My Mortal Enemy Read Free

“human relationships are the tragic necessity of human life; that they can never be wholly satisfactory, that every ego is half the time greedily seeking them, and half the time pulling away from them.” And it is the struggle to get beyond the necessity of human relationships that is the secret history of all Willa Cather’s novels, only as time went on, as the struggle turned, one supposes, more desperate, its nature became more apparent. After
My Ántonia
there is a gathering darkness of which
My Mortal Enemy
is the crisis, and in each of the novels between those two the enemy is, successively, a more intimate part of the hero. In
One of Ours
the particular enemy is still for the most part the aggressively ignorant village, and
One of Ours
is still for the most part one of those 1920’s novels of the “village virus.” In
A Lost Lady
the enemy is the village, but it is also the modern life that the heroine after all must live. In
The Professor’s House
it is the family, and the Professor is put to the altogether impossible choice between his artifice of the past and the wife whom he does love. In
My Mortal
Enemy
, then, it is friendship and love, human relationship itself.
    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, bya 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 ofother people, though happiness is indeed not quite relevant to her. The