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- [00:07]
Deborah Treisman
This is the New Yorker Fiction podcast from the New Yorker magazine. I'm Deborah Treisman, fiction editor at the New Yorker. Each month we invite a writer to choose a story from the magazine's archives to read and discuss. This month, we're going to hear the Faithful by Elizabeth Hardwick, which appeared in the New Yorker in February of 1979 in Amsterdam.
- [00:27]
Lauren Groff
We knew many people, and not a single one has slipped from memory. Just now dreaming, I am drawn back to a woman painter named Simone and to her fervent romancer, the eternal husband, Dr. Z.
- [00:41]
Deborah Treisman
The story was chosen by Lauren Groff, who's published seven books of fiction, including the story collection's Delicate Edible Birds and Florida, which won the story Prize in 2018. Hi, Lauren.
- [00:53]
Lauren Groff
Hi, Deborah.
- [00:55]
Deborah Treisman
So the story you're reading today, the Faithful, became a chapter of Elizabeth Hardwick's novel Sleepless Nights, which was published later the same year, in 1979. You told me that you've read that.
- [01:05]
Lauren Groff
Book 15 times at least, and. No, I just read it again yesterday. So is that whole book? Well, it's a short book. It's 130 pages, something like that. It's one of my favorites. Every time you read it, you see something new. It's like a jewel. Right. You turn it in the hand, you find something radically new and different and strange. So it's just one of those touchstone books for me, for sure.
- [01:29]
Deborah Treisman
What do you think is it that makes it that way?
- [01:32]
Lauren Groff
Yeah. I've been thinking about this book for years now, decades. And it's unusual for a work of fiction. Right. It doesn't have the Aristotelian arc, the rise to a climax, to a denouement. Right. It's very much a constellated story. It's a story that feels written from the flesh and the blood and the bone of Elizabeth Hardwick's actual life. While she said that it was very much a work of fiction. Right. So there are these moments that seem unbearably true, almost so true that she's having a hard time holding them in her hands. And then on the page, of course, they become something different. And I think the other thing, too is I know the circumstances of Elizabeth Hardwick's life, and so I do feel as if this book is written around a very deep wound. And it's a story talking about the wound without talking about it directly. It brings me back to this feeling of longing and yearning.
- [02:27]
Deborah Treisman
Yeah. And it's very much written in these individual chapters that can be read separately from the whole. And as you Said it doesn't have the standard arc of a novel. Each chapter has a bit of an arc and progression. Why do you think she approached it that way? Was it just that she was writing.
- [02:44]
Lauren Groff
It in pieces or she's focusing on different people in different chapters? I mean, there's a whole amazing chapter about Billie Holiday in it. It's just an astonishing chapter. The last chapter is about a number of people who worked in domestic labor in her life. And it's really touching and moving. So I think that it's not based on plot. Right. This is very much a book that reminds me of a number of other sort of plotless, amazing books like I Remember by Jo Brainard or Lesnes the Years by Aniel Nod, where it feels deeply focused around something that is slightly out of the reach of the reader, perhaps. Right.
- [03:26]
Deborah Treisman
And whether that's autobiography or just something more personal than one would expect, I.
- [03:32]
Lauren Groff
Think there's a buried architecture that was very clear and it feels very clear, but it's maybe a little bit distant to the reader, perhaps.
- [03:39]
Deborah Treisman
How did you first come across Hardwicke's work?
- [03:42]
Lauren Groff
I am a New York Review of Books classic freak. I think I have read basically everything they've ever put out, and so many of those books are absolutely astonishing. So this was one of the first books, I believe, that they put out. And I think I've given away 30 copies of this book. I love it so much, I try to give it to everyone who hasn't read it. I stumbled on it and it took hold in my brain, and it probably has ruined some of my writing because I'm trying to write Elizabeth Hardwick, and it's very hard to do.
- [04:13]
Deborah Treisman
Yeah, well, I think we should listen to it now, so we'll talk some more after the reading. And now here's Lauren Groff reading the Faithful by Elizabeth Hardwick.
- [04:24]
Lauren Groff
The faithful, the travels of youth, the cheapness of things, and one's intrepid poverty. All ye who love the Prince of Orange Take heart and follow me. So it was Holland that year, 1951. Descartes, more than 300 years before, had spoken of himself as the only foreigner in Amsterdam, not on business. Everywhere we went in Europe that year, everywhere except for Amsterdam, there were Americans just like ourselves, those who had not been married long or were not married at all. Most of us with fellowships and a little savings. We were to be seen now in December, wearing winter coats pleated with the wrinkles of a long summer's rest in torn suitcases. Holland, led there by Motley's the Rise of the Dutch Republic and Fromentin's the Masters of Pastime in its neat little Phaidon edition, an unfashionable gracht in the center of Amsterdam, the Nicolas Wittenkade, a busy bourgeois street bordering on sloppy waters and the towers of the Rijksmuseum in view toward the west. Houses with stone steps and made of yellow or red brick were lined up in a businesslike, practical 1920s decency and dullness. Autumnal tile decorations on the facades and here and there fans of purple and amber glass over the doorways. Housewives of centuries had created. The pleasantly stuffy little rooms with their dark paneling, had hung round lamps with shades of old tasselled silk over the carpeted dining tables. The house was not handsome and the landlady worried about the apartment because it had been her own and everything in it was dear to her anyway, he and I said as we met her anxious glance, what a triumph every country is. We observed that the coziness of small countries could not always be expropriated by an invader. Yes, a squat, round, shiny black stove that had worked for years with the solemn obedience of an old donkey tormented our days and nights with its balky resentment of a new and ignorant hand, perplexing, dying of the embers so soon after they had been coaxed ablaze. We crept into the cold sheets under the ancient thick coverlets and were held at head and foot by the heavy frame of the bed, pierced by the sharp metal of carved leaves and fruits, acute reminders of spring. Daylight came in a rush and the whole town came alive at dawn. The baker and coal seller arrived with such swiftness they might have been dressed in waiting throughout the night. Greedy travelers, Americans, hail the dawn of a new experience. In the winter sleet blew through the beautiful town, graying the waters of the Amstel. In the spring, in daylight and in the early evening, we used to watch on the porch that faced us the life of the unemployed Indonesians. Their ancestors had been exiles once, flung out from the swamps of the Zuiderzee to the humid airs of Jakarta. Now their children were returned colon's geographical curiosities, back once more to the sluices and polders of home, the unfamiliar homeland that received them with a chagrin proper to what they were a delayed bill. Finally arriving, the Indonesians gathered on their porch, sitting there as a depressed late testament to the great energy of the Dutch, to old mapmakers, shipbuilders, moneylenders, diamond cutters, receivers of Jews, Huguenots, puritans The unions we were staring at had taken place on unimaginable sugar plantations in the deranging heat of exhausting empires. Beautiful, liquid brown women, silky, petite, mother in law, dust colored child. Their little wrists and ankles, delicate as chicken bones. And the heavy, dry, freckled, tufted Dutchman, homely and reassuring. The disasters of the war still lay over the country, and yet all of our Dutch friends were reading Valerie Labaul's A o Barnabeth, his diary, enjoying the sly chic of the fabulously rich hero and his addiction to boutiquism. The crowds of Amsterdam and even the countryside filled with people in their houses, each one a sort of declassed nobleman, sharing the space as a tree would patiently accept the nightly roosting of flocks and flocks of starlings. All the knowledge of Europe seemed to