My Mortal Enemy (2 page)

And the three novels of the 1920’s in which Willa
Cather tracked the decline of the Nebraska frontier made still another instance, recorded in another parish, of modern degeneration. That last agricultural frontier had also become a wasteland. That was the objective fact, and the fact had social and political and cultural implications. But still the mode of her apprehension of it is everything, and her response to it was unique. It had no public implications for her. The tone of the new generation was by and large irony, or outright shock that such Babbittry or such a wasteland could be, and despite the negatives in which it spoke, its purpose was forward-looking and progressive. It meant to stir things up, to effect reforms, to set society and politics and culture right. Or the tone of such a writer as Ellen Glasgow, Willa Cather’s exact contemporary, was by and large romantic irony. Ellen Glasgow’s aristocrats had declined into the time of modernism, and she exposed their decline but loved them nevertheless. Or the searching vision of an elder, Edith Wharton, had come to rest, in
The Age of Innocence
, in retrospective affection, just bolstered by a modern sharpness. The new generation was censorious, with a purpose. The older generation watched the passing of the old with nostalgia, just made a bit acid by a sense of the new.

The tone of Willa Cather’s apprehension was neither ironic nor nostalgic. And in fact her purpose was just
the opposite of, say, that of T. S. Eliot. Eliot made a wasteland populated by bored, sterile, desiccated, valueless automatons and submitted it, by a process of interweaving myths, to the criticism of the heroic past. Willa Cather had from the beginning made heroic myths—myths rescued from the crushing clutter of the present, or myths of the heroic past which, it happened, could not prevent what she was to call “the noisy push of the present.” It was the past she looked at, and not the present at all except where some value of the past miraculously could spring out of it, or where it intruded. The past was, simply, where she located greatness, and greatness was her constant subject, and not degeneration. It was not even actual, or her personal history that she recorded—she was not, after all, a “historical novelist”—but a country that her imagination could conceive to contain images of greatness. The three Nebraska novels of the 1920’s track degeneration, and their effect is not of the rush of the new mediocrity, not of degeneration, but of the quantity of the loss.
The Waste Land
discovered the present and was hortatory. Willa Cather created a past and was elegiac.

Those three Nebraska novels record, in a way, her loss of a subject. The frontier had in fact yielded to the obtrusive present, and it must have been as difficult for Willa Cather to locate again its greatness as it would
have been inconceivable for Sinclair Lewis to imagine the pioneering days of Gopher Prairie. And so she was put to the critical labor of finding a purer past, one that would stay past and not decay into the present, one that could propose images that would last forever. Like Eliot, ironically enough, and at about the same time, she discovered an aesthetic proposed by Catholicism. She was not a Catholic. It was not the doctrinal Church that attracted her. But there was a magnitude in Catholicism that was sufficient to her, and a tradition in it that had preserved itself whole through much change, and a tradition so ancient as to be effectively out of time.

Death Comes for the Archbishop
, the first of her two novels of Catholic inspiration, is a novel without plot, and the plot of the other,
Shadows on the Rock
, is the merest sketch. Plots occur in time, depend on change, and it was precisely an image of changelessness that she wanted. And not that image that Eliot came to name “the still point of the turning world,” but something that would clearly dominate the turning world—the aesthetic that Henry Adams had developed out of Catholicism was much closer to her own—something with landscape to it. And the vast landscape of
Death Comes for the Archbishop
, the deserts and mountains and mesas of the Southwest, is scarcely so much the setting of the novel as it is the condition of the two emissaries
of the Church who are set to move through it. As there is in the priests, there is change, even fluidity within, a varying distribution of accents and light. But its aspect as a whole, as it is that of the priests, is of a largeness and solidity and serene fixity. The novel, indeed, isn’t a novel at all, but a legend or a vision of a great, severe quietude, quite removed from and superior to all mortality.

For it was not after all the peculiar historical circumstances of the present that constituted the enemy. Willa Cather’s mode was elegy, and as it must be for all elegists, the enemy was time, mortality, itself. The enemy, therefore, was everything that is a part of mortality, including that modernism that had sapped the frontier and including as well all domestic, mortal feelings. Professor St. Peter had discovered himself wishing for death when the emphasis of his life shifted from the past to the prospect not only of mean present-day commercialism, but to the prospect also of his being merely a husband and a father. There is destruction in such mortal love. It is antagonistic to grandeur. There is in
Death Comes for the Archbishop
a libertine priest, a remarkably good man, who argues the needs of the flesh, and the Archbishop, rather than punish what he perceives to be unworthiness and uncleanliness, can wait for the priest to die. It is the success of the Church that it survives mere mortal goodness, as it is the success of
the land that it is unmarked by human habitants. Love, charity, goodness, kindness—they are as much in time as modernism and therefore equally corrupting, only perhaps more insidious because not so apparently evil.

In an essay of 1936 on the fiction of Katherine Mansfield, Willa Cather was to remark that “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, 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.