Oliver Wendell Holmes

by Stephen Budiansky

  Looking into the two little windows on the two sides of the door you see engrossed on pieces of parchment medieval looking inscriptions, so that the impression is of the scriptorium of a monk. Fanny was so struck by the general look that we went in, and found a little room lighted also from one side like Albert Durer’s St. Jerome; and in it a very good looking young man, who had made this his occupation. . . .

  Anything more remote from the fashionable world of these shores would be hard to imagine. We bought one or two and F. asked him to do the beginning of the prologue to the Canterbury Tales through “Then longen folk to gon on pilgrimages” as a sort of spring song for this house—or Washington. F. has taught me how many poems and pictures are to be seen all about one, if one looks.

  He added, “I am afraid I should have passed the place every day without even noticing it.”12

  THE ONE SOURCE of sadness Fanny did mention to a few others was not having children. The wife of Holmes’s nephew and sole surviving heir told Mark Howe in the 1950s “that she had destroyed a number of exceedingly personal papers of Fanny Dixwell Holmes—including poems—which reflected her profound regret that she had had no children.” Katharine Bundy, the wife of one of Holmes’s secretaries, became closer to Fanny than most of their Washington acquaintances, and she said their not having children “was great grief to both of them.”13

  Holmes himself dropped a few hints, however, that he was just as happy to have avoided fatherhood. Whenever forced to admire a baby, he trotted out a wisecrack about endorsing infant damnation;14 and when he was in his fifties he wrote a wry account of the miseries of dealing with a visiting adolescent cousin, which suggested he did not feel he had missed much in not having had a daughter of his own. It was probably his young cousin Dorothy Upham, who would later live with them in Washington after her parents died, to whom he was referring in an account to Mrs. Gray of a week she spent at Beverly Farms in the summer of 1895:

  It is a spike in one’s celestial crown to try to please a young woman of 13 whose dislikes seem to be her only articulate consciousness—who never speaks—and lets everything drop flat. There is a theory that she adores me—but if she does not hate me by the end of this week I shall think myself lucky.15

  Learned Hand recalled Holmes saying late in his life that “this is not the kind of world I want to bring anyone else into,” which sounded like a bit of formulaic justification.16 But around the same time that he made that remark to Hand, he wrote to Einstein a more nuanced expression of his feelings about the subject, referring at the outset to a dinnertime conversation he had had with an English judge during his and Fanny’s first trip to England in 1874, just after their marriage:

  Once at dinner in England old Sir Fitzroy Kelly on hearing that we had no children said le bon temps viendra. But I am so far abnormal that I am glad I have none. It might be said that to have them is part of the manifest destiny of man, as of other creatures, and that he should accept it as he accepts his destiny to strive; but the latter he can’t help and part of his destiny is to choose. I might say some sad things but I won’t. Whatever I may think of life, the last years of mine have been happy and are so now. Of course, if I should break down before dying it would be awkward, as there is no one to look after me as a child would. But I daresay my nephew and my friends would cook up something.17

  There was a suggestion in this that he had chosen deliberately not to have children, but, again, others who knew Fanny vehemently rejected that suggestion.18

  There was also a rumor that Holmes was impotent, which his cousin John Morse rather nastily spread, but the medical evidence is at best highly speculative. Holmes did suffer from prostate problems in his late fifties; in a passage that Mark Howe cut from his edited edition of Holmes’s correspondence with Pollock, Holmes wrote of having to halt his foray into bicycle riding because of a flare-up of the condition: “Although I have an ideal saddle arranged so as not to bear on the prostate, rather a bumpy ride the other day seemed to make some disturbance in that region and I prudently knocked off to avoid the risk of trouble.” Twenty years later he had emergency surgery to remove his prostate. The symptoms were consistent with what today would be recognized as benign prostatic hyperplasia, or an enlarged prostate. But whether these troubles ever seriously impinged on his sex life at any point is impossible to say.19

  Almost no correspondence between Holmes and Fanny survives, nor is there anything in Holmes’s papers that gives a hint of the nature of his and Fanny’s sexual relationship (despite one extravagant overreading attempted by Sheldon Novick).20 It was not an age when people opened the most private aspects of their lives to others, and the true reasons for their childlessness remained theirs, and theirs alone.

