My Mortal Enemy

Willa Cather Cather

Description

Willa Cather’s darkest and most dramatic work, My Mortal Enemy is an agonisingly honest examination of marriage, love, and the evolution of a single person’s life.

This 1926 novella depicts a life set for fortune that ultimately results in spite and bitterness. Myra Henshawe, an Irish Catholic, abandoned her uncle and her fortuitous inheritance, instead eloping with her true love, an Ulster Protestant. But is love alone enough to sustain a marriage? As Myra ages and her husband’s economic position worsens, she grows resentful and is filled with regret.

The narrator, Nellie Birdseye, is a young woman who has met Myra three times. She has also been filled with many stories and snippets of gossip about the infamous woman from her Aunt Lydia, who helped Myra elope. Towards the end of Myra’s life, it is Nellie who comforts her, and Willa Cather poses a revelatory question to her readers about the true enemy in one’s life.

Featuring an introductory essay by H. L. Mencken, My Mortal Enemy is a short classic that would make a great addition to the bookshelves of all Cather readers.

Sujets

• Catholicisme
• Fiction
• Romance
• Later in life

Informations

• Publié par: Read Books Ltd.
• Date de parution: 26 septembre 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781528798006
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

MY MORTAL ENEMY
By
WILLA CATHER
WITH AN EXCERPT BY H. L. MENCKEN

First published in 1926



Copyright © 2022 Read & Co. Classics
This edition is published by Read & Co. Classics, an imprint of Read & Co.
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Read & Co. is part of Read Books Ltd. For more information visit www.readandcobooks.co.uk


Contents
WILLA CATHER
An Excerpt by H . L. Mencken
PART I
I
II
III
IV
V
VI
PART II
I
II
III
IV
V
VI
VII


WILLA CATHER
An Excerpt by H. L. Mencken
Four or five years ago, though she already had a couple of good books behind her, Willa Cather was scarcely heard of. When she was mentioned at all, it was as a talented but rather inconsequential imitator of Mrs. Wharton. But today even campus-pump critics are more or less aware of her, and one hears no more gabble about imitations. The plain fact is that she is now discovered to be a novelist of original methods and quite extraordinary capacities—penetrating and accurate in observation, delicate in feeling, brilliant and charming in manner, and full of a high sense of the dignity and importance of her work. Bit by bit, patiently and laboriously, she has mastered the trade of the novelist; in each succeeding book she has shown an unmistakable advance. Now, at last, she has arrived at such a command of all the complex devices and expedients of her art that the use she makes of them is quite concealed. Her style has lost self-consciousness; her grasp of form has become instinctive; her drama is firmly rooted in a sound psychology; her people relate themselves logically to the great race masses that they are parts of. In brief, she knows her business thoroughly, and so one gets out of reading her, not only the facile joy that goes with every good story, but also the vastly higher pleasure that is called forth by first-rate cr aftsmanship.
I know of no novel that makes the remote folk of the western farmlands more real than My Antonía makes them, and I know of none that makes them seem better worth knowing. Beneath the tawdry surface of Middle Western barbarism—so suggestive, in more than one way, of the vast, impenetrable barbarism of Russia—she discovers human beings bravely embattled against fate and the gods, and into her picture of their dull, endless struggle she gets a spirit that is genuinely heroic, and a pathos that is genuinely moving. It is not as they see themselves that she depicts them, but as they actually are. And to representation she adds something more—something that is quite beyond the reach, and even beyond the comprehension of the average novelist. Her poor peasants are not simply anonymous and negligible hinds, flung by fortune into lonely, inhospitable wilds. They become symbolical, as, say, Robinson Crusoe is symbolical, or Faust, or Lord Jim. They are actors in a play that is far larger than the scene swept by their own pitiful suffering and aspiration. They are actors in the grand farce that is the tra gedy of man.
Setting aside certain early experiments in both prose and verse, Miss Cather began with Alexander’s Bridge in 1912. The book strongly suggested the method and materials of Mrs. Wharton, and so it was inevitably, perhaps, that the author should be plastered with the Wharton label. I myself, ass-like, helped to slap it on—though with prudent reservations, now comforting to contemplate. The defect of the story was one of locale and people: somehow one got the feeling that the author was dealing with both at second-hand, that she knew her characters a bit less intimately than she should have known them. This defect, I venture to guess, did not escape her own eye. At all events, she abandoned New England in her next novel for the Middle West, and particularly for the Middle West of the great immigrations—a region nearer at hand, and infinitely better comprehended. The result was O Pioneers (1913), a book of very fine achievement and of even finer promise. Then came The Song of the Lark (1915)—still more competent, more searching and convincing, better in every way. And then, after three years, came My Antonía, and a sudden leap forward. Here, at last, an absolutely sound technique began to show itself. Here was a novel planned with the utmost skill, and executed in truly admirable fashion. Here, unless I err gravely, was the best piece of fiction ever done by a woman in America.
I once protested to Miss Cather that her novels came too far apart—that the reading public, constantly under a pressure of new work, had too much chance to forget her. She was greatly astonished. “How could I do any more?” she asked. “I work all the time. It takes three years to write a novel.” The saying somehow clings to me. There is a profound criticism of criticism in it. It throws a bright light upon the difference between such a work as My Antonía and such a work as—. . . But I have wars enough.
An e xcerpt from Willa Cather, The Borzoi, 1920






MY MORTAL ENEMY


PART I
I
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 mother scarcely 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 this idea to me.
I hastened across the room with so much bewilderment and concern in my face that she gave a short, commiserating laugh as she held out to me her plump, charming little hand.
"Certainly this must be Lydia's dear Nellie, of whom I have heard so much! And you must be fifteen now, by my mournful arithmetic— am I right?"
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 grey 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. I could not meet the playful curiosity of her eyes at all, so I fastened my gaze upon a necklace of carved amethysts she wore inside the square-cut neck of her dress. I suppose I stared, for she said suddenly: "Does this necklace annoy you? I'll take it off if it does."
I was utterly speechless. I could feel my cheeks burning. Seeing that she had hurt me, she was sorry, threw her arm impulsively about me, drew me into the corner of the sofa and sat dow n beside me.
"Oh, we'll get used to each other! You see, I prod you because I'm certain that Lydia and your mother have spoiled you a little. You've been over-praised to me. It's all very well to be clever, my dear, but you mustn't be solemn about it—nothing is more tiresome. Now, let us get acquainted. Tell me about the things you like best; that's the short cut to friendship. What do you like best in Parthia? The old Driscoll place? I knew it!"
By the time her husband came in I had begun to think she was going to like me. I wanted her to, but I felt I didn't have half a chance with her; her charming, fluent voice, her clear light enunciation bewildered me. And I was never sure whether she was making fun of me or of the thing we were talking about. Her sarcasm was so quick, so fine at the point—it was like being touched by