Beth Gutcheon’s “Leeway Cottage” is, at first glance, a novel that follows a couple through an unlikely 20th-century marriage. But just beneath the story’s surface is a tale built more on character, both personal and national, than characters. Gutcheon uses one of the lesser-known chapters of World War II as the spine of her work, illustrating a quiet bravery that plays out in ways both obvious and unimagined.
Gutcheon was in Chicago, on book tour, when she spoke by phone about her latest novel. “Leeway Cottage” started out as a story about “the kind of marriage where the partners are so different, and yet the marriage lasts and even seems to work,” she said. She has written the story of the union of American Sydney Brant and Danish pianist Laurus Moss. They wed in April 1940, neither with any idea of their essential differences.
It won’t take long for readers to place Sydney as a poor little rich girl. The only child of a doting father and shallow mother, she is a teen devastated by her father’s death. A family trust allows her to go to New York after high school and against her mother’s wishes, to study voice. There she meets and falls in love with Laurus, a half-Jewish concert pianist from Denmark.
In the early days of their marriage, Germany invaded Denmark and turned it into a “Model Protectorate.” The project was intended to prove that it was possible to be an occupied yet sovereign nation. Laurus leaves his now-pregnant wife and heads to England to help with the Danish resistance.
Gutcheon discovered stories of Denmark’s role in WW II when she went to the country as an au pair at age 18. “It looks very much like Maine, I just loved the light and the country and the people. But while I was there that summer, I heard some of the story of the rescue of the Jews,” she said. The story, which most Danes seem too modest to tell, began before September 1943, with an order to round up Danish Jews on the Friday night of Rosh Hashanah. The Danish mounted a hasty, secret effort to protect their Jewish citizens. Holocaust records show that 219 of the 7,000 Jews living in Denmark at the start of the war lost their lives.
Gutcheon said she did a huge amount of research while writing the novel. “Some of what was available was great narrative but not reliable as history,” she said. “I had to find at least two references for every date or event.” Though the novel does not include a bibliography, she has posted a list of sources on her website, www.bethgutcheon.com. “I find that people say that they really want to know how much of the story is real. And the answer is, except for the fictional characters I inserted, all of it. Everything in there that I say happened, happened and happened in that way.”
Laurus’ family in Denmark – a sister active in the resistance, a brother in medical school, his father and his Jewish mother – put faces to the events of history. It is a tale made more amazing by the workaday nature of the participants. Gutcheon said, “The more I got into it, the more astounded I was. It’s a story of an entire nation with a particular character. All through the war, the power of conscience affected everything. It even affected the occupying army. The Germans in Denmark behaved differently from anywhere else during that war.” She said that much of the national character is rooted in the work of 19th-century Danish author Nikolai Grundtvig. One of the things it means to be Danish “is absolute respect for the personhood of everybody else. When it came time to consider Danish Jews as different from other Danes, it just seemed natural to them to refuse to do it.”
It is challenging to pick up the reins of a marriage after a long separation. War had led Laurus and Sydney in different directions. Their linked story, on American soil, is focused by the summers spent at Leeway Cottage in Dundee, Maine.
Dundee is a setting that will be familiar to readers of Gutcheon’s previous novel, “More Than You Know” (2000). Friendships are built, children are born and family pathologies play out, but the cottage remains the constant in the lives of those who pass through it.
Over time, Sydney morphs into a person her children refer to as “Syd Vicious.” Gutcheon said, “It was difficult to be fair to her because the contrast between the people who do act out of principle and conscience, as against one who just settles into being a big fish in a small pond and throwing her weight around – it’s not very attractive. She became a problem for me.”
But not, presumably, a problem for her husband. Laurus wasn’t around in the early days of their marriage, when he “might really have fought back and helped her become something more like what he thought he had married.” But the marriage works in its own fashion, as so many do. “Laurus brings out the best in Sydney. It’s not so awful good, but she is at her best when she’s with him and trying to live up to what he expects of her. She fails often. But he is such a Dane. He has made promises and he intends to keep them. He tries to value her at her best and respect what’s good and just determined not to react to the rest.”
Gutcheon said she hopes one of the things her readers walk away from “Leeway Cottage” is “a real understanding and an interest in the amazing thing that happened in Denmark. “If it could happen there, why didn’t it happen elsewhere?”
She isn’t finished with Dundee, Maine, or Leeway Cottage. She is returning for at least one more novel, “because when I wrote the proposal I included – almost as a throwaway to my editor – that what I would do next is the three children inherit the summer house together and how that works out.”
Gutcheon will read and sign copies of “Leeway Cottage” at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday at the Tattered Cover Book Store, 2955 E. First Ave., Cherry Creek, and at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday at the Boulder Book Store, 1107 Pearl St., Boulder.
Robin Vidimos is a freelance writer who reviews books for The Denver Post and Buzz in the ‘Burbs.
Leeway Cottage
By Beth Gutcheon
William Morrow, 432 pages, $24.95
