The Memoirs of a
Failure

With an Account of
the Man and his
Manuscript

By

Daniel Wright Kittredge

ALBERT BRITNELL
TORONTO, CANADA

Copyright, 1908, by
DANIEL W. KITTREDGE.
Entered at Stationers’
Hall, in London

CONTENTS

DUNLEVY AT THE UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA.

Lest the name of a hitherto unknown author be totally obliterated, I am going to give a description of his curious personality, together with an account of a manuscript in his handwriting, as bewildering as it is extraordinary, from which some extracts are now for the first time brought from obscurity into the daylight of print. I give at once the name of this writer—William Wirt Dunlevy.

It is essential to begin by relating what little is known of the man himself. Otherwise these fragments of his work would be even more inexplicable than if they were presented without comment. Indeed, it is best to admit at the outset that the character of this man and the outcome of his life are subjects which seem destined to remain quite as inscrutable as the meaning of his manuscript. All that lies within my aim or power is simply to try to make known his personality as I have conceived it from the few facts of his life known to me, from his writings and from a slight intimacy with the man himself. What is finest to me is the man behind the manuscript; and so my part is strictly to essay at interpretative biography. I am about to tell the brief story of a life singularly strange, a life whose overmastering interest is not in public events, not in famous friendships, not in outward adventures, in nothing but in the man himself. I doubt if Dunlevy will make a wide appeal for favor. And there will be many, very many, to whom this whole account will seem not worth while.

Dunlevy was a student at the University of Virginia at the time when some of us, who were undergraduates, began to notice and comment upon his personality. He was considerably older than the other students; and we imagined that this was the reason why he held himself aloof from us. We used to watch him from the athletic field on pleasant afternoons. He was wont to stand on the great flight of stone steps which led from a shaded avenue to gently sloping terraces that lie before the Rotunda, the name of the college library. Dunlevy used to stand at the foot of these steps, looking intently at the lofty porticos, as though impressed with the majesty of this copy of the Pantheon, its majesty in all its simplicity.

The terraces are connected on the sides by open colonnades, forming two interior courts. In them, for indefinite periods, Dunlevy was accustomed to walk, his hands crossed behind him, gazing out upon the distant wooded valleys of the Blue Ridge Mountains. We wondered what sort of man he might be, who was as sufficient unto himself as the fixed stars in the sky which radiate no other light than their own.

He came to take his meals in the same dining-hall with us; indeed I sat at the table beside him. I think he liked me, because I let him alone. I did not attempt conversation. It was noticeable that he tried to come to his meals after the others had finished eating. But he found this difficult, as one burly foot-ball player usually remained as long as anything remained on the table. This fellow used to make stupid, broadside sallies at Dunlevy, who had the look of a man who had once been strong and robust, but who was now almost ashamed of his grotesque appearance. Dunlevy did not try to stop the foot-ball player in any of his onslaughts of muscular wit. The latter’s name was Crowther. I used to think that Crowther’s conception of wit amused Dunlevy more often than it irritated him.

One morning at breakfast I made a most inane remark for a place where all the conversation was devoted to the subject of athletics, such as who was the Harvard full-back in ’94 or what was the best batting average last year. My remark was totally out of place, as it had to do with literature. It happened this way: when I came into the dining-hall I noticed a copy of one of Cardinal Newman’s works sticking out of the pocket of Dunlevy’s overcoat. And as I took my seat at the table no one was saying anything, so I merely remarked how much I admired Newman’s style. Every one stared at me except Dunlevy, who was smiling at my thoughtlessness.

“What is it in the cardinal’s fashion that you admire so much?” asked Crowther.

“The color of his coat, of course;” suggested Dunlevy with a straight face.

“Why, what color was it?” asked Crowther, seriously knitting his brow.

“He preferred red,” answered Dunlevy, “because his books were not read.”

The bell rang for nine o’clock lectures; and Dunlevy and I were left alone.

That was the last time we had breakfast together at the University of Virginia. Dunlevy had overtaxed himself by his work in the School of Philosophy, and broke down in health.

All of us knew where he lived, even if none of us had seen the inside of his quarters. He rented the ground floor of an old private residence which was situated just beyond the University limits. It was set upon a knoll, and from this point one could obtain a clear view of Monticello, the home of Jefferson. I presumed so much upon my slight acquaintance with Dunlevy as to deem it a simple duty to go to see him. I was ushered into his chamber by an old negro servant who had not succeeded in intercepting me. I found Dunlevy propped up in bed, reading a book. He laid it across his chest open, and looked at me as though he could not believe my presence.

“Why, you have come to see me, haven’t you?” he said. The poor man seemed to beam at the thought that some one had actually come to call upon him.

“I heard that you were sick.”

“And did you let the gentleman in, Sandy?” he asked of the negro, at the same time trying to conceal a frown from me.

