De Kooning's Bicycle: Artists and Writers in the Hamptons by Robert Long. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2005; $23; 240 pages.

FROM THE DUST JACKET:

Some of the 20th Century's most important artists and writers --- from Jackson Pollock to Saul Steinberg, Frank O'Hara to Jean Stafford -- lived and worked on the East End of Long Island years before it assumed an alternate identity as the Hamptons. The home they made there, and its effect on their work, is the subject of these lyrical vignettes by the critic and poet Robert Long. Pollock moved to Springs because he thought he wanted to stop drinking, but he found a connection to nature there that inspired some of the most significant paintings of our time. Others followed him. When Fairfield Porter bought a house in Southampton, the New York School had a new headquarters, and James Schuyler and Frank O'Hara found companionship and raw material for their poems on South Main Street and on the three-hour train ride between the city and the East End. Willem de Kooning rode his bike every day between his studio in the East Hampton woods and the bay, where the light informed every brushstroke he put to canvas from the early 1960s on.

In De Kooning's Bicycle, Long mixes storytelling with history to re-create the lives and events that shaped American art and literature as we know it today, in a landscape where town met country and the modern met America's rural past.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

Publishers Weekly: Critic and poet Long illustrates how the East End of Long Island indelibly etched a mark on the style and work processes of the abstract impressionists and their artistically minded friends.

The New York Times: Long, the art critic for The East Hampton Star...does not shy away from the alcoholism, vanity, and perfidy that ran through his heroes' lives, but there is a wistfulness to his tone, a sense that, were it possible, he would have liked more than anything to have been a part of it all.

The New York Sun : Robert Long writes like the poet he is...a hymn to the East End of Long Island, and of the influence it had on a few great American painters and writers.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Robert Long is the art critic for The East Hampton Star, the author of four books of poetry, and a contributor to The New Yorker and Partisan Review, among other publications. He lives in East Hampton, New York.

A CONVERSATION WITH THE AUTHOR:

Robert Long was born in 1954. He spent school years in New York City. Summers, his parents left the city for the Hamptons. "I was a summer kid," Mr. Long said. Long's first year in the Hamptons was 1956, the year that Jackson Pollock died. When Long was 16, his family moved, he writes, to "the Springs, the working-class hamlet outside of East Hampton Village, several miles north of the Montauk Highway, in a marshy neighborhood near Gardiners Bay called Maidstone Park, one of the Montauketts' fishing grounds. It was just down the road from the places where Jackson Pollock died, Frank O'Hara drank gimlets, Jean Stafford stared out her study window, and Willem de Kooning rode his Royce Union three-speed, white hair and work shirt flapping." Newsday writes this about the area: "The Springs refers to the freshwater springs at the head of Accabonac Creek, which was named for the area's profusion of nuts. 'Bonacker' originally meant a person who lived on Accabonac Harbor and was something of a hick."

Mr. Long attended high school in New York and in the Hamptons. He went to college at Long Island University and to graduate school at Goddard College. "In the late '80s the MFA program at Goddard was remarkable. On the faculty were Raymond Carver and Tobias Wolff and Donald Hall and Louise Glück and Richard Ford.

"The students were interesting too -- Mark Doty and Mary Karr, Dennis McFarland. I finished graduate school at Vermont College. I was teaching already by then. I taught off and on for many different schools."

"And you're a poet."

"I started publishing poetry when I was young. Outside of art criticism, whatever small literary reputation I have rests on the poetry."

"I kept saying to myself, 'I know that name.'"

"Poets are on the margins of fame."

"There seems nowadays to be a renewal of interest in poets and painters who worked in the postwar era." Did Mr. Long agree?

"I'm always puzzled when I hear that there's a renewal of interest in something in which I've always been interested. When the Lowell books came out last year, I was surprised to hear that there was a renaissance of interest in Lowell. I thought that people had always been interested in Lowell, but I guess if there is such a thing, then it's simply a generational thing."

"It's as if many younger readers, reading Lowell and books such as yours, are learning about their parents and grandparents."

