272 Part III: Emigration Years
for the philosophical labour that awaited them. Thus he had been reading
Geoffrey Gorer’s new book on the Marquis de Sade,^153 and this had
made it clear to him once again that anti-Semitism could be a ‘crystalliza-
tion point’ for the future book. The same letter, on 10 November 1941,
contains the first mention of the actual title of the joint work: Dialectic
of Enlightenment.^154 In his joy about the imminent collaboration, Adorno
went so far as to write an ‘alphabet in verse’, evidently inspired by
reading about the Marquis de Sade, with which he hoped to surprise his
friend. ‘Sodomy comes from need in bed / Sadism makes the cheeks
glow red.’^155
Despite his exuberant high spirits, Adorno did have reservations on
one point. Would he not be forced into inferior living conditions in Los
Angeles, and would this prevent him from continuing with a life and
way of working that had now become a habit? ‘You know’, he observed
in a letter of August 1941, ‘how far we are from craving any particular
status, but precisely because of that I believe that the protection given
by a certain bourgeois solidity cannot be overestimated.’ He ended the
letter with the question: ‘When will we be able to sit in the garden
together, dictating, etching, “lammergeiering” together? Soon!’^156 And
that is how things turned out. By the middle of November, Adorno and
his wife had arrived in Los Angeles.