“Maarstar, don’t you say I done it. He say he be a doctor and was sent for!”

“My trick succeeded even if it was impudent;” I said.

Dunlevy was confused.

“You see—a—I feel a little queer now and then about the head—that is all—and I do not care to bother others with coming to see me. Perhaps you may know that feeling of all-goneness, as I call it?”

“And what are you doing for it?” I asked.

“Aha!” he exclaimed; “curiously enough I have just come across a short passage in this book that fits your question. Do you mind listening to it?”

He took up the book and read this sentence:

“How hard it is, my dear brother, to recover a little strength when one has become accustomed to one’s weakness; and how much it costs to fight for victory when one has long found delight in allowing one’s self to be conquered!”

I took out a pencil and paper and asked him to read it again in order that I might write it down.

“And who is the author?” I asked.

“Oh dear!” said he, “you are like all the rest. What difference does it make who says a thing, so long as it is good? And what difference does it make how great a man is so long as he says things which are not good.”

Hereupon he reached over to a little reading table at the head of his bed upon which was a single tumbler full to the brim of a thick mixture. He raised it and drank the contents. I imagined that the man was taking some medicine and that he felt ill. I made an apology for my intrusion and took my leave.

During this brief call Dunlevy maintained a dignity that was impenetrable. He had the power to impose respect for himself at all times, and to do so unconsciously.

As I sat in his bed room I had a chance, as I thought, to take a glimpse of its furnishings, but there were none. The walls were perfectly bare with the exception of one picture, hung so that he could see it from his pillow. It was the portrait of a young girl upon a horse, habited in the style of twenty years ago.

I went to see him again, but I was not admitted by his servant. Before the end of the week Dunlevy had left the University, and never returned.

Nobody missed him particularly, because he had had practically little to do with any of us. There were some stories told concerning his disappearance. One was to the effect that an old mental trouble had come over him again, and that he had retired to his ancestral plantation in Albemarle County, over in the James River country. Though it was admitted that perhaps this old trouble was brought about by overwork, as I have said, still, certain students used to look wise and say nothing whenever it was given as a reason for his breakdown.

As to what his incubus was or the cause of it, I could not well make out. Two students who came from the same part of the state also sat at our table, and they said that they used to hear their older brothers and sisters talk about Dunlevy and tell how he was much like the rest of them up to the time when he was quite a young man; that he was such a wit and so entertaining, and what a fine dancer he was, and how he used to be asked to break the colts which were to be ridden by the young ladies of the neighborhood. And that he was one of the shrewdest young poker players that ever drew cards from a pack. Then, of course, there was a love affair. Was there ever a young southerner without love affairs? But here, it appears was the unusual with Dunlevy; for he had just one love affair.

He had courted the girl season after season ever since he was fourteen years old, so their tale went. She lived down the river near his home on a big plantation in Goochland County. One of these students said that he remembered hearing his father say that he had often seen Dunlevy as a boy in knee breeches and tan legs drop down on a packet boat when she was going through the locks; and then how Mr. Dunlevy, senior, would have to send down to Goochland to get him home again. That was in the last days of the old James River canal when traffic with Richmond went by packet. But to go on with what I heard about his unusual case. They said that this couple, young as they were, seemed perfectly devoted to each other and grew more and more attached and tender in their affection up to the time when Dunlevy became a full grown youth.

I am writing this at a distance of nearly a decade since I heard the account and naturally most of the details have escaped me. But as I remember, they said it was one Easter vacation when young Dunlevy felt his blood rise with the sap and determined to see the world by spending a fortnight in metropolitan New York. Probably he took a little undue prestige unto himself, for not many young southerners could afford a metropolitan junket in those poverty stricken days of the Reconstruction period. He made the journey, staying a month instead of a fortnight. Up to this point his case is conventional enough.

When he came back he went on a day’s visit to Goochland. The young girl and he went into the parlor together and the door was closed. No one ever knew a word of what took place between them; whatever he told her and whatever she responded must have been serious, for when their meeting was over, Dunlevy opened the door and walked straight out of the house without a spoken word to her mother and father, and he never saw her again from that day to this. But she remained true to him, and no other man’s hand ever touched her. Dunlevy’s life changed; his face changed; his disposition changed; he was literally not the same man. Something had befallen him.

Such was the account that I gathered about him from what the two students told in our dining hall at the University of Virginia. We each of us wondered what had happened to him and put our individual construction upon the bare facts as I have related them. Oddly enough, I remember that a third-year medical student who sat with us remarked with a Carolina accent that he “reckoned” he could tell what was the matter with him. To which Crowther rejoined:

“Well, I always said the man was a damned fool, and now we know it. Pass the pickles.”