"I think it's wonderful because the so-called 'New York School' was under-appreciated, for awhile was a cult thing. Of course, if you consider the politics of the poetry world, that comes into play too. Things go in and out of fashion in that world. Right now it's language-derived poetry.

"It's funny," Mr. Long said, "how things change. I remember William Matthews telling me years ago that during the late 1960s and through the 1970s he could happily bounce from college to college as a visiting poet. He could do a one-year gig here or a three-year gig there. 'But,' Bill went on to say, 'now if you get a job, you'd better like it.' The market really shut down in the '80s, and people like Bill Matthews stayed wherever they were. There was a lot more of the visiting poet thing for a long time. But fashions change."

"It had to be hard on wives and children."

"Sure. It was pretty peripatetic for a lot of people, but that's how they made a living."

"How did you happen to do this book?"

"Almost by chance. A friend had an agent and bumped into her in the elevator in the building in which they both lived. She said to my friend, 'I had lunch with an editor who said, 'Wouldn't it be wonderful to have a cultural history of the Hamptons?'

"I'm not a professional historian. When Farrar, Straus, & Giroux bought the proposal and I started working with my editor, Loren Stein, he looked at what I was writing and he said, 'This is what you're really good at.' He was pointing to the more personal narratives. He asked, 'Why don't you push off in that direction?'

"That's how the book evolved. We went to my strengths and away from what had been proposed, which was artificial for me, because I'm not academically trained and I'm not interested in doing things year by year and all that."

"Also, it's been done."

"Yes, it's been done. Too, I'd rather tell a good story. By telling the story through the eyes of the people in this book, that allows me to tell the story of the place at the same time without seeming to be writing history.

"It's a wonderfully different group of people. They're all different and distinctive and I admire them all endlessly and the fact that they all lived here is miraculous. To think of Jean Stafford down the road from de Kooning, of all people, and, my God, she lived around the corner from Pollock's house. Stafford's house is two city blocks away. To have them here at the same time is even more remarkable."

Included in the book's photographs is a snapshot of Jean Stafford looking raffish in striped knee socks and a ball cap.

A friend, Mr. Long said, took that picture. Mr. Long's friend and his friend's wife, he said, "helped take care of Jean in the later years. And in return she let them live in a little house behind her house, like sharecroppers. They still live there."

"You must have had fun doing this."

"Oh, it was great fun. In different ways. It was fun because it gave me an excuse to spend time imagining myself into the lives of other people -- particularly Jean Stafford, whom I met when I was a kid. She made a big impression on me."

"What sort of impression?"

"Well, I knew she was Jean Stafford. When I say 'kid,' I wasn't a little kid. I was maybe 20 or 21. So I was a young person, but I had read her. I was impressed because there was Jean Stafford in the flesh. To me she was the most amazing prose writer. She also had a remarkable presence because she really did have the voice of an undertaker. She was a wonderful reader of her own work. She read her stories slowly. She read the way that they should be read. I've heard some good readers over the years. Another good reader was William S. Burroughs.

"Jean Stafford and William S. Burroughs both had the same presence, in a different way of course, Burroughs being his persona. But they both had this Midwestern thing going on in their manner and voice. I thought of Burroughs and I thought of Stafford when I'd hear each of them read."

We talked about the pleasure in hearing poets read aloud. Mr. Long allowed that he "mostly likes to hear the words out of their mouths. I like to hear John Ashbery. John reads in a flat, declarative way. People could say that he's not a good reader because he doesn't make any attempt to make a dramatic instrument of his voice. He's wonderful. I've heard him I don't know how many times."

In De Kooning's Bicycle, Mr. Long "speaks" through the voice of each of his subjects. "It's as if," I said, "you'd taken over their mouths."

"That's what I was trying to do. I don't think I could have written it any other way. To try and make the pictures I wanted to make of what they were seeing, of the time that they lived in, or where they were going or what their lives were like, I had to try to inhabit them in some way."

"I kept wondering if so-and-so was going to bump into so-and-so."

"Once I'd finished the book, I kept thinking -- because one of my favorite painters is James Rosenquist, who lived here for a long time, that it might be nice to write a chapter closer to the present. Well, actually, it wouldn't be closer to the present. It would be in the '70s. But with James Rosenquist. In 1968 or 1969 there was an event down the road across the street from Jean Stafford's house. A hot air balloon called 'The Free Life' took off. It crashed two days later and the people who were piloting it perished.

