But what if you get to places more than sixty years after the philosopher-stars have left, after Adorno and Horkheimer returned to Germany in 1949? Is a place still touched by the same kind of magic that Antoine records and creates? And isn’t that magic enhanced by the way that there is no blue plaque in commemoration, that most of the people driving along South Kenter have no idea that someone called Adorno lived here — or who this Adorno was or how his name is spelled?
A few weeks prior to our pilgrimage to South Kenter Avenue I’d met an actor called Norman Lloyd at a party. He was ninety-nine, had not only played tennis with Charlie Chaplin, but still played tennis. I called him up the day before coming here and asked if he’d ever met Adorno. He hadn’t, it turned out.
‘Though I knew Brecht rather well,’ he said. It would have been nice to establish a living connection with Adorno, but perhaps just knowing who he was, that he had lived here, was sufficient to. . To what? To make us conscious that if we had stood here seventy years earlier, when Norman was in his twenties, we might have seen Adorno coming out of the door, could have walked up and asked for his autograph or persuaded him to invite us in.
That’s pretty much what happened when, on a Sunday afternoon in 1947, the fourteen-year-old Susan Sontag turned up at Thomas Mann’s house at 1550 San Remo Drive in Pacific Palisades. Sontag’s friend Merrill had looked up Mann’s number in the phone book, called up unannounced and — to Susan’s mortification— secured an invitation for tea. The young Sontag loved The Magic Mountain, one of those books I wish I’d read when I was in my teens, when I had more patience, instead of in my early fifties, when I found it cosmically boring before it finally became great — even if it never stopped being boring, even right at the end, when my sense of its greatness was undoubtedly informed by the knowledge that I’d soon be done with it. People say that Mann can be funny but this seems hard to credit, even if he first envisaged The Magic Mountain as ‘a humoristic complement’ to Death in Venice and later thought of it as ‘English humoristic expansive.’ If Sontag found Mann humouristic, then that might well prove that he wasn’t, since her obsession with seriousness led her to eliminate any slight natural tendency she might once have had in that direction. I worry that if I quote David Sedaris people might think that I’m not serious, but he is correct when he writes that serious is not the opposite of funny; the opposite of funny is not funny. I’m always on the brink of saying or thinking that anyone without a sense of humour is stupid, and at some level I believe this, even though it’s a stupid thing to say or think, since Sontag, though not humouristic, was very clever, something that was already obvious — to her — by the time she had tea with Mann in 1947.
Sontag wrote about this visit years later in ‘Pilgrimage,’ a piece of not-even-disguised ‘fiction’ published forty years after the fact in The New Yorker, in 1987. It’s the nearest she ever got to writing something funny. Already ‘a zealot of seriousness’ at the time of the visit (‘Listen, that’s not funny,’ she scolds Merrill when he tells her he’s phoned the Mann household), even Sontag is taken aback by Mann’s stupendous seriousness and glacial grandeur. ‘I wouldn’t have minded if he had talked like a book. I wanted him to talk like a book. What I was obscurely starting to mind was that (as I couldn’t have put it then) he talked like a book review.’
Why ‘Pilgrimage’ was published as fiction is hard to say — perhaps because the events described took place so long ago they could no longer be fact-checked? Or is it in fact, despite its apparent reliability, fictive in some now unverifiable way, a work of art as defined by Adorno in his second-best-known aphorism: ‘magic delivered from the lie of being truth’?
Either way, if, when all is said and done, we were sort of pilgrims at the Adorno house, then this piece of fairly reliable non-fiction is a sort of homage to Sontag’s ‘Pilgrimage,’ even if I only became aware of its existence after we had made our pilgrimage to the Adorno house. What starts out as one thing can become something else even if nothing in it changes. Conversely, 316 South Kenter remains what it was — Adorno’s house — even though it no longer is.
*In The Story of a Novel, his account of the composition of Doctor Faustus, Mann explains how, while reading the manuscript of Adorno’s Philosophy of Modern Music, he ‘rediscovered as a long familiar element in myself, a mental alacrity for appropriating what I felt to be my own, what I felt belonged to me.’ The fulsome tribute to Adorno in The Story of a Novel also includes a lengthy quotation from a ten-page letter in which Mann apologised as best he could for his ‘“scrupulously unscrupulous” borrowings from his philosophy of music.’ A few pages later he admits to running a few musical ideas by Schoenberg ‘behind Adorno’s back, so to speak.’ In July 1948, Mann asked Adorno to furnish him with a few details and dates about his life so that he could make sure he’d got everything correct in The Story of a Novel. Adorno replied in tones so respectful as to be almost fawning about his anticipated ‘ascent to immortality by the back door.’ Four months later Mann wrote to his daughter Erika, ‘I have made too much of my indebtedness to Adorno.’
*Pathetic and vain even to mention this, but the truth is that I am still able to perform this impressive, semi-gymnastic manoeuvre. A further injury — a broken toe — meant that I couldn’t play tennis for six weeks, so that my troublesome left shoulder and elbow got a well-deserved rest. Fearing a complete collapse of fitness during this time, I submitted to the strength-building physio regime I’d previously baulked at and, as a result, was able to execute a somewhat flailing version of the flip on the bar. I have since refined my technique and am once again on the look-out for opportunities to demonstrate it.
8
I was back in London on the day it was announced that Charlie Haden had died in Los Angeles, the city I had just come from. As a tribute, I made a sign (reminiscent, I hoped, of the banner on the cover of the first album by his Liberation Music Orchestra) and fixed it to a window in the front of our flat:
RIP CHARLIE HADEN 1937–2014
I propped the stereo speakers in the open window too, facing outwards, filling the street with music. Anxious that what was intended as a tribute might be perceived as a civic nuisance, I kept it to three tracks: ‘Lonely Woman’ from The Shape of Jazz to Come, with Haden’s mournful, melodic bass intro and the country-boy whoop of delight as Coleman cries out the first blues-drenched solo. Then ‘Ramblin’’ (from Change of the Century) with the down-home, country-sounding solo, which is really a duet with drummer Billy Higgins, who keeps the whole thing kicking and tickling along. The last track was ‘Taney County’ from the first of the Quartet West albums, a shit-kicking and elegiac medley for solo bass: as light-footed as a teenage girl, as old and wise as her grandma — and as vast as the Missouri sky. In the course of the eight-minute solo Haden quotes from the ‘Ramblin’’ solo, which takes us back by looking forward to the next Quartet West album, In Angel City. That record came out in 1988 but the picture on the back is from thirty years earlier, when Haden was twenty-one. He’s squinting in the sunlight, bare-chested, not exactly athletic-looking, with a Marine haircut and his arms around his bass. The photo has been cropped so we don’t know who was with him or what was in the background. What we do know is that the future only sounded as it did because Haden’s bass dug so deeply into the soil and soul of the American heartland.