"St. Poleander's Eve" (1979)
- Jon Nelson
- May 27, 2025
- 15 min read
Updated: Sep 24, 2025
“The strictly artistic quality in a work of art is the display of significant form or pattern. To this therefore the utilitarian or didactic purpose must be strictly subordinate. If it interferes with the display of form the artistic value of the work is correspondingly diminished.” E. I. Watkin
Today I want to think a little about how Lafferty uses E. I. Watkin’s The Bow in the Clouds (1931) in the Barnaby stories. I’ll focus on one of the most striking examples of this to better understand the relationship, with the caveat that it is impossible to do justice to “St. Poleander’s Eve” in a single blog post. There are so many pieces here that a tight focus is the best way in. I noted the other day, Lafferty is not drawn to Watkin as a source for simple thematic color coding. Instead, Watkin offers a map for thinking through the ideas that most preoccupy Lafferty as an artist. Because The Men Who Knew Everything stories act as a kind of fictional monograph, an extended meditation on Lafferty’s philosophical and theological concerns, they especially reward slow and attentive reading.
I’ll begin with some context covering who Watkin was and what The Bow in the Clouds sets out to do. Then, I’ll consider why Lafferty might have found the book so compelling. Finally, I’ll look at how Lafferty puts Watkin to work in “St. Poleander’s Eve” by triangulating Watkin with two writers he loves, Kipling and Chesterton.
Because “St. Poleander’s Eve” turns on questions of artistic purpose, formal constraint, and the interplay of order and chaos, it offers an interesting meta-level window into Lafferty’s aesthetics. Lafferty discusses fiction, art, and science fiction in his nonfiction writings, but he never gives readers anything like a systematic theory. “St. Poleander’s Eve” comes closer than almost anything else he wrote to offer one because of how clearly we can use it to identify a satiric norm. It also pushes further into the terrain of thinking more aggressively about artistic purpose, although a strong case can be made for a few different stories going just as hard, with The Three Armageddons of Enniscorthy Sweeny being his magnum opus in this vein.
So, who was E. I. Watkin, and how did Lafferty come to be interested in him? Watkin (1888–1981) was an unusual and compelling figure. He was educated at Oxford where he converted to Catholicism, which propelled him into what can be described as a Catholic renaissance in early twentieth-century England. Two figures at the center of that revival were Frank Sheed and his wife, Maisie Ward. Through their publishing house, Sheed & Ward, founded in 1926, they championed many of the most influential Catholic voices of the period, including G. K. Chesterton and Ronald Knox. Maisie, who wrote the first biography of Chesterton in 1943, was also a close friend of his wife, Frances. In her later years, she did much to bring attention to one of the most remarkable and unjustly neglected Catholic artists of the next generation, Caryll Houselander. Watkin was deeply influential in this multi-generational intellectual circle, with Sheed & Ward publishing several of his works, including The Bow in the Clouds (1931), a long-form essay on modernity and the stakes of spiritual vision in the aftermath of the Industrial Age and World War I.
Watkin’s thought draws deeply from the Catholic intellectual tradition of the Middle Ages, particularly the theology of Saint Bonaventure (c. 1217–1274). This was extraordinarily unusual at a time when neo-Thomism held intellectual dominance, and it is perhaps not too surprising that it was a convert rather than a cradle Catholic who developed it. Where Thomas Aquinas emphasized reason (though this is oversimplifying), Bonaventure placed his focus on beauty, teaching that beauty and goodness are not only intimately connected but also fundamentally rooted in God’s aseity. Drawing on Augustine and the Platonic tradition, Bonaventure emphasized that creation bears the vestigia Dei, the traces of God, which manifest as radiance, harmony, and moral order. These qualities are not subjective impressions but objective realities since beauty, goodness, truth, and being are, at their core, one. He taught that moral beauty, the soul shaped by virtue, surpasses all material beauty and that the highest expression of both is found in Christ, whose sacrificial love reveals the splendor of the divine. It is because such things exist that Watkin thinks significant form is so important in art. Gregorio Montejo has brought this current into Lafferty scholarship through the somewhat uneasy fit between Lafferty and Hans Urs von Balthasar. Still, Bonaventure is strongly present, not least because of the influence of Watkin.
