by Willa Cather
Willa Cather wrote My Mortal Enemy in the early months of 1925, in the interval while The Professor’s House was being put through publication, and it is clear that she was making another, now sterner attempt at the same thematic material. Professor St. Peter had had his artifice of another life and he had also had money, by which he could make at least an uneasy compromise with his family. Moreover, at the last moment he had been saved from death and from thoughts of death by an old woman out of the frontier past who was seasoned to endurance. He had not had to live through his marriage, and he is saved in his critical perception of it now from the ultimate despair. What if a person even, or especially, of St. Peter’s intensity of character were to be submitted to other circumstances and conditions, to a marriage contracted in passionate youth that could not afterwards be evaded? What if there were no device by which another life might be accomplished, and what if there were no money? The story of Myra Henshawe is, briefly, that of a woman who chooses love over all other possibilities, and who suffers for it. She suffers not heartbreak—poetry should not attempt to do any heartbreaking, Willa Cather was to remark—but diminution. She purchases at the end, by a harsh sacrifice of all human affections, a desperate moment of greatness.
The novel, a recent critic says, is “the least likable” of Willa Cather’s works—and it probably is, in the way that Coriolanus is perhaps the least “likable” of Shakespeare’s plays—and Myra Henshawe, the same critic says, is “thoroughly unpleasant.” She is, and that is a mark of the novel’s strictness. Her charm is, or was, in the youthful abandon with which she gave up a fortune for romance. It is what a heroine should do. She and her runaway marriage, the narrator tells us at the very beginning, have for years been the only interesting topics of gossip at family dinners, and it is clear that her Aunt Lydia has devoted her life to the memory of the night Myra eloped. But the charm of that moment cannot be, and is not, permanent. It is preserved in Aunt Lydia’s gossip, but for Myra the pleasant gesture meant a marriage and, in the most practical terms, a commitment to love. Her subsequent life has been as happy as that of most people, Aunt Lydia says, though apparently she thinks such reflection somehow beside the point, and only the narrator sees the slight tarnishing irony in it, sees that Myra’s gesture, which had been larger than most people’s, should have earned her a happiness more brilliant than other people’s.
Her commitment to love, we come to see, has yielded her a life somewhat less happy than that of other people, though happiness is indeed not quite relevant to her. The novel isn’t an inverted fairy tale, of the princess who must, princess or no, accommodate herself to a daily life and growing old. Myra isn’t a romantic heroine, but imperious and equipped with a taste for greatness. And what we see in the first part of the novel is Myra, with what the narrator calls her something “compelling, passionate, overmastering,” extravagantly, against frustrating circumstances and with a secret notion of her folly, repeating her commitment. Myra in middle age has become a friend to young lovers. She is nearly always, her husband complains, helping a love affair along. She is at pains to put the best romantic appearance on her own marriage. She dresses brilliantly, as befits a great lover. And she devotes herself absolutely, because it is part of loving, to her friendships. She is one of the great few who know what friendship means. But underneath all her actions there is a sense that the activity itself is insufficient, that it can’t secure for her what her nature demands. She has behind her a record, not to be blinked, of friendships betrayed. It is suggested that she knows, moreover, that her husband is unfaithful to her. And as for the lovers she is helping along, she thinks that “very likely hell will come of it.”
There is about Myra, and that is also a part of the novel’s strictness, something not merely unpleasant but disproportionate; the intensity of her character is superior to her materials, and so her grand loving has become compulsive. Nevertheless she is sustained while she has a certain amount of youthfulness and a certain amount of money. In the second part of the novel these are taken from her, and she is left with her commitment pure, and the lesson of her failure. The friends are gone. In their place are the upstairs neighbors whose every movement beats on her consciousness. “Why,” says Myra, who has been a great friend and therefore intimate with human existence, “Why should I have the details of their stupid, messy existence thrust upon me all day long, and half the night?” She regrets bitterly now her sacrifice of a fortune. Money has might and it does endure. The money that was to have been hers has actually gone to found a convent, and it is implicit that it is a convent that Myra wants, a place of quiet but absolute strength and dignity. And most of all she regrets her marriage, now.
