My Mortal Enemy

Willa Cather is so interesting. Baptized and confirmed an Episcopalian, nonetheless, when religion featured in her novels, it always seems to be Roman Catholicism. And I’m not even just talking about Death Comes for the Archbishop and Shadows on the Rock. It seems as if every Cather work I read has a Catholic element woven into it, and usually as a positive force.

I read this piece from Ralph McInerny, but it really didn’t help explain. Yes, Cather grew up knowing Catholic immigrants, whose faith evidently impressed her, and maintained important friendships with Catholics, including clerics, through her life.

In the case of Death Comes for the Archbishop, we have a bit of an explanation in a letter Cather wrote to Commonweal, which you can read here. She begins, it seems, with a place and an experience – and in the many years spent in her beloved Southwest, as she says, the stories of the missions had a profound impact.

Catholicism is not the center of My Mortal Enemy, but then, perhaps it is.

It’s the story of a whirlwind romance, a forbidden marriage, disillusionment, disappointment and reality. It’s very focused, told from the perspective of, at the beginning, a teenaged girl who lived in the town in which this marriage began, heard the legends, and then got to know the protagonists during a holiday in New York City and much later in life, in San Francisco.

My Mortal Enemy is an interesting, even absorbing read, and, as I said, it’s a novella, so depending on your reading speed, you could gulp it down in anywhere from thirty minutes to an hour.

It’s essentially about appearances and reality, fantasy and truth. And a sober corrective to the myth of happily ever after I suppose.

Here’s a really interesting article on the possible, perhaps even probable origins of the story in the lives of people Cather knew. Interesting, not for the events themselves, but for insight in how Cather turned the facts of other people’s lives into fiction.

But what I want to focus on is the Catholic part.

Myra, the woman who married against her great-uncle’s will, had a somewhat Catholic background, and in fact upon her elopement, her great-uncle disinherited her and directed what would have been hers to a Catholic religious order, and his mansion was turned over to them after his death as well.

When I was older I used to walk around the Driscoll place alone very often, especially on spring days, after school, and watch the nuns pacing so mildly and measuredly among the blossoming trees where Myra used to give garden-parties and have the band to play for her. I thought of the place as being under a spell, like the Sleeping Beauty’s palace; it had been in a trance, or lain in its flowers like a beautiful corpse, ever since that winter night when Love went out of the gates and gave the dare to Fate. Since then, chanting and devotions and discipline, and the tinkle of little bells that seemed forever calling the Sisters in to prayers.

I knew that this was not literally true; old John Driscoll had lived on there for many years after the flight of his niece. I myself could remember his funeral–remember it very vividly–though I was not more than six years old when it happened. I sat with my parents in the front of the gallery, at the back of the church that the old man had enlarged and enriched during the latter days of his life. The high altar blazed with hundreds of candles, the choir was entirely filled by the masses of flowers. The bishop was there, and a flock of priests in gorgeous vestments. When the pall-bearers arrived, Driscoll did not come to the church; the church went to him. The bishop and clergy went down the nave and met that great black coffin at the door, preceded by the cross and boys swinging cloudy censers, followed by the choir chanting to the organ. They surrounded, they received, they seemed to assimilate into the body of the church, the body of old John Driscoll. They bore it up to the high altar on a river of colour and incense and organ-tone; they claimed it and enclosed it.

In after years, when I went to other funerals, stark and grim enough, I thought of John Driscoll as having escaped the end of all flesh; it was as if he had been translated, with no dark conclusion to the pageant, no “night of the grave” about which our Protestant preachers talked. From the freshness of roses and lilies, from the glory of the high altar, he had gone straight to the greater glory, through smoking censers and candles and stars.

Myra turns her back on all of this until the end of her life, when our protagonist encounters her again out west. Still married, but not exactly happily, and in terrible health, Myra is essentially an invalid. In that state, she has turned back to the Church.

Father Fay came to see her almost daily now. His visits were long, and she looked forward to them. I was, of course, not in her room when he was there, but if he met me in the corridor he stopped to speak to me, and once he walked down the street with me talking of her. He was a young man, with a fresh face and pleasant eyes, and he was deeply interested in Myra. “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?”

During those days and nights when she talked so little, one felt that Myra’s mind was busy all the while–that it was even abnormally active, and occasionally one got a clue to what occupied it. One night when I was giving her her codeine she asked me a question.

“Why is it, do you suppose, Nellie, that candles are in themselves religious? Not when they are covered by shades, of course–I mean the flame of a candle. Is it because the Church began in the catacombs, perhaps?”

At another time, when she had been lying like a marble figure for a long while, she said in a gentle, reasonable voice:

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

She accented the word “seeking” very strongly, very deeply. She seemed to say that in other searchings it might be the object of the quest that brought satisfaction, or it might be something incidental that one got on the way; but in religion, desire was fulfilment, it was the seeking itself that rewarded.

Isn’t it interesting what we can find in old books, in words written so long ago. We say “it was a different world.” But was it, really?

Last point, and this means nothing to those of you who haven’t read it, which I assume is all of you.

The title of the book is My Mortal Enemy – and it’s generally understood, it seems to me, to refer to Myra’s husband (who seems to have cheated on her in the past, but is a faithful support to her in her last days.) – as she exclaims….

The sick woman began to talk to herself, scarcely above a whisper, but with perfect distinctness; a voice that was hardly more than a soft, passionate breath. I seemed to hear a soul talking.

“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?”

Oswald was sitting on the sofa, his face shaded by his hand. I looked at him in affright, but he did not move or shudder. I felt my hands grow cold and my forehead grow moist with dread. I had never heard a human voice utter such a terrible judgment upon all one hopes for. As I sat on through the night, after Oswald had gone to catch a few hours of sleep, I grew calmer; I began to understand a little what she meant, to sense how it was with her. Violent natures like hers sometimes turn against themselves . . . against themselves and all their idolatries.

As I said, the assumption is that she’s talking about her husband, but I wonder. My instinct hinted that “my mortal enemy” is not Oswald, but herself, even on a subconscious level – that this is Cather’s intention. Myra can’t let go of her accusatory stance towards her husband, but under that, there’s an intuition that her worst enemy – the one who had the most power to kill her spirit all along has been no one but herself.