And so the conversation turned to other topics; and I heard no more of Dunlevy. Thus do men dispose of one who has lived amongst them.

To me the impression that this separation made upon Dunlevy did honor to his sensibility. His existence was stranded. It bears out my own observation of the man when I say that in the midst of our college fellowship, he reflected at an age when we had scarcely begun to think. Of one thing I can vouch for certain. In the earlier account of him he is drawn as a strapping, active boy with all the suppleness of youth. Whereas the man I met was a strange looking, undersized curiosity. This leads me to recount another incident which is relevant.

One day in the early fall of that year when Dunlevy was forced to leave the university, he sat at luncheon with even a more sombre demeanor than usual. His shoulders were bent with weakness, his face calm but drawn with endurance.

“Why don’t you put on some old clothes and go out on the athletic field and get some lively exercise?” Crowther asked, good naturedly.

“Why doesn’t a mole see or a snail fly?” answered Dunlevy smiling, though evidently much embarrassed at having attention centered upon him. He finished the meal hurriedly and departed.

Poor man! I look back to those days and realize how little we purblind associates of his knew what a fight for strength he was making before our very eyes. It is one thing to observe suffering, it is another to experience it. Those who belong to the robust ranks of health, who arise in the morning with a song or a whistle on their lips, and at night drop without restlessness into slumber, those who know not what it is to be nervous and irritable, all those of sound body and sound mind, have no right to pass judgment upon Dunlevy and his kind. I say this because I am reminded that after Dunlevy had gone that day at luncheon, Crowther said to us:

“I don’t believe that man would have the spunk to run a hundred yards. He lacks gumption. There is too much of the woman about him. Please pass the pickles.”

I pondered upon this utterance as I left Crowther eating his third helping of beef steak. And I wondered which is the more noble—the courage that comes from strength or the bravery born of suffering?

There was one man, a black man, who understood Dunlevy and his condition better than we did. He was that old negro body-servant, a relic of plantation days. I saw his good, open, loyal face when I went to Dunlevy’s chambers during his illness at the University of Virginia. His name was Sandy. Could I know what Sandy must have known, I might have a tale that would be better left untold.

DUNLEVY AT HARVARD.

Long afterwards, a year and more, I went to Harvard College for the purpose of pursuing special studies. I was standing one rainy November afternoon in the stone vestibule of Gore Hall. A figure approached with his head close under an umbrella, which he closed as he entered the library. It was Dunlevy. Our eyes twinkled a moment, then we each grasped the other’s hand. It was like coming from the cold into a warm room to meet a southerner in New England.

“I am afraid you don’t remember me;” I said.

“Don’t I!” he exclaimed; “do you suppose I could forget the man who came to see me twice when I took sick at the dear old ‘U. Va.’ and who is also an admirer of Cardinal Newman’s style?”

His memory astonished me; and it touched me to think that the man should be grateful for my simple attention of calling upon him when he was ill. After a few words of greeting I told him that I had an appointment and should have to hurry on, but that if he would tell me where he lived I would come to see him. He told me the number of his room in Beck Hall.

“I have a corner window in the rear;” he said, as we parted.

Well, I went to see him; and he returned my calls, for that was all they were—just calls. Somehow or other, Dunlevy and I were not to become intimate. It seemed as though I were handling a piece of quicksilver on an earthen platter, looking so bright, so impressionable, and yet the moment one would say, “You are mine!” all was gone, scattered and running in every direction, nowhere to be seized. So long as I did not seek to make an intimate friend of him, all went well.

To describe how I felt when calling on Dunlevy, I may do best by quoting this sentence from Emerson:

“He is solitary because he has society in his thought, and, when people come in, they drive away his society and isolate him.”

With me he was outwardly cordial and inwardly aloof.

The truth is, no one ever knew Dunlevy well. So far as I am aware he had not a single intimate friend. He walked alone. I used to see him on winter afternoons going up Brattle Street, carrying his head back, his eyes looking upward as though he were studying the leafless branches of the trees. He made me think of what Abbé Barthelemy wrote of himself: “I go on solitary promenades, and when night comes I say to myself, ‘There is another day gone by.’” I verily believe that Dunlevy was so alone during those days at Harvard that for two months at a time no one entered his room.

At lectures and at meals it was as if he were not really thinking of what was actually taking place in his presence. I do not mean that his appearance was that of a listless dreamer. Nor do I mean that he tried to carry a pose of abstraction. It was simply that he had the nervous, conscious look of an habitual recluse. He might well have said with Rousseau, “Being a recluse, I am more sensitive than other men.” He held himself aloof, not wilfully, but because he seemed to have a constitutional inability to adapt himself to others. This reserve was by many mistaken for rudeness.