In her old age, she says at one point, she has lost the power to love. In fact, however, she has not suffered loss but, rather, defeat by love. Her husband, who is devoted to her, is now unbearable to her, because he is the source of her defeat. She and her husband, she tells the narrator, have been great lovers and as well great enemies. They have done each other harm. Their marriage has been their ruin. They have destroyed each other. And what in their marriage was destructive, though she does not explicitly draw the conclusion herself, is what is destructive in “messy existence” itself. Myra turns, in this savage, bitter age of hers, to what is not messy. She is drawn to a particular bare headland on the Pacific slope where there is silence and vista and where she can imagine the first cold, bright streak of dawn over the water—it is in that setting, rather than in her husband’s home, that she chooses to die. And she turns to the Catholicism of her youth. Catholicism is not a dogma for her, but, as it was to be in Death Comes for the Archbishop, it is an aesthetic. Religion is that in which seeking is finding, desire is fulfillment, and so it has none of the tragic restlessness of human relations.
The Pacific headland and Catholicism have an incontestable greatness and endurance which human relationship, even at the highest pitch of love, can’t have. When Myra dies she faces her husband with a “terrible judgment”: “Why must I die like this, alone with my mortal enemy?” There is a deep pun in the phrase. Her husband is her enemy because he is the source for her of human relationship, of that which passes without fulfillment, of mortality.
For Willa Cather herself, of course, the source of personal greatness and immortality was her craft, and she went at it with an enormous energy and intelligence. There were others at the time of her greatest production who also made a religion of craftsmanship—Gertrude Stein, who was her exact contemporary, Ezra Pound, Hemingway—but next to Willa Cather they seem sloganeers. She quite alone, and without making a public campaign of it, put in the work and achieved a relentless purity of style. Never so pure and never so relentless as in My Mortal Enemy. It is a book made with the utmost rigor, and it is therefore the perfect expression of Myra Henshawe. Like Myra, the novel makes a raid on all amplitudes, all mere pleasantness, and all sloppinesses. The novel is not without its structural curiosities. The narrator wanders in and out of perspective and acts sometimes as a naïve observer and sometimes as the author’s spokesman. An eighteen-year-old lady journalist who looks very much like Willa Cather herself at eighteen wanders twice into the story without apparent function. It is not so surely composed a novel as A Lost Lady. But in no other novel did Willa Cather ever so strenuously grasp and compress her matter. As no other novel required of her such strenuosity.
The story of Myra Henshawe must have been a personal crisis. There is no knowing for sure because there is available no record other than the novel. It doesn’t much matter. It is that crisis in which all merely mortal life must be measured by the terms of real greatness.
MARCUS KLEIN
Barnard College 1961
ONE
I first met Myra Henshawe when I was fifteen, but I had known about her ever since I could remember anything at all. She and her runaway marriage were the theme of the most interesting, indeed the only interesting, stories that were told in our family, on holidays or at family dinner
s. My mother and aunts still heard from Myra Driscoll, as they called her, and Aunt Lydia occasionally went to New York to visit her. She had been the brilliant and attractive figure among the friends of their girlhood, and her life had been as exciting and varied as ours was monotonous.
Though she had grown up in our town, Parthia, in southern Illinois, Myra Henshawe never, after her elopement, came back but once. It was in the year when I was finishing High School, and she must then have been a woman of forty-five. She came in the early autumn, with brief notice by telegraph. Her husband, who had a position in the New York offices of an Eastern railroad, was coming West on business, and they were going to stop over for two days in Parthia. He was to stay at the Parthian, as our new hotel was called, and Mrs. Henshawe would stay with Aunt Lydia.
I was a favourite with my Aunt Lydia. She had three big sons, but no daughter, and she thought my mother scarcely appreciated me. She was always, therefore, giving me what she called “advantages,” on the side. My mother and sister were asked to dinner at Aunt Lydia’s on the night of the Henshawes’ arrival, but she had whispered to me: “I want you to come in early, an hour or so before the others, and get acquainted with Myra.”
