This is the autobiography of Liam Clancy, the youngest member of the Irish folk music group, The Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem. Liam and The Clancy Brothers were responsible for making Irish Folk Music and Aran sweaters a fad in America during the 1960’s, and they also introduced guitar accompaniment to Irish folk music. The mountain of the title refers both to Liam’s sexual exploits and to Slievenamon, a breast-shaped mountain near his hometown, Carrick-on-Suir. Slievenamon is an Anglicization of the Gaelic, “Sliabh na mBan,” or mountain of the women.
Clancy says that the success of his childhood friend Frank McCort’s book Angela’s Ashes inspired him to write his memoirs. Unlike McCort’s, however, Clancy’s story lacks the rage and the passion that made Angela’s Ashes such a gripping read. Clancy’s childhood was impoverished, but not lacking in comfort. He never suffered the constant cruelty and humiliation that McCort endured. Clancy’s father had a respectable job (insurance underwriter) and his parents had a happy marriage. Clancy, the youngest of eight children, was also rooted in a family tradition. The Clancy’s had been Brehon lawyers (an ancient law tradition that combined elements of Celtic, Viking and English legal systems) for generations, which gave them prestige far above their neighbors. They also lived in the same cottage that their ancestors had built the 17th century. More information on the Brehon law tradition can be found here.
Clancy, who says he was initially attracted to acting because he loved taking on a persona more interesting than his own, doesn’t seem to have much familiarity with his subject. There are only a few sections where Clancy seems to be a living, breathing person, while there are way too many instances of name dropping and pointless anecdotes (the lowest point is the anecdote devoted to how he nearly bedded the Governor-General of Bermuda’s daughter). He wanders through the book like Linus with a guitar, the perpetual youngest child who relies on his charm, good looks, luck and powerful friends and relations to propel him through life.
The book has its moments, though. Liam began his career as a kept man, and the chapters describing his relationship with his patroness, the complex, tormented millionaire folklorist Diane Hamilton/Guggenheim have a power and immediacy that make the rest of the book seem stale. Diane Guggenheim, who called herself Diane Hamilton to distance herself from her wealthy family and to protect herself from kidnappers and gold diggers, had a childhood as horrible in its own way as Frank McCort’s. Her mother had been declared insane and rather than institutionalize her, the family kept her in isolation at home. Diane spent a loveless childhood listening to her mother’s screams, but was not permitted to have any contact with her.
For Diane, folk music and folk community became the antidote to the emptiness of her early life. She became infatuated by the 20-year-old Liam, whom she met on a folksong-collecting trip to Ireland. She imported him to the U.S., and according to Liam, it was she who first thought of creating the Clancy Brothers folk group as a means of keeping him in the States. She also created a record company, Tradition Records, to record them. While Liam loved her money and her access to a wider world of culture and privilege, he did not want to put out for his patroness. The succeeding chapters unfold like a bedroom farce as Liam tries to preserve his virginity while enjoying her money. He gets his comeuppance on a collecting trip to the Outer Hebrides. There the noted folksong collector and wild man Hamish Henderson attempted to finagle Ms. Hamilton out of her money and her pretty boy. On one car trip, Liam had to fight a battle on two fronts as he sought to protect himself from Ms. Hamilton’s advances in the front seat while Henderson groped him from the rear.
Liam finally freed himself from Ms. Hamilton’s clutches and appears to have spent the next ten years on a continuous drinking binge. As a result of his career as a Clancy Brother, he hobnobbed with the great and the near great, but he was too drunk at the time to do more than take note of their names–which he does with mind-numbing frequency. He may have shared a mistress with Bob Dylan, but never seemed to have shared an idea with him. Indeed, when he writes of his illustrious buddies, the reader gets no clue as to what it must have been like to live in Josh White’s skin as compared to Bob Dylan’s or Richard Farina’s.
To paraphrase Dorthy Parker’s famous description of Los Angeles, “There’s no ‘there’ there.” While Clancy’s book has some poignant moments and some interesting anecdotes it lacks focus and slides into mindless name dropping.
(Doubleday, 2002)
