WHAT DR. HOLMES would be famous for was none of these things. His fame was for being a talker, in a city that prized talk. In fact, said Van Wyck Brooks, he was “more than anything else a talker.” Dr. Holmes himself regarded talking as “one of the fine arts—the noblest, the most important, and the most difficult.” He described his own method of practicing this art as “interviewing himself,” and the answers he gave formed a stream of “whimsical discursiveness” that leapt nimbly from topic to topic. A few of his contemporaries complained of his habit of monopolizing conversation—he was never invited to join the town’s Friday Club because the other members feared they would never get another word in if he were a regular member—but none faulted his ability to keep his listeners entertained.42
Holmes’s own famous Saturday Club met once a month at the Parker House hotel, and even with Longfellow, Hawthorne, Emerson, James Russell Lowell, Charles Eliot Norton, and the renowned orator and senator Charles Sumner and the eminent scientists Asa Gray and Louis Agassiz at the table, Dr. Holmes was who they mostly listened to, hours on end, sometimes into the early morning hours. He had a knack, said one, not just of having something witty or insightful to say on just about everything, but of creating the sense that it was a conversation no matter how much he talked: he played off the thoughts and suggestions of others like a jazz musician improvising a riff.
Talk was a Holmes family trait; they all had it. At age six, the future justice’s first teacher sent home a report card: “Talks too much.” “Is it true,” the president of Harvard Charles Eliot once asked Justice Holmes, “that when the Holmes family sat down to breakfast together they all talked at once without really expecting to be listened to? Your father once gave me a very amusing picture of that performance.” Wendell Jr.’s tactic for dealing with this “free for all” was recounted by his younger brother, Edward: “Wendell ends every sentence with a ‘but’ so as to hold the floor till he can think of something else to say.”43
The Holmes family: left to right, Edward, Mrs. Holmes, Amelia,
Wendell, Dr. Holmes
The real wit and talker of the family, according to the justice’s own estimate many years later, was Dr. Holmes’s younger brother.44 John Holmes was not famous at all, except among a close circle of devoted friends.
He had done his brother’s dilettantism one better by abandoning any pretence of working for a living at all. The ne’er-do-well bachelor was as rugged a New England archetype as the Brahmin, and Holmes’s Uncle John played it to the hilt. He had graduated from Harvard and Harvard Law School but after a short and none-too-serious effort to practice law gave it up forever. He then went to sea as a common sailor on a square-rigged sailing ship, returning two months later with a lame leg and no further ambition but to live in the old family home and look after his widowed mother.45
John Holmes
With a small income from some rental property in Cambridge he had inherited, he did just that, moving to a smaller house near Cambridge Common after his mother died in 1862. He played whist and conversed with James Lowell and other friends who regularly dropped by to see him (among them the publisher John Bartlett, then at work on his first book of quotations); kept stacks of dimes and quarters on the windowsill to hand out to neighborhood children and other passing strangers; regularly attended Harvard commencement; and composed long whimsical letters in the persona of an old Yankee seafarer from Kennebunk, Goliath Tittle, to his young nephew Ned.46 To others he wrote letters and spun dialogues involving biblical patriarchs trying to tie their shoelaces, Calvinist preachers reassessing the doctrine of infant damnation after a few mellowing mugs of toddy, and a loquacious dog on a desert island. It was from his Uncle John, Holmes told his fellow justice Charles Hughes many years later, that he learned “not to be afraid of vulgar talk,” something he definitely would not have learned from his father.47
