Adorno

Debates with Benjamin, Sohn-Rethel and Kracauer 235

being offered a half-post on a reduced salary. This compromise solution
was to finance his position on a fifty-fifty basis from the Princeton radio
project and the institute’s own funds. This in turn was connected with
the acute money problems of the institute. Fritz Pollock had invested a
part of the institute’s capital in the stock market and now, in autumn
1937, found himself forced to sell, incurring serious losses.^102 Horkheimer
had not told Adorno about this difficult situation, one which threatened
to undermine the institute, until after the latter’s wedding: ‘Incidentally,
you should pray to all the saints that the New York stock market will
rise again!’^103
Against this background, Horkheimer must obviously have been
eager to seize the opportunity for long-term cooperation with a different
research outfit. Only in that way could he bring Adorno to New York
with a good conscience and tie him down contractually without the
institute’s having to bear the costs of a full position itself. It was agreed
that for the first two years the Princeton research group would pay
for Adorno.
A few days after Adorno had received Horkheimer’s telegram
he cabled his agreement in principle back to America and took the
opportunity to mention a number of practical difficulties, chief among
which was the fact that they had just signed a rental contract for a flat
(in 70 Holland Park). Furthermore, they were expecting their furniture,
which was being sent over from Germany. In the following letter –
addressed to ‘Dear Max’, a familiar form of address that had been
established at the time of the wedding – Adorno acted as if nothing new
had happened, and as if this opportunity to live and work in the USA
did not exist. He was concentrating on his work on Husserl and
Horkheimer’s fundamental criticism of his essay on phenomenology
to the exclusion of all else. In this sense, this letter is an eloquent
testimony to what concerned Adorno most deeply: his own scholarly
work. Despite urgent questions about his own life and his future, it was
his work that stood at the centre of his being. Hence he explained in
detail to Horkheimer how he intended to revise his essay ‘On Husserl’s
Philosophy’ – a piece of work of which he remarked: ‘I have never been
quite so concerned about the fate of one of my writings as I am in this
case.’^104 In a letter that almost amounted to a rewriting of his essay
in itself, he listed the reasons for dismissing Horkheimer’s criticism. His
concern was not ‘to replace the thesis of the primacy of consciousness
with the primacy of being, but to show, first, that the search for an
absolute first principle, even it were being itself, necessarily has idealist
consequences, i.e., leads back in the last analysis to consciousness. And
to show, second, that a philosophy that actually draws these idealist
conclusions necessarily becomes entangled in such contradictions
that the initial formulation of the question must be seen to be false.’^105
Even if this letter conveys the impression that Adorno was exclusively
preoccupied with advancing his work on Husserl and preparing it