It was noticeable that he rarely entered into general conversation and that for the most part he kept strict counsel with himself. Yet whenever I felt certain that Dunlevy was utterly inattentive, he had a way of stroking his delicately featured face and then of saying a few carefully chosen words which were sufficient to prove that he took an occasional reckoning of the depth of the persons with whom necessity forced him to have intercourse. Dunlevy had much of the feminine in the make-up of his character, though he was in no sense effeminate.

Usually he ate his meals in silence, surrounded by the students and instructors who throng Memorial Hall. One could see that he hated the puerile discussion and long-winded disputations of Sophomores and Juniors. He had heard them before. Some of the fellows thought him hopelessly conceited, queer, and that he deemed himself “above the common flight of vulgar souls.” Others were convinced that the man was morbidly sensitive, diffident, shy, afraid of the light. A few of us knew him to be a sort of semi-sane genius, prematurely old; a disappointed being who wreaked vengeance upon himself by trying to keep others from knowing the cause of his troubles, if troubles there were. In fine, none of us knew anything definitely or specifically about him.

Of course this last statement is not strictly accurate as regards my own slight intimacy with him at the University of Virginia, taken in connection with the hearsay tattle about him there. I went over in my mind the gossip of his love affair, the particulars of which I had not the malignant disposition to relate to other students. Yet I could not refrain from asking, were these two periods in his life forever separated by a sort of moral illness which he could not cure? Else what had happened so suddenly to put an end to the levities of his early life? But it is not my purpose to tell the story of the lover in Dunlevy.

Let it not be supposed that because Dunlevy came from the South in those days that he was in needy circumstances. Such was far from the case. His rooms were in what was then the most expensive of dormitories. This was one of the strange things about him, like his dining at such a crowded place as Memorial Hall. One would have supposed that he would have sought a secluded peaceful spot. He preferred, as it were, to live in the midst of social life, and yet take no part in it. In like manner, he had very little intercourse with the Boston world, and, so far as I know, he made but few excursions into that City of Inconsistencies. The fashionable cafés and hotel lobbies were not rendezvous for Dunlevy. Nor those pseudo-Bohemian joints, where students imagined they “were seeing life” and the seamy side, these tinsel vacuums apparently had small attraction for him. And most peculiar of all, if by chance he were discovered in one of these places by somebody like myself who knew him, he would bow cordially, and soon afterwards pay his check and depart. Even to laugh or sneer at garish pretense, fashionable or unfashionable, had become a bore to this lonely mortal.

Apparently, he was one of those who like to observe without being observed. This trait must also have been an outgrowth of the man’s morbid sensitiveness. Balzac in a letter to Madame Hanska says: “It is only mis-appreciated souls and the poor who know how to observe, because everything wounds them, and observation is the result of suffering. Memory keeps a record only of what is painful.” This last view strikes me as being erroneous, but the first part of the great Frenchman’s comment is applicable to Dunlevy.

As to his wealth, he told me once that his father had owned extensive sugar plantations with four hundred working slaves in Louisiana, besides their farm lands in Albemarle County, Virginia; but that his father had lost all in the war of the Rebellion. I looked at him in wonderment.

“But,” he added, “after the war was over, an immense deposit of coal was discovered on a tract of land belonging to my mother. This mine saved our family fortunes.”

Dunlevy had with him in Cambridge the same aged man, the full-blooded negro of the old regime, who, he said, had been his father’s body-servant during the war and who was with him when he was wounded at Manassas. I have mentioned having seen this man in his chambers at the University of Virginia. He was constantly attendant upon Dunlevy. He appeared to worship him and to love him as if he were one of those god-descended heroes about whom the ancients tell us. And Dunlevy on his part seemed to be in perfect contentment with this one man. He said that now that all of his own family were gone, the old fellow was the only remaining human being who connected him with the past. The two seemed inseparable. I state these things about him, because Dunlevy makes reference to one “Sandy” in his papers and I want it to be clear that it is to this aged family retainer he refers. Moreover, when persons told me, as I relate below, that no one would answer Dunlevy’s door—that door with hinges oiled lest their creaking grate upon his nerves—I used to take it to mean that he had instructed Sandy to pay no heed to their calls unless he bade him.

And now for the stories about his being dissipated. Gossip said that Dunlevy was what is known as a solitary drinker. Students who roomed in the same dormitory with him said that he barricaded his doors and would not answer knocks for days at a time. That when they first met him upon his coming to Harvard at the beginning of the college year, he used to make engagements with them and then invariably break his appointments at the last moment by sending Sandy with a scrap of paper looking as if it had been taken out of a waste-basket and scribbled upon in the extremity of indecision.

