By Gregory Clark, Illustrated by James Frise, September 10, 1938.
Greg and Jimmie take this opportunity to wish everyone a happy and prosperous New Year
“Heigh-Ho,” sighed Jimmie Frise, stretching, “summer’s over.”
“Now we’ve got to turn from grasshoppers,” I agreed, “into ants.”
“New Year’s Day,” stated Jimmie, “ought to be somewhere around this time of year instead of in the dead of winter. Because in reality, each year really begins about now, when summer’s ended, and we all knuckle down to the grind.”
“That,” I admitted, “is a real idea.”
“How did this January the first business start,” inquired Jim, “as the beginning of the year?”
“Julius Caesar,” I informed him.
“Oh, him,” muttered Jim, bitterly; remembering his far-off unhappy high school days.
“Yes, sir,” I declared, “Julius Caesar adopted what he called the Julian calendar, in his own honor. And to this day, all over the western world, as if his empire were not in the dust a thousand years, we go on honoring old Caesar by obeying his edicts.”
“It’s time we changed,” stated Jim. “I can’t think of any time of year being less the beginning of anything than January the first is just the dreary middle of the winter, the dreary middle of the long laborious year.”
“Even the ancient Egyptians and Phoenicians,” I advised Jim, “had the right idea. They began their year on September 21, at the autumn solstice.”
“The Egyptians?” cried Jim. “Good gracious, how did we ever get ourselves mixed up with the Romans? Why didn’t we stick with the ancient Egyptians? They’d haye handed us down something like a little civilization, instead of all this glorification of Julius Caesar.”
“Well, you see,” I explained, “the Egyptians could see a year begin and a year end. They saw the crops develop and the calves get born and the year come to its fulness. Then they gathered the crop and that ended the year. They began a new year in September, when a year begins now as it began then. Here we are back from our vacation. Everybody is back from vacation. All the hot dog stands are shuttered. All the highways are getting the has-been look. The show is over. The stage is being dismantled and the properties piled against the wall. Summer’s carnival is ended and here we are back to the grind. The year begins.”
“It ought to be New Year’s,” repeated Jim firmly. “How I hated Latin and algebra.”
“The Jews,” I stated, “begin their civil year still on September 6.”
“Why didn’t we stick with the Jews?” demanded Jim. “All we took was their Bible. We would have been better off if we had taken their calendar and their laws and everything else.”
“My, how vindictive you are,” I smiled. “Who would dream that Julius Caesar could be so alive after 2,000 years?”
“I am happy to learn,” stated Jim, “that Latin is now an optional subject in nearly all civilized nations on the globe.”
“The school year begins in September,” I reminded us. “The, fiscal year begins on October 1. I wonder what we could do to start an agitation for the abandonment of January 1, and the adoption of September 15 as New Year’s Day?”
“Ah, it would be great,” cried Jimmie. “What a lovely season of the year. With its hale winds and its ripeness and vigor. How we could set the stage for a new year’s celebration about September 15.”
“Even nature herself,” I pointed out, “goes into a sort of celebration, turning her leaves scarlet and orange, and all her fields golden.”
Dawn of New Work Year
“Instead of going out into a sleet storm on a blizzard,” went on Jim, “as we do in January, we could stage such a September carnival as would fill every man, woman, and child with a sort of joy at getting back to work again. The dawn of the new year of work.”
“It could be a festival of industry,” I recounted.
“Oh, it could be a great day,” cried Jim. “In the cities, the carnivals, the visiting and inspection of big industrial plants, all decked out, the banquets of employees; and in the country, the farmers painting their barns and hauling in the implements to be painted and repaired for another year’s toil, instead of being left to rot in a far corner of the farthest pasture. And at midnight, at the stroke of midnight, all the factory whistles would blow and all the workers of the world would gather about their shops and factories and offices, brilliantly lighted and bedecked, and a new year would have begun.”
