On the Internet I came across a picture of Adorno in a bathing suit, looking not so much puny as unformed, embryonic even. Since it was the Internet I worried that it was some cleverly photoshopped thing, but, whether genuine or not, it’s highly likely that Adorno looked like this. (Maybe he refused to exercise as a tacit protest against the Aryan ideal represented by all the perfectly formed athletes with 1930s haircuts in Olympia.) Evelyn Juers’s evocation, in House of Exile, of ‘members of the German colony. . standing like castaways in the shade of palm trees along the promenade’ is so persuasive you’d think someone like Volker Schlöndorff would have made a feature about them, starring Maximilian Schell or Bruno Ganz, with music by Schoenberg and a potential audience of about thirty people.
We stood in the shade and then walked back round to the front of the house. Nothing had changed in the brief time we’d been away: there were no cars in the drive, no indications of anyone having come or gone and no sign of any other pilgrims. I wondered if Perry Anderson, who teaches at UCLA, ever came up here, either alone or with his friend Fredric Jameson, whose book Marxism and Form (also bought from Compendium, on 17 May 1985) had been my introduction to Adorno and whose later book about Adorno, Late Marxism: Adorno, or The Persistence of the Dialectic (bought at a book sale in Iowa City for a dollar in 2012), I’d found completely unreadable, either because it was or because I was now more stupid than I had been thirty years earlier or, in a way that is not quite dialectical, neither (which might also mean both). For me Perry is the ultimate badge, the badge of badges, and I’m always on the lookout for him in L.A., had once joked to Jessica that I’d spotted him by the beach in Santa Monica, coming out of Perry’s Cafe, sporting a one-to-one-scale tattoo of a corduroy jacket, but he must be too busy to do frivolous things like going to the beach or even making a pilgrimage here, to the house where Adorno used to live. To that extent Perry is like Teddy, who, in his essay ‘Free Time,’ wrote about how he hated hobbies. ‘As far as my activities beyond the bounds of my recognized profession are concerned, I take them all, without exception, very seriously. So much so, that I should be horrified by the very idea that they had anything to do with hobbies.’ One of these activities was playing music. The photograph on the back of my copy of Minima Moralia shows Adorno, bald and a bit of a chubster in his big black glasses and pullover, presumably navigating the catastrophic difficulties of some piece of late Beethoven or Alban Berg, not improvising on the kind of jazz tune on which he’d famously poured scorn in a quite fantastically misguided essay in Prisms. As for ‘those who grill themselves brown in the sun merely for the sake of a sun-tan,’ well, ‘dozing in the blazing sunshine is not at all enjoyable, might very possibly be physically unpleasant, and certainly impoverishes the mind.’
Much of Adorno’s writing conforms to our vision of the intellectual in an environment and culture to which he was absolutely unsuited: ‘a stranded spiritual aristocrat,’ I read somewhere, ‘doomed to extinction by “the rising tide of democracy.”’ This is the Adorno who claimed that America had ‘produced nothing but automobiles and refrigerators,’ that ‘every visit to the cinema leaves me, against my vigilance, stupider and worse.’ (Every visit? Isn’t that a rather stupid thing to say? There must have been a few good films to see back then. I always feel better and less stupid after seeing Brief Encounter or The Maltese Falcon, the latter starring Peter Lorre, who, in the words of David Thomson, prowls through its shadows like the ‘spirit of ruined Europe.’) Terry Eagleton noticed the ‘bizarre blend of probing insight and patrician grousing’ in Minima Moralia; re-reading it on site, in L.A., I too was struck by the tone of self-blinding hauteur, as when he claims, ‘Technology is making gestures precise and brutal, and with them men.’ Self-closing doors impose ‘on those entering the bad manners of not looking behind’ and, as a consequence, of not holding doors open for others. This technologically driven corrosion of basic courtesies proceeds in tandem with the need to slam car and refrigerator doors, actions already imbued with ‘the violent, hard-hitting, unresting jerkiness of Fascist maltreatment.’ The reality, these days, is that everyone is always holding doors open for everyone else or thanking someone for doing so, all the time smiling beautifully with their Hegelian teeth, so that it seems like you’re living in the most courteous place on earth even if a lot of the people doing this door holding, thanking and smiling have a phone wedged between ear and shoulder and some of them are so blissed out on sun, yoga and Neville’s Haze that they’d forget everything about ‘Memento’ (the first section of part two of Minima Moralia) within five minutes of reading it. Schoenberg — a keen tennis player, pictured playing Ping-Pong in our book with the map in it — could talk of being ‘driven into paradise,’ but Adorno often depicted his own exile in melancholy or negative terms. ‘Every intellectual in emigration is, without exception, mutilated, and does well to acknowledge it to himself, if he wishes to avoid being cruelly apprised of it behind the tightly-closed doors of his self-esteem,’ he writes in Minima Moralia.
That, in a nutshell, is the orthodox or standardised impression. Other passages do not entirely negate this but enable us to see Adorno’s Californian experience in a more nuanced way. Soon after his arrival in L.A., Teddy had written to his mum and dad, ‘The beauty of the landscape is without comparison so that even a hard-boiled European like me is overwhelmed.’ I liked that use of ‘hard-boiled,’ as though he were a philosophical investigator in the mould of Sam Spade or Philip Marlowe who ends up sounding as enthusiastic as Reyner Banham: ‘The view from our new house lets me think of Fiesole. . But the most gorgeous are the intensive colours that you cannot describe. A drive along the ocean during the sunset is one of the most extraordinary impressions that my rather nonchalant eyes have ever seen. The southern architecture and limited advertising have created a kind of Kulturlandschaft [cultured landscape]: one has the impression that the world here is populated by some human-like creatures and not only by gasoline stations and hot dogs.’
These were early impressions. Later, in the foreword to Prisms, Adorno expressed ‘something of the gratitude that he cherishes for England and for the United States — the countries which enabled him to survive the era of persecution and to which he has ever since felt himself deeply bound.’ Noticing how democratic forms had ‘seeped into life itself,’ he was charmed, as European visitors always are, by the ‘inherent element of peaceableness, good naturedness and generosity’ in American daily life. And while he found much in L.A. that confirmed his suspicions about the worthlessness of life here he was, inevitably, changed by it. ‘It is scarcely an exaggeration to say that any contemporary consciousness that has not appropriated the American experience, even if in opposition, has something reactionary about it,’ he later decided.
But there was an element of confusion here too as he and Horkheimer mistook Los Angeles for a prophetic indicator—‘the most advanced point of observation,’ Horkheimer deemed it — of America as a whole. ‘The exiles thought they were encountering America in its purest, most prefigurative moment,’ writes Mike Davis in City of Quartz. Unaware of the peculiarities of southern-Californian history that made it exceptional rather than representative, they ‘saw Los Angeles as the crystal ball of capitalism’s future.’