Richard Kostelanetz Comments

I was hoping we could create collectively something so special about ourselves, our school, and our times that it would be recognized in, say, The New York Times and become a model for future class reunion books at Scarsdale and perhaps elsewhere. My forte as an occasional writing teacher has been getting people to do what they'd not done before and, indeed, didn't expect to do.

Since collective autobiography probably won't happen before our reunion, unless everyone gets everyone else writing pronto, may I suggest keeping the blog open so that everyone can consider adding to it AFTER we get together, making the collective document yet richer for all of us?


¶Mike Fox's house I remember for its more bohemian appearance that distinguished it from others and later informed my own housekeeping. It looks like a place where someone was doing some serious cultural work. Books were scattered around. Among them was James Joyce's Finnegans Wake, which I recall opening, discovering the errata sheet accompanying earlier editions, and soon came to study intensively. Nearly two decades later I was pleased to contribute some
visual/numerical art to a book honoring Mike's father, Milton, and designed by his
older sister, Robin, whom I remember as sophisticated.

¶Since contributing to modestly circulated literary magazines has been a major activity for me since 1962, I purchased from an antiquarian book dealer perhaps a decade ago a used ex-library copy of Frederick Hoffman's legendary The Little Magazine: a History and a Bibliography (1946). What a surprise it was for me to discover that the copy sent to me once belonged to the SHS library, which means that I could have read it by 1958, had I had then more knowledge of my future.

¶I recently recalled liking baseball until I turned fourteen or so, in the field that sloped down into a creek, I saw Art Paulin's curveball come at my head before swerving over the plate. No más.

¶Looking at Albie's incomplete list of fellow classmates, I noticed that none
currently reside in Scarsdale and that remarkably few live in New York City,
where so many of our parents worked, which I've always regarded as the center
of the world. Given that some of us could have inherited the houses in which we
grew up, I couldn't figure out why everyone went elsewhere. Does this moving
away reflect the sentiment behind the Scarsdale Shuffle? So I sent a circular
email to other SHS alumni, mostly literary, known to me. All of them replied
that they have classmates still residing in Scarsdale, sometimes to their
surprise, which means our class must be an aberration deserving no explanation.

¶A few weeks ago I shared drinks with the woman two years behind us whom I
took to our senior prom and had not seen in the fifty years since, and was
pleased to discover her as bright and attractive as she was then. May I be so
fortunate.

¶I'm relieved to read that others practice the Scarsdale Shuffle. I swear I
got the euphemism from Ken Gangemi, Don's older brother, who's a fellow
downtown (Manhattan) writer. He mentioned it as we were talking at an American PEN party to Victoria Redel, a writer who graduated from SHS a generation after us; but Ken insists that the coinage is mine. Why argue?

¶A colleague planning to write about parallel literary lives mentioned Ezra
Pound and William Carlos Williams, who went to school together before pursuing
separate careers, as did George Orwell and Cyril Connolly in English and Lionel
Trilling and Clifton Fadiman in America, the work of each writer in the pair
contrasting the other's for as long as they lived.

A comparable pair would be Richard Foreman and me, he graduating from
both SHS and Brown (U.) three years ahead of me, and preceding me into Artists' SoHo, which gave everyone here an informal artistic education. Though we've
lived across the street from each other for over three decades now, we rarely
exchange messages, as he is resolutely nonsocial and I more available than I
should be. Nonetheless, may we suspect that at least one historian will pair us
as two Scarsdale boys succeeding in innovative arts.

¶The last time our class gathered together so much love was flowing through
the room that I hope some people took up with each other, perhaps to their
surprise. At least one couple did, I heard, and are still together. Something
similar should happen again during our 50th. There's only one classmate I'd rather
not see again, and I doubt if he'll come.