Even Roberto Calasso, who has read everyone, who is himself another badge author, was once that someone; it’s just that — being Calasso — he started early and actually met Adorno when the philosopher was writing Negative Dialectics. Adorno was sufficiently impressed by this ‘remarkable’ young man to declare, ‘He knows all my books, even those I haven’t written yet.’
When I became that someone — someone who read Adorno — in the summer of 1986, I was so overwhelmed by what I was reading that I had to stop reading. This is perfectly normal. Thomas Mann himself wrote to Adorno that Minima Moralia was ‘the most fascinating reading, although it is concentrated fare that can only be enjoyed in small amounts at a time.’ I was going to say that I was shocked and jolted by the current coursing through every page of Minima Moralia, but that would understate things. Reading Adorno, you’re hurled forward and taken aback by the escalating intensity of a dialectical method in which everything is constantly turning on itself in order to surge ahead again — all within a sentence or two: ‘Dialectical thought is an attempt to break through the coercion of logic by its own means. But since it must use these means, it is at every moment in danger of itself acquiring a coercive character.’ Every other line is a punch line. Or a counter-punch. Some are both: ‘It extrapolates in order, by the over-exertion of the too-much, to master, however hopelessly, the too-little.’ In the margins next to this sentence I’d scrawled an exclamation of approval—‘Phwah!’—even though I wasn’t sure what the opening ‘It’ referred to. As that ‘phwah’ indicates — more appropriate to a picture of the Korean model we’d seen tottering across the road by the Spitfire than to a work of philosophy — the appeal of the book was not simply cerebral. The women I hung out with back in the mid-1980s were all radical feminists. None would ever have worn high heels — they clomped around in DMs — and all were incensed by that ad campaign for lingerie, ‘Underneath They’re All Loveable,’ and we all would have agreed with Adorno’s claim that ‘Glorification of the feminine character implies the humiliation of all who bear it.’ Even now, when lots of the militant feminism from the 1980s seems pretty crazy, heels and make-up, which are intended to be a turn-on, do nothing for me. When we lived in London, before moving to California, we’d often go to parties where women were wearing heels, but Jessica was always wearing flats, partly because she’s tall, but mainly because we never travelled anywhere by taxi and always had to be ready to sprint for a bus or tube, even though Adorno, in a passage that seems both like a Hitchcock shooting script and the reaction of a member of the audience watching the film that was made from the script, claims that ‘Running in the street conveys an impression of terror. . Once people ran from dangers that were too desperate to turn and face, and someone running after a bus unwittingly bears witness to past terror. . Human dignity insisted on the right to walk, a rhythm not extorted from it by command or terror.’
Footwear-wise, I also liked what Adorno said about slippers, that we like being able to slip our feet into them, that they are ‘monuments to the hatred of bending down,’ even if this seems to apply only to those shiny Noël Coward — type slippers rather than the Chinese ones I wear (black canvas, white soles), which have to be tugged over the heel like any other shoe. There’s a lot of stuff like this in Minima Moralia, the kind of observations you might get in fiction, minus the time-consuming mechanics of plot and story. The description of a short-order cook in a place like Teddy’s Cafe, as ‘a juggler with fried-eggs’ is Nabokovian, though in addition to seeing the cook as a juggler Nabokov would probably have put a spin on the eggs too. I thought of this as I made a note in my notebook, and when I looked up at the house, the pilgrimage site, it seemed Swiss some-how, and for a moment I thought I’d come to the place where Nabokov lived, even though that was a hotel, the Montreux Palace, not a simple house.
We walked round the corner, onto the road that turned out to be the discreet continuation of Bundy. I stood in front of a sign—‘Not a Through Road’— and Jessica took a picture to send to our friend back in England who would have got the allusion to the book by Adorno’s friend Walter Benjamin. As I stood there, waiting for her to take the picture, I remembered how Klaus Mann had reacted to news of Benjamin’s suicide: ‘I could never stand him, but still. . ’ Right behind Adorno’s house was a modernist home with some kind of copper fronting, deep-blue walls and cactuses on a sloping desert garden by the driveway. Behind the modernist façade it looked like the original homely-looking home was still standing, still being lived in. The sky was as blue as can be, though it’s always risky saying that about the sky in L.A. The sky is routinely blue, then it gets bluer still and then goes on to achieve a bluer blue than ever seemed possible: a blue so intense that the earlier blue might as well have been a coloured shade of grey, which is how this day had begun. The knowledge that England was in the grips of a heat wave took the shine off our visit a bit. I had begun whitening my teeth, but the various fillings and crowns refused to whiten, so discoloured bits of old England were still apparent and in any case the teeth were all crooked — not like straight-down-the-line, born-and-bred American teeth, so white and shiny as to be semi-transparent, as if illuminated from within, something which might actually be possible a few years from now.
I knew, when I read it, that Minima Moralia was composed in the molten core of the century, as Germany was being laid waste by a war of its own making. I knew that it was a book about exile. I hadn’t realized how deeply and explicitly it was informed by the experience of being exiled in L.A. In a typical move, Adorno views the Californian obsession with health as a kind of sickness: ‘The very people who burst with proofs of exuberant vitality could easily be taken for prepared corpses, from whom the news of their not-quite-successful decease has been withheld for reasons of population policy.’ Adorno even seems, at one point, to have prophetically glimpsed the early decades of the twenty-first-century future, when everyone would be covered in tattoos: ‘their skin seems covered by a rash printed in regular patterns, like a camouflage of the inorganic.’ The reality has far outstripped his imaginings. A few days before coming to South Kenter, on the beach at Santa Monica, we saw an otherwise rather square-looking guy — polo shirt and shorts — with the muscles of one calf laid bare, red and entirely exposed. It was only a tattoo, but done so convincingly it looked as if he had been flayed. Was this just the beginning? Would he continue until his whole body was transformed in this way, rendering the internal external?