be nesting there too, in a certain sadness, a gasping for breath. No, no, the strain is nothing. Take no notice of it. I have just had a wish for the mountains. In Amsterdam we knew many people and not a single one has slipped from memory. Just now dreaming. I am drawn back to a woman painter named Simone and to her fervent romancer, the eternal husband, Dr. Z. Dr. Z had the moderate, well nourished egotism, suitable to his small learned group of colleagues and friends, and proper to the educated, professional world of Amsterdam. He had his success, some of it medical, as a specialist in blood diseases, and some of it amorous because of the time he devoted to women. He might be surprised to find himself remembered as a husband in Holland. The coziness of life is so complete it cannot even be disturbed by the violent emotional ruptures that tear couples and friends forever apart in other places. Instead, their first husbands and first wives are always at the same dinner parties and birthday celebrations with their second husbands and wives. Divorces and fractured loves mingle together as if the past were a sort of vinegar blending with the oil of the present. Where can one flee to new alliances among this restless people are like the rearrangement of familiar furniture. Houses and lives are thus transformed up to a point, my dear. Look. There is the man who plays his violin in the street. And there is his son with the saxophone. Coins are falling from the windows. The shadow has passed and everything is in order. Once more. She moves into his place. The herengracht a great improvement. His wife settles someplace else, taking along her volumes of the existentialist philosophers. What a pleasure to be recombining and yet not going anyplace. The old map of the central city with its faded tintings, catches the sunlight. Dr. Z All day in his white coat and in the evenings wearing a tie of bright red and blue stripes, was born in Amsterdam, but the blood of the east ran in his veins. There was something shakish about him, and although there were more flamboyant men around, handsomer and younger, he occupied his space with a kindly, intense assurance. His personal life was rich in variety and yet thoughtful. His originality was that he did not shift so much as acquire fidelity, consideration, sweet natured uxoriousness were the marks of this faithless husband. In a way, he was like a cripple who yearly enters the hundred yard dash. Bravo. Everyone cried out when he scored. Of course, his exploits were not large in number, and he was a busy, serious man who was often called the platform of universities and academies to receive honors. Still, he had his entanglements, rather plain and serious like himself, but worthy, intense, absorbing. Without ever leaving his only wife, he turned each of the women in his life into a wife. Have you paid your taxes? He would say. Have you called your mother this week? Oh, dearest, I do not like the sound of that cough. Many times he was seized by the impulse to flee and thought himself ready or forced by love to make a new life. But this was impossible for one who could not throw anything away. What a commitment intimacy always is, he would sigh. The sacred flow between men and women in bed, conversing in a cafe, talking on the telephone, passing time. What didn't he know about the treacherous, beautiful golden yoke of time? Does one still enjoy his old schoolmates, his first cousins? That is not the point. They are one's schoolmates, one's cousins, and there is always something there, like the enduring presence of one's big toe. Mefrou Z. She had been there forever. They had been separated by the war but managed to get back together in their same old house. Mefrouzie liked to be called Madame Z because she was French small. She must have become, in her first youth, one of those petite, compact persons who never change, who find a certain exterior style and accept it as one accepts a piece of architecture for a purchase. When her young black hair began to turn gray, she dyed it back to the old color and wore it in the short bob of her youth. The moment she got out of bed in the morning, she recolored her eyelashes with black mascara. She wore velvet berets and held firmly to her luke, which announced like a trumpet that she was not Dutch, she was French. Otherwise she did not conform to any of the notions of a Frenchwoman. She did not cook well. She was not interested in attracting men. She did not have a shrewd hand with household accounts. She let an old Dutch woman from the country look after the house. Madame Z Was idle except for the enormous amount of reading she did and except for her passion for the French theater. She read about the theater in French papers every day and went to Paris often, taking in a performance every night. After you had seen her a few times, you found that she was vain but not argumentative. Little appeared to her as new in life. Little came as a surprise. It was appealing. She had the idea that a gross, uncomplicated self interest was the old truth, that a new force or person was trying to disguise. Dr. Z, who found the events of his own life flushed with the glow of the unique, the unexpected, the inexplicable, sometimes chewed his lip in an annoyance when she expressed her belief in the principle of repetition. They lived in a profound intimacy. Nevertheless. From Holland I wrote many complaining letters. Dear Mr. How cold the house is, how we fight after too much gin, etc. Etc. Complaining letters. And this one of the happiest periods of my life. With what gratitude I look back on Europe for the first time. So that wraps up Verona. We take in the cracked windows and the brilliant dishevelment of Istanbul and the long time in Holland. Time to take trains, went to Haarlem to see the old almshouse governors painted in their unforgiving black and white misery by Frans Hals and his last days. The laughing cavaliers perhaps had eaten too many oysters, drunk too much beer and died a replete unwilling death, leaving the poor and their guardians freed by a bitter life from the killing pleasures to shrivel on charity, live on with their strong, blackening faces. Antwerp and Ghent, what wonderful names. Hard as the heavy cobbles in the square. Amsterdam, a city of readers. All night long you seemed to hear the turning of pages. Pages of French, Italian, English and the despised German. Those fair heads remembered Ovid, Yeats, Baudelaire and remembered suffering, hiding, freezing, the weight of books and wars. Dr. Z had acquired the nurse in his office, A fresh looking woman who had never married and who lived frugally outside the center. A long trip on her bicycle. She had her occasional afternoons with Dr. Z. Afternoons now grown, according to gossip, as perfunctory and health giving as a checkup. Oh, the burdens. Dr. Z acquired Simone, the painter after her husband left her. He nudged the other two to make room. Simone was often spoken of as the most independent woman in Amsterdam. She was also the only female painter anyone talked about, and it was from her long, anxious struggle to establish herself that the independence had arrived, if indeed it had. She did not display any special happiness or confidence from doing something well. Why should painting pictures make you happy? She said. It is not a diversion. Her nerves were frazzled, and she had a strong leaning toward melancholy and exhaustion. Yet worn down by life as she saw herself to be, she was always in movement, always running up and down the stairs to her studio on the fifth floor in her agitated fatigue. Simone was a striking figure in tattered, mysterious clothes that she apparently bought in junk shops on her travels. Skirts and blouses and jackets of satin or flowered cloth, Balkan decorations, old beads, capes, shawls, earrings. The effect was sometimes that of a deranged frugality, and other times she brought it off, like the church dignitaries in Florence when they go in their worn velvets and shredded furs to release the dove from the altar of the Duomo. Perhaps if she had been a man, she would have become a cardinal. She had been born a Catholic, and although this had been set aside in the libertarian Amsterdam intellectual world, which was a sort of archive of Trotskyist, socialist and anarchist learning, Simone was sometimes seen slipping into church wearing several large shawls in pitiful disguise. It was whispered that perhaps she was praying for the soul of her brother, who had collaborated with the Nazis. Simone's husband looked like an alpine skier and was instead a professor of history. He