274 Part III: Emigration Yearsgranted, and the view from there reminded them of Fiesole near
Florence. A few weeks after they had moved in, their own furniture
arrived, and scarcely had they settled in early in 1942 than they received
their first invitations – from Salka Viertel and from the Dieterles. They
also met Brecht, Schoenberg and Max Reinhardt.^2 Not only did Adorno
find himself accepted into the network of Hollywood society, his material
circumstances were also assured thanks to the monthly payments from
the Hermann-Weil-Stiftung, so that, financially speaking, he could lead
a relatively untroubled life. For his activities at the institute, he drew an
annual salary of approximately $3400, which was roughly equivalent to
the salary of a professor at an American university at the time. He also
received a contribution of $150 towards the cost of the move from
New York to Los Angeles. Since Oscar Wiesengrund had been able to
salvage at least a portion of his not inconsiderable wealth, Adorno did
not have to contribute to the support of his parents in New York.
Now that the long-planned and greatly longed-for collaboration
between Horkheimer and Adorno could become reality, both could
point to a considerable quantity of preliminary work. This included the
records of their discussions in New York in 1939 and Horkheimer’s
essays. Adorno’s contribution amounted to his provisional ‘Notes
towards a New Anthropology’,^3 as well as two essays, one a criticism
of Oswald Spengler’s two-volume book The Decline of the West, or
rather the underlying world-view, with its cultural pessimism and its
traditionalist view of history and its nature and goals; the other, a
discussion of Thorsten Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class.^4 In that
book Veblen depicted the conspicuous consumption of the upper
class as the expression of its members’ exaggerated search for prestige.
Adorno decoded Veblen’s social critique as a verdict inspired by a
cast of mind dominated by the puritan work ethic. It was ineffectual
because it went no further than denouncing the external aspect of the
consumption of luxury goods. Adorno emphasized his view with an
argument that was typical of his way of thinking: ‘As the reflection
of truth, appearances are dialectical; to reject all appearance is to fall
completely under its sway, since truth is abandoned with the rubble
without which it cannot appear.’^5
A very different manuscript had a far greater importance for Adorno
than these reflections, partly published and partly only sketched out.
On his arrival in Los Angeles this manuscript was already complete and
typed out in his suitcase. Horkheimer had already read it. This was
the draft of his Philosophy of Modern Music, which Adorno explicitly
thought of as a kind of preparation for the joint project that would
occupy his whole attention over the coming months. In this text, which
was written between 1940 and 1941, the composer Adorno criticized
the regimenting tendencies of orthodox twelve-tone music. At the same
time, he discussed some of the central categories of music theory, such
as time, form, material, construction, technique and expression. When