4. The Tales We Tell

As human beings, one of the things that separate us from other animals is our ability to tell stories. This goes beyond ghost stories, fairy tales, and good books. We tell stories in subtler ways as well. We tell ourselves stories about the world around us, and we tell the world around us stories about ourselves. 

I'm telling you a story right now, a story about Ben Legg. I'm not the first person to write stories about him. The Seattle newspapers told a number of stories about Legg, which I'll argue had varying degrees of accuracy. Legg told stories about himself as well, having learned something of the art from his father, Robert Legg. 

Robert Legg told stories. Lots of stories. They were generally motivated by the desire to obtain some advantage (like money or property), or put forth a particular idea about himself. A lot of what the contemporary Legg family knows about its senior patriarch was passed down to them in the stories he told. Unfortunately, these stories don't always square well with historic fact.

It's tiresome to be so relentlessly skeptical about the Leggs, but the flare for storytelling often outstripped commitment to the truth. I considered writing only the facts, leaving out Robert's more colorful embroideries on the truth. But I believe I we can learn a lot from the stories that people pass down, even if the story itself is not likely to be true. Robert Legg's tall tales may not always convey facts about him and his family, but they are useful in telling us more about what Robert Legg wanted to see when he looked in the mirror.

I had planned to discuss Robert Legg's propensity for telling stories much further down the line, but we come up against Robert Legg's first colorful story in the discussion of why he left England to come to the United States. Did he really strike a nobleman? There is no way to prove or disprove the story, and it's possible that it was based in fact. Again and again, Robert Legg would paint himself as a hero of the common man, a bold, adventurous, brilliant fellow, who was nevertheless persecuted due to no fault of his own.

Many of Robert Legg's stories are passed down in the Legg family tree compiled by his granddaughters, Nancy Lodine and Patricia Gilbert. Lodine and Gilbert were working with recollections of a number of people, in an era before genealogy had been revolutionized by the internet. Two of the stories that recorded were passed down from Robert Legg concerned his connections with famous writers: Algernon Swinburne and Robert Louis Stevenson. Legg deeply valued literature and was known to write poetry, so these connections would have been a great source of pride. Unfortunately, they are easily disproven with a little leg(Legg?)work.

In his article about Jack Legg and Jane Swinburn, Matthew Tate invokes Algernon Charles Swinburne but stops just short of claiming a relationship between the writer and Robert Legg's mother. Robert Legg had no such compunction. Swinburne was the grandson of Sir John Swinburne, 6th Baronet, whose home, Capheaton Hall, was in Northumberland. Having pored over the known genealogies of both Algernon Charles Swinburne and Jane Swinburne, I can tell you that they are not related. Not even as distant cousins. Swinburne is an interesting writer to have been revered by Legg, as he evidently wrote about a variety of taboo topics, including lesbianism, cannibalism, sado-masochism, and anti-theism.

The other writer that Legg claimed connection with was Robert Louis Stevenson, who he said paid him a visit while en route to the South Pacific. Again, the timing makes this event impossible. Legg moved to Washington State in 1890; two years prior, Stevenson chartered a boat that would convey him all over the southern and eastern Pacific, until his death in Samoa in 1894.

So would it be better not to mention the two famous writers and Robert Legg's claims to them? I don't believe so. I think there is great valuing in learning more about the stories that Robert Legg was telling others - and telling himself.