14. Benjamin Pantier

We have already seen, in the marriage of the McGee’s, that the state of matramony is no heaven-sent blessing. We should not be unduly surprised, then, at the state of play between the Pantiers - that Benjamin has been driven from his own house by a wife who finds him disgusting.

The soap opera that is the series of poems dealing with the Pantiers would appear bathetic, coming straight after Kinsey Keene’s inspiring call to arms against all that corrupts the heart of Spoon River, if not for one simple fact. The series of five poems makes clear for us, firstly, that the grossest kinds of corruption lie in the hearts of ordinary men and women, not just the high officials of the town. Yet, they further reveal, there is hope that the most wanton wastrel may be brought to change his ways if only those who believe remain faithful. And, finally, we are shown that it is not the Anthology’s organisation that results in bathos; it is life itself.

Benjamin Pantier, then, is guilty of not being of noble spirit - a man, yet not a man. There is no way to see Benjamin Pantier as anything other than a pathetic man, who allows defeat at the hands of a wife, a woman. Those same “law[s] and morality” which make him her only choice, dictate that she must obey his will in all things. That he, who had once been an aspiring attorney at law who had seen some “glory”, allows himself to be so maltreated by his wife that his only recourse is to live, with his dog, in “a room back of a dingy office”, is all too indicative of the smallness of the heart which allows those so recently named by Kinsey Keene to perpetuate the corruption that riddles the town.

This lack of strength is alluded to in the poem. Pantier tells us that “Under my jaw-bone is snuggled the bony nose of Nig”. Superficially, it paints a picture of the closeness of the two pathetic creatures. It also reveals something of the unnaturalness of the condition to which Pantier has allowed himself to sink. It may be unreasonable for Pantier to ask his wife to be his companion in drink, but she should certainly have been his “partner” and, if only on occasion, his “bed-fellow”. That Nig occupies both these roles is as far from the dignity of man as Pantier’s whole life is from Kinsey Keene’s. He has plummetted to such depths for lack of moral courage and strength, symbolised by mention of “jaw-bone”, the weapon wielded by the last of the Judges of the ancient Israelites (cf. Judges 15:16). 

The poem ends with one of those paradoxes that must occur in an Anthology such as this. It may well be that Benjamin Pantier feels his life upon this earth has gone by unremarked, for who would remember, and for what cause, such a pathetic individual? Yet, to say, “Our story is lost in silence” is not accurate, as we continue to hear his words all these years after he went to lie upon The Hill. It is, in a sense, a failure to understand this paradox that condemns Benjamin Pantier, for, yet again, he fails to recognise the significance of the most insignificant of lives. Thus, he condemns himself; thus, he is truly pathetic. And, thus, he fails to live the ideal Kinsey Keene calls for if Spoon River is ever to be wrested from the grip of those who would corrupt.