A considerable number of bachelor books have appeared over the years, but none that draws quite so generously as this one does from history, mythology, sociology, anthropology, theology, psychology, philosophy and the arts. Mr. Reed ponders what...

A considerable number of bachelor books have appeared over the years, but none that draws quite so generously as this one does from history, mythology, sociology, anthropology, theology, psychology, philosophy and the arts. Mr. Reed ponders what we can learn from writers like Shakespeare and Schopenhauer, Flaubert and Wilde, Danielle Steel and P.G. Wodehouse, and examines the tension between a man's need for independence and society's apparent need to break him in. From Ovid to Holofernes, Henry Higgins to Sherlock Holmes, men have puzzled over those mystical beings who grace the dinner table and the dance hall but whose wave length seems ever out of range. The author also considers scientific evidence of mental and physical differences between the genders. Noting reports that women's brains have four times as many neurons, he freely admits that "Men are more thick-headed, as women have long perceived."

Bachelors, as a rule, are not especially well received. Befuddled married men are jealous of them; petulant unmarried women are more than a little frustrated by their understated but still firm resistance to matrimony. The origins of this perpetual dilemma lead us inexorably back to the mythic Pygmalion, the young and incomprehensibly talented sculptor, cited by Ovid in Book X of his Latin Metamorphosis. The bacheloresque Pygmalion does not entertain a particularly favorable view of women because of what he somewhat prudishly views as their shameless behavior. Ovid also tells us (in Rolfe Humphries' translation) that Pygmalion "was so shocked at the vices/ Nature has given to the female disposition/ Only too often, [he] chose to live alone, / to have no women in his bed."  What to do? He sculpted a woman of his own, that's what. With a little help from above, our bachelor boy has managed to fashion a woman to his own specifications, although Ovid's account leaves us with the impression that Galatea is as much the creation of his romantic imagination as it is his artistic hands. Nevertheless he succeeds in getting what he was after, to wit: the perfect woman. Today we recognize this circumstance as the Pygmalion Effect, sometimes called the Rosenthal Effect, meaning that the greater the expectation one places on people, the greater they perform. The Galatea Effect assumes that the more people are encouraged by what they're doing, the greater will be the result. Misogynistic though he once was, Pygmalion appears to be a bachelor no more. In time, however, the ivory lips he's been kissing don't kiss back. He is eventually made to realize that his ideal woman is no more than a fleeting artistic image so ingeniously sculpted that, as we are told, art has concealed art. His romantic expectations have been dashed. We must, before any more's said, reach an understanding upon what bachelor means and has meant, and how it's spelled and has been spelled. Its etymology, by which we mean its linguistic history, is confused enough to be contestable. A bachelor was once taken to mean a male (occasionally female) in the employ of a calonuus, meaning a manor. Bachelor has also been taken to mean a yeoman (attendant, retainer, petty officer, one who is sturdy, loyal, brave, or possibly a small farmer who cultivates his own land). We should not fail to mention that a bachelor is tellingly one of the young, inexperienced and inept of the fur seal species that the adult bull seals prevent from entering the mating grounds.

Chapter I. "Where the devil are my slippers, Eliza?" Chapter II."There's nothing better than the single life."' Horace Chapter III. The Foot-Long Weltanschauung Chapter IV. Bachelors in Paradise: If l

Chapter I. "Where the devil are my slippers, Eliza?" Chapter II."There's nothing better than the single life."' Horace Chapter III. The Foot-Long Weltanschauung Chapter IV. Bachelors in Paradise: If life were best lived as couples, we'd all be Siamese twins Chapter V. Gershwin's Girlfriend, Casanova's Cuties &c