Quiet Days in Clichy is a novella written by Henry Miller. It is based on his experience as a Parisian expatriate in the early 1930s, when he and Alfred Perlès shared a small apartment in suburban Clichy as struggling writers. It takes place around the time Miller was writing Black Spring. According to his photographer friend George Brassaï, Miller admitted the title is “completely misleading.”
Plot
The plot follows Joey, an American expatriate in and around Place Clichy. The book is divided in two parts. In the first, Joey and his equally destitute roommate Carl search for food and navigate relationships with various women. Chiefly, Joey with Nys, a prostitute he meets at the Café Wepler near Montmartre, and Carl with Colette, a fifteen-year-old runaway who moves in with them before eventually being retrieved by her parents. The second half, “Mara-Marignon,” describes Carl's volatile love affair with the married Eliane, and Joey's relationship with Mara, a prostitute he meets on the Champs-Élysées. Mara reminds Joey of a previous lover, the married Christine, whom he regrets not marrying himself. This leads to a recollection of an evening he and Carl spent at their home with an acrobat named Corinne and a Danish woman named Christine. The four of them have a spontaneous orgy, which upsets Christine, who is laughed at by the other three.
Writing and publication
The thin volume was initially written in New York shortly after Miller's return from Paris in 1940, and revised in Big Sur in 1956, while he was working on Nexus. The book was first published in France by Olympia Press in 1956. Following Miller's victory in the obscenity trial for Tropic of Cancer, Quiet Days in Clichy was finally published in the United States by Grove Press in 1965.
Adaptations
The novella has twice been made into a feature film. The 1970 version was a Danish production, written and directed by Jens Jørgen Thorsen, and featuring a soundtrack by Country Joe McDonald. The second film, Quiet Days in Clichy, mostly in English with some bits of French, was released in 1990. It was directed by Claude Chabrol and starred Andrew McCarthy as Miller. McCarthy was 26 years old when he played Miller, who is in his early 40s in the book. Chabrol deemed the film a not-too-faithful rendering of the novella. In an HBOanthology series based on American literature, , one of the shorts is “Mara,” based on the second half of Quiet Days in Clichy. The 30-minute film was directed by Mike Figgis. It stars Scott Glenn as Miller and Juliette Binoche as Mara.
