Had The Mere Living not been largely forgotten by now, it would undoubtedly be saddled with an unshakeable and unfavorable comparison to Virginia Wolf’s Mrs. Dalloway. For both are circadian novels (taking place within the space of a single day) set in London and both really heavily on the use of a stream of consciousness narrative told through multiple characters. The Mere Living was the first novel by B. (for Betty) Bergson Spiro, who would publish the rest of her books under her married name, Betty Miller.
Two of Miller’s later novels are now in print: Farewell, Leicester Square (1941) has been reissued by Persephone Books and On the Side of the Angels (1945) by Capuchin Classics. The Mere Living, on the other hand, disappeared soon after publication and there are currently just two copies available for purchase.
One clue to the nature of The Mere Living can be found in the author’s maiden name, for she was a close relative of the French philosopher Henri Bergson, who was best known at the time for his theory of time. Bergson argued that there were essentially two different times: clock time, the regular, rhythmic, linearly progressing dimension measured by the clock; and time as experienced by individuals, which in our perceptions can speed up or slow down based on factors that may have nothing to do with the ticking of the clock.
The Mere Living is, in one way, an illustration of Bergson’s theory, as the author takes through one day in four progressive stages — Breakfast Time; Lunch Time; Tea Time; and Dinner Time — but at widely different paces as experienced by the four members of the Sullivan family: Henry, the husband and father; Mary, the wife and mother; Nancy, the daughter (19); and Paul, the son (17). So, as an example, as Henry, Paul, and Nancy rush out and into the whirl of the morning rush hour at the end of the Breakfast Time section, Mary feels “an air of release, of pleasure in her solitude,” and quietly tends to the bulbs in her window pots.
Spiro was, without a doubt, aware of and perhaps somewhat inspired by Mrs. Dalloway, but it would be both unfair and not particularly illuminating to compare the two books. For Spiro’s title reveals her major theme, which I’d argue is not only the experience of time framed in the space of a day but also time framed in the space of a life(time). All four Sullivans wake up and go to sleep in the same house and the same beds. One can safely assume that much of their next day will be very much like this one — full of rituals, tasks, chores, and obligations.
On the other hand, in each of their days is a sign of a profound change to come, all of them changes that will put their lives on a different course. Paul becomes aware of his infatuation with a fellow student, Richard, the first sense that this is where his need for physical and emotional connection will take him. Nancy meets Oliver, the married man she has been seeing, in his apartment, his wife being out of town, and realizes she is ready to sleep with him. Henry, having gone into an import/export business with a somewhat mysterious man with Continental connections, begins to understand that he is probably being swindled. And most omninously, Mary’s physician connects her sharp, intermittent attacks of pain and anxiety to a lump in her breast.
By sending her characters out into a busy London day, Spiro is provided with numerous opportunities to show the varieties of time that can be experienced in modern life, such as the hurry-up-and-wait world of the subway:
Along the passage. Hurry, hurry. Quick pattering of many feet. But the train had already gone. Too late. It had gone. Low vacant tunnel. Too late. Aimlessly, they walk up and down, their steps sounding in the shallow silence. In the self-conscious silence. Up and down. Or stare at the advertisements on the in-curling walls. Seen ’em before, anyway. Up and down. Damn the train, was it never coming?
Or the new time-refuges of the cafe, the pub, and the cinema: “But here, for three hours, is a new time, self-sufficient, unrelated: the march of actual time artificially broken, and synthetically replaced, dream-potent.”
Miller took her title from a line from Browning’s “Saul”: “How good is man’s life, the mere living! how fit to employ/All the heart and the soul and the senses forever in joy!” And The Mere Living vibrates with energy generated from a world filled with other people. For Miller, the “blooming, buzzing confusion” that William James called the infant’s impression of the world is part and parcel of modern life for old as well as young. Not that this energy is all positive and productive. On the dust jacket of the U.S. edition of The Mere Living, Miller described her own challenges in writing the book:
Virginia Woolf has said that it is impossible to write without “a room of one’s own.” The Mere Living was written, for the most part, in a corner of the sitting room, with the wireless giving forth its eloquence, and my father, mother, sister and two brothers all tirelessly discussing their particular interests in life at the moment.
Considering that Bergson Spiro was just 22 when she published The Mere Living, she displays, in her treatment of Mary’s examination by her physician, remarkable insight to the perspectives of much more mature women and men. She also demonstrates a clear understanding of the common practice of doctors benignly deceiving their patients:
“Well, Mrs. Sullivan, it’s more or less as I thought. There’s nothing serious to worry about.” Deliberately, he spoke the words: and waited for the change of expression that he knew, the upward, dawning smile, eager, humble, grateful, released. It was one of his hardest moments. The penalty he had to bear, the physician’s, the priest’s, for assuming the responsibility created by that necessity for mother-trust which persists in all grown-up children who fear the dark … his duty being, as he had come to see it, to keep the frightened and ignorant man-child or woman-child from that elemental fear, his duty being to reassure, to inspire comfort and confidence as well as physical relief, for as long a period as possible in these children who came to him with awed confidence in his silent knowledge, in the shining toys, the knives, the lancets, the colored drugs, the mysterious paraphernalia …
When Mary is reunited with her family in the last section, Dinner Time, she draws some comfort from the knowledge that, whatever happens, her children will carry on a part of her: “They glance at me with the living flame of their eyes. To me they owe that flame.” Though family can seem a straitjacket to the two young people eager to break away and discover their own lives, it is also one of their time refuges, like the cafe or cinema: “At nightfall, they returned, acquiescent, to the household of common existence, mutually dependent, interrelated; resigning, in the common purpose that held them about this table, the divergent demands of each separate-striving personality.”
And after the evening time with the family, each person heads to the last essential refuge of sleep. For Mr. Sullivan, it frees him from the deepening fear that he is about to be ruined:
Gradually, sleep-warmth lapped, vague and mollifying and blind. It deprived him increasingly of knowledge of his own body.
Dying away into an easeful warmth of non-being…. He no longer felt his hands. Soft drunken pillow.
Body was darkening and darkening, all knowledge of himself was going, he was escaping at last….
One reviewer attributed the success of The Mere Living to “the extraordinary keenness of its author’s sense-perceptions and her impulsive (but often effective) tyranny over words.” The passage above, with the repetition of warmth, of knowledge, the repetition of short drumming phrases, the synesthesia of “drunken pillow,” all work to achieve a convincing sense of falling asleep. The book is full of such deft descriptions. If there are occasional moments of awkward characterization, these are quickly left behind in the tremendous current of time that runs throughout The Mere Living. When I finished Robert Hillyer’s perfect novel, My Heart for Hostage, I was a bit afraid that it would be hard to find something to maintain its high standard. In its own unique way, The Mere Living certainly does.
I can’t produce genealogical evidence, but it’s stated right on the dust jacket of “The Mere Living.” Shame on me for repeating the statement without having certified her bloodline. Related through DNA or not is hardly as important as the facts that the two knew each other and that Spiro/Miller’s approach to time in this novel was deeply influenced by Henri Bergson’s work.
Hi,
I am always surprised that it is assumed as fact that author, Betty Bergson was the great niece of Henri Bergson.
I have been doing research into the Swedish Bergsons and there is nothing to back up this claim. Social status and location make this connection a vitual impossiblity.
If you do know of anyone who can back up this claim – which I’m sure you can’t – please let me know. After much research and time, I have come across noone who can verify this. On the contrary, most genealogists believe that it’s a load of old cobblers.
John