My Dinner with Andre Page #4

so wonderful for me, Wally.

They arranged a christening...

a baptism... For me.

And they filled the castle with flowers.

And it was just a miracle of light...

...because they had literally set up

hundreds of candles and torches.

I mean, no church

could have looked more beautiful.

There was a simple ceremony, and one

of them played the role of my godmother...

...and another played the role

of my godfather.

And I was given a new name.

They called me Yendrush.

And some of the people

took it completely seriously...

...and some of them found it funny.

But, uh, I really felt

that I had a new name.

And then we had an enormous feast,

with blueberries picked from the field...

...and chocolate someone

had gone a great distance to buy...

...and raspberry soup and rabbit stew.

And we sang Polish songs

and Greek songs...

...and everybody danced

for the rest of the night.

- Hmm.

- Oh, I have a picture.

See, this was... Let's see.

Oh, yeah.

This was me in the forest. See?

- God!

- That's what I felt like.

- That's the state I was in.

- God.

Yeah. I remember George, uh, told me

he'd seen you around that time.

He said you looked like

you'd come back from a war.

Yeah, I remember meeting him. He, uh...

He asked me a lot of friendly questions.

I think I called you up, too,

that summer, didn't I?

Huh.

I think I was out of town.

Yeah, well, most people I met thought

there was something wrong with me.

They didn't say that, but I could tell that

that was what they thought.

But...

...you see, what I think

I experienced... was...

...for the first time in my life...

...to know what it means

to be truly alive.

Now, that's very frightening...

...because with that comes

an immediate awareness of death...

'cause they go hand in hand.

You know, the kind of impulse that led to

Walt Whitman, that led to Leaves of Grass.

That feeling of being connected

to everything...

...means to also be connected to death.

And that's pretty scary.

But I really felt as if I were floating

above the ground, not walking.

You know, and I could do things

like go out to the highway...

...and watch the lights go from red to green

and think, " How wonderful. "

And then one day, in the early fall...

I was out in the country,

walking in a field...

...and I suddenly heard a voice

say, "Little Prince. "

Of course, The Little Prince

was a book that I always thought of...

...as disgusting, childish treacle.

But still, I thought, " Well, you know,

if a voice comes to me in a field"...

This was the first voice I had ever heard.

Maybe I should go and read the book.

Now, that same morning

I'd got a letter...

...from a young woman

who'd been in my group in Poland.

And in her letter she'd written,

"You have dominated me. "

You know,

she spoke very awkward English.

So she'd gone to the dictionary,

and she'd crossed out the word " dominated"...

...and she'd said,

"No. The correct word is 'tamed. "'

And then when I went to town

and bought the book and started to read it...

I saw that " taming" was the most

important word in the whole book.

By the end of the book, I was in tears,

I was so moved by the story.

And then I went and tried to write

an answer to her letter...

'cause she'd written me a very long letter.

But I just couldn't find the right words,

so finally I took my hand...

I put it on a piece of paper,

I outlined it with a pen...

...and I wrote in the center something

like, " Your heart is in my hand. "

Something like that.

Then I went over

to my brother's house to swim...

'cause he lives nearby in the country

and he has a pool.

And he wasn't home.

I went into his library...

...and he had bought at an auction

the collected issues of Minotaure.

You know, the surrealist magazine? Oh, it's a great,

great surrealist magazine of the '20s and '30s.

And I never...You know,

I consider myself a bit of a surrealist.

I had never, ever seen

a copy of Minotaure.

And here they all were,

bound, year after year.

So, at random,

I picked one out, I opened it up...

...and there was a full-page reproduction

of the letter " A"...

...from Tenniel's Alice In Wonderland.

And I thought, that...Well, you know,

it's been a day of coincidences...

...but that's not unusual that the surrealists

would have been interested in Alice...

...and I did a play of Alice.

So at random,

I opened to another page...

...and there were four handprints.

One was Andr Breton,

another was Andr Derain...

...the third was Andr...

I've got it written down somewhere.

It's not Malraux. It's, like, someone...

Another of the surrealists.

All A's, and the fourth

was Antoine de Saint-Exupry...

...who wrote The Little Prince.

And they'd shown these handprints

to some kind of expert...

...without saying

whose hands they belonged to.

And under Exupry's,

it said that he was an artist...

...with very powerful eyes...

...who was a tamer of wild animals.

I thought,

"This is incredible, you know. "

And I looked back to see

when the issue came out.

It came out on the newsstands

May 12, 1934...

...and I was born during the day

of May 11, 1934.

So, well, that's what started me on, uh,

Saint-Exupry and The Little Prince.

Now, of course today...

...today I think there's a very fascistic thing

under The Little Prince.

You know, I...

Well, no, I think there's a kind of...

I think a kind of S.S. Totalitarian

sentimentality in there somewhere.

You know, there's something, you know...

that...

...that love of, um...

Well, that masculine love

of a certain kind of oily muscle.

You know what I mean?

I mean, I can't quite put my finger on it.

But I can just imagine

some beautiful S.S. Man...

...loving The Little Prince.

Now, I don't know why, but there's

something wrong with it. It stinks.

Well, didn't George tell me that you were gonna

do a play that was based on The Little Prince?

Hmm. Well, what happened, Wally...

...was that fall I was in New York...

...and I met this young Japanese

Buddhist priest named Kozan...

...and I thought he was Puck

from the Midsummer Night's Dream.

You know,

he had this beautiful, delicate smile.

I thought he was the Little Prince.

So, naturally, I decided

to go off to the Sahara desert...

...to work on The Little Prince

with two actors and this Japanese monk.

You did?

Well, I mean, I was still in a very

peculiar state at that time, Wally.

You know, I would... I would look

in the rearview mirror of my car...

...and see little birds

flying out of my mouth.

And I remember always being

exhausted in that period.

I always felt weak. You know, I really

didn't know what was going on with me.

I would just sit out there all alone

in the country for days...

...and do nothing but write in my diary.

- And I was always thinking about death.

- Huh.

But you went to the Sahara.

Oh,yes, we went off into the desert...

...and we rode through the desert

on camels.

And we rode and we rode.

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