My Mortal Enemy Read Free Page A

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 butdisproportionate; 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