That evening I slipped quietly in at my aunt’s front door, and while I was taking off my wraps in the hall I could see, at the far end of the parlour, a short, plump woman in a black velvet dress, seated upon the sofa and softly playing on Cousin Bert’s guitar. She must have heard me, and, glancing up, she saw my reflection in a mirror; she put down the guitar, rose, and stood to await my approach. She stood markedly and pointedly still, with her shoulders back and her head lifted, as if to remind me that it was my business to get to her as quickly as possible and present myself as best I could. I was not accustomed to formality of any sort, but by her attitude she succeeded in conveying this idea to me.
I hastened across the room with so much bewilderment and concern in my face that she gave a short, commiserating laugh as she held out to me her plump, charming little hand.
“Certainly this must be Lydia’s dear Nellie, of whom I have heard so much! And you must be fifteen now, by my mournful arithmetic—am I right?”
What a beautiful voice, bright and gay and carelessly kind—but she continued to hold her head up haughtily. She always did this on meeting people—partly, I think, because she was beginning to have a double chin and was sensitive about it. Her deep-set, flashing grey eyes seemed to be taking me in altogether—estimating me. For all that she was no taller than I, I felt quite overpowered by her—and stupid, hopelessly clumsy and stupid. Her black hair was done high on her head, á la Pompadour, and there were curious, zigzag, curly streaks of glistening white in it, which made it look like the fleece of a Persian goat or some animal that bore silky fur. I could not meet the playful curiosity of her eyes at all, so I fastened my gaze upon a necklace of carved amethysts she wore inside the square-cut neck of her dress. I suppose I stared, for she said suddenly: “Does this necklace annoy you? I’ll take it off if it does.”
I was utterly speechless. I could feel my cheeks burning. Seeing that she had hurt me, she was sorry, threw her arm impulsively about me, drew me into the corner of the sofa and sat down beside me.
“Oh, we’ll get used to each other! You see, I prod you because I’m certain that Lydia and your mother have spoiled you a little. You’ve been overpraised to me. It’s all very well to be clever, my dear, but you mustn’t be solemn about it—nothing is more tiresome. Now, let us get acquainted. Tell me about the things you like best; that’s the short cut to friendship. What do you like best in Parthia? The old Driscoll place? I knew it!”
By the time her husband came in I had begun to think she was going to like me. I wanted her to, but I felt I didn’t have half a chance with her; her charming, fluent voice, her clear light enunciation bewildered me. And I was never sure whether she was making fun of me or of the thing we were talking about. Her sarcasm was so quick, so fine at the point—it was like being touched by a metal so cold that one doesn’t know whether one is burned or chilled. I was fascinated, but very ill at ease, and I was glad when Oswald Henshawe arrived from the hotel.
He came into the room without taking off his overcoat and went directly up to his wife, who rose and kissed him. Again I was some time in catching up with the situation; I wondered for a moment whether they might have come down from Chicago on different trains; for she was clearly glad to see him—glad not merely that he was safe and had got round on time, but because his presence gave her lively personal pleasure. I was not accustomed to that kind of feeling in people long married.
Mr. Henshawe was less perplexing than his wife, and he looked more as I had expected him to look. The prominent bones of his face gave him a rather military air; a broad, rugged forehead, high cheek-bones, a high nose, slightly arched. His eyes, however, were dark and soft, curious in shape—exactly like half-moons—and he wore a limp, drooping moustache, like an Englishman. There was something about him that suggested personal bravery, magnanimity, and a fine, generous way of doing things.
“I am late,” he explained, “because I had some difficulty in dressing. I couldn’t find my things.”
His wife looked concerned for a moment, and then began to laugh softly. “Poor Oswald! You were looking for your new dress shirts that bulge in front. Well, you needn’t! I gave them to the janitor’s son.”
“The janitor’s son?”
“Yes. To Willy Bunch, at home. He’s probably wearing one to an Iroquois ball to-night, and that’s the right place for it.”
Mr. Henshawe passed his hand quickly over his smooth, iron-grey hair. “You gave away my six new shirts?”