"'The Free Life' brought together the whole community. The day when the balloon launched, Saul Steinberg, James Rosenquist were there, Stafford was watching from her window, and Bill de Kooning may well have been there. He may have been at the studio. But he had helped them --- he had given them money or provided material. Stafford used to have them to her house every night for drinks when they were preparing for the voyage and Rosenquist and Steinberg were there. I thought, 'My God, there are four of my people.' But it seemed to me, finally, artificial, although it was a nice idea."

Halfway through the book, a long-dead Pollock walks through the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Pollock finds a new wing dedicated to American painting. Pollock thinks: "He would be in it, and Bill, and maybe Franz."

I confessed to Mr. Long that, initially, this section confused me. "For several paragraphs, I could not figure out what the time of the book was."

"Well," he explained, "I wondered what it would be like for Pollock to come back and walk through the museum. And also to be out of the uncomfortable body of his last years."

"Your description of the Pollock hangovers is hellish to read."

"Yes, the hangovers. I've had a few hangovers. But he had a bad time, old Jackson did. I thought it was important to talk about that without getting maudlin. That's a fact of the way he lived for the last chunk of his life. And he wasn't working much."

Perhaps Frank O'Hara's best-known poem is his "The Day Lady Day Died." (See page ##.) Mr. Long loosely follows the trajectory of his poem in his section that features O'Hara.

We talked about the poem and details from the poem in Mr. Long's book. "He's walking his poem," I said.

"It makes him seem real, doesn't it?" Mr. Long said. "To know that he wrote about that in a poem, so if he reflects a little bit of it in the text, that tricks the reader into thinking he's real.

"I actually knew the Museum of Modern Art at the point when O'Hara worked there, because my grandmother worked there. When I was a kid, I used to stop at her office on my way home from school and leave my books there and I'd wander. So I knew the old Museum of Modern Art intimately. My grandmother knew Frank O'Hara and had no idea he was a poet until many years later. I showed her his picture in an anthology and she said 'My God, that's Frankie. He used to call me "Mom."' I said, 'Grandma, that's Frank O'Hara, that's my favorite poet.'"

Poet James Schuyler for more than a decade lived in Southampton with painter Fairfield Porter and his wife. (The UCSD library has Schuyler's papers and a typewriter on which he wrote.) "Schuyler," Mr. Long said, "is certainly one of the major poets of our time. For a long time he was under-recognized. Perhaps because this work has that easy surface and seems so casual and so easily done."

Many moments Mr. Long chose to portray "seem," he said, "to be the most poignant moments. And it happens that those were the times when these men and women were here. Pollock came in '45, so actually he had some relatively good years. But he stayed here. And Jean came here at the end. She had several good years with Joe [her third husband, New Yorker writer A.J. Liebling, who predeceased her]."

"He must have been fun."

"I wish I'd known him. I have friends who knew him well and were extremely fond of him. He's a great writer in whom I think there's been a revival of interest. Stafford and Liebling were quite a couple."

"Liebling must certainly have been an improvement over Lowell [Robert Lowell was Stafford's first husband; he behaved quite violently toward her]."

"Lowell I know only from the biographies, but he and Jean certainly seemed to have a good time for a while. But Lowell, of course, was unstable. They both got famous while they were married to each other. Jean had a huge hit on her hands with Boston Adventure at the time [1944]."

"I wonder how long that money lasted."

"I actually know the answer, but I've forgotten it. I don't know that it lasted all that much longer. The Mountain Lion [1948] didn't do the same business. I don't know how she collected on Boston Adventure."

"I don't know what they paid for books then."

"Well, that's the other thing. In those days, what was a best seller? Certainly not what it is today. I'm sure Boston Adventure didn't sell one-tenth of what The Corrections sold. I'm guessing, but I suspect that the figures were less."

"A little boy shows up in your book."

"Oh, the one riding on the bike?"

"Yes."

