As the medicals head for the pub, "hollering" down Holles
Street, one says to a companion, "Bonafides. Where you slep
las nigh?" Anticipating a short window for drinking, he
jokes about taking advantage of a loophole in the laws that
governed the operating hours of public houses. According to
U.K. law, pubs were required to close at 11 PM on weekdays and
stay closed all day on Sundays. But in Ireland a "bona
fide traveller" could be served later on
weekdays, and even on Sundays. The thinking was that people
who needed to be on the road all day might require nourishment
(and, naturally, drink to accompany it) at odd hours. Such
travelers were required to "prove" that they had come at least
three miles from wherever they had slept the night before, and
their journey "must not be for the purpose of obtaining
drink."
In practice this exception, finally repealed in 1960, created
gaping grey areas in the law. Did someone who bicycled three
miles from his own home to a pub count as a bona fide
or a mala fide traveler? And what balance would a pub
owner strike between satisfying the demands of the law (by
demanding proof of genuine travel) and increasing his revenue?
"The Bona-Fide Traveller," a humorous piece published in The
Lepracaun in November 1905, defined its subject
biologically as "an animal which subsists chiefly on damp,
which it travels long distances to obtain. It is frequently
found in the suburbs on Sundays before two and after seven
o'clock, when it goes in pursuit of its favourite moisture."
The article also quotes an authority's legal definition:
someone "who had a bona-fide thirst, wanted a bona-fide drink,
and had the the bona-fide money to pay for it." In Joyce's
story "Grace," Mr. Power and Mr. Cunningham, who work in Dublin
Castle, speak about such a man, named Harford:
––Hm, said Mr Cunningham.
When Mr Cunningham made that remark
people were silent. It was known that the speaker had secret
sources of information. In this case the monosyllable had a
moral intention. Mr Harford sometimes formed one of a little
detachment which left the city shortly after noon on Sunday
with the purpose of arriving as soon as possible at some
public-house on the outskirts of the city where its members
duly qualified themselves as bona-fide travellers.
Such ambiguities, arguably legal but never "moral," are
responsible for the question asked in
Oxen, "Where you
slep las nigh?" (Slote, Mamigonian, and Turner identify "slep"
as "London dialect.")
According to Joyce's two schemas, Oxen takes
place between 10 and 11 PM. A good part of that hour has
already been spent in the common room of the maternity
hospital, so time is short for drinking at Burke's. As the men
tramp up Holles Street someone says, "Keep a watch on the
clock. Chuckingout time." In the following paragraphs,
as drinks are ordered in the pub, one man anxiously asks
another for the time, explaining that his uncle has his watch,
and the other happily obliges: "Avuncular's got my
timepiece. Ten to. Obligated awful. Don't mention it."
With ten minutes to drink and talk as volubly as possible,
several paragraphs go by until the bartender's voice is heard:
"Closingtime, gents. Eh?" At the end of that paragraph
comes another call: "Time." Still another paragraph of
talk follows, and then a definitive command: "Time all. There's
eleven of them. Get ye gone. Forward, woozy wobblers!"
Eleven bells have sounded, and the eleven drinkers are out on
the street again.
At the end of part 2 of The Waste Land, T. S. Eliot
creates a very similar scene. Two women talk in a pub as
another voice repeatedly cuts across their conversation:
"HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME." Clearly one of these two great
writers has been pilfering from the other. My money is on
Eliot, the fellow who wrote that bad poets borrow while good
poets steal.