Watkin wanted to communicate serious theology and philosophical aesthetics to a broad readership. He decided that ordered beauty could be coveted by the Noahic image of the rainbow, then he sought to update it for a world reshaped by machinery (think Roy Mega), secularism, and cultural disillusionment. Interestingly, Lafferty was working the other side of the theological street through Sheed & Ward, for we also know that he read widely and deeply in their catalog. Aurelia, for example, draws heavily on W. T. Farrell’s Companion to the Summa (1938–1942).
At its simplest, the rainbow in The Bow in the Clouds is a divine harmony. It breaks through the “clouds” of human limitation and ignorance. Watkin imagines the various strata of reality and human engagement, ranging from physical matter (ultra-violet) and the positive sciences (violet) through technology, ethics, metaphysics, biological life, art, and sexuality (indigo, blue, green, yellow, orange), to the heights of religion (red) and finally mysticism (ultra-red), as forming a coherent metaphysics. Each “color” in this spectrum, whether approached through abstract contemplation or intimate union, reflects an aspect of the incarnational and contributes to a unified vision of being. This ascent from the “impenetrable darkness of matter to the impenetrable light of God” is Watkin’s response to modern skepticism. It is a metaphysical affirmation that reality is ordered, meaningful, and luminous. The flipside, as Lafferty once put it, is that man can make himself into a monkey upside down.
As Watkin writes, the rainbow assures us that “every problem has its solution.” That solution lies in a Bonaventuran synthesis, where all forms of knowledge are rightly ordered toward beauty, and the highest beauty is mystical communion. In this culminating “ultra-red” band of the spectrum, all previous levels are not abandoned but integrated, each transfigured and set in its proper place. Mystical union, for Watkin, is the full realization of a metaphysical harmony in which the material and spiritual, the rational and aesthetic, are reconciled in the light of God. It goes far beyond art, but art, metaphysically open to it or not, always discloses its directionality. Significantly, it has been excluded in Lafferty’s story.
This is the deep background for "St. Poleander’s Eve," where Lafferty dramatizes what happens when a Bonaventuran vision of life is interrupted, tested, or refracted through the yellow band of art. In the story, the yellow paint of art keeps curdling, becoming murky yellow rushlight, and only Austro knows why. Although all the spectral colors of Watkin’s metaphysical rainbow appear in all reality, it is art, marked by yellow, that stands at the thematic center of the narrative, hues of yellow detached from the higher reds.
The central disruption is initiated by Daisy Flavus (she being “Yellow Yellow,” which might be interpreted as l’art pour l’art), Barnaby’s self-appointed “artistic secretary,” and Roy Mega, the electronics boy genius. Together, they infiltrate the hermetic sanctum of Barnaby Sheen, a male-only third-floor study bar marked with the motto Leave every dame behind who enters here. This space, at once bohemian and scholastic, becomes the site of a technological and artistic incursion on the strange non-holiday of St. Poleander’s Eve, where a mixed-media drama will be performed. (An aside: the motto alludes to the inscription above the gates of Dante’s hell: Abandon all hope, ye who enter here. A reader who catches the reference and also knows Paradiso may recall that without Beatrice, Dante’s guide and symbol of transcendent Bonaventuran beauty, the pilgrim would never have reached heaven. Lafferty plays with this reversal. Catherine O’Donovan enters not as Beatrice but as her inversion, appearing “in red fury, in redheaded and freckled fury,” a visual echo of the red that accommodates Beatrice. But I digress. There is so much going on in this story.)
For the in-story production, Roy Mega introduces his "sympathetic transmitter devices," which begin to distort spatial and narrative boundaries, blending the study with the nearby Rushlight Theatre and an increasingly bizarre surrounding world. As the evening unfolds, the performance spirals into a surreal and dangerous spectacle. Reality and art collapse into one another. Characters slip between domains. The line between creator and creature, stage and world, grows perilously thin.
Through this aesthetic apocalypse, Lafferty invites readers to reflect on the power of art and its limitations, particularly when it seeks transcendence without integration. The chaos that ensues is not the result of too much creativity but of creativity disconnected from the ordered ascent Watkin's rainbow. To put it sharply, the performance lacks the red of religion to contain it, and the result is a breakdown of form, the saffron drapes open onto hell, not heaven.
Before looking at how the color bands work in "St. Poleander's Eve," I think it is important to pause over two other structural features Lafferty embeds in the story: the poems he quotes. Lafferty often provides compositional cues in the form of epigraphs, epithets, and embedded verse, which allow us to reconstruct what he is up to and how he arrived at where he is, and this strategy is especially prominent here. The title itself comes from a drinking song by G. K. Chesterton, written for his novel The Flying Inn (1914).
