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

by Daniel Wright Kittredge

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.