Michael Cusack and James Joyce:
Pair May Have Reshaped Modern Ireland

A young James Joyce, 1904.

Ennis, County Clare, Ireland — The Clare poet and founder of Burren Perfumeries, Brian Mooney, makes convincing claims for both Cusack and Joyce as the most influential figures of modern Ireland — Joyce for his reconstruction of the English language, Cusack for his reconstruction of Irish nationalism. Mooney writes, "In spite of the diverse nature of their achievements, one thing unites them: Each in following his own intuition was being singularly true to that peculiar genius of the Celt to reshape, shift or reinvent old forms. ... The life-blood of a culture is its openness to meaningful change."

Their paths crossed well before Mooney's pen united them for praise. Cusack obviously made an impact upon the young Joyce. The Clareman appears in "Stephen Hero" as the football fellow in the knickerbockers and in "Finnegan's Wake" as Sir Micholas de Cusack, and is alluded to in "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" when Joyce writes "Davin, who had sat at the feet of Michael Cusack the Gael." For Joyce, history was a nightmare from which the Irish people were trying to awake. Fellow Dublin resident Cusack, meanwhile, was acting in a continuum of a declining civilization. Both visions are on view in these various references of Joyce's novels.

I have no hesitation in saying that the game of hurling is in the front rank of the fine arts. — Michael Cusack

Cusack's crowning achievement, the creation of the GAA, was the culmination of a personal 10-year odyssey. Yet his voyage was to continue beyond Thurles, where the GAA sallied forth, for there was to be no Ithaca for old man Cusack, no final, happy destination. For his was a journey that was to continue on a downward social trajectory until his death. His beautiful young, County Down wife, Margaret Woods, mother of their six children, died in 1890, and his famed Civil Service Academy, which had brought in a then considerable income of at least £1,000 a year, folded on account of his neglect of the school during the GAA's development.

It was this Cusack, raging against turn of events, whom Joyce encountered, and caricatured with the figure "The Citizen" in his novel "Ulysses." Perhaps it was the paralleled decline in the fortunes of Joyce that sparked the writer's intrigue with the ailing Clare schoolmaster. It has been suggested that Joyce did see a reflection of his own father in the Cusack in their support for Irish parliamentary leader Charles Stuart Parnell, along with their alcoholism and latter-day poverty. Joyce wrote to his brother Stanislaus from Zurich in 1907, "I suppose you saw old Cusack is dead" soon after Michael's death from chronic kidney disorder, a condition which Cusack's predilection toward drink certainly did not help.

An illustration of hurling from the 1890s.

Joyce's brilliant gifts of observation of even the most minute detail do emerge in the line in "Ulysses" where "The Citizen" "spat a red bank oyster out of him right into the corner." It is a play on the English translation of "Carranroo Bay oyster bed," less than 10 miles from Carron, Cusack's birthplace in Clare. This oyster bed was owned by Burren native Joe Hynes, a close friend of the GAA founder and proprietor of the Red Bank hostelry in Dublin's D'Olier St, a favored watering hole of Cusack's.

Perhaps it was Cusack who was the ultimate modernist in that he was the first Gael to take on the modern world while being true to the traditions that molded him. Cusack gave his own "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man":

"When I reflect on the sublime simplicity of the game of hurling, the strength and swiftness of the players, their apparently angelic impetuosity, their apparent recklessness of life and limb, their magic skill, their marvellous escapes and the overwhelming pleasure they give their friends, I have no hesitation in saying that the game of hurling is in the front rank of the fine arts. Let me explain. Tolstoy says that "art is a human activity, consisting in this that one man consciously by means of certain external signs, hands on to others feelings he has lived through and that the other people are infected by those feelings and also experience them. My father passed those feelings peculiar to the hurling field on to me. I shoved them a stage further at least, and now I am luxuriating in the manful enjoyment of those who have taken my place. It is a consolation to me to know that in the "calm eve of my life" that I have been an artist. I was quite conscious of what I was doing all along, but I was not aware until recently that I was an artist. Now I submit that every good hurler is an artist of the finest type."

This feature was produced by Joe Gannon and edited by Gerry Regan.

FOR ADDITIONAL INFORMATION:

Early GAA Pictures

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