actually went off alone on a long skiing holiday in Austria, and in about six months a new woman arrived in Amsterdam. An American. I've always wanted an American, the husband said. Dr. Z was sympathetic to Simone and outraged by the husband's complacency and more by his ridiculous happiness with the pretty American, the doctor would have managed differently. Somehow, in some way, man of binding memories that he was, he took to quoting the Russian folk song mentioned in Pushkin's story, the Captain's if you find one better than me, you'll forget me. If one who is worse, you'll remember worse. How does he know now? And if it turns out that way, it will be too late, Madame Z insisted. Slowly or not so slowly, Dr. Z's duet became a trio. He and his wife had known Simone for years. Was that not favorable? Wasn't the ex husband living with his American in the apartment below Simone's? Dr. Z was a passive man by nature. That is, he was often led to actions and moods quite the contrary. Certainly at the beginning of his affairs, this natural passivity took flight. He began in a frenzy of passionate feeling. He fell in love. He drank too much. He rushed through his work as quickly as possible and got home very late for dinner, and sometimes not until midnight. His nest was shaken by the new windstorm and the squawking of birds began. His wife said that this was exactly what she had expected and that it did not interest her. Simone hesitated. But there was the infatuated Dr. Z with theater tickets. There he was, holding fast to her arm as they passed her husband and the American girl at the door of the house. Soon, she said with a disheartened sigh that she too was in love. The nurse cried all day, even in front of the patients. When Simone sometimes called the office, the nurse abused and threatened her. It is very poor medicine to have nurses in such a state, Simone said. Perhaps another position could be found for her. Dr. Z was taken aback, but quickly resumed his ground. It's all over with her, he insisted. But I cannot turn away someone I have known and worked with for seven years. Dr. Z was jealous of Simone, and her silences filled him with terrible alarm. He pushed his love back a few years. Yes, he remembered being overcome with feeling years ago, just at the sight of her buying a book in the square and at a New Year's party when she was wearing green velvet shoes. I don't remember anything of that sort. Right now is soon enough for me, she said. At times the doctor did not want to go home at night and announced that he was prepared to give his house to his wife or to set her up in France for weeks. Some new plan would seem to be working itself out. Yes, I am working it out, he said to everyone. But then the time came when his mood turned crestfallen and sad. He said Madame Z hated change. No one likes change, Simone said. Dr. Z wept. But it has been more than 20 years. Think of that. In Amsterdam there were no celebrated expatriates living in the hills or set up in flowery villas near the sea. One week, a lot of snow. Where are we? We wondered. In Iowa City, northern Europe. Many times it was as if all of the trams were leading back to America. At night, feeling uprooted because so much was familiar, we would tell each other the story of our lives. The downy, musty embrace of the bed set us afloat not as travelers, but as ones somehow borne backward to the bricks and stuffs of home. We went to the flower market. A thousand still lifes, people rushing about on the Leeds plain revealed ghostly Similarities to those we had left behind. The stove died. The snow clung to the panes. The outline of our fringed lamps caught the light of the street. In the shadows, listening to the bells ringing the hours we would lie smoking and talking the hills of home in the flatness of Holland. Think of it, he would say. Our parents were born in the last century. The Tsar was out chopping wood for exercise. History assaults you and if you live you are restored to the world of gossip. That is what it had been for Dr. Z. He was half Jewish and had spent time in a labor camp in Germany. This well established Netherlands lover, with his nervous alliances and peculiar fidelities, had looked death in the eye, had lived through the extermination of his younger brother. This life, his aura remained in his proud olive tinted eyes, in his researches on the devastations flowing in the bloodstream, in his death defying lovemaking. He was a small, shrewd European country moving about carefully in peacetime, driven on by the force of ghastly memories. So life after death is to fall in love once more, to set up a little business, to learn to drive a car, take airplane trips, go to the sun for vacations. It began to appear that Simone was not suited to the role of mistress. She said, this thing has brought a coarsening of my nature. I hate Madame Z. What is she, a general? She seems to be giving a great many orders to those of us behind the lines. Hate, Dr. Z said, that's quite extreme. She has her qualities. When Simone saw the wife on the street, she rushed off in the opposite direction. So fearful was she of a meeting that she would not go to her friends houses without making careful inquiries. The whole of their circle in Amsterdam was involved in the affair. This wish to oust Madame Z and the nurse is Simone's cardinal side, people decided. Yes, the little girl who held the hand of so many nuns cannot accept the purgatory of Dr. Z's confusing nature and intentions. One time Madame Z went to Paris for several weeks with a round trip ticket, of course, Simone observed bitterly. But in the freedom, she and the doctor went for a weekend to London to look at pictures. It was not a happy time. Dr. Z was always calling Paris to speak to his wife or calling his office to speak to the nurse, telling them tremendous lies about a conference. Simone spent most of her time in London saying, it will soon be over and we will be back where we started. Dearest darling, do not rush to suffer future pain, the doctor said. But all went as she had predicted. Back once more, Simone could be seen several evenings a week at the window of her top floor. Looking down on the street. Waiting for the hurried approach of her lover. And late in the night, when he was returning to his wife. Simone would open the shutters and wave a long goodbye. To the swarthy, badly dressed, vivacious man. Now turning a corner and fading from sight. Dr. Z was happy in his love pains. He adored to spend the evening in Simone's studio. Smoking a cigarette, Drinking coffee. Eating little chocolate cakes and sipping gin. He was honestly more and more in love. And the genuineness of his feelings. Often caused Simone to burst into tears of anger. Dr. Z. Has studied the body and its workings. And liked to say. We human beings are au fons. Put together quite simply. Yes, quite simply. The part that is complicated. Even we, as scientists are ignorant of that. In matters of love, he seemed to feel the same. His distressing trio caused him to be often fretful, sleepless, anxious, jealous, even drunken. But he also knew well the dejection of resignation. And the torture of absence. So tormented, accused, even guilty. There was still happiness to be found. In reassuring the weeping nurse at the end of the day. In bringing home a pate and cheese to his wife. And going down a dark canal on the arm of Simone. And singing in questa tomba scura. Somehow he could lend to the noble composition. A heartfelt flirtatiousness. During our year in Holland. There was at last. A movement of reclamation. On the part of Simone. She broke off with the doctor and stayed in the house for weeks. For fear of meeting him. And once more surrendering to his passion for her. He whistled. Below the window, potted tulips arrived. Look at the colors. A late Mondrian. No, his note would say. He called upon the help of European poetry. Alas for me, where shall I get the flowers when it is winter. And wear the sunshine and shadow of earth? The walls stand speechless and cold. The weather vanes rattle in the wind. Simone was assisted by an attack of depression and did not turn back. She hurt the doctor's feelings by saying. I do not seem to care for anyone just now. Least of all myself. The doctor's wife and the nurse were affronted by Simone's revolt. They accused her of triviality and shallowness, of heartlessness. The doctor's suffering fell alike upon them as if it were a contagion. His alarm, his loss, his humiliation. Were an insult to themselves. And perhaps the two women, so accustomed to his ways. Sensed that the singularity of endings. May slowly gather into a pl. Love affairs with Their energy and hope do not arrive again and again forever. So you no longer play tennis, no longer move from place to place in the summer, no longer understand what use you can make of the sight of the Andes or the columns of Luxor. It gradually became clear that Simone would not be replaced. Poor Dr. Z, with his infidelities and agreeable lies, his new acquisitions and engaging disruptions. They vanished suddenly, but so quietly and naturally he was the last to know. As Raleigh said about Queen Elizabeth, old age took her by surprise, like a frost. In a few years the nurse went home to retire to look after her old mother in the country. Simone died. It turned out that she had done more than a dozen portraits of Dr. Z. And one was sold to an American museum for a fair price. In it Dr. Z is seen in a white jacket and there are instruments of his profession about him. On the wall. Not one but three stylized skeletons are dangling from hooks. 