  FANNY HOLMES WAS certainly aware from the start that putting up with her husband’s flirtations came with the territory of being the wife of Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

  He often commented that he much preferred the company of women to men. In his sophomore year at Harvard he wrote to a girl he had met, Lucy Hale, “Now almost all my best friends are ladies and I admire and love ladies’ society and like to be on intimate terms with as many as I can.” He earnestly explained to her that he did not want to be on the same footing as “these flatterers” and “fellows who don’t care what harm they do a girl if they only have their fun.” He wanted to talk to her about the things she really cared about, he said.21

  “I hate men’s dinners,” he told Mrs. Curtis a number of years later. “My male friendships, at least, make a queer company—they have included a fair share of cranks.” Even to the one woman who would touch his affections more deeply than any other, Lady Castletown, he explained that what he valued above all in the company of women was “the unspecialized interest which women bring to conversation and the greater personal warmth which is present however unconscious, in the most Platonic relations with them.”22

  The intensity and number of his friendships with women, however, certainly raised eyebrows around Boston. “I never meet you when I am with a woman but you begin to grin. Why is this?” he facetiously asked John Morse one time in 1887. Owen Wister remembered how “certain ladies in those Boston days” would tell him with great concern that certain other Boston ladies “were spoiling Wendell Holmes.” During his years on the Massachusetts bench Holmes nearly always went to see Mrs. Gray at her home on Beacon Street for a long talk every Tuesday afternoon.23 He also became exceptionally close to a number of the young wives on the North Shore on whom he similarly paid regular calls in the summers: there was a story that one young husband threatened to divorce his wife if Judge Holmes came by one more evening to read her poetry and amuse her with his witty conversation.24

  Mrs. Gray was eleven years younger than Holmes, but the age difference with most of his female friends was considerably greater: most were in their twenties or early thirties when he first met them in his fifties or sixties. They were also, nearly without exception, notably attractive and prominent in Boston or New York society, as well as intellectually and artistically accomplished. Nina Gray, from a wealthy Boston family, the Lymans, published poetry. (It was said of her husband, John Chipman Gray, who carried on his very lucrative practice as a property lawyer while teaching at Harvard, that “he made a million and married a million.”)25

  Anna Codman, who lived almost directly opposite the Holmes summer place at Beverly Farms, was the daughter of a professor of chemistry at MIT and the author of one novel, and later the translator of the journal of a German U-boat commander published during the First World War—“a civilized woman,” Holmes described her to Mrs. Gray. Ellen Curtis, whose husband raced yachts with the Lowells and Saltonstalls at Marblehead and led hunting expeditions to British East Africa when he was not practicing law or serving as Boston police commissioner, could also “hold her own” intellectually.26

  Bas-relief of Nina Gray by Augustus Saint-Gaudens

  Clara Sherwood Rollins was another young and socially prominent novelist whom Holmes
drew quite close to. She was in her twenties and separated from her husband when Holmes met her in the 1890s; her subsequent marriage in 1899 to Joseph S. Stevens—Harvard graduate, star polo player, member of Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders in the charge up San Juan Hill—made her one of the wealthier women in America, with a mansion on Madison Avenue and homes in Newport, Rhode Island; Aiken, South Carolina; and Colorado Springs, Colorado.27 The New York society pages regularly noted her appearances at Long Island horse shows, Newport tennis tournaments, and teas with Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt and visiting European royalty, always carefully describing the clothes she wore, and reported on her exploits as one of the few female polo players of the time.

