New at IWP Books: Phyllis McGinley, 1958, Merry Christmas, Happy New Year.

A New Year & No Resolutions

There’s this to be said for making New Year’s resolutions: it is good clean sport — one that limbers the imagination, flexes the muscles of the character, and adds a kind of rough-and-tumble zest to those dreary weeks immediately following the winter holidays.

But like most forms of exercise, it should be indulged in with moderation — particularly as one reaches the wiser, or declining, years. After all, wrestling with temptation can be as exhausting as any other sort of athletics and can result in a variety of wounds and traumas — fractured egos, tempers thrown out of joint, lumbagos of the spirit. I’m not sure anyone over forty should make a resolution.

Particularly not on the first of January. Of all the bleak, dark, unthinkable times to write out a prescription for improvement, January is the bleakest and darkest and most inauspicious. The high fever of Christmas has only just burned itself out; on its heels comes the New Year’s relapse. And it is in this invalid condition that across the length and breadth of the land people decide to remold their behavior or their careers or their figures closer to some Technicolor ideal. Is it any wonder they are foredoomed to failure? The very month conspires against them, adding the spites and angers of storm, bursting steampipes, and delinquent progeny to the misery of blessings withdrawn. Nothing can possibly get a decent start in the depths of winter except a nasty, nagging cold.

And yet the temptation to make resolutions is something I’ve not been able to overcome. “This year,” I tell myself, “no promises!” But let one wild bell ring out, let me get halfway through a chorus of “Auld Lang Syne,” and I find myself vowing that, come tomorrow, I’ll begin my program of bending from the waist fifty times, night and morning, or answering all my letters the day they reach me. And it’s sometimes as late as February before I’ve won the struggle against my Better Self. It takes strength of character not to give in to good resolves.

But one must fight off the impulse. For resolutions made under a sprig of fading mistletoe are generally the wrong type for January. I can imagine someone’s vowing to cross a desert or lead a crusade or build a rocket to the moon and managing it triumphantly. Those are active aspirations and they’d keep one’s mind off the weather. But in a season that cries out for small solaces, we keep on giving up things.

We promise to deprive ourselves of the trivial comforts that may be all that stand between us and frenzy. Coffee, for instance, or that martini before dinner. Strong with the spurious courage lent by a yet unspotted calendar, we abstain from cigarettes. Are we chatterers by nature, loving the neighborly tidbit on the tongue? Then we swear to forego gossip and be succinct on the telephone.

Or else we vow to shun the second helping of chicken with dumplings and that cream puff for dessert, to live horribly on cottage cheese and pineapple for our waistline’s sake. Somehow we persuade ourselves that, however dismal the soggy landscape and the winter afternoons, cutting down on our pleasures will bring the roses to our cheeks and the bonus to our pay envelopes.

Or else we acquire a compulsion toward Culture. We cancel our reserve copy of Murder at the Glove Counter and resolve to give War and Peace another chance. Some of us so far lose our heads as to make resolutions about how we’ll treat our children. We’ll give up scolding them, we assert; we’ll try to make friends with them instead and invite their confidences.

Folly, folly, all folly! Those promises might stand a chance of being kept in June, say, with the spirits burgeoning along with roses and summer barbecues. In spring, when the year really begins. But in winter, no.

My plan calls for giving up no luxurious bad habit. I shall try only to savor each with more contentment. That plumpness around the midriff may be insurance against nagging at the dinner table. Fortified by that extra cup of coffee in the morning, I can kiss my husband off to work serenely. And I shan’t mind which television station he insists on watching, so long as I am not going cigaretteless through the evening. Besides, how do I know — since doctors still debate the issue — that science will not some day decree there is a necessary vitamin in tobacco or something especially nutritious in caffeine? Wouldn’t I feel silly then, having spent all that anguish of mind in doing without them?

Up, then, with the guilty cup, the avoirdupois, the cigarette! My sincerest efforts shall lie in taking more pains with the percolator and improving my recipe for crepes suzette.