The more important difference between the two brothers, though, when it came to their wit and talk, was the distinction Lowell pointedly drew: “Wendell markets all his goods, John gives his to his friends.”48
Dr. Holmes had indeed found a way to make talk pay. Not long after his Autocrat stories first showed him just how much the market would pay for his goods, he was regaling his nephew and some of his nephew’s college friends after dinner for an hour or so, when he suddenly leapt up from the table, and exclaimed, “Why! I believe I’ve wasted a hundred dollars worth on you boys tonight!” He was kidding, but not really.49
The genius of The Autocrat was indeed that it was Dr. Holmes’s conversation. With no Boswell to record his table talk, “he had Boswellized himself,” Brooks wrote.50 The index of the book was a minor comic masterpiece in itself; a random selection perfectly captures the “whimsical discursiveness” of the doctor’s talk:
Abuse, all good attempts get; Authors, hate those who call them droll; Beauties, vulgar, their virtuous indignation on being looked at; Bores, all men are, except when we want them; Canary-bird, swimming movements of; Children, superstitious little wretches and spiritual cowards; Conversation, very serious matter; Dandies, men are born; Feeling that we have been in the same condition before, modes of explaining it; Gil Blas, the archbishop served him right; Heresy, burning for, experts in, would be found in any large city; Huckleberries, hail-storm of; Knuckles, marks of, on broken glass; Log, using old schoolmates as, to mark our rate of sailing; Minds, jerky ones fatiguing; Minister, my old, his remarks on want of attention; Norwich, how not to pronounce; Novel, one, everybody has stuff for; Old Age, how nature cheats us into; Profession, literary men should have a; Rum, the term applied by low people to noble fluids; Seven Wise Men of Boston, their sayings; Shakespeare, old copy, with flakes of piecrust between its leaves; Sin, introduction to; Thoughts, tell worst to minister and best to young people; Toy, author carves a wonderful, at Marseilles; Walking arm against arm, laws of; Youth, American, not perfect type of physical humanity
One typical passage of the Autocrat not only demonstrates Dr. Holmes’s breathless “tendency to linguacity,” as he himself described his relentless style of talk, but also expressed what would become a favorite maxim of his son’s:
All generous minds have a horror of what are commonly called “facts.” They are the brute beasts of the intellectual domain. Who does not know fellows that always have an ill-conditioned fact or two which they lead after them into decent company like so many bull-dogs, ready to let them slip at every ingenious suggestion, or convenient generalization, or pleasant fancy? I shall allow no “facts” at this table. What! Because bread is good and wholesome, and necessary and nourishing, shall you thrust a crumb into my windpipe while I am talking? Do not these muscles of mine represent a hundred loaves of bread? and is not my thought the abstract of ten thousand of these crumbs of truth with which you would choke off my speech?
(The above remark must be conditioned and qualified for the vulgar mind. The reader will, of course, understand the precise amount of seasoning which must be added to it before he adopts it as one of the axioms of his life. The speaker disclaims all responsibility for its abuse in incompetent hands.)51
Nobody had done this before; like Mark Twain’s Mississippi steamboat captains and gold rush desperados, Dr. Holmes’s Autocrat was not a character out of a book but a character out of life—and American life at that—and he did it before Twain. “The Autocrat is not a picture of New Englandism,” observed Morse, “it is an actual piece of New England, a sample cut solidly out of the original body.”52 Each of the Autocrat’s papers ended with an original poem, a gimmick Dr. Holmes had used in his popular lectures, and among the Autocrat’s are two that remain Dr. Holmes’s best and best known, “The Chambered Nautilus,” and “The Wonderful One-Hoss-Shay.”
