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  ‘I must find out more,’ she said. ‘How do you spell “Adorno” again?’

  I spelled it out and we said goodbye. There was no bell on the main door, the door to 316, so we had to rap on the wood assertively, like cops—‘Open up!’—come to check on German-speaking aliens. There was no answer. We had knocked hard, but it seemed possible that even if people were at home, sitting in a back room or upstairs, they might not have been able to hear us. This may have been deliberate, a response to having been disturbed too often in the past by unwanted pilgrims ringing the no-longer-there bell, asking about someone who no longer lived there.

  We walked back to the car while other cars zoomed noisily by. Like so many other places in L.A., this was a place people drove past in order to get to some other place. We were people like that, people who had to get to some other place. I said at the outset that our pilgrimage wasn’t really a pilgrimage, especially if a pilgrimage has to be an end in itself. You can’t tag on a visit to Mecca at the end of a tour of the fleshpots of the Orient, but we had arranged our trip to South Kenter so that we could have coffee with Antoine Wilson, who also lives in Brentwood. Antoine is a novelist with a sideline as ‘the Slow Paparazzo,’ photographing spots where movie stars have sat, stood or walked minutes after they’ve left. It may look like an empty street with cars and parking meters, but Laura Dern had been here a short while before. The Hungry Cat is not just a restaurant (with the exit sign in bright green neon), it’s where Ben Affleck and Jennifer Garner had just finished eating. Antoine works according to a tight set of rules. He can’t turn up after a friend has tipped him off about a sighting, he has to have been there and seen the celebrities himself. And he takes the picture within minutes of their having moved on.

  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.

  In the film Rambling Boy, Haden reminisces about how he’d travelled to L.A., hoping to find work as a jazz musician. At Tiny Naylor’s, an all-night drive-in restaurant and hang-out for musicians, he met Red Mitchell, who introduced him to pianist Hampton Hawes. This led, in turn, to his meeting—and playing with—Art Pepper. (A clue to what’s missed out from his life story in this invaluable if somewhat over-respectful documentary is obvious to anyone familiar with Raise Up Off Me and Straight Life, the respective autobiographies of Hawes and Pepper.)

  As he established himself in L.A. Haden started working with Paul Bley, whose band played at the Hillcrest. On a night off, at the Haig, he heard an alto player sitting in on a Gerry Mulligan gig, playing a solo so crazy he was promptly ordered off the stage. Haden was transfixed (‘the whole room lit up for me’), but the unwanted guest left too quickly for Haden to follow him out into the night. When he started asking around about this mysterious player, the drummer from Bley’s band, Lennie McBrowne, asked if the guy was playing a plastic saxophone. He was! So McBrowne brought the guy along to the Hillcrest and introduced him to Haden. His name was Ornette Coleman. After the gig, Haden went back to Ornette’s place, which was so littered with music that it was hard to open the door. They played all day and all the next night. A little later he met fellow aficionados Cherry and Higgins (who had been mentored by Coleman’s long-time collaborator Ed Blackwell). They began rehearsing Ornette’s music together, playing at the Hillcrest (with Bley on piano) in October 1958.

  So this white boy—born in Shenandoah, Iowa, raised in the Ozarks of Missouri—with country music in the marrow of his bones is suddenly at the frontier of the avant-garde. The following year the quartet will head east, to the Five Spot in New York, to unleash the shape of jazz to come. Haden will look up and see Charles Mingus, Percy Heath, Paul Chambers—the great bass players of the age—and decide that it’s best if he plays with his eyes shut, so that it’s just himself and the bass, himself and the music.

  Tiny Naylor’s, at the junction of Sunset and La Brea, was demolished in 1984. It’s now an El Pollo Loco. Where was Ornette’s apartment, the place he and Haden went to after their first meeting at the Hillcrest? There’s no mention of the address, either in Rambling Boy or in any of the books I’ve read about Ornette. (It is possible, on the other hand, to locate the place on Wilshire where Bullock’s department store used to be, where Ornette supported himself by working as an elevator operator.) On the front cover of In Angel City there’s a photo of the Hillcrest with a small sign advertising the Ornette Coleman Quartet. Not to be confused with the country club of the same name, the Hillcrest was on Washington Boulevard, a block east of La Brea. It’s not just that it’s no longer there. I was unable, from the information I had, to work out exactly where it used to be.

  The Ballad of Jimmy Garrison

  While Adorno was living in Los Angeles, did reports or rumours reach him about something that was happening over in the south-east of town, in Watts? That another émigré, an Italian, was building a demented trio of towers in his back yard?