The same goes for the other indulgences. Give up gossip? Why, it’s the very stuff that talk is made on. What is any conversation worth that doesn’t include it? Even the dictionary bears me out. Its lovely derivation is “God-sib” and it refers to a godparent who, it is to be supposed, once brought into the welcoming house his own brand of ineffable tattle. Gossip isn’t scandal and it’s not merely malicious. It’s chatter about the human race by lovers of the same. Gossip is the tool of the poet, the shoptalk of the scientist, the consolation of housewife, wit, tycoon, and intellectual. It begins in the nursery and ends when speech is past. Who am I to fly in the face of nature? Besides, consider the mischief-makers of the universe. They are not the gossips, but the reformers and the puritans and the witch-burners and the keepers of resolutions. They do things. They drop bombs and search out heretics. Untobaccoed, coffeeless, and without humor, they start the wars or set the juggernauts rolling. But the gossips, happily employed with discussing Mrs. Lilywhite’s peculiar behavior at the club dance or whether young Jones is serious about that girl in Tallahassee, are having too pleasant a time to upset the status quo.

Perhaps the word has fallen into disrepute because it’s so often linked with “idle.” But what, I ask myself again, is wrong with a bit of idleness? To waste a little time, to stop one’s customary busyness and look around at the world in which one holds so brief a tenure — these are not unadmirable occupations. The Devil finds work for idle hands, says the old saw. But you notice that it’s the work that’s castigated, not the contemplation. When I recall all the sunsets I’ve missed, all the glimpses of apple trees and feathery snowstorms and faces of passers-by, lost because some commonplace task was too absorbing to put off, I’ve sworn to be more idle rather than less in the new year. Let meals be half an hour late or a table go undusted. When there’s sun, I’ll sit in it. When the spring rain is particularly appealing, I’ll walk in it. I’ll put second-class mail straight in the wastebasket without reading it and stop scouring corners except on days when nothing worthier calls. If I find it rewarding to sit down in the middle of a cluttered morning and read a book, I’Il do that too.

But I shan’t make any promises about the importance of my reading. At my time of life — at anybody’s time of life — reading shouldn’t be for duty only, even if duty consists merely in keeping up with the best sellers. Otherwise one of the great consolations of existence grows tarnished. I’ll read as I please — a spot of science fiction, a taste of Jane Austen. Mark Twain and Keats and Agatha Christie shall sit cheek by jowl on my night table. And I’ll make it a point of honor to finish no book I’m not enjoying, also to skip as much and as often as I like. If I want to peek to see how a novel comes out, I’ll feel perfectly justified. I’ll go to Plato when I’m in the mood and the newest thriller when I’m not. For again, the little vices bring relaxation; and a bit of trash now and then is good for the severest reader. It provides that necessary roughage in the literary diet.

As to improving my footing with the children, I’ll shun that trap altogether. The flaw in too many “child-parent relationships” (to quote the current jargon) is the amount of fussing about it that mothers and fathers do. Children from ten to twenty don’t want to be understood. Their whole ambition is to feel strange and alien and misinterpreted so that they can live austerely in some stone tower of adolescence, their privacies unviolated. There’s nothing they resent more than their elders’ feebleminded attempts to make friends. To them that’s not comradeship, but prying. Authority they will accept. It’s something to complain about and to rest against. But their confidences come only when they’re not applied for.

And while I’m about it, let me add a word of counsel. Parents ought to thank providence when their children don’t constantly confide in them. Hearing the confidences of the young can be as wearying as it is flattering and is chiefly required at eleven-fifty-five on Sunday night just when one is most comfortably in bed, set about with pillows, and eager to find out who killed the blonde in Lord Stanhope’s library.

To ignore my progeny, then; to skimp the housework, to gossip over cups of coffee and cigarettes, to let the pounds and the great books fall where they will; are those reputable goals for a human being and a citizen? I think perhaps they are. At least in January. They are the lesser lapses I shall cultivate to combat the larger ones of greed, ambition, faultfinding, spite, and envy. If I let myself have my head on the small vices, maybe I’ll have time to encourage the small benignities like admiring my husband’s jokes or my friend’s hairdo. I’ll keep blithe enough to give a compliment when it’s needed, listen to Bach done to “Lute, Harpsichord, and Consort of Viols,” and see the winter through without an ulcer.

If I ever feel myself genuinely on fire for a fling at heroism or sainthood, I’ll choose a different time. There’ll be sun beaming away like a rich uncle and dogwood budding and the earth spicy with flowers and fertilizer.

But that will be some lacquered day in April, at the genuine beginning of the year.