And yet, as his sharper literary contemporaries recognized, there was always something flash and superficial about the doctor’s performances. “He could always write or speak to order,” Emerson pointedly noted in his journal, “partly from the abundance of the stream, whic
h can fill indifferently any provided channel.” The doctor’s irreverence and endless juggling of ideas and words (he loved bad puns, while pretending to deplore them) was always an end itself, never a means to deeper reflection. “He laid trains of thought that later became abuses,” admitted Brooks. “In fact, he was a wit and not too wise.”53
The humor of an earlier time rarely translates well to a later generation, but Dr. Holmes’s best-known creation was so closely identified with its author that it barely outlived him at all. “Unsupported by his physical presence,” the critic V. L. Parrington wrote just thirty years after his death, “his writings seem far less vital than they did when the echoes of his clever talk were still sounding through them.” The doctor’s attempts at more lasting literary accomplishment went nowhere. No one took his serious novels seriously, and Parrington’s final verdict on Dr. Holmes’s place in literature was acute, and deadly. “He was always an amateur,” Parrington concluded; “life was too agreeable for him to take the trouble to become an artist.”54
When the doctor’s friend Henry Bowditch heard that Dr. Holmes was proposing to write Emerson’s biography, he threw his head back and laughed at the idea that the wit of Back Bay considered himself equal to a subject as profound as the Sage of Concord.55
TRACING A FATHER’S influence is always a difficult proposition, all the more so in a relationship that combined intellectual competitiveness, family pride, and sarcastic humor in equal measures. In his later years, nothing so irritated Justice Holmes about his father as his incurable dilettantism and contentment with easy popularity.
When the justice was in his seventies, he wrote his friend Clara Stevens,
I think my father’s strong point was a fertile and suggestive intellect. I do not care as much as he would have liked me to for his poetry and novels—but I think he had the most penetrating mind of all that lot. After his early medical work, which really was big (the puerperal fever business) I think he contented himself too much with sporadic aperçus—the time for which, as I used to say, when I wanted to be disagreeable, had gone by. If he had had the patience to concentrate all his energy on a single subject, which perhaps is saying if he had been a different man, he would have been less popular, but he might have produced a great work. I often am struck by his insight in things that he lightly touched. But, as I said, it is the last five percent that makes the difference between the great and the clever.56
Holmes remarked to several of his secretaries and friends that “distracted into easy talk,” his father had “dissipated fine talents on literary trivialities.”57
Dr. Holmes’s irrepressible flippancy was a constant blister in the relations between father and son, whose very similarity in intellect and verbal facility made abrasion inevitable. As a father he had early adopted a frivolous manner of speaking about his offspring—“a second edition of your old acquaintance, o.w.h.,” he referred to his son in one letter to a friend—which he never abandoned. When Holmes, at age forty, was appointed to the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, his father wrote a friend with the news, “To think of it,—my little boy a Judge, and able to send me to jail if I don’t behave myself!”58
Sensitive about his own diminutive stature, Dr. Holmes more unpleasantly made his son’s appearance a target of his mocking humor. Years later Holmes told Felix Frankfurter that while his father “certainly taught me a great deal and did me a great deal of good,” he wondered if he “didn’t also do me some harm by drooling over the physical shortcomings of himself and his son and by some other sardonic criticisms.” Once, as a young man still living at home, Holmes returned late at night from a club dinner having had too much to drink, and passed out just inside the front door. His father found him there the next morning. “Sonny, my father never let me forget this for weeks,” he told his secretary sixty years later. “My mother, being a much wiser woman, never said a word. That hurt me much more than my father did. My father just got my back up.”59
Holmes took a certain vengeful satisfaction in finding among his father’s papers “a letter or two from his father to him at school inculcating virtue in the same dull terms that he afterwards passed on to me. If I had a son I wonder if I should yield to the temptation to twaddle in my turn.”60
He always mordantly referred to his father as “the governor” or “the old man.” When both were on the program for Harvard’s 250th anniversary in 1886, Holmes to address the Law School Association and his father to deliver a poem, Holmes could not resist the chance to stick the knife in. He began his speech with a not very veiled allusion to his father’s having dropped out of the Law School: “Perhaps, without revealing family secrets, I may whisper that next Monday’s poet also tasted our masculine diet before seeking more easily digested, if not more nutritious, food elsewhere.” In his house in Washington, the two desks that had belonged to his grandfather Judge Jackson went into his library; his father’s desk, where he wrote The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table, was relegated to the adjoining office for his secretary’s use.61
He kept up at least a humorous rivalry with his father’s ghost long after Dr. Holmes had departed. Holmes’s secretaries, gathering to reminisce about the justice after his death, recorded an anecdote from James Nicely, his secretary in 1923–24.
