WALLY: Hunh!
ANDRE: Oh, I have a picture. See, this was...oh, yeah: this was me in the forest. [He shows the picture to Wally.] See?
WALLY: God!
ANDRE: That's what I felt like. [They laugh.] That's the state I was in!
WALLY: God! Yeah, I remember George told me he had seen you around that time. He said you looked like you'd come back from a war.
ANDRE: Yeah, I remember meeting him. He asked me a lot of friendly questions. I think I called you up, too, that summer, didn't I?
WALLY: Hum. [Evasive:] I think I was out of town.
ANDRE: 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, you know, 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: I'd 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"! Now, of course, The Little Prince was a book that I'd always thought of as disgusting childish treacle, but still I thought, well, you know, if a voice comes to me in a field, I mean, this was the first voice I have ever heard, maybe I should go and read the book! Now, that same morning I got a letter from a young woman who had been in my group in Poland, and in her letter she had 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 into 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 had 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.
And 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, and I went into his library and he had bought at an auction the collected issues of Minotaur, you know, the surrealist magazine? Oh! It's a great, great surrealist magazine of the twenties and thirties, and I'd 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: "Well, you know, it's been a day of coincidence, 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 hand prints! One was André Breton, another was André Derain, the third was André...I have 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 hand prints 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! So 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 twelfth, 1934, and I was born during the day of May eleventh, 1934. So! That's what started me on Saint-Exupéry and The Little Prince. [Eating interruption.]
Now, of course, today I think there's a very fascistic thing under The Little Prince, you know--well, no, I think there's a kind of SS totalitarian sentimentality in there somewhere. You know, there's something, you know, that [takes a bite and talks with his mouth full]...love of, uh...hum. 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. You know, I don't know why, but there's something wrong with it. It stinks! [They laugh.]
WALLY: Well, didn't George tell me that you were going to do a play that was based on The Little Prince?
ANDRE: [With his mouth fulclass="underline" ] Hum. 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: You did?
ANDRE: Well, I mean, I was still in a very peculiar state at that time, Wally. You know, I would look in the rear view 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, and 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.
WALLY: Hum. But you went to the Sahara.
ANDRE: Oh, yes! We went off into the desert, and we rode through the desert on camels, and we rode and we rode and then at night we would walk out under that enormous sky and look at the stars. I just kept thinking about the same things that I was always thinking about at home. Particularly about Chiquita. In fact, I thought about just about nothing but my marriage. And then I remember one incredibly dark night being at an oasis, and there were palm trees moving in the wind; I could hear Kozan singing far away in that beautiful bass voice, and I tried to follow his voice along the sand. You see, I thought he had something to teach me, Wally. And sometimes I would meditate with him. Sometimes I'd go off and meditate by myself. You know, I would see images of Chiquita. Once, I actually saw her growing old and her hair turning gray in front of my eyes and I would just wail and yell my lungs out out there on the dunes.
Anyway, the desert was pretty horrible! It was pretty cold. We were searching for something but we couldn't tell if we were finding anything. You know that once Kozan and I, we were sitting on a dune and we just ate sand. Y'know, we weren't trying to be funny. I started and he started. We just ate sand and threw up, that's how desperate we were. In other words, we didn't know why we were there, we didn't know what we were looking for, the entire thing seemed completely absurd, arid and empty. It was like a last chance or something.
WALLY: Hum. [Pause.] So what happened then?
ANDRE: Well. In those days, I went completely on impulse. So on impulse I brought Kozan back to stay with us in New York after we got back from the Sahara, and he stayed for six months. And he really sort of took over the whole family in a way.
WALLY: What do you mean?
ANDRE: Well, there was certainly a center missing in the house at the time. There certainly wasn't a father, 'cause I was always thinking about going off to Tibet, or doing God knows what! And so he taught the whole family to meditate, and he told them all about Asia and the East and his monastery and everything. He really captivated everybody with an incredible bag of tricks. He had literally developed himself, Wally, so that he could push on his fingers and rise off out of his chair! I mean, he could literally go like this, you know, push on his fingers and go into like a head stand, and just hold himself there with two fingers! Or if Chiquita would suddenly get a little tension in her neck, well, he'd immediately have her down on the floor, he'd be walking up and down on her back doing these unbelievable massages, you know. And the children found him amazing. I mean, you know, we'd visit friends, who had children, and immediately he'd be playing with these children in a way that, you know, we just can't do. I mean, those children, just giggles, giggles, giggles about what this Japanese monk was doing in these holy robes! I mean, he was an acrobat, a ventriloquist, a magician, everything! You know the amazing thing was that I don't think he had any interest in children whatsoever. None at all. I don't think he liked them! I mean, you know, when he stayed with us, in the first week, really, the kids were just googly-eyed over him. But then, a couple of weeks later, Chiquita and I could be out and Marina could have flu or a temperature of a hundred and four and he wouldn't even go in and say hello to her. But, he was taking over, more and more! I mean, his own habits had completely changed. You know that he started wearing these elegant Gucci shoes under his white monk's robes, and he was eating huge amounts of food. I mean, he ate twice as much as Nicholas ate, you know, this tiny little Buddhist who when I first met him, you know, was eating a little bowl of milk, hot milk with rice, was now eating huge beef! [They laugh.] It was just very strange! You know. And we tried working together, but really all our work consisted mostly of my trying to do these incredibly painful prostrations that they do in the monastery, you know, so really we hadn't been working very much. Anyway.