“Be sure I did. You shan’t wear shirts that give you a bosom, not if we go to the poorhouse. You know I can’t bear you in ill-fitting things.”
Oswald looked at her with amusement, incredulity, and bitterness. He turned away from us with a shrug and pulled up a chair. “Well, all I can say is, what a windfall for Willy!”
“That’s the way to look at it,” said his wife teasingly. “And now try to talk about something that might conceivably interest Lydia’s niece. I promised Liddy to make a salad dressing.”
I was left alone with Mr. Henshawe. He had a pleasant way of giving his whole attention to a young person. He “drew one out” better than his wife had done, because he did not frighten one so much. I liked to watch his face, with its outstanding bones and languid, friendly eyes—that perplexing combination of something hard and something soft. Soon my mother and uncle and my boy cousins arrived. When the party was complete I could watch and enjoy the visitors without having to think of what I was going to say next. The dinner was much gayer than family parties usually are. Mrs. Henshawe seemed to remember all the old stories and the old jokes that had been asleep for twenty years.
“How good it is,” my mother exclaimed, “to hear Myra laugh again!”
Yes, it was good. It was sometimes terrible, too, as I was to find out later. She had an angry laugh, for instance, that I still shiver to remember. Any stupidity made Myra laugh—I was destined to hear that one very often! Untoward circumstances, accidents, even disasters, provoked her mirth. And it was always mirth, not hysteria; there was a spark of zest and wild humour in it.
TWO
The big stone house, in its ten-acre park of trees and surrounded by a high, wrought-iron fence, in which Myra Driscoll grew up, was still, in my time, the finest property in Parthia. At John Driscoll’s death it went to the Sisters of the Sacred Heart, and I could remember it only as a convent. Myra was an orphan, and had been taken into this house as a very little girl and brought up by her great-uncle.
John Driscoll made his fortune employing contract labour in the Missouri swamps. He retired from business early, returned to the town where he had been a poor boy, and built a fine house in which he took great pride. He lived in what was considered great splendour in those days. He kept fast horses, and bred a trotter that made a national record.
He bought silver instruments for the town band, and paid the salary of the bandmaster. When the band went up to serenade him on his birthday and on holidays, he called the boys in and treated them to his best whisky. If Myra gave a ball or a garden-party, the band furnished the music. It was, indeed, John Driscoll’s band.
Myra, as my aunt often said, had everything: dresses and jewels, a fine riding horse, a Steinway piano. Her uncle took her back to Ireland with him, one summer, and had her painted by a famous painter. When they were at home, in Parthia, his house was always open to the young people of the town. Myra’s good looks and high spirits gratified the old man’s pride. Her wit was of the kind that he could understand, native and racy, and none too squeamish. She was very fond of him, and he knew it. He was a coarse old codger, so unlettered that he made a poor showing with a pen. It was always told of him that when he became president of our national bank, he burned a lot of the treasury notes sent up to his house for him to sign, because he had “spoiled the sig-nay-ture.” But he knew a great deal about men and their motives. In his own way he was picturesque, and Myra appreciated it—not many girls would have done so. Indeed, she was a good deal like him; the blood tie was very strong. There was never a serious disagreement between them until it came to young Henshawe.
Oswald Henshawe was the son of a German girl of good family, and an Ulster Protestant whom Driscoll detested; there was an old grudge of some kind between the two men. This Ulsterman was poor and impractical, a wandering schoolmaster, who had charge for a while of the High School in Parthia, and afterwards taught in smaller towns about. Oswald put himself through Harvard with very little help from his parents. He was not taken account of in our town until he came home from college, a handsome and promising young man. He and Myra met as if for the first time, and fell in love with each other. When old Driscoll found that Oswald was calling on his niece, he forbade him the house. They continued to meet at my grandfather’s, however, under the protection of my Aunt Lydia. Driscoll so persecuted the boy that he felt there was no chance for him in Parthia. He roused himself and went to New York. He stayed there two years without coming home, sending his letters to Myra through my aunt.