1973. The doctor and his wife were in New York for a conference. I went to meet them at a shabby, depressing hotel in the West 70s where Europeans who are not rich often stay. They were like two woolen dolls, and I could not decide whether the Frenchwoman had grown to the size of the Dutchman or whether he had, with a courteous condescension, simply inclined downward to the size of his little French wife. She was still wearing her black berets and her fingernails shone with a wine coloured polish. She spoke in tongues, Dutch, German, French and English, as if choosing cakes from a tray. Dr. Z met a mild New York winter day, clothed in Siberian layers. He was wearing a heavy black overcoat, a woolen vest, a dark gray sweater, and when he sat down in the waiting room of the lobby, gray winter underwear appeared above his socks. He talked, he told the Amsterdam gossip. He spoke of his work, of the fearful cost of things, of hippies in Vondel Park. Madame Z smoked cigarettes and coughed. They were studying the map of the city, looking for subway and bus lines. The outstanding difficulties of thrift in New York bewildered them, and they sat there as if pulled down into the mud of a dismaying displacement, the confusion that afflicts unfashionable elderly foreigners when they visit America, they who had been everywhere from Jakarta to Tokyo to India and every country in Europe. Dr. Z smiled and bowed and dashed about looking for chairs in a quiet corner. In fact, he seemed to be groping in the New York air for the supports of his life in Amsterdam, for his weathered little house on the Amstel with his office on the first floor and the rooms above with the old patterned carpets, the comfort of the hideous abstract paintings given by patience, abstractions that covered the walls next to the stairs like so many coloured water spots left over from an old leak. Where is my life? He seemed to be saying. My plates of pickled mussels, the slices of cheese, the tumblers of lemon gin. Still importance flickered in his eyes, his olive eyes still shining with the oil of remembered vanity and threatening to water with the tears of all he had learned and forgotten in his long life. We in Holland were the first to do certain important blood studies, he said. I no longer have my laboratory at the hospital, but I keep up with the developments in my field. How can one not a life's work? We in Holland kept appearing in his conversation. The vastness of the skies they had flown over and the large abyss into which they had fallen on the ground made him call forth his country like an ambassador, one who stands for the whole. You remember that he was well known here, his wife said without any special inflection. Oh, I know, I know. I remember well the well known Dr. Z. Enough of that, he said. Etam cheese is better known than any Dutchman. That is well to recall. Also, as it got to be near 6 o', clock, I asked if they wanted to go to a nearby Irish saloon for a drink. The doctor drew back with a frightened look, but his wife took up the suggestion vehemently. Indeed, yes, she would like a drink, she said with a peculiar insistence and defiance. We sat in a dark booth and Madame Z ordered a martini. An American martini, she said twice. The doctor crumpled and sagged over a beer. Heinekens supporting home industries, his wife said. Suddenly in the gloom, Madame Z began her lilting harangue, all of it pouring forth with an appalling energy. She did not used to talk very much, the doctor said, attempting a smile. See the unbekoned, unpredicted changes of age, the sky full of falling stars. It was clear that the recitation was not new and that in the midst of it she could pause only to order another drink. I have always hated Holland. I am not Dutch. I am French. Born in Paris. There are many Frenchmen, the doctor interrupted. It is not what I would call a special distinction in itself, she went on. There are many Dutchmen too, and all alike, the men and the women, the provincialism. Can you imagine a country proud of skinny Indonesians, dark and slow and surly primitives serving in red coats, Restafell a joke. Nuts and raisins and bananas. I would Rather have herring if the choice must be made. And it must be made, or starve. But the worst thing is the ugliness of the people. Who can tell the men and the women apart in their rotten mackintoshes, their rubber soled shoes? Look at the Queen, a joke. And old Wilhelmina in her tweeds like a buffalo. And the weather steaming like hell in the summer and drizzling sleet the rest of the year. Drizzling. Is that English? What is going on in Amsterdam? Tell me. Someone playing the organ in a church. They think they are masters of culture when they speak French. But if you want to write something, you write it in Dutch, which no one reads. And why should they? Even the Poles are better off. Warsaw is a real city, not a puppet show setting like Amsterdam. Her black black hair, her tiny little black feet, her wine colored fingers heavy with red and green semiprecious stones set in gold. She was like an old glazed vessel, veined and cracked, that nevertheless held water. The doctor trembled. This is not what you would call a discussion, he said, and turning aside, he made an effort to change the awful flow. I am not a patriot, he said. Still, couldn't I claim that the Dutch are a civilized people? A bit tiresome about the loss of Indonesia and all that perhaps, but Indonesia. She shrieked and the bartender shrugged. How all of you used to complain when you had to go out there to lecture, to advise, as you called it. To visit the rich men on their plantations. Little cries all night about the bugs and the humidity, the suffering sweat of the lordly Dutchman. Imagine Holland with colonies. Have you ever seen the so called city of Paramaribeau? It's a scandal, a joke. Madame Z tottered to her feet, exhausted. The doctor took her arm and gave a sigh as deep as death itself. Out on the street in the cold wind, he supported his little wife who could not stand alone. She dangled on his arm like a black shopping bag. For the moment she was quiet and he attempted a light hearted manner, a whispered addition. As you can see, she has taken to drink in a disastrous fashion. A sigh and then he bowed with something of his old shakishness, drawing me into his memories. It's all those love affairs, especially the darling Simone. They don't forgive you. After all, they have their revenge. It seemed to soothe the doctor to try to take the blame, as if even the revenge brought him back to his younger days. It was not clear whether he believed what he was saying, the ruefulness of his smile. As we neared the hotel, he said bitterly. It is only 8 o', clock, but what can we do except go to bed without dinner. She will sleep it off and not remember a thing the way they do, so mysterious. Yes, she must go to bed. Bed. Madame Z cried out, calling upon her last breath. They're all terrible lovers, frauds, every one of them. Fiascos. They passed into the brown and gray lobby, old companions, sad but not quite miserable. They were waving goodbye, he was bowing, and she was now winking and smiling. She had hit the doctor like the Spanish fury, but fortunately he was accustomed to the wind from the North Sea, her hat askew and a strand of hair slanted down her cheek. Madame Z of Paris had at last become Dutch, needing only a few strewn oyster shells and a ragged dog to bring to mind those tippling, pipe smoking women in the paintings of the 17th century. Creatures of the common life the Dutch bourgeoisie were pleased to admire and and purchase.
