Kate Bush: Under the Ivy, Graeme Thompson; Adventures in Kate Bush and Theory, Deborah M. Withers

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Second paragraph of third chapter of Under the Ivy: The Life & Music of Kate Bush, by Graeme Thomson:

When the light falls a certain way an unlikely pub singer comes into focus, embarking on an enforced, somewhat delayed apprenticeship. Fronting the KT Bush Band, she was a characteristically vivid turn as a lounge bar chanteuse, singing the likes of Hall & Oates’ ‘She's Gone’, Steely Dan’s ‘Brooklyn’, Arthur Conley’s ‘Sweet Soul Music and Free’s ‘The Stealer' to a less than select crowd of lager drinkers, corporate low-rollers and sports aficionados. “We played Tottenham Football Club, where they thought she was the stripper,” says the band’s drummer, Vic King. “At a pub in Putney on the day [before] Scotland beat England at Wembley we had dry ice machines that set off the fire alarm. There was a bit of a riot and a panic. It was a really good evening!” He pauses. “But not really her thing, no.”

Second paragraph of third chapter of Adventures in Kate Bush and Theory, by Deborah M. Withers:

Never for Ever is marked by the same fascinations with taboo sexuality of The Kick Inside and Lionheart. For example, ‘The Infant’s Kiss’ is inspired by the 1961 film The Innocents, which dramatises a governesses’ [sic] obsession with the children she looks after, in particular the young boy Miles who is possessed by the spirit of an adult man: ‘There's a man behind those eyes.’ The BFS performs as the governess to tell a tale of spiritual and emotional obsession, ‘I want to smack but I hold back/ I only want to touch’ (NFE) while the simple orchestration and violin riffs convey the tense, creeping horror of the film.

I'm not a huge Kate Bush fan, but my other half is; I got her these two books for Christmas a few years back and have now got around to reading them myself. Thomson's book is a readable artistic biography, taking us through Bush's career up to the time of publication using public sources and interviews with former colleagues (though not Bush herself as far as I can see). Bush is far from a one-shot wonder, but it's clear that her biggest (and quite extraordinary) success was at the very start of her career, with “Wuthering Heights”, “The Man With the Child in his Eyes” and The Kick Inside. It's extraordinary that those first songs were written when she was a teenager, “The Man With the Child in his Eyes” when she was 16.

After that, she was basically rich enough to do what she wanted, without too much pressure to succeed further (and clearly much more careful with her money than, say, Pete Townshend). And what she wanted was generally studio recording rather than the public stage – between 1979 and 2014 there were no Kate Bush live concerts, and few appearances. Few of her later songs are as successful as the early ones, but some are, and I get the sense that for the last forty years she has been more or less throwing artistic ideas at the wall and seeing what would stick.

I was also very interested to note that despite her eclectic performances and style, she is still very much a music industry insider – an outlier rather than a revolutionary. It was David Gilmour of Pink Floyd who spotted her when she was 16 (here's a 2002 bootleg video of her perfoming "Comfortably Numb" with Gilmour). As The Kick Inside and Lionheart came out she was providing backing vocals for Peter Gabriel (who is co-credited with her on the 1979 Kate Bush Christmas Special). The book includes chummy pictures with Midge Ure and Terry Gilliam. I don't want to exaggerate this, of course – she also cultivated the Trio Bulgarka for The Sensual World and The Red Shoes, well outside the British music industry's normal comfort zone.

Anyway, Thomson's books was an enlightening read even for a non-fan.

Withers' book is her PhD thesis, so it's rather less accessible. The performing personality of Kate Bush is described as the "Bushian Feminine Subject", abbreviated to "BFS" throughout the book, which is rather confusing. Where lyrics are quoted, citations are given to the album rather than to the song in which they appear. More fundamentally, I felt that this was a case where a thematic rather than chronological approach might have been more suitable – like Thomson, Withers goes through Bush's career album by album, but this obscures the interesting questions of whether her approach to sexuality, gender identity, orientalism or colonialism has changed over time. My other half confessed that she had not managed to finish the book; it is only 150 pages, but a bit impenetrable.

You can get Under the Ivy: The Life & Music of Kate Bush here, and Adventures in Kate Bush and Theory here.

Under the Ivy was the non-fiction book that had lingered longest unread on my shelves, and Adventures in Kate Bush and Theory was the shortest book on my shelves acquired in 2011. Next on those lists are Cycling in Victorian Ireland, by Brian Griffin, and Alina, by Jason Johnson.

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My tweets

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  • Sat, 09:46: RT @taniahershman: Foote wasn’t allowed to read her own paper at the conference because she was a woman. In 2010 a geologist came across he…
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John de Courcy, Prince of Ulster, by Steve Flanders

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

About 50 years later, however, the first William de Courcy of Stogursey granted all of his lands to his own first son, named William after him, undoubtedly expecting him to make some provision for his younger brothers, but keeping the lordship itself in one piece and firmly under Courcy family control. Although the father might have been tempted to provide for all his sons by dividing up his lands, when he passed everything on to his eldest son he ensured that the integrity and strength of the lordship would be maintained. Dividing it up into three parts, even unequal parts, would have substantially reduced the financial and military strength of the lordship and consequently lowered the status of the second William de Courcy amongst his fellow aristocrats. Having established himself in England, the first William de Courcy was clearly determined that his family should maintain its status within the highly-competitive Anglo-Norman aristocracy and for that the new lord, his eldest son, needed as large a lordship as possible.

