Joey

No friendship on this shelf has more books in it: Perlès shared the Clichy flat of Quiet Days, haunts Tropic of Cancer as Carl, co-edited the Villa Seurat ventures, wrote his own My Friend Henry Miller — and for half a century the two exchanged letters addressed, in both directions, to 'Joey,' the pet name they held in common like a joint account. The trilogy's last volume pays the debt directly: the full portrait of Fred — the wit, the cowardice and courage in their exact proportions, the delicacy under the clowning — drawn by the only witness who had been there for all of it.

Capra published it in 1979, completing the Book of Friends, and the volume carries the trilogy's oddest cargo: alongside the Perlès portrait, the promised 'bizarre episodes' — late reminiscences of the women of a long lifetime, told with the old candor grown reflective. But its lasting note is the friendship itself: the Paris poverty relived as the wealth it secretly was, and the astonishment — his word and ours — that both Joeys survived everything to grow old in comfort, still writing each other, still laughing at the same twenty jokes. The gallery could not have closed on anyone else.

The portrait first: Perlès from the Clichy kitchen to old age — journalist, scrounger, novelist, soldier (improbably) in the British Army, and lifelong correspondent — the friendship's whole arc told with the specific gratitude of a man naming what saved him. Then the appendix the subtitle advertises: the 'bizarre episodes' — late, rueful, comic recollections of the women who crossed the long road.

Best read after Quiet Days in Clichy: the fiction first, then the fact — Carl, revealed at last as Fred, revealed at last as Joey.