What is your favorite rose?
The pomperola It blooms with many petals.
What fascinates her about roses?
His perfume. I grow only fragrant roses – pre-1871 English varieties.
What happened in 1871?
Unscented varieties were grafted.
Do those rose bushes have a name?
Orient express and other such evocators. I have not bought the Julio Iglesias variety.
‘Hey’!
Yes, Kiss me, Kate, a rose named after the musical inspired by The Taming of the Furry, by William Shakespeare.
You novel about him now…
About Eugene Schieffelin: Devoted reader of William Shakespeare, reader who acclimatized birds in New York in 1890.
Acclimatized birds?
He brought thirty pairs of starlings from England, which he released in Central Park, descendants of the 300 million starlings currently on the American continent.
What is the starling like?
Small, elegant, with iridescent black feathers, omnivorous and gregarious: it flies in flocks drawing beautiful ripples in the twilight sky.
And what does Shakespeare have to do with it?
Shakespeare, in Henry IV, talks about teaching a starling to repeat “Mortimer”, the King’s enemy, to mortify him.
Do starlings talk?
They can reproduce some words.
Why did Schieffelin fixate on it?
The English world brought distinction to New Yorkers, and he read Shakespeare.
I?
He focused on all the species of birds that appear in Shakespeare’s plays.
How many species of birds?
The starling and 53 other species of English birds: owl, cormorant, cardinal, nightingale, lark… And many crows.
I Schieffelin en va prendre nota?
The New York World newspaper reported on that release of English birds in Central Park: Schieffelin was a neighbor.
He brought an English detail to New York.
He presided over the United States Acclimatization Society, acclimatizing European species to America, his well-intentioned way of improving the new world.
And did they improve it?
That perception has been reversed and today we talk about “invasive species”: starlings are seen as a pest.
And are they?
A Lokheed plane crashed in 1960, the largest air crash in the United States: 62 people died. He blamed the starlings. But many died too!
Yeah, but…
I see ornithoxenophobia, a form of racism: it is called a “foreign bird”, a foreign invasion, and a plague! The poor starling gets a lot of bad press – that disgusts me.
How does the starling see?
While documenting myself, I empathized with all the birds… I bought binoculars, which is the entrance to ornithology.
Have you had an instructor?
The ornithologist Jordi Sargatal, a sage. And now my daughter is also fond of it: “Look, mom, a smoky car, a mallerenga, a gaig”…
Is the starling your favorite bird today?
Yes, and the cardinal, with very showy red plumage. And while I was writing, a puput came to my balcony every day: she watched over me. I finished the novel…and it flew by.
What else did you learn documenting yourself for this story?
That Vanessa’s name is going to invent Shakespeare! Ho Explains How Shakespeare Changed Everything, by Stephen Marche.
And what do you know about Eugene Schieffelin?
He was a member of a very wealthy New York Jewish family thanks to the pharmaceutical trade. With a farm then in the middle of the field… where today the University of Columbia is located. He died in 1906.
What was New York like then?
Eugene Schieffelin’s grandfather, Jacob, owned half of Manhattan and laid out its grid, and founded a church… Jacob became the richest man in all of New York City in the nineteenth century.
One of the great New York personalities of the 19th century, then.
Like Nellie Bly, courageous journalist of the New York World: she was able to pretend to be crazy to write about an insane asylum or to go around the world in 72 days just to win Verne’s Fogg.
Another character worthy of a novel…
Like Claudia, a Catalan girl who had one wish: to marry a man from Seville. Thus, he celebrated one of them by letter, Antonio. And they got married. Claudia and Antonio: my parents. I will also novelize this one day. My father, by the way, liked to raise canaries.
