White Sands Page 12
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.’
In Minima Moralia, Los Angeles is glimpsed frequently between the lines, as it were, even if this phantom L.A. bears little relation to the city of today. It’s not so much that Adorno says things that are untrue; it’s more that he is responding to a reality ‘that reality no longer tolerates.’ As with the stuff about self-closing doors, it suits Adorno’s view of the alienating effect of capitalism to discover, in a restaurant, that ‘the waiter no longer knows the menu,’ but it’s an observation that leaves the twenty-first-century reader with only one response: Are you fucking kidding me? The defining part of the waiter’s job involves reciting the day’s specials in such extreme detail that you have to be reminded of the first items the moment he or she has finished telling you about the last. Back in the days when all waiters were assumed to be aspiring actors it was as though this recitation was part of an endless audition, with the ironic twist that some who’d brought it to a pitch of perfection would actually be typecast—stuck in the role of waiter—for the rest of their working lives (an entirely different form of alienation, one akin to that described by Brecht in the first of his ‘Hollywood Elegies’).
Minima Moralia is not a portrait of L.A., but the city and its culture are there as the black backing that enables Adorno’s ‘reflections’ to function. In a way that is entirely appropriate for the author of Negative Dialectics, L.A. is turned into a kind of mirror image of itself, like a photographic negative where everything light is dark, white has turned black and so on. In fact, I realize now, this would be a cool cover for a new edition of Minima Moralia: a spectral view of a boulevard, palm-fringed and frosty, with a black sun freezing through the grey sky.
It’s appropriate as well because, notwithstanding that enthusiastic early letter to his parents, in the pages of Minima Moralia the one thing L.A. never seems to be is in colour. Adorno seems oblivious to the light of L.A., to the amazing blues, the contemporary blaze of colour. We—people in our late fifties or older—tend to remember the weather of our English childhoods as being much better than it was, because back in the 1950s and 1960s people only took pictures if there was ‘enough light’ and so the memory-shaping evidence of photography suggests a permanent light-and heat-wave that has long since receded. In southern California, by contrast, it takes an effort to recall that the beach always looked as it does now, that sky and sea were the same perfect blue when Adorno was here, in the black-and-white years of the Second World War, and before that even—in the 1920s, 1890s or a hundred years B.C.
Before we started going on our driving pilgrimages we would cycle along the bike path to Santa Monica. The bike path is clearly marked, but there are always lots of people walking or not even walking, just dawdling and stopping in the middle of the path to take pictures. Even some of the cyclists have no more idea how to ride a bike than if they’d rented a donkey for the afternoon, so although it’s one of the nicest bike paths in the world it’s also slightly irritating, since you have to ring your bell constantly to avoid the herds of iPod zombies and THC drongos—some of whom don’t even register that the bell is intended as a warning, like the slim girl in unignorable denim cut-offs who, smiling through a fog of narcotic bewilderment, responded, ‘What a pretty bell!’—but since one of the attractions of California is the relative absence of aggression, it’s not in anyone’s interests to start yelling, ‘Get out of the fucking bike path, arsehole!’ even if that is the thought going round and round your head like a bicycle wheel.
On Sunday afternoons, on a sma
ll area of grass near where the original Muscle Beach was located, people gather to do a version of acrobatics. A few are doing solo somersaults and cartwheels, but most are in pairs, practising a fusion of acrobatics and yoga called ‘acro’ or ‘acro adagio.’ One person, usually a man, provides a stable but constantly changing platform for the flyer—usually a woman—and together they move through a series of more or less complex routines. Often these moves will culminate with the flyer standing, smiling and staring straight ahead, held up above the man’s head. Sometimes the flyer balances on one foot—perhaps with the other leg bent up over her back—held aloft by one thickly muscled, slightly quivering arm. I’d seen pictures of this—Charles Atlas lookalikes holding up smiling blondes in swimsuits—from the forties and fifties and had assumed that it was all about the men, that the women were trophies or symbols of what was on display: i.e., the men’s strength. Either I’d got that wrong or what is being practised nowadays is different in several ways. The woman is not just held aloft; she plays an active part in the man’s being able to fling her into the air and sustain her weight. As much as strength it’s a matter of balance and cantilevered force, of using the weight of one part of the flyer’s body—its urge to succumb to gravity—to lighten another part. And whereas from photographs it seemed that the important thing was the climactic pose, it is the fluid succession of movements and rhythm that is spellbinding. Sometimes there is no stillness, just an endless succession of unfolding movements, a constant and subtle display of physical dialectics.