Chesterton considered The Flying Inn one of his four or five favorite works. Much could be said about the novel’s thematic overlap with Lafferty’s story, but two points are especially salient. First, “St. Poleander” is an entirely fictional saint, invented whole cloth by Chesterton (the “polyandry” in the story alludes to polygamy in Chesterton’s novel). Second, The Flying Inn is a satire on a society that fails to integrate religion into its broader cultural and legal life. Its Pickwickian plot centers on the rise of a dangerously aestheticized form of Islam in Edwardian England, one that prohibits alcohol and, with it, much of the festal spirit Chesterton saw as essential to the Christian imagination.
Lafferty’s allusion to Chesterton's in-text drinking song is anything but incidental. It pinpoints both a critique of disordered aestheticism (Chesterton's fairy-tale Islam) and a plea for the kind of theological integration Bonaventure and Watkin find necessary.
I come from Castlepatrick, and me heart is on me sleeve,
And any sword or pistol boy can hit it with me leave,
It shines there for an epaulette, as golden as a flame,
As naked as me ancestors, as noble as me name.
For I come from Castlepatrick, and me heart is on me sleeve,
But a lady stole it from me on St. Gallowglass's Eve.
The folk that live in Liverpool, their heart is in their boots;
They go to hell like lambs, they do, because the hooter hoots.
Where men may not be dancin', though the wheels may dance all day;
And men may not be smokin'; but only chimneys may.
But I come from Castlepatrick, and me heart is on me sleeve,
But a lady stole it from me on St. Poleander's Eve.
The folk that live in black Belfast, their heart is in their mouth,
They see us making murders in the meadows of the South;
They think a plough's a rack, they do, and cattle-calls are creeds,
And they think we're burnin' witches when we're only burnin' weeds;
But I come from Castlepatrick, and me heart is on me sleeve;
But a lady stole it from me on St. Barnabas's Eve.
The other poem Lafferty uses, Rudyard Kipling’s “The Conundrum of the Workshop,” is just as integral to "St. Poleander’s Eve," and its plot significance can hardly be overstated. If Watkin provides the story’s metaphysical program, Kipling supplies the provocation. Lafferty stages the story as an experiment, running the Bonaventuran vision through the devil's "But is it art?" Without the context of this poem, much of the narrative’s deeper conflict is obscured.
When the flush of a newborn sun fell first on Eden's green and gold,
Our father Adam sat under the Tree and scratched with a stick in the mold;
And the first rude sketch that the world had seen was joy to his mighty heart,
Till the Devil whispered behind the leaves: "It's pretty, but is it Art?"
Wherefore he called to his wife and fled to fashion his work anew—
The first of his race who cared a fig for the first, most dread review;
And he left his lore to the use of his sons—and that was a glorious gain
When the Devil chuckled: "Is it Art?" in the ear of the branded Cain.
They builded a tower to shiver the sky and wrench the stars apart,
Till the Devil grunted behind the bricks: "It's striking, but is it Art?"
The stone was dropped by the quarry-side, and the idle derrick swung,
While each man talked of the aims of art, and each in an alien tongue.
They fought and they talked in the north and the south, they talked and they fought in the west,
Till the waters rose on the jabbering land, and the poor Red Clay had rest—
Had rest till the dank blank-canvas dawn when the dove was preened to start,
And the Devil bubbled below the keel: "It's human, but is it Art?"
The tale is old as the Eden Tree—as new as the new-cut tooth—
For each man knows ere his lip-thatch grows he is master of Art and Truth;
And each man hears as the twilight nears, to the beat of his dying heart,
The Devil drum on the darkened pane: "You did it, but was it Art?"
We have learned to whittle the Eden Tree to the shape of a surplice-peg,
We have learned to bottle our parents twain in the yolk of an addled egg,
We know that the tail must wag the dog, as the horse is drawn by the cart;
But the Devil whoops, as he whooped of old: "It's clever, but is it Art?"
When the flicker of London's sun falls faint on the club-room's green and gold,
The sons of Adam sit them down and scratch with their pens in the mold—
They scratch with their pens in the mold of their graves, and the ink and the anguish start
When the Devil mutters behind the leaves: "It's pretty, but is it art?"
