James gang: bigger than you thought
It is said that in 1876, my great-grandmother, then a girl growing up on a farm in Minnesota, was surprised at her chores by one of the James brothers - Jesse or Frank - stepping out of the woods and politely asking for dinner. She brought him to the house, where her mother fed him, and after he left, thanking them courteously, the two - who'd not let on they knew who he was - considered themselves lucky to be alive. Well, maybe it wasn't one of the James boys, but who else could it be? That was their thinking - and the thinking of hundreds of other Minnesotans that autumn and winter whenever they spotted a stranger, for the James brothers were still on the loose after holding up a bank in Northfield, leaving the cashier and a Swedish immigrant dead. Now I learn from Richard Liebmann-Smith's "The James Boys: A Novel Account of Four Desperate Brothers" (Random House, $25) that there was yet another famous James brother involved in that notorious heist: Henry. That's right, the man of letters and brother to William. Could my family have actually served Henry James dinner? The man's politeness goes far to suggest it.
This is preposterous, I hear you say. And you are right, but the notion that Frank and Jesse were Henry and William's younger brothers (otherwise known to history as Wilkie and Robertson) is the very funny conceit that drives Liebmann-Smith's ingenious novel. As you no doubt know, there is still a good deal of mystery attaching to the James family - or families - all members being indefatigable fiddlers of evidence. A biographer, observes Liebmann-Smith, "faced with all these scissored diaries, doctored documents, incinerated correspondence, multiple aliases, and horses with their shoes on backward . . . could well be forgiven for speculating that an entire Halloween of skeletons might yet be found lurking in the family closet."
The novel begins with Henry aboard an eastbound train pulling out of Kansas City in retreat from the West, about which he had hoped to write lively articles for newspaper readers back in New York. But Henry was no journalist, and the West turned out to be horrid: "All of that open space - those endless empty miles with scarcely a shanty, much less a café or a cathedral to break the sheer geology of it all - had literally made him sick." Soon his troubles are amplified when the train is stopped by bandits and Henry, who has "doubtless never imagined himself the victim of any crime more violent than plagiarism," has to give up not only his watch, wallet, and tiepin, but his notebook. And then, how curious! He recognizes two of the malefactors as his own brothers. Forced to accompany them along with a young lady, Elena Hite, he describes the situation in a letter to William some days later: "Que vous en dirai-je? In brutal summary, our late soldier brothers Rob and Wilkie . . . are very much alive and they are outlaws, having adopted the prénoms de guerre 'Jesse' and 'Frank,' while retaining our illustrious surname," which "they drag through the mud at every criminal outing." Worse, "there appears to have developed something of a bounty on my own belle tête, owing to which wholly unwarranted cranial premium my movements have of necessity been severely curtailed - at least until 'the heat' is off."
Well, you get the picture, enough of it, anyway. There is a great deal more involving the adventures of Miss Hite and the doings of, among others, the detective William Pinkerton, Harvard president Charles Eliot, Gustave Flaubert, and both of the Alices James, sister to the brothers and wife to William. It is surprising how long Liebmann-Smith can sustain this romp, though 261 pages is perhaps one hundred too many. He keeps things from being merely madcap by including inspired pastiche, by quoting pertinently, if noncontextually, from the literary James brothers, and by calling on the insights of biographers and critics from Leon Edel to Louis Menand.
Farfetched though it may be, "The James Brothers" can't hold a candle to the exuberant fabrication that was once the history of Scotland. The late Hugh Trevor-Roper, Lord Dacre, as he became, is now best known for putting his imprimatur on the fake Hitler Diaries, which is, in some ways, just too funny, as one of his great subjects was forgers and fantasists, creative geniuses for whom he had an unmistakable affection. They are present in zealous array in "The Invention of Scotland: Myth and History," a book that had lain unfinished for various reasons even to Trevor-Roper's death, in 2003. It has now been nicely stitched together by Jeremy J. Cater and put before us by Yale University Press ($30).
The aim of this wonderful work of scholarship and literary wit is to show how the "customs and costumes of the Scottish Highlands," which had once been despised as barbarous and even outlawed for a time, were reinvented, embellished, and extended to embrace all of Scotland and her glorious history. The eight chapters show the construction of ideal Scottish pasts by various pens from the 12th century to the 19th. The ends to which these histories were concocted ranged from erasing the period of Pict domination, obscuring the fact that the Scots were Irish, trumping the Welsh for claim to longest reign of kings, uncovering a golden age or two, and justifying Scottish independence.
The last two chapters, on the invention of the kilt and clan tartans, were in fact published 25 years ago, so I give nothing away by telling you that neither kilt nor tartan owes much to ancient Scottish ways. The kilt was the brainchild of an English Quaker who brought his charcoal-making operation and iron foundry up to Scotland from Lancashire in 1727. Dismayed by the inappropriateness to factory labor of the blankets worn by his Scottish workers, he had little skirts run up for them - of the sort now seen everywhere where Scottishness is celebrated, from the gateway to Nova Scotia to the greensward of Balmoral. As for the distinctive tartans of the many Scottish clans, they sprang from the union of industrial cloth manufacture and the romantic spirit of a couple of Englishmen posing as Scots and, eventually, as direct successors of Charles Stuart. Their story is exhilaratingly odd and revelatory, as is this whole marvelous book, of how much history owes to charlatanism.
Katherine A. Powers lives in Cambridge. Her column appears on alternate Sundays. She can be reached by e-mail at pow3@verizon.net.