- [41:55]
Deborah Treisman
That was Lauren Groff reading the Faithful by Elizabeth Hardwick. The story appeared in the New Yorker in February of 1979 and was included in Hardwick's novel Sleepless Nights, as well as in the collection the New York Stories of Elizabeth Hardwick, which was published posthumously in 2010. Hi, I'm Deborah Treisman, fiction editor of the New Yorker. Each week on the Writer's Voice podcast, New Yorker fiction writers read the their newly published stories from the magazine. You can hear from authors like Colson Whitehead.
- [42:27]
Lauren Groff
Turner nudged Elwood, who had a look.
- [42:29]
Deborah Treisman
Of horror on his face. They saw it.
- [42:32]
Lauren Groff
Griff wasn't going down.
- [42:35]
Deborah Treisman
He was going to go for it, no matter what happened after. Or Joy Williams, her father was silent.
- [42:43]
Lauren Groff
Slowly he passed his hand over his hair. This usually meant that he was traveling to a place immune to her presence, a place that indeed contradicted her presence. She might as well go to lunch.
- [42:58]
Deborah Treisman
Listen to news stories, or dive into our archive of great fiction. You can find the work of your favorite fiction writers and discover new ones. Listen and follow the Writer's Voice wherever you get your podcasts.
- [43:16]
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Lauren Groff
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- [44:55]
Deborah Treisman
So Lauren, the faithful begins almost as a travelogue, right? There's a couple, they're traveling. They land in Amsterdam and get an apartment. And we hear about the furnishings and the culture and the surroundings, but we hear almost nothing about the couple themselves except that they fight after too much gin. And as you mentioned before, a lot of this is autobiographical. And Hardwick and her then husband, the poet Robert Lowell, spent the early 50s traveling around in Europe and did live in Amsterdam in, I think the winter of 1951-52. So clearly it draws on real life, but very little of that particular part of life is described. Why do you think the gaze here is so directed outward?
- [45:41]
Lauren Groff
Well, as you said, mentions of Robert Lowell or a character like Robert Lowell are in this. And the story of their love is really complicated, right? And it was really very, very, very painful to Elizabeth Hardwick because he left her for someone else. But he kept coming back to Elizabeth Hardwick. And this is maybe me reading a little bit too much autobiographically. It's hard not to do in this case, but I do feel like perhaps there's something too hot to handle at the center of this. And maybe by refocusing on a separate trio, right, that of Dr. Z and Madam Z and Simone, there's a way to discuss her own nuclear reactor in her Life without actually touching it herself. Right. And it feels very much as that this is getting a lot of its maybe erotic charge out of something that she even couldn't maybe discuss directly. Right. What do you think?
- [46:45]
Deborah Treisman
Well, I think that she was brilliant at observing other people and that was obviously a fascination for her. And she's sort of scientific about observing interactions and behaviors and patterns socially among other people. And perhaps it's not possible to turn that exacting kind of science on oneself.
- [47:09]
Lauren Groff
Maybe in some ways it seems a prefiguring Rachel Cusk's project in the Outline trilogy. Right. Where by writing about other people, one is drawing a negative image of oneself. Frank Sinatra has a cold. You're circling around things in order to draw an image. But I think you're right. I think that she's so good at observing other people and she's very, very good, at least in sleepless nights and observing herself. But it comes in fractured moments, in these really tight, almost self deprecating moments. But you're right, the prose is more comfortable looking at others.
- [47:48]
Deborah Treisman
Yeah. And this is sort of a complete story, the story of Dr. Z in the Faithful, because we get a coda, we get a sort of look at the aftermath. And in her own life she maybe didn't quite have that.
- [48:01]
Lauren Groff
Yeah, yeah, right. It's 1979. So this is a while after Lowell broke up with her. And then, you know, the other horrible, difficult thing that happened is that he took letters that she had written to him and republished them in the Dolphin. Right. His book the Dolphin, which is really difficult as well too. So that seems to have a really strong impression upon this book as a whole. And even in this story we do see these moments where from Holland. I wrote many complaining letters. Right. So her letters throughout are repeated refrain through the book and through this too. And I do think, you know, writing about the moment is something that's very powerful as like a powerful undercurrent in this story and in this book as a whole.
- [48:49]
Deborah Treisman
And she also says that when she was writing those complaining letters, this was actually the happiest time of her life. Little did she know, you know, what was coming.
- [48:57]
Lauren Groff
Right, right, exactly.
- [48:59]
Deborah Treisman
So why do you think Dr. And Madame Z and Simone are in the spotlight here? What is she trying to tell us about them? Is it specific to them? Is it something larger?
- [49:12]
Lauren Groff
I think it's specific to them. They seem like such specific humans. Right. But there's very much themes and ideas of one's country informing who one is, which is very much the case throughout Sleepless nights. Right. Elizabeth Hardwick comes from Kentucky. It's the basis of who she is. She comes back to it over and over again. So there's that aspect of it, but there's also the aspect of being an American in post war Europe, coming from a place that was touched by World War II, but perhaps less directly so, and being able to see sort of the aftermath, live in the aftermath of a great eruption like World War II, which is sort of what this story is also doing. Right. It's sort of tracking the great eruption of Simone into Dr. Z and Madame Z's life. And then the aftermath too, where everyone is a little bit diminished by age and past loves and rancor.
- [50:12]
Deborah Treisman
Yeah, yeah. I mean, until Simone, he's been able to acquire women and never actually give them up, just sort of keep them going.
- [50:20]
Lauren Groff
Right.
- [50:21]
Deborah Treisman
And Simone is different for him. Perhaps the first woman who truly insists on her own identity as separate from his. She's not married to him. She's not working for him.