Now, if we could win to the Eden Tree where the four great rivers flow,
And the wreath of Eve is red on the turf as she left it long ago,
And if we could come when the sentry slept, and softly scurry through,
By the favor of God we might know as much—as our father Adam knew.
Turning now to the story, we can see what happens when we approach saffron drapes:
Watkin’s Band & Core Meaning | Key Sentences in The Bow in the Clouds | Color-Coded Moment / Figure in "St Poleander’s Eve" | What the Story Does with Watkin’s Idea |
Ultra-violet – Matter & Chaos | “Below the first visible colour… we touch the last confines of being… a bubble on the verge of dissolution” | Daisy first sees Mary Mondo only as a “smoky black smudge” (black = absence of visible color) | The play opens with an undefined blot of matter that art will try (and fail) to shape. |
Violet – Positive sciences | “Science emphasises the problem of evil, but also reveals its gradual though partial conquest” | Roy Mega’s electronics turn a tiny Rushlight Theatre into a planet-sized hologram | Technology supplies the apparatus for art, but also lets loose ungoverned powers, Watkin’s warning. |
Indigo – Technology / Social ethics | “Technology… the significance, justification and abuse of machinery” | Roy’s “sympathetic transmitter devices” kidnap the audience into the play | Lafferty literalises Watkin’s fear and hope: machines can knit society, or swallow it whole. |
Blue – Metaphysics | “Metaphysics founded on intellectual intuition” | Austro’s “deep, dark voice” keeps intoning first principles that no one hears | The metaphysician is on stage, but drowned out by brighter colors; the hierarchy is inverted. |
Green – Life | “Concrete union with biological life… the Holy Spirit Giver of natural life” | Barnaby’s club's pastoral backdrop: “late-April green fields touched with gold.” Not that this is an allusion to Kipling's poem (line bolded above) | Watkin’s “green” bursts in as idyllic scenery, yet it is only a painted set, hinting that mere nature is insufficient. |
Yellow – Art | “Art, sex and religion… the three pre-eminently ecstatic forms… yellow, orange and red” | The whole Rushlight world is washed in “studio yellow”; Harry O’Donovan carries a “garish overlay of studio yellow” on his face | Lafferty makes Watkin’s “yellow” dominant, then shows it curdling when unbalanced, Kipling’s Devil glaring through the pigment. |
Orange – Sex | “Sex is… the best reflection on the natural plane of the spiritual union… coloured orange” | Daisy Flavus (flavus = yellow-orange) manipulates every other character; Catherine’s “carrot hair” rages in “red fury” | Erotic energy propels the plot but, severed from transcendence, turns destructive, exactly Watkin’s caution. |
Red – Religion | “Red: ecstatic peace, the gift of religious experience” | Final chaos arrives in a shower of blood-tinged “redly dead” imagery around Catherine | Religion is invoked only as color and curse; without true worship, the spectrum collapses into violence. |
Ultra-red – Mysticism | “Mystical union the organic fulfilment of the life of grace” (chapter heading) | Absent: no one in the play reaches it | Lafferty’s ending is a negative demonstration: skip the final band and the structure collapses. |
Here it all comes together—or doesn’t, as it were—on St. Poleander’s Eve on the third-floor "monastery" of Banaby's house in "the only room I ever saw that is large enough to portray the world," as Daisy Fulvus puts it:
Catherine was crying out lines in high rhyme. She was standing on a little ledge or sideboard before saffron drapes.
There was such a sideboard in the study; there was also one in the Rushlight. There were brass and copper bells in her voice when she rang out her rhyme lines.
“Broke you the fellowship, poisoned the well! Spirits, bleak spirits, go back to your hell!”
But the spirits—the Putty Dwarf and seven worse than himself—would not go back. The spirit had already gone out of those pseudo-spirits Loretta Sheen and Mary Mondo. Thecraft of Daisy Flavus and Roy Mega had left them; therewere places where their electronics could not follow. The end of the show had been taken out of their hands; it would not be as they had devised it. It was all between the unholy spirits and the spirited Catherine now.
“Carrot top, carrot top, lose you the fray! You be the going one. We be the stay,” those spirits rhymed it, andthey were coming at Catherine in her high place.
Reading "St. Poleander’s Eve" alongside Watkin’s The Bow in the Clouds shows just how closely Lafferty kept Watkin’s text at hand. The story reads as a kind of fictional gloss on it, and readers who love Lafferty and this story should, if nothing else, read Watkin’s chapter on “Yellow.”
