YANKEE FROM OLYMPUS — Catherine Drinker Bowen — Little, Brown ($3).
Since the late great Justice Holmes died, in 1935, he has been the subject of eight books and 47 major articles. The latest is the most romantic — a fictionalized biography by Catherine Drinker Bowen, co-author with Barbara Von Meek of Beloved Friend (TIME, Feb. 1, 1937), fictionalized biography of the Russian composer Peter Tchaikovsky.
There were only 27 states in the U.S. when Oliver Wendell Holmes was born (1841). William Henry (Tippecanoe) Harrison was President. Daniel Webster was Secretary of State. The best people believed in a twelve-hour day for work men ("The morals of the operatives," said one observer, "will necessarily suffer if longer absent from the wholesome discipline of factory life").
Wrens and Marmalade. Young Wendell was raised among Boston's Brahmins by a father whose eccentricities plagued his son more than a storm of briefs. Dr. Holmes was noted professionally for his researches into puerperal fever. But he was famous as an indefatigable essayist and light versifier. His Autocrat of the Breakfast Table had impressed even the Germans — who read it under the some what imperious title, Der Tisch-Despot.
Autocrat Holmes presided over a family (he had two boys, one girl) who chattered like "a nest of wrens" (whoever was wittiest at table was awarded an extra spoon ful of marmalade). "Don't take it so hard, Wendell," said Uncle John Holmes when the doctor wrote whimsical articles about his son in the Atlantic Monthly. "You will get used to your father. I did, long ago."
Holmes was in his final year at Harvard when Fort Sumter was bombarded. He was commissioned a lieutenant in the Twentieth Massachusetts Infantry, was wounded three times. The second time, as he lay near death in a cornfield, a passing chaplain murmured: "You're a Christian, aren't you? Well then, that's all right." The third time his right heel was almost torn off. Captain Holmes kept the wound open with a sliver of carrot. "I pinched W's heel a little the other day," wrote his jolly father, "and asked him into what vegetable I had turned his carrot. No answer. Why, into a Pa's nip! was my response." "War," growled his son, "is an organized bore."
Felt Necessities. Privately, the 27-year-old ex-soldier had other views about his experience. "We [soldiers]," he said, "have learned that whether a man accepts from Fortune her spade and will look downward and dig, or from Aspiration her axe and cord and will scale the ice, the one and only success which it is his to command is to bring to his work a mighty heart." But when Emerson talked to him passionately of the work of reconstruction that lay ahead, young Holmes felt no crusader's impulse. "Merely, he desired to use his brain, drive it to its fullest .capacity ... to examine . . . the laws of social being, the pattern men followed in their lives. One morning he knocked on the door of his father's study, announced: 'I am going to the Law School.' The doctor was shocked. 'What's the use of that, Wendell?' he cried. 'A lawyer can't be a great man.' "