"That's me. I used to see de Kooning on his bike when I was a kid. I would ride from my parents' house over to Dan Miller's store. I would get a root beer and some candy. This was a ritual of mine.

"I remember what the store looked like then and I know the route because I took it on my bike. But yes, I'd see Bill on Fireplace Road, and he'd wave at me and I'd wave at him. This would have been '64 or '65.

"This is a great place to bike, or it was. Now you take your life in your hands if you ride on a bike. In the summer, it's dangerous because we have rollerbladers and bike riders and hikers and runners and walkers and BMWs. Even here in the Springs."

"Given how long you've lived in the Hamptons do locals still consider you as 'from away'?"

"No, not really but basically this is a second homeowner community now. It's not exactly suburban because we're too far from the city for that. Homes in Springs are quite expensive. So the same distinctions aren't drawn much any more.

"What happens is that you have people who arrived here in 1985, who think that 1985 was the good old days. And, of course, if you came in 1970, 1970 was the good old days, but of course, if you came here in 1950, that was the good old days. So everybody's got his own idea of some ideal Hamptons. And usually it's the Hamptons that was in existence when you first got here, that started going straight to hell two days later, and has been doing so ever since, whether you got here in 1940 or 1985."

"What's it like in the winter?"

"Quieter than it was in the summer but, again, it's much more a year-round and weekend community than it used to be. It used to be, of course, the day after Labor Day, silence descended. That's certainly not the case now.

"'Are you considered "from away"?' is a good question and much to the point of the opening chapter of my book, and speaks to the nature of the place. Bonackers have been here for centuries; one of my best friends' families came here in 1680 or something. I am a New Yorker and will always be from away and have never felt remotely like a native. I know nothing about salt hay except what it looks like, and I don't like clams. In high school I fit in more with other kids who had moved here from the city than with local kids. Of course now we are all 50 years old and we all laugh at the people who spend $1.2 million for half-acre lots so they can tear down the nice little house it holds in order to build a 10,000-square-foot teetering, shingled monstrosity, a faux-Shingle Style palace with a two-car garage jammed onto one side for the Range Rover and the Porsche Cayenne with the 'EH' stickers on the back.

"Because I have lived here for a long time people presume I am a 'native' of East Hampton, as my friend and hero John Ashbery put it in the first version of his endorsement for the book. This bugs me because it (unintentionally) makes me a hick who miraculously learned how to write. I remember when The Liars' Club came out much was made of Mary Karr's Texas background in reviews, and Molly Ivins, who should know better, wrote something about how The Liars' Club and Karr seemed to spring like some miraculous weed from the fallow plains of west Texas and jes' plain grew, whereas the fact was that Karr had been publishing poetry for 15 years by then in places like Poetry and was a Bunting Fellow at Radcliffe.

"The 'from away' thing, though it still exists, is dying since the native families' kids can't afford to live here, and farming and fishing have been close to extinction for at least two decades, so that distinction is more or less defunct. Now, it's more like, 'I've had a summer house there since the '80s, who do you think you are to try to build an accessory structure on your corner lot without a wetland permit, when you bought your house in '99? I am suing you.' It's like Luc Sante's comments on the changes to Tribeca and SoHo in New York City in the 1980s: 'Warehouses that are transformed into boho-chic housing for the vermin of the corporate world.'"

"Did writing this book change your life, and if so, how?"

"Yes, it did. In that...how can I explain this? This is my first nonfiction book. So it reinforced my impression that 'talent travels,' in the phrase Richard Price uses. That is something I've always told my students, that if you learn your craft well enough, 'talent travels.'"

"In your case, talent did travel."

"That's part of the satisfaction of writing. It doesn't matter what it is. When I finish a poem or decide that it's finished -- I can say to myself, 'I was able to do that, and that one is better than the last one.' And your writing is better than it used to be because I don't think any of us would keep on going on writing, unless we thought we'd get better and better and better at it."

Like Mr. Long, I am an only child. I suggested, "I think only children tend to compete against themselves. They want to get better and better to please themselves."

"It's also probably the only child's tendency to fall into reading, too."

"And reverie," I said, "the dreaminess of things."

Mr. Long suggested, "That's what writing comes from, isn't it, reading and that reverie?"