Three examples out of a dozen possible examples will illustrate this intertextual intimacy.
First, the presence of Lafferty’s sinister recurring figure, the Putty Dwarf, takes on its fullest meaning as a failure of Watkin’s aesthetics of significant form. Watkins: "The sculptor, fashioning his material to the expression of ideal humanity, copies the work of the Spirit moulding man, soul and body, to the human likeness and image of God, the archetype eternally present in the Divine Mind.”
Second, the breakdown of significant form as the principle of order that gives art its meaning. Lafferty: “They watched their own faces melt like wax, and harden into a more outré wax. They were flesh no more. Ah, but much more arty effects may be got with wax than with flesh that breaks and scorches and burns, instead of melting pungently and quickly into a new and more deforming mold.” Watkin, quoting Paradiso: “‘The wax of these [contingent things] and that which mouldeth it standeth not in one mode, and therefore ’neath the ideal stamp is more or less transparent. … Were the wax exactly moulded ... the light of the signet would be all apparent; but nature ever furnisheth it faulty, doing as doth the artist who hath the knack of the art and a trembling hand.’”
Third, the story’s darkly comic failure of resurrection, centered on the character Catherine, waking in the grave unblessed, draws directly from Watkin’s ideas about the aesthetic implications of tragedy, comedy, and resurrection, and Lafferty why Lafferty chose the form of drama itself to make his point:
The dramatist tells of the tragedy arising from the conflict between good andevil, disorder and form, as seen in its process by avision too shortsighted to behold the end. For religion resolves tragedy in triumph, and leaves only the epic of understanding and the lyric of praise. The story of the Cross, for all its suffering and defeat, is nolonger a tragedy when the Resurrection is known to be its sequel. Dr. Albert Schweitzer’s account of Christ’s life is tragedy, a heroic failure ending in despair; the Gospel, as the very word implies, is not. Great tragedy arises only where, though the presence or living memory of a great religious tradition solicits the soul with desire for God, and keeps in view the depths of the human spirit with its capacity and need of the infinite, that tradition has been rejected or so seriously questioned that a more or less conscious agnosticism prevails, at least among the intelligentsia.
While Lafferty avoids overt didacticism, he shares Watkin’s conviction that didactic art is justified when the idea it expresses is also its organic form. This is what Watkin means by significant form: not a message added on, but a natural fit between vision and expression, where the form grows out of the structure of what it means to say. In "St. Poleander’s Eve," Lafferty’s strange and often chaotic story holds together by following this principle. It does not preach. Instead, it tests a theological vision through the risks and surprises of fiction.
Lafferty stages the metaphysical drama as an experiment. On St. Poleander’s Eve, each color band is assigned to characters, pigments, or devices, and set loose in the story’s theatrical ritual. What unfolds is not integration but disintegration: the characters indulge sensation (violet–indigo) and spectacle (yellow–orange), while neglecting or outright mocking the spectrum’s higher registers, those associated with metaphysical clarity (blue), religious longing (red), and mystical communion (ultra-red). The spectrum, intended as a ladder of ascent, goes down under misuse.
As Watkin warns, when the rainbow is “received out of order,” human endeavor degenerates into Babel-like confusion. That is precisely how "St. Poleander’s Eve" ends: in failed signs, disfigured beauty, aesthetic ruin, and grave stench. And, as so often happens in The Men Who Knew Everything stories, it is not Laf who serves as Lafferty’s real stand-in. That role belongs to Austro. He becomes the strange center of gravity in a collapsing cosmos. The spectacle becomes, through Austro’s incorruptible presence, a refusal to yield fully to disorder, the significant form of the story.
All of them took roles in the ruddy thing, except Austro; he refused further parts. He stood apart and fumed in histowering, high-hackled morality. Not even the electronic Austro devised by Roy Mega would be sullied by such outrageousness. Austro could fight on this field. He was already, accordingto his nature, somewhat electronic—this is common among people of the early types. Austro would not be subverted and he would not be imitated. He himself entered into every effigy of himself and nullified it. Austro was the battleground; he was the arena; he was the stage. Austro as Rocky McCrocky was very tough; and Rocky was the basic Everyman of the drama. The trend of the drama was settled in Austro and by him. It became not quite the drama that Roy Mega had intended; yet it was even more powerful, of amore sophisticated art than had been planned.