In regard to these insinuations, I can only speak of my own experience. On three occasions (two of them were appointments) I went to Dunlevy’s door and I tapped and I knocked and I pronounced words in vain like Ali Baba’s brother in the robbers’ cave. Another night late, I went unexpectedly to his door and met the janitor of the dormitory coming out of his rooms. He said that a student had told him that he saw flames coming out of Mr. Dunlevy’s windows. I supposed it was merely a practical joke that some undergraduates had put upon the janitor in order to disturb Dunlevy. I prevailed upon the janitor to let me enter, as he said that Mr. Dunlevy was within.

“I have brought you over that work on Ethics about which I spoke to you yesterday at the philosophy lecture,” I said, entering his study and finding him in a long silk dressing gown and wearing a pair of stunted Chinese slippers. He had in his hand a tumbler full to the brim of a heavy mixture.

“Oh!” he exclaimed, as if he had received a shock, and was momentarily pausing over his surprise, “how the devil did you get in here?”

“The janitor let me in,” I explained; “I met him at your door as he was going out.”

“Oh—that was it—was it? Well—a—sit down, won’t you? This is a funny get-up you’ve found me in—isn’t it? You wouldn’t think to see me in street attire that I wore this sort of thing—would you? I say, a—have a drink, eh?”

I said that I would have a glass with him, at which he appeared to be rather taken off his guard and confused.

“Well, I’ll tell you,” he said, “this is a beverage of ante-bellum days, a sort of compound potpouri or strong sangaree of the olden time—you wouldn’t like it. But I will send Sandy out for anything you say?”

I insisted upon taking what he was having. He hesitated for a moment as though I had put him in a predicament, and then he called out:

“Sandy! Bring the gentleman a glass of our sangaree.”

During this brief colloquy Dunlevy kept shading his eyes from me as if he did not care to have me see his face; and after giving the order for the liquor, he drew his chair up close to the fire-place so that his back was towards me. Even while he had been speaking these few words to me, his face and figure attracted my notice. His expression was a blending of artlessness and of shrewdness. He seemed to be one of those men who try to keep you from believing that they have a heart, when their gracious bearing and gentle mien give their tongue the lie.

So long as you do not try to make an intimate friend of him, I said to myself, all will go well.

But after he had once invited me to share his rare beverage I could perceive that there was an intangible metamorphosis going on within him. It reminded me of Mr. Mansfield playing the character of Dr. Jekyll just before becoming Mr. Hyde, only with Dunlevy the character change was exactly the reverse: the genial GOOD in him seemed to thaw out. His eyes, usually drunk with thought, were now radiant and watery with feeling. His sensitiveness appeared to tingle in every pore. Perhaps he anticipated the effect that his liquor was to produce upon me.

The negro brought me a glass filled with a thick posset. I drank a quarter of the tumblerful before I could take it from my lips.

“My soul! What is this?” I asked, still tasting the grated nutmeg and the old-fashioned flavor of wild-cherry bounce. It seemed also to leave that delicate bouquet of real Medford rum.

“You speak as though it were ambrosia,” said Dunlevy over his shoulder from his chair before the fire, “but as a matter of fact, it is only sangaree. You see, the reason I was surprised to see you was that I every now and then have a spell of sickness—feel queer about the head—that is all, and I don’t like to see anyone, you know; but as the janitor let you in, I am certainly glad to see you and I reckon you won’t mind me h’eh in this costume.” Here his southern accent broke out.

“But this sangaree!” I exclaimed, finishing the liquor, “how in Heaven’s name is it made?”

“Really I couldn’t tell you,” replied Dunlevy calmly, “Sandy makes it for me. He used to brew it or mix it or distill it, whichever you please, for my father before me. Didn’t you, Sandy?”

“Yess, maarstar,” said Sandy, “that ah did! Right h’eh in this ole bowl, too, that Gin’rl La Fayette give to ole maarstar’s maarstar.”

“Sandy,” interrupted Dunlevy, “I wish you would go down and tell the janitor that I wish to see him tonight.”

It occurred to me, not only from this remark, but from the fact that I noticed a large writing book open on the centre table, that I had interrupted Dunlevy in his work, whatever it might be, and that it was high time for me to depart. The book was an odd looking volume as large as an office ledger, only very thin, and bound in sheepskin like a law book. Dunlevy had evidently been writing in it or was just about to do so, for a wet pen lay in the crotch between its pages.

“Pray don’t hurry,” he said conventionally, as I took my hat.

“I came up merely to give you the book on Ethics,” I answered, “and I would not have stopped at all, had you not asked me to join you in that beverage, and had I not felt that I needed some stimulant on this howling first of March. Good-night.—I say, would you mind giving me the receipt for your sangaree some day?”

“Aha!” he smiled, “that’s a secret which I have never been able to worm out of Sandy.”

