-perfect parody of a supposed Henry James Christmas story.
The American (1877) (the one where an improbably named “Christopher Newman” (get it?) travels from America to Europe)
Daisy Miller (1878) (the one where a wealthy American girl goes to Switzerland and Rome and gets toyed with by Frederick Winterbourne)
The Europeans (1878) (the one where two Europeans observe Boston morals and mores)
Washington Square (1880) (the one where wealthy Austin Sloper seeks to shield his unsought daughter Caroline from suitor Morris Townsend)
Portrait of a Lady (1881) (the one where wealthy American Isabel Archer copes with American expatriate Gilbert Osmond across Europe)
The Bostonians (1885) (the one where Southern chauvinist Basil Ransom and Boston feminist Olive Chancellor vie for the affections of Verena Tarrant)
The Princess Casamassima (1886) (the one where Hyacinth Robinson considers committing an act of terrorism—this one, The Bostonians and the “telegraphess” story “In the Cage” (1898) together form what I call the “political phase of Henry James”)…
I say, all these Henry James novels sound about the same. I am grateful to the blog writer for naming the main characters so I can remember which is which. No matter, though, it is time for William James to get another word in edgewise!
His medical and philosophical interests coincided in his Principles of Psychology (1890), considered to be the first textbook on the subject. Key concepts in that two-volume tome include the stream of consciousness, the James-Lange theory of emotion (we are scared of a bear because we run from it; we are happy because we smile), and the mystery of free will. “The moral equivalent of war” is a famous line from his speech at Stanford in 1906 (where he rode out the San Francisco earthquake, nearly shouting “Go it, and go it stronger!”)…
Okay, you varmints has got way ahead of the story of Frank and Jesse. The heat was on after Glendale so in 1881 Jesse he settled down in St. Joseph, Missouri under the name of Thomas Howard, with a loyal gang member named Charley Ford and Charley’s kid brother Robert. Well sir, that kid decided he would get him the dead-or-alive ree-ward money that the railroads had done laid on Jesse’s haid.
One day in 1882, it seems Jesse knew the jig was up. He stopped to unholster his loaded gun, laid it down on the table, and turned to look at a picture on the wall—and I’ll be durned if that coward Robert Ford didn’t shoot him in the back right then and there. That assassin Robert was convicted of murder and sentenced to hang, but the governor he done pardoned him…
How interesting.
Now, as I was about to relate, William’s interest turned from psychology to philosophy and religion. A key work is The Will to Believe (1897) (judge your free will by what belief brings to your life; an attempt to refute determinism that is unsuccessful, Robert Sapolsky would say). He presciently attacked the worship and pursuit of “the bitch-goddess SUCCESS.”
In The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), he urged us to explore not religious institutions, churches, or theology, but rather what experiences individuals have while acting under the condition of their personal faith.
In works like Pragmatism (1907) he explored the pragmatic theory of truth—measuring the truth of a statement by how well the statement and actual things cohere, hang together. (His statement that truth is measured by its “cash value” has been misread; he calls for an appraisal of some relationship to “possible empirical observations” (a precursor of positivism).) …
Thank you for those aetherial observations. As for the next stage for our dear Henry, his later writings became ever more complex.
What Maisie Knew (1897) (the one with the girl observing her parents divorce and remarry and the new partners chase each other, all of them except poor Maisie deserving what they got)
The Turn of the Screw (1898) (the one where the governess thinks her two kids see ghosts of former employees—but who is insane here?)
The Wings of the Dove (1902) (the one where wealthy sickly Milly Theale is preyed upon by Kate Croy with Merton Densher in the middle)
The Ambassadors (1903) (the one where Lewis Strether is sent to Europe, as an “ambassador” of sorts, to fetch his fiancee’s possibly wayward son Chad Newsome, much like The Talented Mr. Ripley)
The Beast in the Jungle (1903) (the one where John Marcher is sure something unique is going to happen to him, so holds May Bartram at bay) (I did the audiobook narration of this work on iTunes, YouTube and Librivox; my favorite critical review is “dude sounds like Kermit”)
The Golden Bowl (1904) (the one with Maggie Verver buying an overpriced antique objet d’art and being courted)…
Just to wrap things up on my end, that coward, the assassin Robert Ford, became a Colorado barkeep and was hisself kilt by a double-barreled shotgun blast courtesy of Edward O’Kelley in 1892. O’Kelley was convicted and sentenced to hang, but the Colorado governor, well, he up and pardoned O’Kelley.
Frank James he died in 1915.
Jesse James Jr. he growed all up and he became a lawyer of all things, in—let me see, let me get my eyeglasses—Los An-gle-eez, Californy.
And that is all she done wrote. R.I.P….
William died in 1910. He now inhabits the vastation of the universe. …
Henry became a British citizen in 1915, was awarded the Order of Merit, and died in 1916. Requesciat in pace.
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And now, gentle reader, you know something of the stories of the famous and the infamous James boys of the nineteenth century.