A very short book about the Norman knight who conquered "Ulster", or rather most of what is now County Down and County Antrim, in the late twelfth century. It's very good on the details of the de Courcy lineage and family holdings in France and England, which goes some way to explaining the drive to expand the family domains. The military details of the crucial capture of Downpatrick in 1177 are examined at length, and lots of other bits and pieces are thrown in, particularly on the record of de Courcy's military patronage and shifting of the centre of gravity of the Ulster lordship to Carrickfergus from Downpatrick.

But lots is left out as well. There is nothing about the attempted mediation role of Cardinal Vivian in the Downpatrick attack, though it's a major part of the narrative in contemporary chronicles. The dramatic story of de Courcy being captured while attending church in 1204 is skipped over. We don't get anything about how the new Norman rulers were able to displace the former Irish chieftains so quickly and so comprehensively. I also think there is a story to be told about de Courcy's wife, Affreca, the daughter of the King of the Isle of Man, and the fact that almost all of the Anglo-Norman fortifications of the Lordship of Ulster are so close to the sea.

It's also frustrating that no sources are given (though at least there are some good maps). Flanders has done some delving into the surviving charters and other records, but unfortunately hasn't shown his work. I learned a couple of things from this, but basically T.E. MacNeil's Anglo-Norman Ulster has far more information and is just as digestible. Still, if you want to, you can get it here.

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Grimm Tales for Young and Old, by Philip Pullman

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

If there was any job that needed doing, it was always the elder son who had to do it. But there was one thing the elder son wouldn’t do: if his father asked him to get something as night was falling, or when it was completely dark, and if his way took him through the graveyard or some creepy place like that, he’d say, ‘Oh, no, father, I won’t go there, it gives me the shivers.’

This is a selection of stories taken from the Grimm Brothers’ collections of the nineteenth century, reinterpreted with some critical apparatus by Philip Pullman. It includes a lot of the classics – Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, Rapunzel, Cinderella, The Musicians of Bremen – and lot of others, many of which have justly been forgotten. Pullman supplies a list of alternate sources for each story, along with a short analysis/critique. Still, I was left wondering a little why he had bothered.

Grimm Tales for Young and Old was my top unread book acquired in 2018 and my top unread sf book. You can get it here. Next on those piles respectively are How To Be Both, by Ali Smith, and A Local Habitation, by Seanan McGuire.

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The Early Life of Samuel M. Wickersham, based on his writings 1819-1862, ed. E.W. Hoffman

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Second paragraph of first letter from third month of correspondence with Fanny:

I would, if it was consistent with the duties now dwelling upon me, have been with you this morning, but I can not, I must forgo for a while that pleasure, that duty.

My second cousin once removed, Edward Wickersham “Wick” Hoffman, inherited from his mother a box which had originally contained bottles of Majorska Vodka. On closer investigation, he discovered that it contained a large number of family documents, which he has done us the great service of transcribing and publishing. In this first volume of four, he has collected the early correspondence of Samuel Morris Wickersham, Wick’s great-grandfather and my great-great-grandfather. Most of this dates from the years 1859-1860, when he was courting his future third wife, my great-great-grandmother Frances Wyatt Belt, and writing to her in Philadephia and Baltimore from points west and north of there. She obviously kept all his letters (including a rather sweet one from his sixteen-year-old daughter by his first marriage); he doesn’t seem to have kept any of hers.

Sam Wickersham had fallen on hard times in 1859. His first two wives had died young, leaving him with two daughters and two living sons, the youngest of whom, a baby, was the future Attorney-General of the United States (his firm, Cadwallader, Wickersham and Taft, is still going – no, not that Taft, his brother). Several of Sam’s business ventures had failed, and he was locked in a lawsuit with his brothers over their father’s estate (he had died in 1858, a few months before Sam’s second wife died in childbirth). He was based in Pittsburgh, Fanny Belt was in Philadelphia where her father was an impoverished itinerant homeopathic doctor. Sam was born in March 1819, Fanny in August 1833, so she was 25 and he was 40 when they got to know each other in mid-1859. The correspondence ends when they married in early 1861, the Civil War having already started. They had five children over the next eleven years, giving him a grand total of nine. The oldest of the five married the metallurgist Sir Robert Hadfieldheavy metal, and also postal chesseclipse). He liquidated that investment for $50,000 (the Internet says that’s about $1.5 million at today’s prices), which obviously made the courtship a bit easier. I found it really interesting that he took his son Tommy with him on this trip (Tommy had his 12th birthday during the journey). It seems that that part of Michigan was considered safe enough for Sam to bring a child with him on a business trip, though it had been settled for less than twenty years.

It’s also striking to read of the looming war, which Sam simply doesn’t see coming. On 1 November 1860, he writes that if Lincoln is elected,

I predict then in one year every southern state will say amen to his election and pronounce it the most constructive republican administration since the days of Washington.

As the election results come in (slowly, of course), he writes on 10 November,

Georgia and South Carolina are passing through the usual periodical display of childish petulancy at being disappointed but if they are only left entirely alone and in no way meddled with they will soon feel ashamed of their course and settle down in quiet for another 4 years

It’s really interesting to realise just how unprepared the North was for the war. But less than a month later, on 7 December, Sam stops by Harrisburg and has “a long talk” with the Governor of Pennsylvania, who tells him that war is inevitable.

Sam’s own base when in Pittsburgh is with his friend and lawyer William Shinn at Evergreen Hamlet, which Shinn had founded, planned and built. There is a rather bizarre exchange where it becomes apparent that Shinn’s wife is briefing against Sam, as a wastrel and bankrupt. Once he gets the money from the Michigan mine, we hear nothing more of that.

It is interesting to reflect that this sort of archive will become impossible to reconstruct for courting couples of the 21st century. Emails are pretty ephemeral, text messages and other apps even more so. My own great-great-grandchildren will not have so much to go on.

You can get the book here