“It’s a beautiful idea,” I confessed. “I think we ought to do something about it.”
“By the way,” said Jim, yawning and pushing his drawing table back a little, “what are we going to do this coming year? I never felt so empty of ideas in my life as I do right now.”
“It’s just the reaction,” I assured him. “Everybody feels like this at the beginning of autumn. It’s a sort of let down after the activity of summer.”
“That’s a funny thing,” declared Jim. “We work harder in summer than any other time of year, yet in summer, there is less accomplished than any other season. Business slacks off. Everybody is away having fun. Yet we exhaust ourselves.”
“Rightly so,” I said. “Summer is the real end of the year. We celebrate the end of the year’s work with a vacation. And we exhaust ourselves having fun.”
“That shows you the true nature of man,” said Jim. “Man’s natural instinct is to have fun.”
“We’ll have to get together right away,” I proposed, shoving back my typewriter desk so as to get my feet up on the edge, “we’ll have to get together in a regular conference and decide on plans for the coming season.”
“Yaw,” yawned Jim, “we’ve really got to. Here we are dawdling through life, writing a few simple stories and drawing a few simple cartoons. Just earning our bread, that’s all.”
“What more can any man do?” I submitted, relaxing.
“Talent,” declared Jim, “is that which a man has in his power. Genius is that which has a man in its power. Why can’t we do something, this winter, on a big scale? Why can’t we do some serious work, like against war or to promote the brotherhood of man?”
“Who’d read it?” I inquired.
“Well,” said Jim, “we’ve presumably got somebody reading your stories now and presumably somebody looking at my cartoons. They’d read the stuff.”
“But they wouldn’t read it again,” I pointed out.
“They’d read it before they knew it wasn’t any good,” explained Jim. “And we’d have scored before they knew it. Let’s work out one tremendous article about world peace or the brotherhood of man or something important like that. Let’s sock it all into one grand big smash. All our regular readers will read it before they discover it’s no good. And we’ll have done our life’s work. Our one noble deed. Our one worthy opus. I hate to pass away, being only a cartoonist.”
Intended to Be Great
“I often see,” I admitted, “a queer expression my family’s face and on the faces of friends and companions. I’ve sometimes wondered if it was pity that I should be so dumb as I am when I write.”
“Can we help it?” demanded Jim, a little angrily, though resting his arms on his drawing board and relaxing his head upon them. “Can we help it if we are only cartoonists and scribblers?”
“I always intended,” I confessed, “to be a great man. I used to read great books and plan what a great book I would write some day. I remember I had a row of books on my desk, as a young man, a row of books like Gibbon’s ‘Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire’ and ‘Sartor Resartus’1 and Plato’s Republic’ and things like that. I remember how I used to come in at night, after a long day spent covering the waterfront or reporting the police court, and I would look with dignity at that row of great books and they would look back with dignity at me. It was a nice feeling to come in at night to that little room and look at those books.”
“Me,” said Jim, drowsily and unhappily, “I used to get from the library big heavy books about Michael Angelo, full of illustrations not only of his finished masterpieces but with fragments of his rough sketches and drawings preciously preserved across the centuries, and I would pore over these drawings, dreaming and practising, thinking some day I would paint great murals and travel from one country to another, in the wide world, painting the frescoes of cathedrals and vast canvasses that would hang in museums for silent multitudes of people to come and gaze at, breathless and wide-eyed.”
“Ho, hum,” I sighed. “I remember the bronze book ends that held up that long row of noble books. They were bronze moose. I can see those two bronze moose yet, peeping invitingly around the ends of the row of books. I think the end book around which one moose peeped was Maeterlinck’s ‘Treasure of the Humble,’2 and at the other end, the moose spied at me from the corner of Darwin’s ‘Descent of Man,’ The books are gone, now. I gave them to my son. He was glad to have them. I can see him often, now, looking at them in a soft way, and they looking up at him with a quiet dignity. But I saved the two bronze moose book ends.”
