Research Commentary: Will Pym: The Bucolic Barbarian of Shady Hill by Jeff McMahon

John Cheever’s “Just Tell Me Who It Was” is, among other things, a scathing portrait of Will Pym, who represents the modern day barbarian, a bloated, vulgar nincompoop who tries to assuage his insecurities, his mediocrity, his vulgarities, and his incorrigibly bovine and banal nature buy setting up a sort of “Doll’s House” where Pym, “Papa,” ruthlessly dotes and smothers his wife Maria, “Mama,” in what we find to be a most odious and, alas, accepted form of barbarism because Pym’s marriage is neatly arranged inside the velvet trappings of the suburban American Dream.

The modern day barbarian, as embodied by Will Pym, is too emasculated and too effete to conform to our traditional image of the raging, pillaging barbarian who, holding studded club and scimitar, gloats above his spoils while tugging on his thick, brine-smelling beard.  Nevertheless, the Elmer Fudd-like Will Pym, described as a corpulent “pudding” face who delights in clichés and banalities, is indeed a bona fide barbarian. By barbarian I mean the type of husband who entraps his younger and weaker wife with the force of money and insidious adoration, using obsequiousness as a form of tyranny, resulting in a slave-master dynamic so intense that Maria is reduced to a pathetic, slavish character who languishes under Pym’s sweaty, bated-breath “devotion,” which in truth is not devotion at all but Pym’s own self-serving attempt to control and contain Maria inside a tiny glass decorative box. Maria is so suffocated by her miserably ugly, dense, and cowardly husband that she is physically and psychologically repelled and repulsed by his constant doting and sycophancy.

Desperate to escape her husband’s loathsome, greedy, grubby fingers and anal-retentive control, Maria abandons herself to community group activities and, most importantly, to wild Dionysian “fetes” or parties where she adorns herself in meretricious outfits and absorbs herself in a sort of fantasy world, waltzing with other men far more dashing than her cow-brained “Papa,” drinking spirits, cavorting, and performing like the happy wife of Shady Hill that she is not. All the while her ogre-like husband watches on with a bilious expression, knowing he must, however reluctantly, let her attend these parties in the same way a prison warden knows he must allow his inmates to workout with weights, watch TV, and read salacious magazines for fear that too much suppression might lead to outright rebellion. Will Pym, the modern day barbarian, relies on the same psychological “venting” as the prison warden in order to maintain his dysfunctional, controlling marriage, for Pym has learned over the years that, unable to please his wife in any manner, he must allow her to find some sort of gratification outside of the marriage, which really is no marriage at all, but an oppressive system whereby the slobbering barbarian keeping tabs on his spoils, including his most cherished of all, Maria.

As a barbarian, Pym cannot love, only possess and control. For example, there is much evidence throughout the story that Pym fetishizes Maria so that, contrary to the disappointed reaction from others, she is, in Pym’s eyes, the most beautiful and distinguished woman in the world. We are left to infer from the narrator’s descriptions of Pym’s constant, lusting adoration and Maria’s infantile incompetence that in fact he has elevated her to a realm far beyond who she really is so that Pym, the vulgar barbarian, can massage his ego with the self-flattering notion that he has found a “great catch.” Indeed, in the spirit of all authentic barbarians, Pym is a crude and coarse trophy collector and Maria represents his most prized talismanic possession.

Do we indulge in too much exaggeration and hyperbole by calling the “harmless neuter” Will Pym a barbarian? I think not. In no other Cheever story do we see the narrator taking an almost ruthless delight in showing what a pathetic ninny Pym really is. And at the same time we never see a wife so physically repulsed by her salivating, pudding-faced husband. It is in fact this disparity between the relentless sycophant and the disgust that he inspires in his wife that Cheever has brilliantly painted for us the modern day barbarian in Will Pym, the portly, suburbanite who, through ingratiating himself with his huge reserves of money, will keep his slave Maria tightly trapped in Shady Hill forever.