And so Dunlevy and I separated practically at the point where we had met. Sandy escorted me to the door, and as he closed it upon me, I thought of both him and his master as two of the last representatives of an epoch, an epoch of landed proprietors, of loyal passionate blood, full of warmth and of color and of stately grace, into which a modern American may never hope to enter. I, for one, gave up the attempt. With generations of slaveholders behind him, it was not hard for Dunlevy to become a Sybarite. I would I were mistaken, but it struck me that the only live color of his college days were these nights of revery, nights such as when Omar awakened. From his appearance that night, I feared that in this respect he lived without constraint according to his inclinations. Here surely was one man who had determined to let the world go by.

As I walked down Holyoke Street that night to my room, I tried to phrase the attractive impression that Dunlevy had made upon me; and from thinking of him many times since then, I have finally found words which describe his elusive nature, a nature leading me by eluding me. The words were said of Grimm in his day:

“He is perhaps the only man who has the faculty of inspiring confidence without bestowing it.”

Before the end of the session Dunlevy had left college again and disappeared for parts unknown. I suppose a new fit of restlessness had seized him. He must have been one of those men who are led by successive impulses and are unable to settle upon anything. No excuse was given and no word was left as to whether or no he would come back until finally a storage van appeared at Beck Hall and carted away his effects. Neither did he return to college the following fall. I lost trace of him completely, yet I used to wonder how that man would “finish,” as race-horse men express it; for one may study men as a trainer does a string of horses and bet against them or bank upon them, and it is always interesting to see who loses and who wins, who it is that keeps whipping to the end in the face of certain defeat, and who it is that loses hope, lags behind and drops out before the stretch is reached. I had wagered upon Dunlevy as a man who would some day carry his colors ahead before the judge’s stand. Perhaps I was mistaken about him from the point of view of the world, but, friend, way down in the bottom of your soul don’t you sometimes admit that there are other points of view than that of the WORLD as we call it? In that case, it may be that Dunlevy has won. Who knows?

The day after my class festivities at graduation were over, I was seated in my room which was littered up with the remnants of packing, when there came a knock at my door.

It was only the postman who said that he had a registered letter for me. I signed its receipt, and sat down on my trunk to read it. The handwriting was unfamiliar. I am going to give a copy of its entire contents in order that my position in this matter be made perfectly plain. Secondly, my part is to explain my own connection with the subject of this biography, and thereby to account for its publication. I have before my eyes this letter:

“San Diego, California,
June 22. 

My Dear Sir:

In the piece of tissue paper which is folded within this letter you will find a little silver key. It opens the lock of a wooden safe which I am forwarding this day to your care.

I am about to ask a favor of you, if I may, as I know of no one else of whom I might make the request concerning which I am now to write you. I have no near relatives, so far as I know; may I therefore take the liberty of forcing you to be my friend, because I want some one to know what became of me.

This little wooden safe contains a book of my private papers. Now I enclose to your order a postal draft for forty dollars, which will pay for keeping this box in some safe-deposit vault for a period of six years. If you do not hear from me on or before the twenty-second day of June of that sixth year from the present you may conclude that I shall have ceased to live. I am confident that if I am ever able to return again to civilization it will be within that period. If not, it will mean that I am gone beyond the hope of return, and in that event, these papers become yours to do with them what you will. I put aside ideas of the future as best I can, and allow myself to be carried along by destiny.

Do not infer from the fact that I wish these documents placed in a vault that I consider them valuable. Such is far from the case. I want merely to be sure that in the event that you should die, they would fall into no other’s hand in case I might return. To be frank, they are scribblings descriptive of personal sensations and remembrances during a long period of time, that is all.

In after years, if I do not return, read these papers, providing you have nothing better to do. May their record awaken within you some apprehension of a similar fate had I given you the receipt for the strong sangaree which you drank at my room in Cambridge on one occasion, when I must have been an object of suspicion to you. Its maker, Sandy, my old body-servant, sails with me today. I may yet overcome myself; but if not, this, then, is my good-bye to you.

W. W. Dunlevy.”

The next morning an express package arrived, and I carried it, box and all, into Boston to a banking house on State Street, where I placed it in their charge, together with the forty dollars for its six years’ safe-keeping.

DUNLEVY: HIS MANUSCRIPT.

Those six years have passed and more too; but no word from Dunlevy. Nor have I been able to gather any information as to his present whereabouts.

I hesitated about opening his box, but still he had empowered me to do so. I found the odd looking writing book in brown sheepskin which I had seen open on his centre table on the evening long ago when I found him drinking his sangaree. The pages were covered with his nervous, irregular handwriting.

I started to read, and I read until the oil ran low in my lamp, until the birds began their twittering in the dawn of the coming day, until I had finished the last sentence in the book. I should advise no one to attempt a similar feat, if he hopes to obtain any satisfaction from these fragmentary writings. I read them as I did, not because I found them captivating or thrilling, but because I wondered what it all meant. I knew no more than before what was the man’s story or what had become of him. Here was a mass of disconnected dreams, allegorical visions, a curious blending of fact, fiction and fancy—or—Heaven forbid—did the man actually feel what he says and do as he writes he did?

