White Sands: Experiences from the Outside World

7

One of my mother’s three sisters, Hilda, was extremely beautiful. In what seems like a Thomas Hardy story relocated to Shropshire, she met a pupil from Shrewsbury School, the improbably named Charles Bacchus. She had been intending to go into domestic service but instead, after a courtship whose details I never learned, she married Charles and moved to London. She later separated from Charles Bacchus and began a long relationship with a self-made millionaire called Charles Brown, whom she always referred to, confusingly, as CB. They led a glamorous life. Once they drove down from London to Cheltenham in CB’s white Rolls-Royce, which they parked right outside our house like a temporary monument to wealth and several kinds of mobility. They were on the maiden voyage — or maiden cruise — of the QE2. Either as part of this cruise or on another trip, they went on a tour of the American Southwest. When I was in junior school Hilda sent me brochures and postcards from places like the Painted Desert, the Petrified Forest and Monument Valley. These were landscapes I had glimpsed in Westerns, but the fact that someone I knew had been to them — had proved that they were real — gave me my first sense of elsewhere: an elsewhere that seemed the opposite of everywhere and everything I knew.

Pilgrimage

I spent the first decade of the century telling anyone who would listen that I wanted to end my days in California. One of the people I said this to, in San Francisco, was quick to put me right: you don’t end your days in California, he said, you begin them. Jessica and I began our Californian life in January 2014, but it wasn’t quite the life I’d always wanted. I’d pictured us in northern California, in San Francisco, but because of Jessica’s work we wound up in southern California, in Los Angeles, in Venice Beach. Life there got off to an unexpected start — to put it mildly — and we’ll come back to that later, because just as stories sometimes start with endings (‘my last day in China. . ’) so beginnings can sometimes make for useful ends. Here I want to tell about our weekends, especially the Sundays when we went on little pilgrimages. It’s not a religious thing — we only do it on Sundays because there’s less traffic and it’s easier to get around — more like a hobby, something we do with our free time. And they’re not pilgrimages really, just outings in the same way that, as a boy, I used to go on drives with my mum and dad to Bourton-on-the-Water or Stow-on-the-Wold.

The first place we went to was 316 South Kenter Avenue in Brentwood. It was cloudy when we set off from Venice and drove past Santa Monica Airport, where aviation informs much of the surrounding development and design. There was the museum with the life-size nose of a FedEx plane protruding ludicrously from the front, and the Spitfire Grill with painted fighter planes and scrambling pilots climbing the sky-walls. People were sitting outside, eating and drinking, getting a few down them, as though they were in the suburbs of a town in Kent where developers had obtained permission for a programme of radical modernisation while incorporating heritage ideals of the few and their — our — finest hour. It was lunchtime, the sky was still overcast — undercast if you were aloft, scanning the burning blue for Messerschmitts or Heinkels.

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.’

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 co-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 small 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 challenging: 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.

‘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.