Blazes Boylan
The Dublin concert promoter who is Molly Bloom's lover. His four o'clock call at her house is the fact her husband arranges the whole day around.
To be looked at, and to be at Molly Bloom's house by four o'clock. In a hotel bar an hour beforehand a hanger-on tries to hold him with a story and he cuts it off: "—I'm off, said Boylan with impatience."
The book
At a glance
- Concert promoter and billsticker; organising Molly Bloom's singing tour
- Hugh E. (Blazes) Boylan
- Tan shoes, skyblue socks, a straw hat at an angle, indigo serge, and a red carnation
- 7 Eccles Street, with the concert programme
- Sceptre in the Ascot Gold Cup, two pounds on a friend's tip — the horse loses
- Glimpsed from a funeral carriage, a fruit shop, a hotel bar, and once as a hallucination
Who they are in the book
Spoiler-freeHugh Boylan, universally called Blazes, arranges concerts and sticks up advertising bills around Dublin. He is putting together a singing tour for Molly Bloom, and he is sleeping with her. He appears in person for only a few pages of Ulysses and is present on almost every page of it, because Leopold Bloom cannot stop thinking about him.
His day, as far as the book shows it: a letter of his arrives at 7 Eccles Street in the morning, and Bloom carries it upstairs and watches his wife push it under the pillow. In the afternoon Boylan buys fruit at a shop on Wellington Quay to be sent to her by tram — pears, peaches, and a bottle wrapped in pink tissue paper — flirts with the shop girl and helps himself to a red carnation from a vase. He drinks a sloe gin at a hotel bar, checks the time, and takes a cab north to Eccles Street.
Joyce draws him from the outside only. Tan shoes, socks with skyblue clocks, a straw hat at an angle, an indigo serge suit, a flower in his teeth, money rattling in his pocket. In a novel that prints the inside of everyone's head, Boylan is the one principal whose head we never enter, and the effect is roughly what a rival looks like to the man he is displacing: loud, well dressed, and unbothered.
How the book draws them
- The clothesNew tan shoes, socks with skyblue clocks, a widebrimmed straw hat at a rakish angle, a suit of indigo serge, a skyblue tie, and a red flower between his teeth. Passing the viceroy's carriage procession he does not bother to salute, and looks the three ladies in it up and down instead.
- The sound of himJoyce writes him as noise rather than character. Tan shoes creaking on a barfloor, coins rattling in a trouser pocket, a cab jingling north across the city. In the hotel-bar chapter the jingle of his cab runs under the singing for pages while Bloom, eating dinner in the next room, hears it go.
- The basket of fruitHe picks pears and peaches at a fruit shop, has a bottle in pink tissue paper packed underneath them, and asks for it to go by tram at once: "—Send it at once, will you? he said. It's for an invalid." Then he takes a carnation out of the display for his own buttonhole and asks the girl behind the counter whether he may use the telephone.
- The nicknameEverybody calls him Blazes, and his impatience is a standing joke in the city. Sending word to him through a friend, an acquaintance called Tom Rochford says: "Tell him I'm Boylan with impatience."
- The betHe put two pounds on a horse called Sceptre in the Ascot Gold Cup that afternoon, on a tip, for himself and a lady friend. The race is won at twenty to one by a rank outsider called Throwaway. Sceptre is still running.
- The letterIt is addressed in a bold hand to "Mrs Marion Bloom" — her own name, not her married style — and Bloom notices the wording before he notices anything else. He hands it over, offers to open the blind, and watches out of the corner of his eye as she reads it and tucks it under the pillow.
- What Bloom concludes about himAt about two in the morning Bloom sets the case out in four bracketed words: "Reflections on his vigour (a bounder), corporal proportion (a billsticker), commercial ability (a bester), impressionability (a boaster)." A bester is a swindler. Bloom never says a word of it aloud, to Boylan or to anyone else.
- Where else his name turns upIn the small hours a down-at-heel acquaintance called Corley touches Stephen Dedalus for half a crown and asks him to get a word put in with Boylan the billsticker about work carrying a sandwich board. Stephen passes the request on to Bloom, having no idea who Boylan is. Bloom looks away at a dredger moored on the quay and says that everybody gets their own ration of luck.
Joyce built most of his Dubliners out of people he had known, often under names anyone in the city could see through. It caused him trouble: his publishers held up his first book, the story collection Dubliners, for years over the real names and real premises in it. Boylan is an exception. No original has ever been convincingly identified, and he reads like an invention — a set of clothes, a walk and an appointment, assembled to be everything Bloom is not.