White Sands Read online

  Just past the Spitfire a Korean girl, model-ishly skinny, tottered across the road in three-inch heels. A cop, not skinny at all, was leaning against his cop car, drinking Sunday coffee. I was expecting him to watch her cross the road from behind his shades, to lick coffee from his lips or wipe his mouth with the back of his hand; if he had done so I was ready to exchange an appreciative and knowing smile with him, but he didn’t pay her—or us— any mind.

  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!’

  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?

  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.’