Taming

“….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 André Breton,

another was André Derain...

the third was André -

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-Exupéry

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 Exupéry'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,

Saint-Exupéry 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 SS totalitarian

sentimentality in there somewhere.

You know, there's something, you know, that… that love of...

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 SS 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.