O.W.H. and Nicely disputed as to the meaning of a word. O.W.H. conceded that Nicely’s meaning was permissible but was only a secondary meaning. He told Nicely to look it up in the dictionary. Nicely did and discovered that his meaning was given as the primary meaning and that by way of illustration a quotation from O.W.H. Sr. was given. He showed it to the justice.
O.W.H.: “Well, well, so the poor old Governor was wrong, too.”62
William James dined at the Holmes house in 1873, when Holmes was thirty-two, and reported to his father afterward, “No love is lost between W. pere and W. fils.” But a more poignant picture of the understanding that Holmes Sr. showed for the complexity of the relationship between fathers and sons was recorded by Alice James, who wrote in her diary of her father coming home from a meeting of the Saturday Club and telling her that Dr. Holmes had asked him if his sons did not despise him—and “seemed surprised” when the elder James said no. “But after all, it is only natural they should,” Dr. Holmes exclaimed, “for they stand upon our shoulders.” In a speech in 1870, Dr. Holmes remarked more humorously, if more pointedly, “The young Feejeean carries a cord in his girdle for his father’s neck; the young American, a string of propositions or syllogisms in his brain to finish the same relative.”63
Still, Holmes always defended his father if anyone else criticized him; it was only to himself that he “reserved the right to criticize and praise,” said Donald Hiss, who served as the justice’s secretary in 1932–33, three years after his brother. Holmes remarked to several friends his lifelong frustration that he had had no ready comeback when a supercilious British writer he was introduced to on an early visit to London, Andrew Lang, drawled to him, “Oh, you’re the son of the man who writes those dreadful novels,” then abruptly turned on his heels and left the room. He was still fuming a half century later. “How I have regretted that I was not quick enough with rapier or bludgeon to hand him one back before he vanished,” he told Laski.64
When he came across some manuscripts of his father’s long after his death, he had them bound into volumes and placed on a shelf in his library. It gave him “an agreeable sense” of having got the better of “my governor,” he told Ethel Scott, “as he never realized that I would take any trouble to do him honor, I not spending my time in adoring him when he was alive. He even suggested to me making a little worm of a nephew his literary executor. . . . [I] intimated that perhaps after all I might be trusted not to wish to belittle his reputation!”65
Along with Holmes Sr.’s and Jr.’s shared love of books, learning, and life; great talent for talk; and unique gift for distilling complex ideas into a beautifully wrought metaphor or epigram, Dr. Holmes had a sympathy for the travails of others that his
son acquired by heredity or example, too. The doctor’s friends always thought part of his reason for giving up medical practice was that he felt the suffering of his patients too acutely. His assistant in his anatomy lectures recalled that Dr. Holmes could not even bear to see a rabbit euthanized with chloroform, but would rush out of the room until it was done.66
Dr. Holmes’s preternatural kindness in answering every letter from bores, cranks, and—worst of all—aspiring writers seeking help getting their poems and stories published (“I have always tried to be gentle with the most hopeless cases. My experience, however, has not been encouraging”) echoed Justice Holmes’s later insistence that his secretary read even the most obvious crank mail. “He was always afraid that some genuine wrong would be left unrighted if he threw them aside,” his secretary Arthur E. Sutherland remembered.67
Mark Howe recorded in his diary the story Holmes told him in 1934 of an incident during the great Boston fire of 1872, when his father worried about his son’s irreplaceable notes for his revisions to Kent’s Commentaries, his first major work of legal scholarship, while Holmes worried about some of his father’s property that also lay in the path of danger. “Holmes was much pleased by the way in which each thought of the other,” Howe noted.68
At age eighty-four, Holmes wryly remarked to his secretary Barton Leach, “Well, I suppose that if I live long enough I may yet come to appreciate the governor.”69
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