240 Part III: Emigration Years
These were the ideas with which he had travelled to San Remo for the
new year to relax with Gretel and Benjamin. His intention to write a
book about Wagner was long since settled. And so, while Benjamin was
working away at his study of Baudelaire, Adorno was attempting to
give his essay on Wagner a sharper focus.
The return journey from the Italian Riviera took Adorno and Gretel
to Brussels, where they said goodbye to his parents. His father was just
coming up for his sixty-eighth birthday, while his mother had celebrated
her seventieth in September two years previously.
Back in London, Adorno began to prepare himself for his future life
and work in New York, while impatiently waiting for their departure.
He used what time there was left to bring his different pieces of work to
a conclusion, as far as this was possible. In addition, he gave a lecture
on ‘The Sociology of Art’ at the London Institute of Sociology.^127 This
did not deter him from indulging his sense of bizarre fantasy, as can be
seen from his letter to Horkheimer:
The rhinoceros king Archibald has a golden crown with a fat
pearl and golden layers of skin over his eyes, but stands aloof
from active government. He is having an affair with the giraffe
‘Gazelle’, occasionally wears a silk-grey pair of pyjama trousers,
and has published a pamphlet, the pan-humanist manifesto. It has
appeared in the publishing house of the united jackals and hyenas.
For years he has been working on his magnum opus. It is called
‘The Rhinoceros Whip’, and is the theoretical groundwork of a
human society that includes the animals. In his youth his curly
tail was bitten off by his girl-friend at the time, the crocodile
Babykroko.^128Horkheimer had no wish to spoil his friend’s good humour, but he did
not leave him entirely to his dreams. He warned him that the initial
period in New York would be bound to have its difficulties. He would
not be able to work in the institute right from the start since there were
no free rooms there. Adorno would have to establish himself by his own
efforts as an ‘independent theoretician’ in academic circles in America.
But that was enough cold water. After all, Adorno was not supposed to
go to America with the feeling that he was embarking on an uncertain
future. ‘I am quite convinced’, he concluded his letter, ‘that you will find
opportunity in America to live in a grand bourgeois manner.’^129 This
statement tells us not only about Horkheimer, but also about Adorno’s
wish to live a bourgeois lifestyle, sustained by the expectation, which he
rather took for granted, that he would be able to live the life of an anti-
bourgeois intellectual on a foundation of material security.
Scarcely four weeks after their return from Italy, on 16 February
1938, the Adornos sailed to New York on the Champlain. While they
were by no means tormented by the thought that they would be unable