Book review: “My Mortal Enemy” by Willa Cather

Generally, I don’t read introductions before starting a novel.  I want to experience the book fresh on its own terms and on my own terms. I don’t want some other writer to tell me what to think.

So, when I began Willa Cather’s short 1926 novel My Mortal Enemy, I skipped the introductory essay by Marcus Klein.

At some point, though, I opened the book to a page in that essay in which Klein, a scholar of American literature, approvingly quotes another critic as describing Myra Henshawe, the central character of the novel, as “thoroughly unpleasant.”

That caught my eye.

“Unpleasant” is one thing, but “thoroughly unpleasant” is something else again. Is Myra unpleasant in such a complete, comprehensive, thorough way? And, really, how unpleasant is Myra?

 

“Flashing gray eyes”

In the book’s opening pages, fifteen-year-old Nellie Birdseye, the novel’s narrator, is meeting Myra who is thirty years her senior and who, in the lore of the small Illinois town, was the famous Molly Driscoll who spurned a fortune to elope with her lover.

Nellie finds “a short, plump woman in a black velvet dress, seated upon a sofa and softly playing on Cousin Bert’s guitar.” Myra’s guitar-playing is never again mentioned in the story, but it’s there as one of a multitude of aspects of her personality and presence.

“Certainly, this must be Lydia’s dear Nellie, of whom I have heard so much!” she says to the teenager, and Nellie recalls:

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 gray 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, à 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.

 

“Angry laugh”

She sees in Myra’s eyes a “playful curiosity” and is bewildered by “her charming, fluent voice, her clear light enunciation.”

The woman’s “sarcasm… was like being touched by a metal so cold that one doesn’t know whether one is burned or chilled.” And Nellie can’t be sure if the sarcasm is aimed at her or elsewhere.  Ill at ease, the teen is, nonetheless, fascinated.

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 humor in it.

Myra’s laugh makes Nellie shiver.  Yet, it is zestful, mirthful and wild with humor.

 

“This mood of high scorn”

This is when Myra and her husband Oswald Henshawe are riding high in the world.

A short time later, Nellie and her Aunt Lydia come to Manhattan to visit Myra and her husband and are having a pleasant time until, one day, Nellie comes to their apartment to hear Myra’s angry laugh.

She and Oswald are having an argument over a key ring, Myra thinking that her husband might have a lover on the side.  And now she is also angry with Nellie and her aunt.

When Nellie and Aunt Lydia get on the train to return to their small Illinois town, Myra boards as well, riding only to Pittsburgh.  Although her talk is jolly and light, Myra is bottled up anger.

I noticed, sitting opposite her, that when she was in this mood of high scorn, her mouth, which could be so tender — which cherished the names of her friends and spoke them delicately — was entirely different. It seemed to curl and twist about like a little snake. Letting herself think harm of anyone she loved seemed to change her nature, even her features.

Getting off in Pittsburgh, Myra made a snarky comment, prompting Aunt Lydia to say, “I’m sick of Myra’s dramatics.”

 

“Wickedest of the Roman emperors”

Ten years later, Myra and her husband have fallen on hard times, and Nellie crosses paths with them in a seedy part of San Francisco.  Oswald tells the young woman that his wife is very ill, and Nellie is almost too afraid to see her.

When I entered she was sitting in a wheel-chair by an open window, wrapped in a Chinese dressing-gown, with a bright shawl over her feet. She threw out both arms to me, and as she hugged me, flashed into her old gay laugh….

I was delighted. She was . . . she was herself, Myra Henshawe! I hadn’t expected anything so good. The electric bulbs in the room were shrouded and muffled with colored scarfs, and in that light she looked much less changed than Oswald. The corners of her mouth had relaxed a little, but they could still curl very scornfully upon occasion; her nose was the same sniffy little nose, with its restless, arched nostrils, and her double chin, though softer, was no fuller.

A strong cable of grey-black hair was wound on the top of her head, which, as she once remarked, “was no head for a woman at all, but would have graced one of the wickedest of the Roman emperors.”

 

“Strong and broken”

Here, again, is the Myra of the first half of the novel.

Her smile, for the moment, is gay, not angry although she’s still able to signal her scorn with the corners of her mouth.  There is a restlessness about her and a strength.  Indeed, she herself describes her head as one fit for “the wickedest of the Roman emperors.”

Nellie again is fascinated, and, as the younger woman tells Myra the gossip from back home:

She looked strong and broken, generous and tyrannical, a witty and rather wicked old woman, who hated life for its defeats, and loved it for its absurdities.

I recalled her angry laugh, and how she had always greeted shock or sorrow with that dry, exultant chuckle which seemed to say: “Ah-ha, I have one more piece of evidence, one more, against the hideous injustice God permits in this world!”

