Books: The Postman Rings Twice

HOLMES-POLLOCK LETTERS Mr. Justice Holmes & Sir Frederick Pollock—Harvard (2 vols., $7.50).

One scorching day in 1862, a Boston Brahmin stood on the battlefield of Antietam, from which some 5,000 bodies had just been removed. The old man was the Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table, the author of The Wonderful One-Hoss Shay and The Chambered Nautilus—Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes. He had heard that his son, Captain Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., 21, was shot through the neck, and he had dashed down from Boston to find the boy or his body. He found neither at Antietam. A week later, in Harrisburg, Pa., the Doctor ran into his son at last. "How are you, Boy?" said the Brahmin casually. "How are you, Dad?" said the Captain.

The bullet that sliced through young Holmes's neck came out the other side. He survived the wound to be: 1) wounded for the third time at Second Fredericksburg; 2) made a lieutenant colonel in the Union Army; 3) professor of law at Harvard; 4) Chief Justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Court; 5) editor of The American Law Review; 6) author of The Common Law and editor of Kent's Commentaries; 7) Associate Justice (1902-32) of the U.S. Supreme Court; 8) the oldest Justice and the most famous dissenter who ever sat in that court.

Last week readers of the Holmes-Pollock Letters found that he was also coauthor of one of the great collections of U.S. letters. The other author was Sir Frederick Pollock, a shy, learned Englishman who was one of the greatest authorities on the English common law, author of Principles of Contract, and The Law of Torts.

First letter (from Pollock to Holmes) is dated 1874; the last (from Holmes to Pollock) is dated 1932. What they wrote in between fills two volumes of 275 and 309 pages, superbly edited by Biographer Mark DeWolfe Howe. When they began writing each other letters, Holmes was 33, Pollock, 28. When they stopped writing Holmes was 91. They wrote through eight wars and nine revolutions. During all this troubled time the two men sat at or near the heart of government of the world's two greatest powers. But they did not write about wars and revolutions in their letters.

They wrote like two sage old Romans from twin centers of the later empire. Their interest was in philosophy, literature, in the arcana of their craft, in their misfortunes and ailments (once Holmes slipped on a piece of ice, again Pollock was struck by a bicyclist), in Washington heat and London fog, in the wonder that returning spring has for aging men. The year the Japanese sank the Russian fleet at Tsushima, Pollock dropped Holmes a postcard: "Certainly I believe you are as real as I am, but, as you are ejusdem generis with me, that does not make you a Ding an sich in the Kantian sense." The Italians grabbed Tripoli from Turkey, and Holmes wrote Pollock: "I have taken up Vita Nuova with Rossetti's translation alongside. Rossetti justifies to my mind my proposition that everything is dead in 25 years. ... As to Dante ... his discourse seems in equal parts from the heart and through the hat."