- [50:32]
Lauren Groff
Yeah. She's an artist. Right. I mean, I think she is known as one of the most independent women in Amsterdam. Right. The story itself says that. And I think there is something there also, as you're saying, about an artist being able to describe themselves, an artist being able to stand apart and insist on their own autonomy in a way that maybe the nurse and even Madame Z weren't able to have. One gets the impression, thinking about Madame Z, that she's maybe an artist. Manchai. Right. Like she really loves theater. And maybe she was longing for some other thing. And maybe having had that art which delineates in certain moments, the external reaches of the soul. Right. That's what art does. Maybe if she'd had that, she would have been able to separate also like Simone from her husband. And instead we get this sadness at the end. Right. This great bitterness at the end. So maybe in some ways Madame Z is a cautionary tale without reducing it to that. But someone. An alternative life.
- [51:32]
Deborah Treisman
Yeah. Though at the end she's sad but not miserable.
- [51:35]
Lauren Groff
Right, Right.
- [51:36]
Deborah Treisman
Well, a little bit of relief there.
- [51:37]
Lauren Groff
She's taking her revenge by becoming drunk, which is a very terrible revenge in some ways.
- [51:46]
Deborah Treisman
Yeah. It's interesting. You know, Simone is the only one who gets a first name. The nurse is the nurse. Madame Z is Madame Z. She's an appendage to his last name.
- [51:56]
Lauren Groff
I had not even noticed that. Yeah, it's true. But Simone is her own person.
- [52:02]
Deborah Treisman
Simone doesn't get her last name.
- [52:04]
Lauren Groff
Yeah, it doesn't matter. Exactly.
- [52:09]
Deborah Treisman
Hardwick. She has that Beautiful line. History assaults you, and if you live, you're restored to the world of gossip. And Dr. Z was assaulted by history. He's one of many people, I'm sure, in Amsterdam at that time who has suffered during the war, and he's lost his brother. He was in a labor camp, and he's looked death in the eye, and he's defying it, in a sense, with his affairs, with his passion. And there's a sense in which he may be one of few people who are doing that in this social circle.
- [52:40]
Lauren Groff
I love him even though he's a cat. I really do, because he was in a death camp. He did witness his brother dying. He saw the worst of humanity. And to react maybe irresponsibly in love. I mean, I actually feel as if in some ways, that is a more appropriate way to react than any other. Right. To go out into the world and enjoy whatever rare sun there is on his cheeks in Amsterdam, and to fall in love serially and to keep his loves going and to enjoy hedonism. To eat the pate with his wife and then go visit. Right. I mean, all of these things. He's choosing the opposite of what he had to endure. And I think that that is a kind of strength that maybe even the story doesn't really acquiesce to. But there's some sort of sparkliness in him that makes you almost forgive him, even as he's being awful to the women around him. It made me almost forgive him.
- [53:45]
Deborah Treisman
Yeah. Because he's maintaining this tenderness towards all of them. They are not just women he's sleeping with. He worries about their taxes. He worries about their cough. He's taking them under his wing, in a sense, and sheltering.
- [53:57]
Lauren Groff
And yet Simone's great painting that she sold has three skeletons dangling in the background. I mean, that was a pretty heavy moment.
- [54:05]
Deborah Treisman
Yeah. Body count.
- [54:06]
Lauren Groff
Yeah, Body count. I mean, his body count would be much higher. Right. But those are the three people who he just kept hanging.
- [54:13]
Deborah Treisman
Yeah.
- [54:13]
Lauren Groff
He kept playing with their affections and their loves.
- [54:17]
Deborah Treisman
Yeah. There's the other complication with Simone, that her brother was a Nazi collaborator. And she's come from a very different heritage, even though she's also Dutch.
- [54:27]
Lauren Groff
You know, I've read this book hundreds of times, so many times. But only in slowly reading it out loud did I actually take a moment and think about that. Right. That complication, that deeper resistance. You know, something's happening there in their love story that gives it a little bit of a sandpapery feel. That's really interesting. And I hadn't picked up on it before.
- [54:49]
Deborah Treisman
Yeah. I feel as though so many world historical subtexts are sort of percolating in this. At the same time, you have the constant discussion of Indonesia and Indonesians, and I think Indonesia had just gotten its independence a couple of years before this, and you still have these skinny, poor Indonesians sort of right across the canal that are under your gaze at all times in this story. And you have war survivors. If Dr. Z is coming from a concentration camp, he is not in great shape. You know, he hasn't had that long to recover. So there's kind of a sort of blasted feel to the people and the culture. And maybe that's why there's this extended sense of hominess and sort of crawling into comfort.
- [55:32]
Lauren Groff
Yeah. You know, I think she works wonders with her subtext. I think you're right. There's so much percolating or there's so much boiling underneath this almost wry surface. Right. I would say that her voice is very wry and she tells these strange corners and elbows of humans, but underneath the surface, you do see these large, vast historical events still pushing up. They're boiling up right under a very thin surface. So I think she does that throughout the book. But in this particular part of the book, that's where you see this idea of aftermath. We're still living right in the point of conflict. We're still living in the war. In some ways, the war is not over even when it ends. Right. It still sort of extends into the future. You can see that in an interpersonal level, too. I mean, that's maybe why we get them in New York City two decades after originally. Looking at them, we see the aftermath extending.
- [56:29]
Deborah Treisman
Right. What has happened to them? What do you think has happened to them in that time?
- [56:33]
Lauren Groff
It's one of those long marriages. Right? Now, They've been together for over 40 years, by the end, in the 1970s, and Madame Z has lived with infidelity. Of course, after Simone, there weren't any more. You know, they're twisted together like old olive trees. Right. They're codependent in ways that I see in people in my own life. Right. And it's a beautiful thing. I know therapists probably wouldn't agree with me, but I do think in certain ways, at the end of a long marriage, this codependency is very, very beautiful to watch and to look at. So, you know, even though the story is tinted and I would say gray and beige, and there's not a whole lot of brightness other than Simone's velvet shoes. You know, there's not a whole lot of bright color in this. Even the way that the sentences on spool, they're very beautiful sentences, but they're pretty subtle. I do think, even so, we have this shocking beauty. I look at it as the story in which nobody behaves correctly, and yet there's this very profound pleasure and beauty at the end. I feel that the narrator is a bit on Madame Z's side, You know, watching her get absolutely trashed in public and say these horrible things about her husband. In some ways, I feel as if the narrator is watching with a kind of pleasure as this is happening. So. Yeah, I don't know if you have a different read, but.
- [58:05]
Deborah Treisman
Well, I was going to say, do you think that she's seeing something of herself as she writes Madame Z in 1973? I think it is. Do you think she's seeing something of herself there?
