The Memoirs of a Failure: with an Account of the Man and His Manuscript

With an Account of the Man and his Manuscript
Daniel Wright Kittredge
ALBERT BRITNELL TORONTO, CANADA

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


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.