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[Aetat. 16-18] J O Y C E 61The students at University College were more unusual than their professors.Three of Joyce's close friends, Clancy, Francis Skeffington, andThomas Kettle, indicated the extent of the earnestness of their youth bylosing their livesjn_jjattle r each.for a different cause. Clancy was to endas a victim of tjtfcTBlack and Tari§\ murdered while he was mayor ofLimerick. His unfortunate death was appropriate in that, even as a youngman, Clancy subscribed ardently to every aspect of the national movement.He helped form a branch of the Gaelic League at University College,and persuaded his friends, including even Joyce for a time, to takelessons in Irish. Joyce gave them up because Patrick Pearse, the instructor,found it necessary to exalt Irish by denigrating English, and in particulardenounced the word Thunder'—a favorite of Joyce's—as an exampleof verbal inadequacy. 18Clancy was an enthusiast also for Gaelicsports like hurling, and therefore a great friend of Michael Cusack, thefounder of the Gaelic Athletic Association.* He brought Joyce to meetCusack a few times, and Joyce liked him little enough to make himmodel the narrow-minded and rhetorical Cyclops in Ulysses. Clancy appearsin Joyce's early work as Madden; he is the only friend who callsStephen by his firstname, and Joyce later confirmed that Clancy aloneamong his classmates did so. 19Madden (called Davin in A Portrait) laborswith rustic sincerity to make Stephen more Irish, and Stephen's relationswith him are simpler and more relaxed than with his other friends. Thereis no indication, however, that Joyce ever called Clancy 'George.'After himself, James Joyce told Stanislaus, the cleverest man at UniversityCollege was Francis Skeffington. Skeffington, like Clancy, died atthe hands of the British, but a few years sooner, during the Easter Rebellionof 1916, when he quixotically tried to dissuade the Dublin poorfrom looting.t As a young man Skeffington, four years Joyce's senior,was the college iconoclast. To protest against uniformity in dress he wore* Cusack was of middle height but had extremely broad shoulders. He usually wore abroad-brimmed soft hat and instead of trousers wore knee breeches. Carrying a heavyblackthorn, he would come into a pub and shout at the waiter, 'I'm Citizen Cusack fromthe Parish of Carron in the Barony of Burren in the County of Clare, you Protestantdog!' He was born in 1847, taught at Blackrock College and Clongowes Wood College,and later opened a grinding establishment. He founded the Gaelic Athletic Associationin 1884, and an article of that time gives some sense of his style: 'No movement havingfor its object the social and political advancement of a nation from the tyranny of importedand enforced customs and manners can be regarded as perfect if it has not madeadequate provision for the preservation and cultivation of the national pastimes of thepeople. Voluntary neglect of such pastimes is a sure sign of national decay and approachingdissolution. . . . The corrupting influences which for several years have been devastatingthe sporting grounds of our cities and towns are fast spreading to our rural population.Foreign and hostile forces and the pernicious influence of the hated and hithertodominant race drove the Irish people from their trysting places at the crossroads andhurling fields back to their cabins where but a few short years before famine and feverreigned supreme.'t For this incident see p. 399.