In modern Rome, boars knock over trash bins, wolves roam the urban fringes, raptors nest atop marble pillars, and ducks tend to their eggs inside world-renowned art museums. The city is home to 1,600 species of plants; 5,200 insects; and around 100 birds, 40 mammals, and 30 reptile and amphibian species. All are wild, though not all are native. Ring-necked parakeets from Africa and South Asia, escaped from the pet trade, nest throughout the city—a modern echo of ancient Rome’s role in the endless human enterprise of shuffling around species.
My husband, your landlady says. Brain tumor. He has been missing now for over twenty years. Or does she say thirty. You try to put together the time frame.
It made him crazy, she says, meaning the tumor or maybe the surgery. He disappeared. You are drinking tea together in the garden. Outside, it is bright and cool like a screensaver. You don’t like it here; you can feel yourself burning.
You know the art of David Gentleman even if you don’t know you know it. Anyone who’s passed through London’s Charing Cross tube station has seen his life-filled black-and-white mural of medieval people, enlarged from his woodcuts, digging, hammering, chiselling to construct the Eleanor Cross that once stood nearby. His graphic art has graced everything from stamps to book covers to Stop the War posters in a career spanning seven decades. He says he’s been making art for 90 years, since he was five.
His parents were also artists, and in his latest book he reproduces a Shell poster by his father to show he follows in a modern British tradition of well-drawn, well-observed popular art. Perhaps it is because he learned from his parents as naturally as learning to speak – “Seeing them drawing tempted me to draw” – that Gentleman dislikes pedagogy. He’s proud that he never had to teach for a living, always selling his art. So his guide to the creative life, Lessons for Young Artists, is anything but a how-to manual or didactic textbook.
This meticulously edited book, full of Woolf’s writing at its glistening best, will surely help critics in their attempts to grasp the author.
Black thumbed or green, you are likely to enjoy a leisurely stroll through Harris’ garden as you become acquainted anew with plants you thought you knew already. We may inhabit different taxonomical kingdoms, but our roots are entwined nonetheless.