Paul Boccaccio

When I was a kid, we had a claymation video of The Little Prince which scared and bored me in turns. My mother threw it away years ago, in a pre-move purge of nonessential objects, and I never missed it. I couldn’t find any footage online, so I can’t reevaluate it. Maybe it wasn’t as creepy or as dull as I remember, but, justified or not, my opinion of the video stopped me from reading The Little Prince until now. Not good.

Le Petit Prince, as the book is called in its original French, is a classic on the order of Pilgrim’s Progress and Das Kapital; it’s timeless and heartbreakingly beautiful. The author, Antoine de Saint Exupéry, used his experience, as a pilot who crashed in the desert and a witness to the general melancholy of midwar Europe, as fodder. The narrator is also a pilot who has crashed in the desert and despairs of being rescued. The way he describes the desert is particularly apt, and gave me the sense he wasn’t talking about the desert. Lines like:

“What makes the desert beautiful,” said the little prince, “is that somewhere it hides a well”

show the little prince’s wisdom. This scene with the fox particularly resonates with me. The fox begins:

“It is the time you have wasted for your rose that makes your rose so important.”

“It is the time I have wasted for my rose—” said the little prince so he would be sure to remember.

“Men have forgotten this truth,” said the fox. “But you must not forget it. You become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed. You are responsible for your rose…”

Exupéry was a thoughtful, quiet man. I’m looking forward to reading his autobiography, Wind, Sand and Stars, which I found in a thrift store for 50 cents. It’s waiting on my shelf for me to finish the other stacks.

His pen and ink illustrations are excellent as well, and add to the journal-ish feel, as well as contributing to the characterization of both the narrator and the prince. The scene in which we meet the prince uses the drawings brilliantly; it even uses their self-admittedly poor quality. All of the comments on imagination and faith the narrator has been making focus down on the prince in that moment, though he is completely unaware of his heightened state of enlightenment.

The best sections of the book were the cumulative expressions of the love the narrator had for the prince, and Exupéry’s explication of loneliness, loss, and innocence. Passages like this one foreshadow heavily:

“Whomever I touch, I send back to the earth from whence he came,” the snake spoke again. “But you are innocent and true, and you come from a star . . .”

The little prince made no reply.

“You move me to pity—you are so weak on this Earth made of granite,” the snake said. “I can help you, some day, if you grow too homesick for your own planet. I can—”

“Oh! I understand you very well,” said the little prince. “But why do you always speak in riddles?”

“I solve them all,” said the snake.

And they were both silent.

The bittersweetness of friendship and loss runs through the book—the prince and his tamed fox, for instance, and of course the narrator and the prince. The little prince’s grave and chidish wisdom made me love him as much as the narrator does. It’s a touching book, profoundly sad and pure. You can read it for free online.

The Big Sleep is the first novel of Raymond Chandler’s I’ve read, and so far the best. The language is magnificent. The cadence, iconic similes, and raw energy all form a tense, brooding mood which plays over my mind in black and white. And, of course, the dialog snaps back and forth—everybody’s clever; witty repartee abounds, and everyone drinks enough liquor to ignite a dozen livers each. (He brings out my noirish tendencies.)

Together with Dashiell Hammett, Chandler created a truly American style, if there is such a thing, which exemplifies our national tough-guy facade. World-weary, bitterly sarcastic, self-assured; a lover but never giving love too much ground—that’s Chandler’s California, and the kind of America I’d like to see more (sort of).

Whether you like him or not, Philip Marlowe is a great character. He doesn’t have to be liked. Despite his constant drinking and gruff manner, he’s an upstanding person of unflinching moral fortitude. His is a lonely, dark road—and we get the sense he prefers it that way.

He figures crimes out slowly, as we readers do, detail by detail, and gets through by a combination of luck and toughness. Everything that happens, regardless of how unexpected, he takes in stride. And he’s smart. Nobody says all of what they’re thinking—other than the soft-minded—but Marlowe sees beneath the surface, to people’s true motivations, and worms out the truth.

What Chandler is saying about human nature and our society hits pretty hard. It takes someone like Marlowe to absorb all that baseness and not break. Despite the dark tone, there’s something bitterstweet and hopeful at the bottom of The Big Sleep. Justice comes, but at a terrible price, and we don’t know how much longer Marlowe, who’s our last man standing, can fight on.

Hunter S. Thompson makes me want to be a journalist. As with some other larger-than-life writers, I’m not sure where the legend ends and he begins, but since I’m interested in his writing and not his person, it doesn’t much matter. His love for language and his discipline are especially inspiring. I read somewhere, while was working as a copy-boy, he typed A Farewell to Arms and The Great Gatsby to feel their structure, and to understand what those two writers were doing beneath the surface. That sort of dedication is like a medical student sneaking into funeral homes. The rhythm and cadence in Thompson’s work, his clean prose and love for words is enjoyable on its own and gives me yet another high target for my own writing.

Thompson’s work draws me in because it gives me intimate access to otherwise unknowable people and events; I can see things firsthand which occurred 25 years before I was born. He makes the ultra-violent, one-percenter, outlaw biker subculture a palatable, prodable entity I can understand—at least as much as any bystander.  I can experience Barger, Tiny, even Thompson himself. I can see what they do in the wild, why they do these things, and what the effects are.

Thompson de-romanticizes the Hell’s Angels. Even at the time, after the initial panic had calmed, some groups began adopting them, thinking the Angels were tame revolutionaries. They invited the Angels to hip parties where the women were enamored of the their outlaw status and the men wanted to talk about isolation and alienation and all that heavy stuff that made the Angels tear off on massive, howling motorcycles to pillage the California countryside. The hipsters mostly gave that up after the Angels beat them up at a few demonstrations.

The Angels are a brutal menace—not Robin Hood or Marlon Brando or anyone you can predict or control. Life with the Angels is not an action movie: when somebody gets stomped, real ribs break; there are lasting consequences. But the Angels disregard all thought of the future, or the effects of their decisions. Their modus operandi is entirely hedonistic, moment-to-moment, though intense loyalty to the club presides. Most of them don’t keep steady jobs, they live for being Angels: for the runs, the binges, and the parties. They take the premise of “all for one, one for all” and extend it to barbarism. If you strike an Angel, all other Angels will come to his aid—whether he was right or not, whether he hit you first; regardless of provocation, once one Angel is offended, all Angels are offended. And they will hurt you in interesting new ways.

Thompson’s journalism—good journalism in general—also sheds light on the culture of the times. Each piece he writes—Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, ditto on the Campaign trail ’72, The Great Shark Hunt—each of these is about more than the subject at hand. He speaks about small things in a way we can extrapolate to larger statements about our culture, and about people in general. His treatment of the Hell’s Angels is no different. They’re a prototype, he says. The Hell’s Angels aren’t an anomaly, they’re the future.