 

“A pair of shooting stars”

Nellie, now twenty-five, is working as a teacher, and Myra tells her, “Only the stupid and the phlegmatic should teach.”  By this time, however, the young woman has learned enough to be able to parry that thrust, leading Myra to laugh:

“Ah, we wouldn’t be hiding in the shadow, if we were five-and-twenty! We were throwing off sparks like a pair of shooting stars, weren’t we, Oswald?”

For thirty years, Myra and Oswald have been together, through high and low, through pleasure and pain.  Even now, the husband dotes on the wife, working through the day at a job he doesn’t like and feeding her, bathing her, despite the many times she berates him.

 

“Perhaps I can’t forgive him for the harm I did him”

Why, Nellie asks, is Myra so hard on her husband?

“It’s a great pity, isn’t it, Nellie, to reach out a grudging hand and try to spoil the past for any one? Yes, it’s a great cruelty. But I can’t help it. He’s a sentimentalist, always was; he can look back on the best of those days when we were young and loved each other, and make himself believe it was all like that.

“It wasn’t. I was always a grasping, worldly woman; I was never satisfied. All the same, in age, when the flowers are so few, it’s a great unkindness to destroy any that are left in a man’s heart.”

Tears are rolling down Myra’s cheeks, and she stops for a moment or two before beginning again:

“But I’m made so. People can be lovers and enemies at the same time, you know. We were. . . . A man and woman draw apart from that long embrace, and see what they have done to each other.

“Perhaps I can’t forgive him for the harm I did him. Perhaps that’s it. When there are children, that feeling goes through natural changes. But when it remains so personal . . . something gives way in one. In age we lose everything; even the power to love.”

 

“My mortal enemy”

Only a few days later, Myra is dying, and Nellie and Oswald are sitting watch, listening to the old woman talk to herself in a voice little more than a breath.  “I seemed to hear a soul talking,” Nellie tells the reader.  And Myra is saying:

“I could bear to suffer . . . so many have suffered. But why must it be like this? I have not deserved it. I have been true in friendship; I have faithfully nursed others in sickness. . . . Why must I die like this, alone with my mortal enemy?”

This last sentence must be why a critic would describe Myra as “thoroughly unpleasant.”  She is describing the man with whom she has spent three decades, the man who has cared for her and coddled her and has kept her alive, as “my mortal enemy.”

 

“A wild, lovely creature”

Later, though, after Myra has died, Oswald is saying goodbye to Nellie and adds:

“Nellie, I don’t want you to remember her as she was here. Remember her as she was when you were with us on Madison Square, when she was herself, and we were happy. Yes, happier than it falls to the lot of most mortals to be.

After she was stricken, her recollection of those things darkened. Life was hard for her, but it was glorious, too; she had such beautiful friendships.

He says that, when she was jealous, Myra was “absolutely unreasonable.”

“But that was just Molly Driscoll! I’d rather have been clawed by her, as she used to say, than petted by any other woman I’ve ever known. These last years it’s seemed to me that I was nursing the mother of the girl who ran away with me. Nothing ever took that girl from me. She was a wild, lovely creature, Nellie. I wish you could have seen her then.”

In the end, though, it is Myra’s cruel complaint about “my mortal enemy” that Nellie remembers.

 

Like some of the early saints

Yet, there is also the comment of the young, fresh-faced Catholic priest, Father Fay, who comes regularly to visit the dying woman.  After one, he tells Nellie:

“She’s a most unusual woman, Mrs. Henshawe,” he said when he was walking down the street beside me.

Then he added, smiling quite boyishly: “I wonder whether some of the saints of the early Church weren’t a good deal like her. She’s not at all modern in her make-up, is she?”

Like the saints of the early church?

Maybe another comment by Myra, seemingly to herself as Nellie sat with her, provides insight:

“Ah, Father Fay, that isn’t the reason! Religion is different from everything else; because in religion seeking is finding.”

Seeking is finding.  The goal is the journey.

 

Thoroughly herself

Perhaps what Father Fay was meaning, perhaps what Myra was saying — what Willa Cather was showing in this 105-page novel — is that she lived life to the full, without guard rails, with all senses wide open to the full spectrum of emotions.

Oswald was fascinated by her.  Nellie was.  It seems that Father Fay was as well.

Myra lived a life that was vibrant, even if it was wounding at times to those around her.

Hers was not necessarily a pleasant life.  It would be hard to describe such emotional highs and lows as pleasant.

But she wasn’t “thoroughly unpleasant.”  She was thoroughly herself.

 

Patrick T. Reardon

12.3.24