  I saw the towers—or a picture of them at any rate— before I’d heard about them, before I knew what they were. They’re in the background of the photo on Don Cherry’s album Brown Rice: skeletal spires silhouetted against the twilight, with Cherry in the foreground, cradling his trumpet, wearing robes that seem not only pan-African but pan-astral. Taken together, the purple-blue sky, Cherry’s outfit and these skyrocket towers create the impression that this may have been the site from which Sun Ra would have chosen to blast off and return to Saturn. Cherry grew up near the towers after his family moved to Watts from Oklahoma. I’m guessing that he must have known Charles Mingus, who was born in 1922—making him fourteen years Cherry’s senior— before he started playing with Ornette, before Mingus came to see the Coleman Quartet at the Five Spot in New York in 1959 (keeping, I’m guessing again, a special eye on Charlie Haden, who also plays bass on Brown Rice). In his autobiography, Beneath the Underdog, Mingus remembers ‘something strange and mysterious’ being built near his home (‘what looked like three masts, all different heights, shaped like upside-down ice cream cones’) and how local rowdies would throw rocks at the crazy Italian guy who was doing this work.

  We drove over there, to Watts, on a cloudy Saturday. Instead of Brown Rice we were listening to ‘Upper Egypt & Lower Egypt,’ the long, slow-to-get-going, two-part song by Pharoah Sanders on Tauhid. Ten minutes of random percussion and bass and plonking around that never seems like getting anywhere. Then the bass initiates a surge that is picked up by drums, electric piano and guitar in preparation for the entry of the sax—which still doesn’t happen, which seems imminent long before Pharoah, after further waiting, eventually comes blazing through like a comet in daylight. You’ve been expecting it for ages and it still feels like it comes out of nowhere. Pharoah started as an R ’n’ B player, and you can feel him plugging back into that before he’s crying and screaming, crying like a baby who knows that’s the only way he’ll ever get fed, that the cry can feast on itself.

  ‘There they are!’ I called out as soon as I saw the towers.

  ‘Well, where else would they be?’ said Jessica.

  ‘What I meant was, we have arrived at the place where they are.’

  We parked. We were always parking, either parking or driving around looking for a parking place or easing out of a parking space or getting our parking ticket validated, never confident about the procedure, worried that we had parked in some place that looked like a parking space but wasn’t. Often the mere fact that a parking space was available suggested that it was not a parking space: if it had been a parking space it would already have been taken and would not have existed.

  The Watts Towers looked, at first, a little smaller than anticipated. Not in height—the three main ones were tall, elegant, vying with each other for altitude—but in the way they were clustered together, hemmed in. More space between them would have made them airier, less solid-looking. The cramping, I saw as soon as we got out of the car, was the product of the six-foot metal fence around the perimeter of the site. Instead of starting at ground level the towers began, visually, six feet from the ground, over the top of the fence. Aesthetically the trick was to keep people out while allowing the sky in; like this the balance—in a place that was partly a celebration of balance—had tipped away from aesthetics towards security. Maybe the weather had played a part; unusually, the sky itself was hemmed in by a band of cloud.

  We walked around the perimeter, seeing for the first time the intricacy of the structures, the abundance of decoration and ornamentation. From the Brown Rice photo the towers seemed made austerely of metal, but each spar, strand and tendril was covered with concrete, adorned with glinting coloured crockery, green and blue glass, bits of tiles.

  The only way to get in among the towers is on a guided tour. We bought tickets at the Vi
sitors’ Center—appropriately homey rather than fully corporate. The tickets, pinky purple, were like the ones you used to get at cinemas; the guy handing them over was wearing a large black T-shirt that was just about big enough for him. We showed him the Cherry album cover on Jessica’s phone.

  ‘Oh man, that’s deep,’ he said. He liked the picture so much he showed it to a colleague, handed the phone back and said again how deep it was. I’d never heard the word ‘deep’ used in this way before. Was it an old expression that had fallen out of use or a new one that I’d not come across, something specifically African American that had not yet crossed over into general usage? I liked it but couldn’t imagine myself ever saying it without sounding sceptical or ironic. Adorno was deep, obviously, but if I said he was deep it would sound like a shallow response or, worse, like I was parodying a shallow response to show the depth of my own understanding.

  We had ten minutes to wait before our tour began, so we went next door, to the Mingus Youth Arts Center. I loved the way this place was named after Mingus, the honouring and the legacy. How many times, in London, had I cycled, walked or taken the bus along Brixton Road, past Max Roach Park? How cool that someone had the gumption to name it after the great drummer rather than one of the English poets: Tennyson Place, Keats Street, Shelley Way—reliable signs, always, that you are entering the world of hard-to-lets and potential threat. Not that Roach’s name made crossing the park to visit a friend who lived in the flats behind it appreciably nicer. Nothing ever happened, but it was always a relief to get to his place, to hear the multiple locks being turned, to see the door opening and then being shut securely behind us again so that we could give ourselves entirely to ‘Speak, Brother, Speak’ or ‘Money Jungle.’