I wanted to know if this was indeed a recent development, and so when one of the flyers was taking a break I asked her if, back in the fifties, when a woman’s life consisted of looking nice and cooking dinners, it was much more of a strong-man-type thing, but she had no knowledge of the history of what was happening here and seemed to think that I was suggesting that the eternal role of women was to cook and smile, even if these days they are as heavily inked as the guys. Later, at home, I did a bit of research and saw, from the famous photographs taken by Frank J. Thomas, that women had indeed been active participants back in the 1950s (in some they’re actually airborne), but in the immediate aftermath of this bungled conversation, I felt awkward about asking anyone else about the history of acro, so I just sat and watched—still feeling awkward, because it might have seemed that I was only here to gawp at flexible, tattooed chicks in Lycra.
Given the partially clothed, physical intimacy of acro, a quite careful decorum is maintained throughout. There’s a lot of Californian hugging as participants greet each other, but both parties push their bottoms outwards to make sure there is no pelvic contact. And while everything being practised cries out to be incorporated into a sequence of erotic moves in the privacy of the bedroom—or on stage at some New Age equivalent of the Raymond Revuebar—the atmosphere is so politely chaste (in a relaxed and healthy way) that to mention or even notice its implied sexual potential is to coarsen what is unfolding before your eyes.
The acro-istas are all strong and supple, though the ratio of strength to suppleness subtly varies. Some are more skilled than others, and there are a number of people who have obviously been coming here for ages, who have the air not of being in charge exactly but who, if there were an election to see who should run the show, would win by an overwhelming and happy majority even if the idea of running anything is entirely anathema to the spirit of the place, which is marked by a quite wonderful inclusiveness. Anyone can join in, at any level, and everyone helps out everyone else, contributing advice and tips (a tiny adjustment, the angle of a foot or shoulder, makes the difference between stability and collapse). Often men team up together to practise things, though it always looks as if this is more difficult than a man-woman pairing. Sometimes kids will join in, their mums or dads holding them up in the air, and you can imagine when they are fifteen or sixteen the boys will be back here, because, obviously, it’s the most fantastic way to meet girls (who will have come back too), completely different to how things were for me in Cheltenham, when trying to meet girls meant going to a disco, drinking a gallon of beer, only speaking to your mates and getting punched in the face on the walk home—often by one of these mates—for reasons that were never entirely clear, though beer obviously played a part. On our second visit to acro, one of the regulars helped a girl of about eight to stand on his shoulders and do a little twirl. She wobbled, fell; he caught her, lowered her gently to the ground and asked if she would mind if they could please try that once more. It was impossible to imagine anything more charming, but the really great thing was the way that the mum sat there, happy to let this stranger, muscled like Conan the Barbarian, assume responsibility for her daughter’s safety and happiness.