“What do you do with them now?” inquired Jim, faintly.
“I use them for a rack on the mantel, to rest my good Mauser rifle on,” I confessed.
“That’s the way life is,” sighed Jimmie. “The commonplace always triumphs.”
He was resting his cheek on his arms now and his eyes were closed.
“Here,” I exclaimed, “snap out of it. Let’s do a little figuring. Let’s figure out our stories and cartoons for the next couple of weeks, anyway.”
Jim opened one eye and it had a blank expression in it.
“Think of it,” I cried, “seven, eight, nine years we have been up here, like flagpole sitters3, banging out a story and a cartoon a week…”
“Twenty years,” muttered Jim. “Twenty years for me. Fifty-two times twenty?”
“Flagpole sitters, that’s what we are Jim,” I assured him loudly, because he was obviously slipping away. “Just a couple of flagpole sitters.”
Here we are,” I propounded, “at the start of the new year, in the lovely September, with a whole fine year ahead of us. Think of all the white paper that lies ahead of us. Fifty square yards of drawing paper that you have to fill in the next 50 weeks with just your cartoon alone.”
“Ughhhh,” said Jim.
“And another 50 square yards for this cartoon for me,” I urged. “Jimmie, wake up. Summer’s over. We must be up and doing.”
But he just drew a long slow breath and snuggled a little on his arms.
“And think,” I shouted, “of the thousands of miles of newsprint that we’ve got to help smear. Tens of thousands of miles of newsprint, lots of which is still little trees growing in the swamps up north of Lake Superior somewhere. Think of that.”
“Zzzzzzz,” said Jim, just like in the comics. So I sat and looked at this grizzle-headed old artilleryman snoozing on his drawing desk, this wielder of billiard cues, this lover of pumps and barns and all the homely things of life, and saw in him all the people of the world, in all countries; the workers and the toilers, all flagpole sitters on jobs not amusing in the least; the men who wield axes and handle tools, eternally making the same things; the men and women who go each day at dawn to the same shop and the same store, forever and ever, and glad of it, to handle goods and bow across a counter to the old familiar and the unfamiliar faces.
I thought of sailors at sea, scrubbing decks and knowing they are five, four, three days from land, and that the land will be the same old land as ever. Of all the patient land, round and round, where men till and sow and garner, knowing that no fortune ever was hid beneath any acre, and only by determination. and patience, will even, the daily bread come up out of the earth.
Of rich men, I thought, and how ashamed they often must be, though their faces are proud. Of rulers and governors and presidents and princes, and how in the night time often they must weep.
Of women, young and lovely and afraid. Of cruelty and despair in nations bright upon the map. Of carelessness in a hundred million hearts. Of loneliness, in a hundred million hearts.
Of loveliness unutterable, glinting for an instant in a thousand million hearts, a glint, an instant, of joy, of delight, of pleasure, of happiness, this moment, countless as the pebbles on a shore, at this instant all over the earth, men, women, and children, feeling in their minds and hearts those beads of colored instants…
“Jimmie,” I said, but not very loud. “Jim, wake up. It’s a new year. Summer’s ended. Autumn is here. Winter’s coming. We must work. We must toil. The whole world is waking.”
But Jim just went on gently breathing.
So I shifted my heels a little better on the edge, and lowered my eyelids just to take the weight off them, and in a little moment, I knew that another crowded year of glorious life had begun.
Editor’s Notes: This story was repeated on September 2, 1942 as “Time for Toil”.
- Sartor Resartus: The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdröckh in Three Books is an 1831 novel by Thomas Carlyle. ↩︎
- The Treasure of the Humble is a collection of thirteen essays by Maurice Maeterlinck. ↩︎
- Flagpole sitting was a test of endurance and a fad in the 1920s. I believe Greg and Jim worked on the top floor of the Old Toronto Star Building, which is why he would say this. ↩︎
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