Aug 1, 2025 · 1 hr 12 min · 18 segments
Lauren Groff joins Deborah Treisman to read and discuss “The Faithful,” by Elizabeth Hardwick, which was published in The New Yorker in 1979. Groff’s works of fiction include the novels “Fates and…
Lauren GroffGuest
Deborah TreismanHost
Descartes, more than three hundred 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.
An unfashionable gracht in the center of Amsterdam, the Nicolaas Witsenkaade, 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 façades, 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 tasseled 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.
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.
The baker and coal seller arrived with such swiftness they might have been dressed and waiting throughout the night.
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 Zuider Zee to the humid airs of Jakarta.
Descartes, more than three hundred 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.
An unfashionable gracht in the center of Amsterdam, the Nicolaas Witsenkaade, 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 façades, 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 tasseled 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.
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.
The baker and coal seller arrived with such swiftness they might have been dressed and waiting throughout the night.
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 Zuider Zee to the humid airs of Jakarta.
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