Delhomme Jean-Philippe - How to be a man: [a guide to style and behavior for the modern gentleman]

First published in the United States of America in 2011 by
Rizzoli International Publications, Inc.
300 Park Avenue South
New York, NY 10010
www.rizzoliusa.com

eISBN: 978-0-8478-3695-6

Library of Congress Control Number: 2010942803
2011 Rizzoli International Publications, Inc.
Text 2011 Glenn OBrien
Glenn OBrien: A Portrait 2011 Jean-Philippe Delhomme
Illustrations 2011 Jean-Philippe Delhomme

Some chapters herein contain material published in another form in GQ, 10Man, and the Bergdorf Goodman magazine, which are gratefully acknowledged.

Editor: Dung Ngo
Production: Maria Pia Gramaglia

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior consent of the publisher. Distributed to the U.S. trade by Random House, New York
2011 2012 2013 2014 2015

v3.1

For Gina and Oscar

Appendix:
Random Tips for Living

Glenn OBrien: A Portrait
by Jean-Philippe Delhomme

Dont just lie there. Get up and evolve!

Anybody can have a penis, two testicles, and a Y chromosome. You might be a man, technically, but that is not enough anymore. Be a man in fullthe full monty. Like the U.S. Army used to tell us, Be all you can be. Be an army of one. Be an alpha and an omega too. This might be called the human race, but its also mankind. You, sir, are the crown of creation. So far. Dont blow it.

Manhood is a realm, so you might as well rule it. Use your head. Give it your best shot. Dont take it lying down. Stand up and be counted. Tell it like it is. Let the chips fall where they may. Put your pants on one leg at a time. Tell em where they can stick it. No pussyfooting. Give it all youve got. Walk it like you talk it. Put your money where your mouth is. Hit the nail on the head. Stop the buck here. And in the end give em something to remember you by.

Socrates said, Know thyself. Oscar Wilde said, Be yourself; everyone else is taken. Matthew Arnold said, Be neither saint nor sophist led, but be a man. Nietzsche said, Man is something to be surpassed. I say, What are you waiting for, man?

Right or wrong, man has always seen himself as special. Weve hyped ourselves as reasonable facsimiles of God. But too often, when the going got tough, weve expected a bailout from a presumed creator. Unacceptable! As Mark Twain pointed out, Man is the only creature that blushes, or needs to. According to what is supposedly our instruction manual, as the crown of creation man is supposed to have dominion over the earth and its creatures. And while that might not be working out quite as well as expected, all the more reason we should step it up a notch. If God arrives, which I dont expect, looking like a Marine drill instructor a mile high, which Id like, we want to be able to yell out, Sir, no excuse, sir!

Being a man really means being everything a man can be. Evolution is our business. Under the right circumstances and with the right effort a man can be far more than just a man; he can be a gentleman, a sportsman, an inventor, an artist, a philosopher, a bard, a magician, or a hero. Some think he can even be a god, but thats another story.

This is just a collection of musings on how to be a man better. One step at a time. Forward, or maybe backward, depending on the situation.

The world changes quickly. Man, science informs us, changes slowly. It has taken nature a million years to get us hereten thousand here to evolve nose hair or ten thousand there to perfect the suntan. It has been a long march to develop the features that will better ensure our survival. But those sophisticated mechanisms so painstakingly developed wont get us out of this one! The jig is up. Now the world is wobbling from our presence. And so now we have to be more and more alert as to how we can adapt ourselves to the facts and manage this ancient organism, with all its flaws and weaknesses, through an ever more challenging environment.

In Homers time, a single man could know all that men knew as a species. Pretty much, anyway. Kings, chiefs, and priests were the repositories of the collective knowledge and wisdom of the tribe. Heroes conversed with the gods and sometimes schtupped them. The human brain, which, when it failed, was often splattered on the ground by bronze axes, was the only available source of gigabytes. A man was great because he was the fullness of mankind. He knew the names of the stars and distant tribes many days away. When something had no name, he gave it one. He knew the lore of the gods and how to appease them. He knew how to build a house. He knew what herbs would heal a wound or change a mind. He knew how to propitiate the powers of nature, how to propagate crops and livestock, and how to make wine and make war. He knew how to address the people and move them to action. He knew how to dance and that maybe it would even rain afterward.

Today a man can know only a minuscule portion of the sum knowledge of man. Through the exponential expansion of the race, the individual man has been vastly diminished. He knows an iota of what is known. His thoughts and actions may not matter. Are you going to settle for that?

Man has been reduced everywhere, serving the hive like an ant or a bee, toiling away at mechanical tasks and never approaching a knowledge of the whole, or performing the great work. There are no Renaissance men because there is no Renaissance. Or is it the other way around?

Maybe its time for a change. Its time to reboot. Put up or shut up. Man up, not overboard. Get up. Stand up. Turn the page.

Most of us were brought up with some notion of being a gentleman. To a boy, it might sound funny at first, because arent the ladies supposed to be the gentle ones, while we males are out there sweating and killing, dragging home sides of venison, and clubbing and clawing our way to the ever-shifting top of the evolutionary ladder? But gradually we learn that gentleman actually means we should be gentle in certain areas, mostly indoors, as in being well mannered and well behaved as opposed to being rough, ill-mannered, and badly behaved. We learn that gentleness will be our cover for being a man, with all the brutal baggage that entails. We will say please and thank you and I beg your pardon and diligently open doors for ladies while remaining alert and prepared to kill communists in far-off countries.

But, in fact, gentleman doesnt come from gentle; its the other way around. Gentle comes from gentleman, and gentleman comes from gens, or race, and it means being of good family, good blood, or top-drawer DNA. And that, of course, means (or meant until recently) belonging to the right class and the right race. Now, I guess, it means having the right stuff.