What Ever Became of Bachelors?

Every man who lives long enough comes to the day when it occurs to him that, as far as the ideas and assumptions of modern people are concerned, he is no longer “with it.” The word came to me a while back by way of the New York reviews of a play called Big Fish, Little Fish, which had to do with a set of unmarried men accustomed to meet and bicker in the apartment of one of them. Give or take a crotchet either way, these fellows were reasonable facsimiles of the group I called my friends before I married. In plain, they were bachelors.

According to the reviews of Big Fish, Little Fish, these men were not merely single, they, were “sick.” The play, according to one comment, “touched on the tortured world of the homosexual.” One reviewer summed up the situation by declaring that “this is a big season for homosexuals”; another described this amusing comedy as “the best study of the homosexual yet to reach the theater.” I may be too old-fashioned to “dig” the intentions of the writer of the piece, but in my book these fellows—barring an unclear reference to the eccentricity of one of them—were simply bachelors.

FN

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Frederic Nelson

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Every man who lives long enough comes to the day when it occurs to him that, as far as the ideas and assumptions of modern people are concerned, he is no longer “with it.” The word came to me a while back by way of the New York reviews of a play called Big Fish, Little Fish, which had to do with a set of unmarried men accustomed to meet and bicker in the apartment of one of them. Give or take a crotchet either way, these fellows were reasonable facsimiles of the group I called my friends before I married. In plain, they were bachelors.

According to the reviews of Big Fish, Little Fish, these men were not merely single, they, were “sick.” The play, according to one comment, “touched on the tortured world of the homosexual.” One reviewer summed up the situation by declaring that “this is a big season for homosexuals”; another described this amusing comedy as “the best study of the homosexual yet to reach the theater.” I may be too old-fashioned to “dig” the intentions of the writer of the piece, but in my book these fellows—barring an unclear reference to the eccentricity of one of them—were simply bachelors.