For the #1976Club: The Question of Max by Amanda Cross

 

‘Beyond all this, the wish to be alone…’

Kate Fansler, Professor of English Literature, is hiding away at her cabin in the Berkshires. And for all those academics who question how any of their number can afford such a cabin, let me tell you at once that Kate is not only clever but rich. She has plenty of family money at her disposal, and she’s also married to the wonderful Reed, a lawyer who worships the very ground on which she walks, and who presses a vodka martini into her waiting hand the minute she walks through the door of their Manhattan penthouse. You mean this doesn’t happen to you?

Reed has bought the cabin – and the land around it – from his friend Guy and given it to Kate as a retreat;

‘It saved Guy’ he said, ‘and it may save you.’

Now one may well wonder what she actually needs saving from, but Kate, for all her sharp wit and smarter banter, is a worrier. She thinks about the state of the world, and especially about the state of public life. It is the time of Watergate, which, for those of us old enough to remember it, seemed like the greatest scandal ever to affect American politics. Oh with what naivety we made that assumption – nowadays bugging one's opponents’ HQ would be brushed aside as ‘normal’. You can already here some politician on the radio telling us the Matter is Closed and we must Move On.

But for now, things are bad in Washington. And Kate has had a hard term.  So here she is, all alone in the wilderness – until she looks out of the window and sees Max Reston picking his way to her door.

Max is a colleague, a professor of art history known for his formal manners, conservative opinions and sartorial perfection. He’s the last person Kate expects or wants to see in her rural backwater, especially as she has abandoned her usual elegance for ‘mud-stained sneakers and ancient jeans.’ Though one can’t help thinking those sneakers would still have come from Saks.

It seems Max is on a mission; he wants Kate to accompany him to the remote coastal home of the late Cecily Hutchins. Hutchins was a writer who found success late in life. Max, the son of one of her oldest friends, has been appointed her literary executor. He tells Kate that there have been reports of someone snooping round her house (which still contains all of her papers and manuscripts) and as he can’t drive, and also doesn’t want to go alone, he hopes – indeed more or less orders – Kate to take him to Maine to check on things.

Katherine Guthrie Wood, one of the first Somerville women allowed to graduate in 1921. 
(Somerville College History Blog 3 January 2012)

When Max and Kate arrive at the property, Kate is much taken by a painting of Dorothy Whitmore. Whitmore, Hutchins and Max’s mother Frederica were three of the first women to take their degrees at Oxford. Whitmore also wrote, never married, and died young. Frederica married soon after graduating;

‘Not that my mother came over all academic, thank the Lord. One could only forgive one’s mother for being a bluestocking in her youth if she also had the intelligence to marry the younger son of a duke. Which, I am pleased to say, she did.’

Hutchins also married, was utterly devoted to her husband until his death, and only then started to write in earnest. She remained in the marital home.

‘She wanted to be alone.’

While Kate and Max are at the house, Kate demands to walk down to the cliffs, and when – against Max’s advice – she clambers down to the rocky shore, lo and behold she finds a body floating in a salty pool. When it transpires that the corpse is that of none other than Gerry Marston, one of Kate’s own graduate students who was writing a paper on Dorothy Whitmore, Kate is determined to find out what she was up to and why she died.

So Gerry’s death – which soon becomes her murder – provides the frame for a story in which, as ever, Amanda Cross looks at many issues, in particular the challenges women have faced in forging careers of their own. After Max has sold Cecily's papers to the Wallingford library in New York, Kate attempts to consult them but is denied a full access. Not being short of funds she also travels to Oxford, where she consults Whitmore’s papers, now stashed in Somerville College library, and visits her friend Phyllis. Phyllis is the headmistress of a prestigious girls’ school in New York, but has accompanied her academic husband on his sabbatical. Cross compares Phyllis’s new and lowly (almost invisible) status as the wife of a don in 1970s Oxford with the lives of Frederica and Cecily, and clearly asks ‘has anything really changed?’

And as Watergate lurks in the background, another question of morals arises much closer to home. Kate’s nephew Leo – currently living with Kate and Reed as he can’t stand his stuffy parents – is a pupil at the prestigious St Anthony’s school.  Kate nobly attends his basketball matches, but is put out by the way in which bad behaviour on the pitch is tolerated as routine. She’s even more put out when Leo voices to her his suspicion that two boys have cheated to get through the College Boards, exams that will open the door to the Ivy League colleges to which they expect to proceed as of right, owing to their families’ wealth and power;

‘He got into Harvard’ Leo reported in disgust.’

‘He has very famous grandparents’

‘The guy’s a creep. Everyone knows that. Frank [college counsellor] told him he couldn’t possibly get into Harvard. He’s never worked in his life.’

The wealth of Leo’s friends, the lives they led, had already left Kate gasping…one..had flown out to Indianapolis for the races..  Was it the difference between boys’ and girls’ schools? Kate thought not.

Leo wonders of he should attempt to catch the cheaters out or just keep his head down. And the pros and cons of this provide another problem for Kate to wrestle with.

The final solution, when it comes, to Gerry Marston’s death, makes sense but is in some ways irrelevant. It is the fact of her death – a young, working class girl who upset the plans of someone who thought their way was the only way, and more importantly one to which they were entitled as of right – that matters to Kate, and to Cross. This book is about entitlement, arrogance and power. It is also a very good read.

I don’t always enjoy books that focus on issues. For me a story must be character-led to be interesting – and that is where Amanda Cross scores, and why I continue to love Kate so much, all these years after I first came upon the book of hers that is still my favourite No Word from Winifred. 

Yes, Cross always approaches things from a second wave feminist perspective, yes she uses Kate to do that – but Kate is such a wonderful character that for me, at least, it all works.  Of course part of this is wish fulfilment – who wouldn’t like to have Kate’s privileged lifestyle, sharp brain and elegant beauty? She smokes, she never says no to a drink or several, and she enjoys long conversations about points of grammar. But she is self-aware, she is witty, she is smart, and above all she is fallible. In The Question of Max she often lets her imagination run away with her, jumps to the wrong conclusions, and regrets things she has said or done. She is feisty, fierce at times, but she is human. As Lord David Cecil said of Barbara Pym, ‘I could go on reading (Cross) forever.’

 

Amanda Cross was the pen name of Professor Carolyn Heilbrun, who taught at Columbia University. Heilbrun’s life mirrored Kate’s in many ways – she came from an affluent family, was brought up on the West Side, went to Wellesley and thence to Columbia, where she remained as a tenured academic in the English department. 

Heilbrun later said that throughout her career at Columbia she experienced a great deal of discrimination and sexism. From 1985 to her resignation (in protest at that discrimination) in 1992 she was Avalon Professor in the Humanities. She married and had three children, but by choice spent much time alone. For this purpose she had a Manhattan apartment, a country house in upstate New York and a summer house in Massachusetts, and later bought another house just for herself.

In 2003 Carolyn Heilbrun committed suicide, leaving a note: ‘The journey is over. Love to all.’

Shortly after Heilbrun’s death, journalist Vanessa Grigoriadis wrote an excellent article* for New York magazine about her life, and her decision to end it. It includes interviews with one of Heilbrun’s daughters and many of her close friends, and gives a great insight into the character of this fascinating woman.

*https://nymag.com/nymetro/news/people/n_9589/