Adorno’s Path to Social Research 271reducing his own activities and confining them to giving lectures and
seminars within the Social Science Faculty of Columbia University.
Pollock played a waiting game. As always, he only gave his true opinion
in confidence to Horkheimer: ‘It is interesting to observe how our
colleagues behave. Marcuse is terrified that after five years he will
be running around like Günther Stern [i.e., Günther Anders] and so
wants to keep up the links with Columbia at all costs. Teddie has only
one interest: to become a small rentier in California as quickly as possible,
and he could not care less what happens to the others. Neumann...
underlines the importance of the link with Columbia. Only Löwenthal
... is totally loyal.’^149
Against his own wishes, Adorno had to stay in New York for the
time being. However much he may have longed for the West Coast and
the great theory project, he and Gretel looked forward to the move
with mixed feelings. After all, they had made themselves very much at
home in New York, and had a large circle of friends and a daily routine
that had become a habit, with fixed working periods in the institute,
writing at home in the apartment on Riverside Drive, and the regular
vacations in Bar Harbor. ‘It is more beautiful here than ever’, Adorno
wrote at the end of July 1941 to Horkheimer. ‘Because of the war and
the defence boom, there are only old people here still and we feel
very comfortable with them.’^150 The couple had become quite fond of
Central Park as well as the zoo in the Bronx. ‘The okapi’, he wrote to
Horkheimer, ‘is quite an experience.’ ‘With a snobbery that would fill
fifty pages in Proust, it nevertheless looks quite unassuming; it is housed
in the antelope house and hardly anyone comes to see it.’^151
One further source of pleasure in New York was the fact that Adorno’s
parents, who were now in their mid-seventies, had been living there
since early 1940, after brief sojourns in Cuba and Miami. The proximity
to their only son and his wife must have been a great comfort for them.
Their inevitable expectations were of course no secret. Adorno and
Gretel tried to look after them as much as possible, and where it wasn’t
they wrote to them, telling them about their lives and letting them share
their plans and intentions.
Apart from their personal ties on the Hudson, a further problem was
that the move to California seemed to drag on endlessly, and kept being
postponed from one month to the next, so that Adorno must have felt
that everything was in the balance. The situation did not become clear
until summer 1941, when the move was fixed for the end of the year. In
September he and Gretel gave up their apartment, put the furniture
into store and took a short let in a furnished studio (611 West 113th
Street). Now that the die was cast, the irritations that were connected
with the projected move all dissolved. Adorno told Horkheimer how
happy he was at their being reunited once again. ‘Oh, Max, everything
is settled now, and we shall manage everything together.’^152 In the same
breath he assured Horkheimer that he had made careful preparations