Ben Markovits

Climb trees and grow a beard

In 1858, he seems to advocate a good night’s sleep, outdoor exercise, careful grooming - and clean cotton socks in summer

A few years after Walt Whitman brought out the first edition of Leaves of Grass (it didn’t do well), he wrote a column on ‘Manly Health and Training’ for the New York Atlas. His pieces were published under a pseudonym, Mose Velsor, and have only recently been connected to Whitman by a graduate student at the University of Houston, who discovered them on microfilm. (Unless this whole thing is a joke — it’s a little hard to tell.) Boxtree has cherrypicked from over 47,000 words of manly advice to produce a cod-retro book along the lines of the Ladybird Book of the Hangover or the Ladybird Book of the Midlife Crisis or the Ladybird Book of the Hipster. In fact, the Manly Health guide is a bit like all of them.

It comes in a handsome blue hardback, small enough (as Whitman wanted the original Leaves of Grass to be) to fit in your pocket as you take it outside, into the open air. There are illustrations, too, by Matthew Allen — pretty sketches of men boxing or rowing or lifting weights, in workmanlike denim and boots or something that seems to resemble striped pyjamas. The poet’s advice is split into useful categories like ‘The Value of Training’ or ‘Grooming & Dress’. This is the kind of thing he has to say: ‘No amount of cultivation, intellect or wealth will ever make up to a community for the lack of manly muscle, ability and pluck.’ His advice is more or less what you’d expect it to be: get up early, wash in a lot of cold water, climb trees, grow beards.

Somehow the effect is both hail-fellow and mealy-mouthed:

Usually the breakfast, for a hearty man, might consist in a plate of fresh rare lean meat, without fat or gravy, a slice or chunk of bread, and, if desired, a cup of tea, which must be left till the last.

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