HORVATLAND - THE '50s - PHOTOJOURNALISM - ENGLANDGO TO HOME

1996, from my preface to Paris-London

My adaptability has always fallen flat in England. In Paris, only expert ears can occasionally pick up the occasional Italianism in the use of prepositions; in Frankfurt, people say I have a Viennese accent; in Milano, they make fun of my inability to roll the r’s, but put it down to my Triestine origins; in Madras, I almost manage to pass myself off as a Brahmin from Kashmere; and in New York, where everyone speaks any old how, the problem simply doesn’t arise. But in London I have only to open my mouth for the other person to start overarticulating the syllabes in reply, as if I had landed from another planet. In England I always feel, figuratively speaking, as if I’ve got one foot on the doorstep – but then, as I write, I wonder if the act of taking photographs does not always imply a distance. There are those that work closer to the subject, like Robert Capa, who used to say: ‘If your photo isn’t good enough, that’s because you didn’t get close enough!’ (but then, you can’t have photography, or any kind of vision, unless there is a hiatus between subject and object…) In London, however, I experienced this distance as a handicap. My accent was made up by a substratum formed by listening to my mothers reading, overlaid by a more recent sediment of Indian influences, which put it half-way between a Viennese psychoanalyst (which my mother had been) and a baboojee from Calcutta. But what really prevented me from feeling at home was the lack of a set of dreams and references of the sort that had travelled with me to Paris. I might have read all the plays by Shakespeare in the original (though of course a good deal of meaning escaped me), but I was so ignorant of the rest of English culture that the simplest allusion to a nursery rhyme was beyond my depth. I have never understood the rules of cricket, nor grasped the difference between Cheddar and Cheshire, jam and marmelade, dog and hound. In the evening, walking the streets of Soho, I was attracted by the friendly noise of the pubs and the bustle I glimpsed through the transparent words Private Bar, engraved in the frosted glass. But I barely had the courage to push open the door and glance inside before going back out unto the pavement. I felt that the landlord and his patrons whould have taken it as the height of indiscretion if I had ventured all the way up to the bar.