MARY GORDON

On Enmity

FROM Salmagundi

1—Trying for a Definition

The word enemy comes to my mind, and suddenly I hear it everywhere. It is a strong
word, not only strong but powerful. To use it can have consequences, and those
consequences can be and have been grave.

I am trying to understand the meaning of enemy, to consider what it might mean. I am

trying, before anything else, to reach a definition.

What can be said of the word enemy? Can we at least begin by saying these things:
The enemy is one who does me harm.
My enemy is one who desires my harm.
I know my enemy because she is the one who desires to harm me.
Is everyone who has done me harm my enemy?

But then, there must be other questions.

Who defines the enemy, who is it that names him?
Is it the one harmed by him? Is the one harmed always right in his naming?
Is it possible to misname someone an enemy, because one feels harmed, feels that the
harming is deliberate, personal, though in fact the one called the enemy had no desire to
harm any particular person? Had only an unfocused, unformed impulse to harm? Perhaps
felt a duty to do some sort of harm?

The enemy of my enemy is my friend.

The friend of my enemy is my enemy.

2—On Hearing of the Death of an Enemy

She wished me harm. She wanted to harm me. I never knew why. Others said that she was
jealous, or that perhaps she loved me, and that her love was blocked, balked. She said that
I had stolen her life. That I wanted too much of her, wanted us to be best friends, assumed
that we were equals and we were not: she was a professor, I a graduate student, and by
insisting that she link herself with me I was destroying her possibilities for professional
advancement. It was the early seventies. We both had dogs. I phoned her one night to ask
her to take care of my dog because I wanted to spend the night with someone I had just
met. She agreed; it didn’t occur to me that this would be a problem.

A few days later, I left for a three-week holiday. When I returned my mailbox was full:
twenty-five letters, in which she told me how I had destroyed her life. In the three weeks
that I was gone, she told everyone everything I had said about them. Repeated all the
gossip we’d bred and stored in a year of being what I had thought was best friends. Many
people felt betrayed by the things she told them and no longer wanted to see me. Others
took her side because they felt that she was mentally fragile and I was strong, that she was
a professor and deserved, therefore, their allegiance, and anyway I would be leaving soon.
She told me that, as Haldeman or Ehrlichman said to John Dean (this was the time of
Watergate), if I said anything to anyone she would “blast me out of the water.”

Thirty-five years later, at lunch with mutual friends, I discover that she died, young, of
breast cancer.

I think of all the hours I spent in torment connected to her.

At the table, a phrase comes to me:

Wasted sorrow.

3—A Story About a Baby

I heard this story many years ago, but it is a story no one can forget. I didn’t know either
the man or the woman, but I know people who knew them, knew them very well. They
were poets. He was older. He had been her teacher, and established, successful, whereas
she was only starting out. They had a child. The child was two years old. I don’t know if
they were married, but whatever their legal situation, she had understood, or perhaps it is
better to say misunderstood, that he would be her partner, living beside her, involved with
the rearing of the child. As it turns out, this was not his understanding. She was happy that
they were both being offered jobs in the same city. A minor city in one of the less
desirable (certainly for a poet) places in America. Then he was offered a better job in a
more desirable city. There was no job there for her. She found herself abandoned, although
he did not think of it as abandonment, though he left her in an undesirable city with a two-
year-old child. She took a knife and stabbed her baby, whom everyone says was a
beautiful boy, and then herself. His last sight on earth was of his mother coming at him
with a knife. Was his last thought, My mother is my enemy?

4—Jerusalem

I am in Kennedy airport, waiting for a flight to Tel Aviv. A blond American couple
complain about the extent of the security. An Orthodox boy, in yarmulke and tallit, says,
“We have a lot of enemies.” The American man says, “You’ve made a lot of enemies.”
Across the aisle from me, the American couple, and the Orthodox boy are a man and wife.
The man, his hair in long side curls, seems to be dressed in a costume from the nineteenth
century: black suit, black overcoat trailing the floor, black fedora. His wife is dressed in
floor-length black as well; her hair is covered by a black wool scarf. During the exchange
between the boy and the American couple, they seemed to be praying. Silently, they rise
and move several rows away. I can no longer see them.

5—My Husband Tells Me a Story About the War

My husband tells me this story, which took place in an army hospital in Paris at the end of
the Second World War. There was a hideous colonel in charge of the hospital. The French
workers who had worked, in turn, for the French, the Germans, and the Americans said he
was worse than any of the Nazis they’d worked for. Inspecting the hospital with my
husband, a young corporal, in tow, the colonel sees a broom leaning against the wall of a
corridor. Enraged, he asks who left it there. My husband knows it is a little French cleaner
whose husband or lover has just been killed in the war. He knows she is very poor. And so
he says, “I left it there.” The colonel knows that he is lying and storms off, furious. Then
he comes back half an hour later to say he has fired the cleaning woman. Weeping, she
says goodbye to all her friends, and knowing what my husband did for her, she whispers,
“I will never forget what you did.”

It immediately occurs to me that the colonel fired her to punish my husband, to make a
point about the folly of his assumptions. My husband is shocked. He never thought of it
this way. He wanted to revel in the good feeling of having someone who would never
forget him.

Why did I have to tell him what I thought?

Does this mean that I am his enemy, or the enemy of his happiness?

Clearly the colonel was the enemy of the little cleaner. But why? Did he consider her his
enemy, one enemy in his larger fight against disorder?

Who did she think of as her enemy?

Did she consider herself a person of so little consequence that she thought no one would
believe her if she said someone had taken her seriously enough to define himself as her
enemy?