Was he simply a literary experimenter? I think not. In reading Dunlevy it is impossible to feel at any given moment that you can take hold of him. There is a curious illusive frankness in his style which gives the effect of making you believe that he is about to open his heart, and then, deftly switching the subject in such a way as to leave the impression that he has told what he intended to and yet left nothing to which he could be held. He is like a magician in that he is always supersensitive about being watched, and by turning back his sleeves to invite confidence, he finally leaves the stage without emptying his pockets. As a reader, I felt that in spite of the commonness of the first personal pronoun, it was the letter and not the self. Yet this does not seem to be an intentional effect on the part of Dunlevy, for even when he expresses affection he is still reserved and abstract. In fine, the result is a peculiar power of being intangible. I can’t tell for the life of me if his facts are also a part of his dreams. And yet none of them last in space for more than a few pages of his manuscript.

Only one fact seems to me certain, both from the internal and the external evidence. It is that this strange mixture of writings was composed and written down at the various times when Dunlevy was either partly or wholly under the influence of that strong liquor of his. Its very influence over him appears to have interested him, and here and there he jots down the most minute sensations, as if he were studying its effects introspectively.

When works are in a manner the offspring of idiosyncrasy, then, to understand them, it becomes indispensable to link together, as I have tried to do, the circumstances of their production. It is not Dunlevy who gives vent to the temper of his moods, but it is the subjects of his moods which take possession of him. These visions or what-you-will, had to be, and they had to be precisely as they were written. From this arises their amazing and disappointing inequality, their chief fault. The fault was born, no doubt, in the more than abnormal conditions of improvisation. What sort of unity, or equality, or connection, could they possess when composed under such chance conditions?

The main thing which interests us in some writers is themselves. We endeavor unconsciously to recover the very states of their minds. So far as they go, Dunlevy’s fragments are the source from which we know him best, if he interests us at all. And I shall state here that I purpose as far as possible to print only those writings of his which will help us to know him. We may have no portrait of a man, as is the case with him, we may not be able to draw his features; these are transitory things; and yet if we can know his mind along certain important lines—that man we have. We know nothing of Ecclesiastes, yet we know rather definitely what manner of man he must have been. And so with this unknown man whom I once knew and this obscure work of his, dishevelled and small as it is, we come to see that it took the place of the illusions he had lost; and therefore he tells us what he was and who he was by a process of elimination. The whole manuscript proves what I said at the outset: no one ever knew or could know Dunlevy well. To the critical eye these writings simply reveal a man of such abnormal imagination that his visions became real to him.

And now lastly, I want to make the ethics of my position in this matter clear. I did not think for an instant that I had any right to give even a few of these papers to the public. It was to me a breach of trust. However, after more than a year of bickering with my conscience, I have reasoned myself out of that position. Perhaps the very words of Dunlevy’s letter, “these papers become yours to do with them what you will,” showed that he had an idea of their publication. I doubt that, though I must confess that he makes occasional allusions in the writings themselves which would tend toward that opinion. What prevailed upon me in the end was their value, for value I felt they had. Whether they would excite general interest was no concern of mine. If they are of value, why then I feel that I have no exclusive right to them. I wish it distinctly understood that I do not publish them as possessing literary merit, but as writings which will help to depict the character of a man who had had unusual potentialities, and wasted them as a result of the incidents and habits of his early life. These fragments have but one real value—the portrayal of a man bordering upon insanity, fighting to maintain his balance in the midst of bitterness, and struggling to prove to himself that he had reasons for becoming a dissipated wreck. We look about us and we see many really brilliant men who go down to self defeat. Why is this? We do not know. But Dunlevy’s fragments are descriptive of the mental condition of one amongst them. It is due him to add that he is conscious of his own shortcomings, for he himself gives these papers their title. To sum up, it is as if his book were a diary of visions, without days or dates or places, having no connections, no continuity, no coherence, no unity—except for being the work of one author, that morbidly sensitive, disappointed, solitary pessimist, William Wirt Dunlevy.

It may be said of my introduction that I have erected a large portico to a small dwelling. That may be; but it was once the spiritual abode of a lonely man.

The specimens that I am about to give are taken at random; for I repeat that his writings in their original form had no evident arrangement. In Dunlevy’s book they are merely separated by the end of a leaf or a blank in the page. Nothing connects them but the fact that they were written in one volume by one man. The Roman numerals which I have placed on the successive blank pages are to indicate, therefore, that there was a break in his manuscript. The following is the first in his book.