  Mark Howe interviewed in the 1940s and 1950s everyone he could find who knew Fanny and Holmes at the time and asked them point-blank if Holmes had affairs with these young women. Not one believed he did. “Charlie Curtis says that both his mother & J. T. Morse asserted with complete confidence that OWH was never unfaithful to his wife—& emphasized that they should know,” Howe noted in a memorandum. Clara Stevens’s son likewise was “thoroughly convinced that OWH had nothing that might be called an ‘affair’ with his mother or other women—but that he turned to them for their youth, their beauty, their intelligence and their admiration.”28

  Portrait of Ellen Curtis by John Singer Sargent

  “My own suspicion is that he talked a good game,” said James Rowe, Holmes’s last secretary. Tommy Corcoran, Francis Biddle, and Isabella Wigglesworth (who was married to Fanny’s nephew) all recalled Holmes telling them in later years some variation on the words, “I’ve always loved the dames, but I’ve never stepped over the edge.” And several shrewder feminine observers of Holmes in his later years, including Katharine Bundy and a North Shore neighbor, Katherine P. Loring, thought that in playing the part of “a very dangerous flirt,” Holmes was just showing off more than anything else. “He was a very handsome man and he knew it,” said Katharine Bundy. “He adored adulation.”29

  A psychoanalyst might read into this urgent need for attention and reassurance of his desirability from much younger women compensation for something unfulfilled in his own life. There was no doubt something highly unusual in the lengths he sometimes went to in his letters—hinting at stronger feelings he dare not express, longing for the next time they might meet, expressing jealousy of other men (though not their husbands, many of whom were his good friends as well). This was more than mere flirtation. Yet it was not the way lovers in a passionate sexual relationship talked. It was only very late in life that he ever addressed Nina Gray, “Dear Nina” or “My dear friend” in his letters; it was always “Dear Mrs. Gray,” just as it was “Dear Mrs. Codman” and “Dear Mrs. Curtis.”

  Clara Sherwood Rollins Stevens

  What these women got from their friendship with Holmes was the respect and attention of a brilliant and warm man, who above all took them seriously. His correspondence with Nina Gray, Clara Stevens, Ellen Curtis, and a dozen other women was indeed extraordinary, all the more so for the time. He wrote Nina Gray 330 letters from 1888 to her death in 1932. His letters to women are the most intimate record of his life during this period. But they are literature as well as biography: he discoursed with wit, zest, and ability on ideas, religion, literature, personalities, the nature of human creativity, his work on the court, the follies of mankind, thinkers ancient and modern, and questions in the law that interested him, often all in one letter. “A letter is not a composition but a talk, a breathing out of the casual contents of one’s mind,” he once said. “I think that it may be intelligent or strange or any other damned thing that gives the writer’s thought or want of it.”30

  Mark Howe observed that if you cut out a few lines at the beginning and end of his letters to women, where he offered courtly formulas of his devotion, what remained was generally indistinguishable from those to Harold Laski, Lewis Einstein, Frederick Pollock, and his other male legal and philosophical colleagues.31 But that was not entirely true: he opened up to women far more, revealing his hopes and apprehensions and occasionally much more personal reflections.

  Holmes destroyed most of their letters to him, but judging by some of his replies they apparently now and then asked him to tone down his more eager efforts to elicit expressions of affection. But they all plainly cherished his way of treating them as intellectual and human equals.

  He was never condescending. “You don’t need to dazzle me with a list of brilliant women. . . . I have had too many deep and truly reverent friendships to require a reminder,” he wrote Margaret Bevan, the fifteen-year-old daughter of English friends with whom he corresponded for several years when he was on the U.S. Supreme Court. “Don’t ever feel that writing is a duty,” he told her. “You took it up for your own satisfaction. Chuck it when you don’t feel like doing it longer or at the moment.” But whenever she did write, he instantly responded with a thoughtful, touching, four-page letter that treated her completely as an adult.32

  She asked him about his views on equality between men and women. He replied,

  As between men and women it never occurs to me to make the kind of contrast you suppose. One meets a human being—one is curious as to this new personality—one wants to know its feelings and views and to lay one’s own cards on the table and submit them to the acceptance or rejection of the other. It is human being, not man or woman. Not of course that one’s feelings are not profoundly modified by the difference of sex. A woman hardly would wish them not to be, I should think. Indeed you speak of the inspiration our sex gets from you—and it is quite true. Gallantry is probably consistent with absolute intellectual respect. I think I can swear that I take thoughts and opinions simply as such without regard to where they come from and do my best to weigh them. . . .