Obviously, I can’t join in. I’m as strong and supple as a pane of thin glass, I’ve got too many ailments—left shoulder, left elbow and left wrist, in fact the whole of the left arm—and I’m too old, but if I’d been here ten years earlier I would have joined in. I used to be able to reach up to a horizontal bar, hang there for a few seconds and then flip myself up and over it so that I’d end up either supporting myself with the bar at my waist or continue on over, so that I’d be back where I started. It’s not just that I used to be able to execute this little manoeuvre; I was always looking for opportunities to do so, especially if there were women around. The last time I managed it was in Goa in 2008. If I tried a stunt like that now I’d end up in a heap, like Dick Diver on the speedboat at the end of my favourite summer book, Tender Is the Night. So, when we leave and unlock our bikes to cycle back home, even though the experience of watching acro is always uplifting, I often feel somewhat cast down because I can’t do stuff like this anymore. I start to think how terrible it is that life is passing by so quickly, and, almost simultaneously, to think that I’m not sure I have the patience to sit through the rest of what life, with its gradually accumulating haul of ailments, injuries and infirmities, has to offer, however glorious it might be to be cycling—I can still do that—along the maddening bike path back to Venice in the ageless light.*
I wonder if Adorno watched the goings-on at Muscle Beach, if he stood with the other intellectual expats, transfixed by what a beautiful thing—schöne Sache—he was seeing through the muscular lenses of his spectacles: fleeting instants in which we catch a glimpse of a unified world, of a universe in which discontinuous realities are nonetheless somehow implicated with each other and intertwined so that there is momentarily effected a kind of reconciliation between the realm of matter and that of spirit. That’s not me, of course; it’s Freddy Jameson’s gloss on a passage from Philosophy of Modern Music, the writing of which probably meant that Teddy spent little time gawping at Muscle Beach, that he left his study at 316 South Kenter only reluctantly.
We were ready to leave in the sense that there seemed nothing else to notice when we noticed, through the window, a figure moving in the house, or in 318 at any rate. Jessica said we should knock on the door and speak to whoever it was. As we were climbing the steps, anxious that knocking on the door was somewhat intrusive, the door was opened by a young woman. Late twenties, wearing a singlet and sweat pants. She looked like she was about to go to a yoga or Pilates class even though she was only taking out the trash. We said hi, apologised for turning up like this, but she greeted us as warmly as if we had been invited for tea—and had shown up half an hour early, when she was still getting things ready. We were interested in someone who once lived here, I said. Theodor Adorno.
‘The writer? The philosopher?’
‘Yes, yes,’ I said.
She put down the trash and asked us in. It was a large apartment, dense with furniture, not at all contemporary-looking.
‘Sorry, it’s a little messy,’ she said. ‘I’m cleaning.’ It looked spotless.
‘No, not at all. We apologise for disturbing you. So this is your place?’
‘I’m a tenant. The landlords are, um, challenging.’
‘In what way?’ In the way that Adorno was ch
allenging: the deliberately complex sentences, thought doubling back on itself and reaching forward, threatening to throttle the reader in an ever-tightening dialectical spiral? That was part of the attraction: the chance to prove that one was up to the challenge of reading Adorno, that one had earned the I’ve-read-Adorno badge in the way that a commando earns the green beret.
‘They don’t fix things.’
The door was still open; she forced it shut.
‘See? It’s little things like this, like the door not closing properly.’
‘And the real-estate person who rented it to you, did she sell it, in the sense of rent it, to you on the basis that Adorno lived here?’
‘No, she did not.’
‘And was it actually next door that he lived?’
‘I’ve lived here four years. I think there was a switch.’
She was not clear about when the house was divided in two. She thought maybe Adorno had divided it up, separating his living space from where he worked, but this seemed unlikely. That was the kind of home improvement Bert Lawrence might have undertaken, not Teddy Adorno. It was possible, she said, that the owners who lived next door at 316 might know more. We should knock on their door and ask them.
She tugged the faulty door open and picked up the trash, leaving us to look around. There was no sign of a lurking piano, no Adorno first editions or memorabilia. It was an unlikely place for a young woman to live on her own. I would have found it a bit depressing coming back here after a night out or even after a yoga class, knowing that whenever I wanted to go out again I’d have to clamber back into the waiting car, the second home that can end up being a first home. We stepped outside as she came back, thanked her for her time and help.