Quiet Days in Clichy

The flat was real: 4 Avenue Anatole-France in Clichy, where Miller lived through 1932 with Alfred Perlès — the Austrian journalist who is 'Carl' here, exactly as he is in Tropic of Cancer. The Clichy interlude was the era's sweet spot: a job, a kitchen, a friend, and Paris outside the door; Miller called those days the closest the expatriate years came to plain happiness. He first wrote the memoir of it in 1940, homesick in New York; the text he rewrote for publication came out from Girodias's Olympia Press in Paris in 1956, illustrated with Brassaï's night photographs — the era's photographer of Paris after dark, matched to its most nostalgic text.

The book runs in two parts — the title novella and 'Mara-Marignan,' a linked episode named for a girl of the Champs-Élysées cafés — and its matter is the era's daily bread: money found and squandered, meals engineered from nothing, the women who move through the flat, the friendship's rhythms of scheming and talk. It is also, unmistakably, banned-book Miller — explicit enough that it waited for Grove until 1965 and got a notorious film adaptation in 1970 that fought its own customs battles. But its lasting note is elegy: written from exile, it is the Paris idyll remembered as paradise — the same days Cancer rendered as war.

Two friends keep house in Clichy: the narrator — Joey, Miller's own nickname in the circle — and Carl, fastidious, romantic, and permanently entangled. The episodes tumble after one another like nights of the week: hunger and windfalls, expeditions down to Montmartre and the boulevard cafés, a Sunday cycling jaunt, women met, sheltered, fed, and mourned — including Nys, whom the narrator picks up at the Café Wepler, and the crisis of Colette, the runaway teenager Carl takes in until her family and the police come knocking, a scrape the pair barely buy their way out of.

Nothing builds and nothing needs to: the book's argument is the texture itself — that a flat, a friend, an empty pocket, and Paris constituted a complete world. 'Mara-Marignan,' the second panel, sharpens the note of loss: one woman, one night, one of the era's ten thousand vanishings, remembered because remembering is all the narrator can still do from the far side of the ocean and the war.