- [58:16]
Lauren Groff
Whether or not it's intentional, I think just in my read, the answer is absolutely yes. Right. I have stayed the course. I have still loved you, and look at what you did. And look what I get to say in public about you. But in the end, and this is the part of my own art that I am still struggling with, we do get the last word. You know, we do get the ability to subtly or radically change the story of our life and of other people in our lives. And that's a profound power that could be used in terrible ways. And, you know, there's a moral responsibility there that sometimes when you're in the flush and the hot. The white hot urge to get it all out of you, you don't really think about these rippling ramifications afterwards. But there is a moral responsibility to this. I do think, probably even if indirectly, Elizabeth Hardwick did find something. Some sort of gleams even in the distance in Madame Z. Yeah.
- [59:27]
Deborah Treisman
And of course, you know, she chose this ending. She wrote this ending. I don't know if there was an original for Dr. Z in her life in Amsterdam. I don't know if she saw the couple again later. My feeling is that the later scene might be the most fictionalized.
- [59:45]
Lauren Groff
Mm, I would agree. Yeah. It feels the most fictionalized, doesn't it?
- [59:50]
Deborah Treisman
Yeah, it's the most storylike because she's bringing us to an ending. And it's interesting because, yes, you do feel she's on the side of Madam Z, but at the same time, you know, Dr. Z takes her arm because she can't stand alone. And that's where you get that moment. It's sort of touching. She's railing against him and he's supporting her right along the street. But you can see just how much of a unit they are.
- [60:17]
Lauren Groff
Still, maybe it also reads as more storylike because the rest of the story is told at a point more arm's length. There are not many scenes. There are no actual scenes. There's just snippets of voice without actually creating actual scenes. I'm trying to look through the pages as I'm talking, but it's sort of told in a way that all writing workshops tell you not to do it. And yet it's an amazing story. And then at the end, we get this actual scene. And maybe that's why it feels more fictional, because by the time you have condensed even actual visits into scene, it feels fictional because there's some sort of. Packed with the reader of the verisimilitude rather than the verity, the rest of it seems trucking in a closer reality because it's being told with the distance of accepted nonfiction. Right. It feels a little bit more nonfictional this time because it's a scene. It feels fictional.
- [61:12]
Deborah Treisman
Yeah. And the first three quarters are more of a cultural overview of that time and place. And this is just one long scene. Yeah. With dialogue for the first time, I think, with actual speeches that last in a setting. And also the way she describes them now that he sort of shrunk down to her size, that they've become these two dolls. It's almost the way one sees people in memory. Right. You sort of adjust them in your memory of them.
- [61:45]
Lauren Groff
Yeah, it is. It is. Even though they're physically smaller, they seem at the same time, in some ways larger. Like age has given them less of a mythic quality and more of a human quality. They're being relaxed into as human beings, maybe during the great love affairs when they're younger. And, you know, the doctor is very successful in his practice, and Madame Z is always trotting off to Paris to go watch theater. They're sort of archetypes. And then they become actual people by the end. Right. They're humbled a little bit in the narrator's eyes.
- [62:20]
Deborah Treisman
Yeah. And they've passed this point where one was tolerating the other one's behavior and the other one was feeling guilty and.
- [62:28]
Lauren Groff
You know, or maybe it's switched now. He's tolerating her bad behavior all the time. Yeah.
- [62:34]
Deborah Treisman
And perhaps he owes her that.
- [62:35]
Lauren Groff
And he does.
- [62:39]
Deborah Treisman
But you're right. It's like it's told in the 1951 section. The narrator is sort of looking at everything with a certain degree of amusement and affection. And at the end, she's much more taken aback.
- [62:52]
Lauren Groff
It's hard to ask this question of you if you saw this story now. Because it's so unusual for a story. Right. It does start in almost like a godlike tone. You know, it's a travelogue in the very beginning, which you take it now. I mean, it ends up being a work of genius, right?
- [63:12]
Deborah Treisman
Yeah.
- [63:12]
Lauren Groff
But it's very much not of 2025.
- [63:16]
Deborah Treisman
It's not of 2025. But with it being published here in 1979. This period of time was a lot fresher in memory. I think I would have to read it several times, but I think I would take it.
- [63:28]
Lauren Groff
I think it's so cute.
- [63:29]
Deborah Treisman
It's so good because the writing is just incredible.
- [63:32]
Lauren Groff
Incredible. She's always so incredible. Would you mind if I read, actually, the first paragraph of Sleepless Nights?
- [63:38]
Deborah Treisman
Sure. I'd love that.
- [63:39]
Lauren Groff
God, I love it so much. Okay. It is June. This is what I have decided to do with my life just now. I will do this work of transformed and even distorted memory and lead this life, the one I am leading today, every morning. The blue clock and the crocheted bedspread with its pink and blue and gray squares and diamonds. How nice it is, this production of a broken old woman in a squalid nursing home. The niceness and the squalor and sorrow in apathetic battle. That is what I see. More beautiful is the table with the telephone, the books and magazines, the times at the door. The birdsong of rough, grinding trucks in the street. I think the reason I wanted to read that is it's one of those fractal paragraphs that sort of gives you the entire book, Right. The buried heartbreak at the Ferry Center. And the rest of it sort of fragmenting out, fracturing out in a constellation. And I see a lot of actually sort of the work of memory, the tangible work of memory coming back to these images that are so powerful. And out of them, extrapolating profound feeling. This is just what she does so beautifully. Her writing is so unbelievably beautiful and smart. And she'll throw in, you know, a long, pristian, philosophical sentence and then go back to the rough birdsong of the garbage trucks at the end of the street. I just find it so. Just texturally, almost Nobody can write like that. It's so great.
- [65:11]
Deborah Treisman
Yeah. I wish she'd written more.
- [65:12]
Lauren Groff
I know she wrote a nonfiction book called Seduction and Betrayal. And I Think it's so amazing? No, but I do. I wish she wrote more, too.
- [65:21]
Deborah Treisman
Yeah. You know, as you said earlier, the faithful does not have much of a plot. I mean, what little plot there is is simply man has an affair, has aftermath. But I was looking at the Paris Review interview with Hardwick, which Darryl Pinkney did, and he asked her about the fact that she doesn't have much plot in her fiction. And she says, if I want a plot, I'll watch Dallas. And what was more important to her was, quote, tone arrived at by language. It's all language and rhythm and the establishment of the relation to the material of who's speaking. Not speaking as a person, exactly, but as a mind, a sensibility. And I feel that is what's going on here. You know, we are inhabiting a sensibility as we watch Dr. Z. Oh, I.
- [66:10]
Lauren Groff
Love that so much. That also speaks to how she does it, how this seemingly disparate book hangs together so beautifully. It hangs together through personal sensibility, which it seems, you know, that's a lot for a novel to write on. But the fact that she pulls it off feels like a miracle.
