Andre Gregory :
“….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 centre, 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 12th, 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 S.S.-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 S.S.-Man
loving The Little Prince.
Now, I don't know why, but there's
something wrong with it. It stinks.
Wally Shawn :
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.
Wally Shawn :
You did?
Well, I mean, I was still in
a very peculiar state
at that time, Wally.