The Memoirs of a Failure

I

I have had occasion to remark how suddenly alcohol may affect the brain if taken on an empty stomach; I shall now illustrate the impression of one stupor after a heavy meal. Last night I drank freely during a long dinner, and when I arrived at my lodging-house, I felt completely overcome with fatigue. After climbing the five flights of stairs to my room, I sank into my arm-chair with the sensations of vast bewilderment and drowsiness. The small squares in the window frame before me merged into the darkness, and I looked out into the crisp moonlight night as if nothing were before my vision. I thought that it was the last Sunday morning in August, as yet in its freshness, long before the steady glare of the noonday sun. I was sitting, as it seemed to me, on the porch of my old plantation home; and my negro servant had just told me of his readiness to dress me for breakfast. Right before me lay the long, rectangular lawn bordered by the grove of chestnut trees. There was the same spreading poplar with the sheep nibbling its fallen leaves; and the same zig-zag fence against which some of them were rubbing themselves; I could even see little strands of grey wool on the splints in the fence, and over the top rails I caught the same glimpse of a curve in the James River, which can really be seen from this point; but the river seemed muddy, as if from recent rains; I saw a hawk rise and grow dim into a speck against the sky as he disappeared down stream.

Looking in this direction led my eyes to rest upon the old clay road which was then a highway crossing our plantation, and down which I saw my father ride off once, never to return. Along this same road now came a young horsewoman with an escort of two negro out-riders. The trio came nearer and nearer until they reached the long driveway bordered by boxwood hedges that led up to our house from the clay road. I recognized her—Susanne, Susanne, wearing a sun-bonnet with ribbons streaming out to the wind, her bosom rising and falling in the excitement of the ride as she urged her bay mare along between the rows of boxwood, the out-riders keeping in her dust. Her lips are red with life and laughter. I remembered the last time but one when I saw her, she kissed me again and again in the bloom of first love, of only love. “Ah, we are together once more, dear, in the happy long ago!” I was different then. I seem to feel the pressure of those lips; methinks I even hear her now, her voice ringing with the love of love and of life. “For life is love;” she used to say. But come I must go into the house and dress to meet her.

For a moment longer I gazed upon this well-known scene, and (as I thought) I heard myself say, “Take me back, oh, take me back again, to the time of youth, and when all nature seemed a friend.” ... At that moment my arm slipped, I grasped hold of the side of my arm-chair, but not without coming forward with a start.... Susanne! A name forgotten on my lips, yet always speaking and calling to me with the tongues of memory. How strange are remembered kisses upon lips that are dead.

II

This night I am guest at a banquet. I am seated next to my host who is a rich man, ah yes, we are all rich men; and he is dining and wining us in celebration of the anniversary of his birth. The table is a long one and is stretched away into a double banqueting hall. The guests are assembled. An orchestra is playing. There is much wine, and food in abundance is passed before us, and we make merry. Course after course is served before us—turtle soup, timbales of pheasant, terrapin, Kennebec salmon, venison, pates of birds in jelly, aspic of plover eggs—bah! I am satiated and can eat no more—and yet now the dessert comes on the table, course after course, but instead of eating anything more I turn my chair a little sideways so that I may shade my eyes and see into the next room. The hall wherein we sit is lighted with brilliant spangles of bright bulbs and dangling prisms, and the whole of our room is surrounded with great mirrors that we may see ourselves feasting and drinking and making merry. But lo! as I shade my eyes and look down the table, it seems to stretch away into a dimness beyond my sight, and seated at the other end of the table in the next room are countless guests; but they are glum and not merry. Upon more careful scrutiny, I observe that this adjoining room is dimly lighted and that there is no food upon the table, neither is there liquor for them to drink. I can see snowflakes falling in the darkness without; I can see it through the crevices in the windows of their room; whereas in our hall the blinds are down, the shutters are closed and the curtains are drawn close.

Every now and then, one of those who are sitting at that other end of the table in the next room way off there in the dimness, would rise, shove his empty chair under the table and make towards the door, but on his way out he would have to pass by my host. As one after another of them drew near, I noticed their wan, care-worn faces. Each one as he passed my host, stooped over and said, “Good-night, brother; you wouldn’t let me eat and I have to go, for all the food is at your end of the table.” Then each would shut the door behind him as he went out into the darkness.

“Who are they?” I asked my host, putting my fingers to my ear that he might whisper.

“They are the poor,” he answered, contracting his eyebrows, “let me fill your glass.”

He filled it to the brim; but in a moment of impulse, I arose and dashed the glass against the wall.

The breaking of the glass and its pieces falling on the floor brought me to my senses. Sandy came rushing into the room. “There is a tumbler over there. Bring me in another;” I said to him. He picked up the broken bits of glass and brought a cloth to dry the stain on the wall-paper where I had thrown my sangaree.

I fear that I shall not be able to sleep this night. Oh, if I could get just a little sleep—