6—Simone Weil and Georges Bernanos

Simone Weil and Georges Bernanos both, or each, traveled to Spain to cover the Spanish
Civil War, Bernanos for the right-wing press, Weil for the left. Each wrote: This war is
hopeless, it is impossible to tell good from evil, there is such evil, such cruelty, such
barbarity on both sides. Simone Weil wrote to Bernanos, “I thought you were my enemy,
but you are my brother.”

7—Do Animals Have Enemies?

From watching my dogs, I know that the sight of certain dogs creates in my dogs the
impulse to aggression, even though the other dog has done nothing provocative to warrant
it. Is it the memory of past conflict that triggers the urge to aggression? Aggression toward
themselves? Their ancestors? Do dogs have in their minds the category “enemy,” into
which they place an individual who fits the category, even if the individual is entirely
innocent? If this is true of animals, what does it say about us? About the possibility for
innocence, or reformation?

8—My Childhood Enemy

My childhood enemy was not another child. My enemy was an adult, who wished me
harm. She wished me harm because I was a child and she was unable to have children.
Because she was a polio victim and my mother was as well. She could bear being childless
if she could understand that it was a result of her handicap. But my mother’s fecundity
made that explanation impossible. Therefore she hated me. She wished to do me harm.
The harm: she wished me always to be unhappy. She wished that I would never admire
myself. She was determined to kill any love I might feel toward myself. She humiliated
me regularly, publically and privately. She accused me of vanity and selfishness. I still fear
that she was right.
When I try to understand regarding a child as your enemy, or considering yourself the
enemy of a child, I cannot. But because I walked beneath the magic carapace of my
father’s extravagant love, that woman’s enmity could not pierce me. But this was not her
desire; her desire was that life should be a misery to me. Perhaps in that way she could
convince herself that it was better never to have borne a child.

9—Rachel Carson

At a lecture on the environment, a scientist says to the audience, “I am now going to

project the face of the person responsible for more deaths in Africa than any political
tyrant.” He projects the face of Rachel Carson. He says that as a result of her campaign
against DDT, millions of Africans have died of malaria.

Does that mean that Rachel Carson, friend of our fragile planet, is the enemy of millions
of the dead?

10—Political Enemies

I grew up believing that Communists were my enemy. Many people would like me to
believe that Muslims are my enemy. It is doubtless true that a certain group of
Communists desired, in fact worked for, the destruction of America. The same is doubtless
true of some Muslims. And I am American, and most of those dear to me, all of those
connected by blood, are Americans living in America. Therefore, if those Communists
who desired and worked for the destruction of America had achieved their wish, if the
Muslims who desire and work for the destruction of America get their wish, I and those I
love and have loved would have been in the past, and will be in the future, harmed. The
work of my enemies. Though now I question what happens to the mind when it invites and
houses the word enemy.

What harm is done by that commonplace word? What distinctions will not, cannot be
drawn where enemy holds sway? Is the concept “enemy” the enemy of clear thought,
therefore of justice? What is gained by its invocation? Perhaps as important, what is lost?

11—Critical Enemies

I believe that postmodern theorists who say that beauty is a socially constructed category
and a threat, who say that there is no such thing as an author and that fiction is an outdated
artifact, are my enemy.
I think the same of a student who believes that all literature must be read in the service of
Catholic doctrine. This one wants to read Emily Dickinson as a crypto-Catholic. I tell her
that her reading practice must be more open, that she must leave aside her preconceptions
when she approaches the text. She is a pretty girl, with full rosy lips, but when she hears
my words, her lips thin; her mouth hardens. She will resist me with all her will. I see in the
thinness of her lips, the hardness of her mouth a desire to do me harm. I try to tell myself
that this is ridiculous; she is very young, quite unsophisticated; she probably isn’t
interested enough in me and what I value to want to take any advice from me. Yet I
perceive that she wants—should want—to take something from the world, a practice of
open reading, and so she stands in my mind for a category of people who want to destroy
what I value.

If I am honest, I have to say that I want to destroy what she values: a practice of reading
that insists that the work of art fit into and confirm her own little idea.

Am I her enemy? Or the enemy of something that could be called a habit of mind? But
whose mind? And who is harmed?

Increasingly, the beautiful things I value seem to me fragile. Susceptible to harm. Harm at
the hands of an enemy.

12—Shock and Awe

We were told that our military might would inspire in our enemies shock and awe. Shock,
yes: this is not difficult to understand. But awe? Doesn’t awe imply admiration? What
does it mean to admire your enemy? Isn’t it to understand that your enemy is, in some way
you can’t help feeling, desirable? That you understand that submission to him might be,
after all, the best, the truest course?

13—“The Spring Is My Enemy”

A friend of mine has a son who experiences severe asthmatic crises, requiring
hospitalization every spring. Not knowing this, I meet my friend on a beautiful spring day
and say, “Isn’t it splendid, isn’t it wonderful.” She says, “Outside my office window there
is a beautiful flowering cherry. It signals the arrival of spring. I look at it, and hate it;
because of what it brings to my son, the spring is my enemy.”

14—My Enemy, My Adversary

In an essay by a psychoanalyst, the following proposition is presented: civilization turns
enemies to adversaries. What is the difference? An adversary can change. And is that the
only essential difference? For the moment I can think of no other.

15—Encounters with the Enemy in Sacred Texts

“You prepare a table for me in the presence of my enemies”: Psalm 23

“The last enemy to be destroyed is death”: First Epistle to the Corinthians