- [66:30]
Deborah Treisman
And, you know, at the center of it is the center of the story anyway, is this sense of temporariness, of transience, of people not in the right place, not in the place they come from, perhaps on their way to another place. Everything is temporary except for the marriage of the Z's.
- [66:48]
Lauren Groff
Yeah, that's actually true. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the place is not temporary, but it goes through such radical transformations. Right. Amsterdam. I mean, it's both everlasting. Right. In every paragraph almost, you see her looking at the past as well, the distant past. Or even in the last paragraph with that beautiful image of Madame Z having turned into one of Rembrandt's Dutch ladies or one of the old master's tippling drunken Dutch ladies. I love this idea that, you know, the past is living within the present, and it's throughout this story. She creates such profound space for that in this story. And it's not just in this story. Right. It's in the life. This is why the story flows in time so gorgeously. Right. We're going deep into Rembrandt's time. We're going into Amsterdam just after World War II. We go back and forth throughout this story, and it's ostensibly about a love trio, which is one of the more titillating story ideas out there. But it's about so much more because she has this historical conception of the world. Right. She's able to sort of see Europe as this repository of historical feeling. And it goes to her ability to work in textures. She's working in textures of prose and rhythm. And the sentences themselves come in radically different textures in order to give you her sensibility at the same time. The sensibility is essential, capacious one. She's very large thinking in this story in particular.
- [68:27]
Deborah Treisman
Yeah, it's panoramic.
- [68:28]
Lauren Groff
Yeah.
- [68:28]
Deborah Treisman
She even begins it with, all ye who love Prince of Orange, take heart and follow me. You know, a 16th century rallying cry for independence in Holland, in Amsterdam, to try to escape Spanish rule. So it's. Here they go, you know, we've gone back four centuries and we're in Holland, and now it's 1951. So the way that she moves through time and pulls past time into the present of the story is amazing.
- [68:55]
Lauren Groff
It's amazing. I was asking myself as I was reading this because, you know, I'm a writer in 2025, and I read with a 2025 eyeball, and I was thinking, would this whole first section where she's really setting everything up, like talking about the old mapmakers. It's all very abstract. I know that in a writing workshop everyone would say, cut it. Right? It's too much. I actually think that it gives such gravity to the final. This squabbling couple getting drunk in public. Right. We get the historical weight from the beginning is somehow applied in a mirror way in the end. So I think it's really necessary for this story.
- [69:38]
Deborah Treisman
Yeah. They're also arriving in Amsterdam kind of tattered with torn suitcases, and their coats are all wrinkled because they've been in the suitcase all summer. And then you have that same kind of displaced, out of place, slightly bedraggled couple at the end, you know?
- [69:56]
Lauren Groff
Yeah. There's a lot of marrying happening all over the place.
- [70:01]
Deborah Treisman
I love the line about Madame Z at the end. She was like an old glazed vessel, veined and cracked, that nevertheless held water.
- [70:07]
Lauren Groff
I love it so much. So good.
- [70:11]
Deborah Treisman
So you've read this in the context of the novel so many times. Is it a very different experience for you to read it outside that context?
- [70:19]
Lauren Groff
It's very different, yes. Exactly. For me, the experience of reading the novel sort of opening question into question, that's my most profound joy when I encounter a novel is just having this feeling of doors opening throughout and I don't know where I'm going and I don't know what the writer is intending. And perhaps, you know, deep down they don't know either. It's just that they're going by feel. And this book is just a series, an endless series of doors. And you can take whichever one you want. And I sometimes read for the longing. I sometimes read for the place, the idea of place. Right. But having this fall where it does in the book, after the half point of the book, I feel the urgency of the density of it. So a lot of the other chapters are sort of floaty, a little bit. I mean, a little bit more abstract. They switch between registers. This one stays in the same register throughout. It's trying to tell me something concrete. It feels like in the flow of the book, reading it separately, without the rest of the book as the web that the spider is sort of sitting on, I get to see the way that it is, in its own way, balanced and structured, the architecture of it, the characters separate from speaking to the other characters. In this constellated life that Hardwick is sort of putting on the page here, I can see it as it's its own thing, its own jewel. And that is a gift, too, because suddenly I'm able to see different things in it.
- [71:56]
Deborah Treisman
Yeah. Well, another question about that. At the center of the story is infidelity.
- [72:02]
Lauren Groff
Right.
- [72:02]
Deborah Treisman
Why is the story called the Faithful?
- [72:05]
Lauren Groff
Oh, well, I mean, at the end, they're faithful, Right. I mean, Madame Z is always faith. And then the doctor is faithful to her after Simone in his own way. I mean, this idea of codependency, it sort of grows through the story and it sort of blooms at the end. I think that's part of it. But of course, there are different kinds of faith throughout. I mean, there's religious faith that sort of touched on. Simone is a Catholic. The Doctor, I think he's Jewish. At least half Jewish, half Jewish. Right. You know, and there's something of faith in staying in a marriage with an unfaithful spouse. There's also the faith of the narrative. I which has tracked these people over the course of a few decades and returns to them, too. There's a lot of different manifestations of faith. One could write a whole long paper on this, I believe, if you really wanted to.
- [73:08]
Deborah Treisman
Someone probably has.
- [73:08]
Lauren Groff
I know. Right.
- [73:10]
Deborah Treisman
Well, thank you so much, Lauren.
- [73:12]
Lauren Groff
Oh, it has been a profound pleasure. Thank you. Deborah.
- [73:18]
Deborah Treisman
Elizabeth Hardwick was a critic, essayist and fiction writer, author of the novels the Ghostly Lover, Simple Truth and Sleepless Nights. Her essay collections include Bartleby in Manhattan and Other Essays and Sight American Fictions. Hardwicke died in 2007 at the age of 91. Lauren Groff's works of fiction include the novels Fates and Furies and Matrix, both of which were finalists for the National Book Award, and the Vaster Wilds, which was published in 2023. A new story collection, Brawler, will come out in February of 2026. In 2024, she opened the bookstore the Lynx in Gainesville, Florida. You can download more than 210 previous episodes of the New Yorker Fiction Podcast, including episodes in which Lauren Groff reads and discusses work by Shirley Hazard and Alice Monroe, or subscribe to the podcast for free and Apple Podcasts. On the Writer's Voice podcast you can hear short stories from the magazine read by their authors. You can find the Writer's Voice and other New Yorker podcasts on your podcast app. Tell us what you thought of this program on our Facebook page or rate and review us in Apple Podcasts. This episode of the New Yorker Fiction Podcast was produced by Chloe Procinos. I'm Deborah Treisman. Thanks for listening.
- [74:45]
Lauren Groff
Introducing Invisible Choir, a true crime podcast that explores the most heinous murders through investigative storytelling, primary source audio and exclusive interviews. He walked to his car, he pulled out the sword, and then he followed her. They found chunks of her hair in the grass because he was swinging at her. New episodes air every other Sunday from PRX.