What the Dead Play

The Heart's Geography Regina Weinreich De Kooning's Bicycle: Artists and Writers in the Hamptons Robert Long Farrar, Straus and Giroux http://www.fsgbooks.com 224 pages; cloth, $23.00 De Kooning's Bicycle could only have been penned by a poet. Long traces the literary/artistic history of his home turf. Long Island's East End — what is now termed both affectionately and with cheeky derision as The Hamptons. In a chain of linked monologues. Robert Long — who, in addition to being a poet, is art critic for The East Hampton Star— provides a knowing perspective on the major figures: Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, Lee Krasner (to name the usual suspects), painters who represent an early wave of migrants to this paradise, before the stockbrokers and investment bankers claimed the territory, colonizing the vast potato fields and transforming their quiet beauty into "real estate." Of course many books limn the story of this rarefied land, but what makes this book so distinct — and so special — is that it covers a more unique geography, the mental/emotional sinews of its subjects' minds. You may consider this approach subjective, and. well, it is — being, ofcourse, the author's imaginative creation —even while the objective facts form a scaffolding as Long's writing moves from the quotidian to the sublime. To get a sense of how Long works his details, consider these passages: The driveway unrolled smoothly beneath the wheels. At its end he walked the bike awkwardly between his legs to open the big dull silver mailbox, and adjusted his rectangular black-framed glasses to read the return addresses: bills from Pearl Paint, East End Hardware, LILCO, and Bell Telephone, postcard announcements of shows by artists he didn't know, a letter to Elaine from the University of Iowa.... People said that East Hampton was like Holland.... Now he was painting a woman on a door. . . . He closed his eyes and touched the charcoal to the page, making a little squiggle: a vagina. Then it grew legs, then a torso and a head.... The woman on the door was done, and he had finished a half dozen other women, pink and red and yellow, all on canvas. He lined them up. looked at them together for the first time: they were like a chorus line! The images add up to a day in an artist's studio; the artist is simply "he" until recognition that this is de Kooning dawns on the reader as if his name were the punch line in a long periodic sentence. Ifyou were wondering what the artists were thinking, Long's language takes you there. Along the way, through the eyes ofthe author's invented de Kooning, the reader is treated to some sly commentary — on A. J. Liebling, for example: Joe was a very funny guy. very nice to be around. He was a reporter during the war, but the stories he told were about the meals he had eaten, nothing about the usual business of war. He [de Kooning] liked that about him. What good did it do to talk about all the horror that everyone had to live through there? Or on East End of Long Island locales: He stood at Gerard Point looking over at its doppelgànger. Louse Point, another sandy point with a crown of beach grass. Detailfrom cover less than an eighth of a mile across the little channel. Tick Island. Louse Point: you had to admire the humor in naming such beautiful places after their unhappiest features. This manner is engaging, informing these poetic glimpses of Pollock, of Saul Steinberg, ofJean Stafford , of Lee Krasner in her determined pursuit of the ultimate boulder with which to grace her dead husband's — Jackson Pollock's — grave. (Needless to say, in these cases "he" becomes "she": this point must be made, obvious as it is. as the narrative makes its melancholy and wistful way from one artist to the next.) Notable figures, such as poets Frank O'Hara and James Schuyler, artists Jimmy Ernst and Jules Olitski. writer Truman Capote, and Dan Miller, the guy from the general store— along with local haunts like Bobby Van's and...