The sky started to clear, became pale blue shortly after we’d turned left on South Bundy Drive. Jessica was driving, constantly wiggling and lane-hopping. We were listening to Ornette Coleman, a conscious and deliberately antagonistic choice given our destination. It’s great music, L.A. music, but it’s not really driving music except in the sense that it starts to drive you hopping mad because it’s frantic, wiggling music, so frantic that even some of the songs with really cool titles and beautiful melodies eventually leave you feeling frazzled. I started flicking through an iPod crammed with some of the best music ever made, unable to find anything we could bear to hear, and then turned the whole thing off as we passed Teddy’s Cafe at the intersection of Pico. A woman with swollen legs was out for the count on a bench beneath an ad for the James Brown biopic, Get on Up. As something to notice that was OK, but for it to have made a decent photo you’d need a third element, like a plane climbing overhead — which there was, as it happened, but it would have been impossible to get it in the frame. At Wilshire, we passed the Literati Cafe, which, like the Spitfire Grill, declared its thematic hand quite openly, even though this particular theme seemed designed to limit its appeal to fewer than the few.
Bundy became South Kenter and we were suddenly there, far more quickly than expected. It was a classic L.A. scene, neither urban nor suburban — green lawns, driveways, large houses, parked cars — even if, put like that, it seems typically suburban. Brentwood. We’d been over this way once before, for a dinner at the very fancy house of a movie agent, but although we had driven up South Kenter, right past 316, we were not aware of the significance of the address and were intent only on not being late or getting lost.
We parked the car a few houses along from 316. The sun was strong and the street deserted. The lawns of South Kenter blazed with a brightness that seemed far in excess of their square footage unless the blazingness was a direct result of the colour being contained and thereby concentrated. Probably the time was not far off when grass could be genetically modified so that as well as being the greenest and weed-free-est grass ever seen it would also stop growing after an inch and a half so you wouldn’t have to mow it. This would be hailed as a breakthrough, because time that had been wasted on mowing could now be used for other things. But this extra time would turn out to be strangely worthless, and people wouldn’t do much with it except the things from which mowing the lawn had provided relief — downloading music and watching episodes of High Maintenance or videos that had gone viral on YouTube — so after a brief honeymoon period people would go back to old-style grass growing and take out their mowers again, and although mowing the lawn would once again become a bit of a chore people would realize that they preferred this chore to the alternative and that this constituted a limited form of enlightenment. Packaged in a different tense — all those “would”s would have to go — this was an idea I could have pitched to the agent whose amazing house we had dined at a few weeks previously, but already, in the time that I had spent pitching it to myself, it seemed to have achieved the only form in which it would ever generate any interest unless I could reconceive it as a commercial for lawnmowers which, I realized almost as quickly, is exactly what it had been all along.
We walked back to 316. There it was, the house we had come to see, the pilgrimage site. A two-storey place (three if you count the two double garages at ground level) painted white. The top floor had a narrow wrap-around terrace or balcony. There were no cars in the driveway, so the building looked inhabited but unoccupied. There was a slender green bush or tree in the middle of the two garages, and a purple plant— bougainvillea? — to the right of both. It stood there, the house, and we stood in front of it. As a pilgrimage site it wasn’t exactly over-run with pilgrims. Just us. There were what looked like two entrances — we could see 318, not 316—but there seemed no doubt this was the place. I’d seen a picture of the house online and had sent it to a friend in England who is interested in this kind of stuff, asking who he thought had lived here.
‘Art Pepper?’ he wrote back. A good guess but wrong; it was actually Teddy Adorno, who, though an accomplished pianist, was not a great jazz fan.
Adorno came to America in 1938, moving from New York to Los Angeles in November 1941 at the suggestion of his friend and colleague Max Horkheimer, who’d arrived a few months earlier. They were not alone. A wave of émigrés from Nazi Germany had settled in southern California: Thomas Mann and Lion Feuchtwanger lived in Pacific Palisades, Bertolt Brecht (who thought he’d wound up in ‘tahiti in the form of a big city’) in Santa Monica. . There were loads of them, and we’d bought a large book with a map showing where they’d all lived.
Adorno served as musical ‘helper, advisor and sympathetic instructor’ for Mann while he was writing Doctor Faustus. He played Beethoven’s 32nd piano sonata (opus 111) for him, delivered a version of the lecture that appears in the book and explained the twelve-tone system supposedly ‘invented’ by the fictional composer Adrian Leverkühn. Naturally, this somewhat irritated the actual inventor of the twelve-tone system, Arnold Schoenberg, who lived nearby, at 116 North Rockingham Avenue, also in Brentwood. Mann hoped to smooth things over by adding a respectful postscript in a new edition but Schoenberg was still pretty pissed because, unlike Leverkühn, he wasn’t insane and didn’t have ‘the disease [syphilis] from which this insanity stems.’ This kind of squabbling and backbiting was part and parcel of life within the émigré scene — Stravinsky (who lived in West Hollywood) and Schoenberg studiously avoided one another — and is not surprising given their extraordinary proximity.* The surprising thing is that all these European super-heavyweights, the gods of high culture, had ended up here, in a place many of them took to be the embodiment of vulgarity, rampant capitalism and crass commercialism, though this didn’t stop them — the composers especially — trying to gouge money out of the Hollywood studio moguls, many of whom were themselves either part of — or the children of — an earlier generation of Jewish émigrés from Europe and weren’t about to let themselves get played by some hustler (Schoenberg) insisting that the actors speak their lines in the same key and pitch as the music in a score for which he wanted fifty thousand big ones — whereupon he never heard a peep from MGM again. Such setbacks notwithstanding, Schoenberg loved L.A., even if, to his wife’s annoyance, tour guides pointed out Shirley Temple’s house across the way while ignoring theirs.
Also unremarked by tour guides — but indicated on our map — was Horkheimer’s house at 13524 D’Este Drive, Brentwood. ‘In the afternoons,’ Horkheimer wrote in a letter in 1942, ‘I usually see Teddie to decide on the final text with him.’ The text, that is, of the book they wrote together, Dialectic of Enlightenment, with its famous chapter on ‘The Culture Industry.’ Adorno was busy working on another collaborative project, The Authoritarian Personality, along with solo books such as Philosophy of Modern Music, numerous shorter pieces and radio broadcasts.
The greatest book to come out of Adorno’s eight-year stay in California, however, was Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life (dedicated to ‘Max in gratitude and promise’). When the Guardian asked a number of writers to choose a book that had defined a summer for them, this was the book I picked. It doesn’t seem like a summer book at all, though it becomes more summery when you realize it was written in southern California. I’d bought it from Compendium, the theory capital of London, in Camden, on 13 May 1986, and I chose it for the Guardian feature partly because I loved it but also to advertise myself as someone who read Adorno, to distinguish myself from novelists who I guessed would choose The Go-Between or Tender Is the Night or whatever. That’s part of the Adorno mystique: the author as badge, as Karl Ove Knausgaard became the badge author of the 2010s. When reading Adorno, you’re not just reading Adorno in the way that you might read George Eliot or E. M. Forster. ‘What enriched me while reading Adorno,’ writes Knausgaard in A Death in the Family, ‘lay not in what I read but the perception of myself while I was reading. I was someone who read Adorno!’