  While no woman ever had a right to feel that I didn’t take her intellectual ideas just as I should take a man’s, I don’t see much good in an attempt to weigh the sexes against each other. . . . It is enough for me that I have seen plenty of women whose genius, or intellects, or characters impressed me—sometimes with awe and humility, sometimes with the joy of companionship—just as I have seen multitudes of men whose company I did not desire except on the footing of simple gregariousness.

  Lest in something I have said I seem to swagger, let me add my favorite quotation from I forget whom, but quoted by Schopenhauer in his big book: “In the vulgar herd there is one more than each of us suspects.” I never forget that.33

  Clara Stevens based a minor character in her 1897 novel Threads of Life on him, and her Mr. Herbert Fiske is an unmistakable sketch of his real-life counterpart’s conversational flair, sympathy, and love of female company in those years in Boston in the 1890s:

  A smile, a rare one for a man, made his stern face beautiful for a moment as he took her hand. . . . The world—the great world—was in the marrow of his bones, but he was intensely human with all his worldliness.

  He called cynicism the smallpox of the nineteenth century, and believed that only those vaccinated with humanity escaped the disfiguring disease. He had been vaccinated. Perhaps the hardships of war had taught him that sympathy for pain of all sorts so uncommon in men. A man who had been wounded for the love of his country can guess at the joys of maternity. He has turned a leaf in the book of life that is uncut by most men.

  Once he laughingly said of himself, “I am like La Fontaine, ‘Un vain bruit et l’amour ont occupées mes ans.’ ” But the noise was not vain, and he had only loved one woman with his whole soul. . . .

  He liked an audience. A listener was always inspiring to him. His ideas were like champagne—eager to be free—effervescing as readily in the pewter mug as in the crystal goblet. A responsive mind was a keen delight to him, but if his companion were unable to assist in the conversational game, he enjoyed playing return-ball with his own thought. . . .

  Talk was like a clearing house to his brain. He found out where he stood, what he had received, and what ideas he had on hand. Stil
l, he was a good listener, and eager to draw out the best from his companion. . . .

  The ewig weibliche—particularly when well dressed—attracted him. There are men who by instinct can single out at a glance the most attractive woman in a room full of feminine prettiness. Herbert Fiske was such a man.34

  Stevens remained forever touched by Holmes’s sympathy and intelligent understanding when she was going through her divorce, remarriage, and separation from her five-year-old son. A few of her letters to Holmes survive, and they speak plainly of the love “deeper than passion” that she alluded to in a poem she wrote for him.

  Say my love is deep

  Deeper than passion. Love of soul and mind

  Transcends all love—yet—were I at his side!35

  From Paris, where she had gone with her husband in part to escape the publicity and disapproval of Boston society following her remarriage, she wrote,

  No account of joy, no combination of new and enchanting experiences can stop the ache that comes from the tearing away of old friendships and associations. Of course the pain of longing for my little boy is a separate physical thing which I reckoned with before I married Jo. And though there have been days when it was worse than I imagined it could ever be, still there has never been a pang of regret. It was best. It had to be. But here my whole life is breathed in as it were through my husband. . . .

  If you come to England this summer I must see you. Please don’t stop caring for me dear. I miss you more and more, there never was any one like you. No one ever was to me what you were. If I could only see you from time to time for one of the old soul reviving talks!36

  His young English friend Ethel James similarly wrote him, on the eve of her marriage in 1896 to the barrister Leslie Scott, to thank him for what he had done for her when they had met at an English country house on his recent trip. “I shall always entertain a very vivid recollection of you & of your kindness at Abinger. . . . You did me a very great deal of good—much more than you can have any idea of. I felt it as you talked & I wished so much I had known you before. So you will understand that I am not likely to forget you.”37