WALT WHITMAN’S MAN-UAL FOR LIFE
Book recycles poet on ‘Manly Health & Training’
Walt Whitman’s Guide to Manly Health & Training Walt Whitman Ten Speed Press
In 1858, two years before publishing his landmark third edition of Leaves of Grass, the U.S. poet Walt Whitman wrote a series of newspaper columns under the pseudonym Mose Velsor on the subject of “Manly Health & Training.”
The articles sat in library archives until 2015, when University of Houston doctoral candidate Zachary Turpin discovered them on microfilm and, a year later, the entire run was republished in the Walt Whitman Quarterly Review at the University of Iowa. Regan Arts published it again with illustrations in a handsome book.
Ten Speed Press has now published yet another version of Whitman’s still-relevant health advice — advocating for beards, a diet of rare-cooked beef and the “tonic and sanitary effects of cold water.” Titled Walt Whitman’s Guide to Manly Health & Training, it distils some of his advice into memorable aphorisms and presents itself as a bearded Brooklynite’s spin on men’s grooming guides just in time to preorder for Father’s Day.
Whether extolling the virtues of baseball, encouraging men to think of their health as a long-term investment or declaring that “the years of your middle age ought to be those not only of your best performance, but of your best appearance,” here are six tips that still ring true:
HEALTH AS A LONG- TERM INVESTMENT
The idea that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure was not revolutionary in the mid-1850s, but Whitman framed it from a financial perspective. “From a money-making point of view, health is an investment that pays better than any other,” he writes.
And though a variety of health organizations continue to write papers about the need for investment in public health, Whitman described it succinctly humanist terms:
“If you are a student, be also a student of the body ... realizing that a broad chest, a muscular pair of arms and two sinewy legs, will be just as much credit to you, and stand you in hand through your future life, equally with your geometry, your history, your classics, your law, medicine or divinity. Let nothing divert you from your duty to your body.”
AVOID THE GYM
“Places of training, and all for gymnastic exercises should be in the open air — upon the turf or sand is best. Cellars and low-roofed attics are to be condemned, especially the former.”
PLAY BASEBALL INSTEAD
Whitman was especially fond of this new game: “base-ball,” which had developed the first set of official rules only a decade earlier. Folsom says Whitman referred to the sport in other writings as “the manly game” and later in life, he would become the first U.S. writer to call it the American game, because it had what he described as “the snap, go, fling, of the American atmosphere.”
COLD BATHS ARE GOOD
Whitman was always a believer in the restorative qualities of water immersion.”
He writes: “Persons habituated to a daily summer swim, or to the rapid wash with cold water over the whole body in the water, are far less liable to sudden colds, inflammatory diseases or to the suffering of chronic complaints. The skin, one of the great inlets of disease, becomes tough and thick, and the processes of life are carried on with much more vigour.”
SPEND ON CUSTOM SHOES
Rather than appealing to men’s vanity, Whitman gave out his footwear advice using the language of good health:
“Most of the usual fashionable boots and shoes, which neither favour comfort, nor health nor the ease of walking, are to be discarded. (A shoe) should be carefully selected to the shape of the foot, or, better still, made from lasts modelled to the exact shape of the wearer’s feet (as all boots should be). ... Hundreds of times the cost of it are yearly spent in idle gratifications — while this, rightly looked upon, is indispensable to comfort and health.”
SPIRITS OVER SODA
“A little while after his dinner, a man should drink a glass of good ale or wine (rather) than one of those mixtures called ‘soda,’” Whitman writes. But Folsom says this was quite different from Coca-Cola, which wasn’t invented until 1886. Instead, it was sodium (alkali) in water, charged with carbonic acid.
“A gentle and moderate refreshment at night is admissible enough; and, indeed, if accompanied with the convivial pleasure of friends, the cheerful song or the excitement of company and the wholesome stimulus of surrounding good fellowship, is every way to be commended,” Whitman wrote.