My Mortal Enemy Read Free Page B

for her of human relationship, of that which passes without fulfillment, of mortality.
    For Willa Cather herself, of course, the source ofpersonal 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 thereis 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.
    M ARCUS K LEIN
    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 dinners. 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 motherscarcely 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