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

by Daniel Wright Kittredge

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.