Harry Hooton
Encyclopedia
Henry Arthur Hooton (9 October 1908— 27 June 1961) of Sydney
was an Australia
n poet and social commentator whose writing spanned the years 1930s-1961. He was described by a biographer as ahead of his time, or rather "of his time while the majority of progressive artists and thinkers in Australia lagged far behind". Initially a socialist and "Wobbly", he later professed anarchism and became an associate of the Sydney Push
during the 1940s, with connections to many other Australian writers, film makers and artists. Hooton's constant attitude and literary style was extravagant, provocative and explicitly outrageous,.
, Yorkshire
, England
His father was Levi Hooton, a railway shunter, and his mother's maiden name was Margaret Lester-Glaister. He had an older brother, Frank.
At the age of 16 he arrived in Sydney on 28 October 1924, on the ship Demosthenes as part of an Empire scheme, the Dreadnought Trust, with fifty-nine other boys. After humping his swag around much of New South Wales
and Queensland
through the Great Depression
, in 1936, just as his first pieces of writing were being published, Hooton was introduced to the poet Marie E. J. Pitt living in Melbourne
and carried on a correspondence with her for the next eight years.
In 1943 Hooton met the authors Nettie Palmer and Miles Franklin
while they were travelling through Newcastle
. Through Miles Franklin he was introduced to the writings of Carl Sandburg
and the American literary scene. Moving to Sydney in 1943 Hooton submitted a book of poems titled Leave Yourself Alone to a publisher without success. Later he self-published Things You See When You Haven't Got A Gun. In a new magazine, untitled, unpretentious and called simply No. 1., the poetry of Hooton, A. D. Hope
, and Gary Lyle was featured. Hooton and Hope also featured in No. 2.
Hooton's Things You See When You Haven't Got A Gun was reviewed by Max Harris in one line in the Ern Malley
issue of Angry Penguins
, 'Our anarchist bull careers madly through his intellectual fog.'
, Hooton was drawn to the intellectual circles of Sydney University, the Sydney Push
and the wider artistic society of the Lincoln coffee lounge, described by Richard Appleton
as the "Mecca of the Australian arts", and the Tudor Hotel. Appleton and others have noted Hooton's opposition to the generally favoured realist philosophy of Professor John Anderson
and its activist offshoot, the Libertarian Society.
) and with more purist
ic poets such as Lex Banning
, James McAuley
and A.D. Hope.
Yet his presence was compelling and characteristically welcomed by those who would otherwise be in disagreement. Many years later, Germaine Greer
noted his influence on her:
While Hooton was living a very bohemian life in Sydney, he was connecting with literary people in Japan, India, Greece, South Africa, England, France, New Zealand, and the USA. Hooton had corresponded with counter-culture figures in California
, and with Tuli Kupferberg
who would later form the rock group The Fugs
. He contributed to many periodicals and journals in addition to those he brought out himself. "He has published not only in Australia but in London
, San Francisco, Chicago
, New York
, etc, and has had some material translated into Greek. He is far better known overseas than he is here".
Hooton never completed his philosophical treatise, titled Militant Materialism
, although he did complete six of its eight chapters. His ideas were magically simple. Leave man alone, man is perfect. Concentrate instead on matter. He formulated what he called Anarcho - Technocracy : 'The Politics of Things'.
Hooton saw proof copies of the last book published during his lifetime, It Is Great To Be Alive, published by Margaret Elliott (Margaret Fink
), just before he died of cancer in 1961.
An 83-minute experimental film, Harry Hooton - Outsider Poet was made by Arthur and Corinne Cantrill in 1969. In the soundtrack, Hooton outlines his social philosophy in a series of recordings made shortly before his death in 1961.
Sydney
Sydney is the most populous city in Australia and the state capital of New South Wales. Sydney is located on Australia's south-east coast of the Tasman Sea. As of June 2010, the greater metropolitan area had an approximate population of 4.6 million people...
was an Australia
Australia
Australia , officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a country in the Southern Hemisphere comprising the mainland of the Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous smaller islands in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. It is the world's sixth-largest country by total area...
n poet and social commentator whose writing spanned the years 1930s-1961. He was described by a biographer as ahead of his time, or rather "of his time while the majority of progressive artists and thinkers in Australia lagged far behind". Initially a socialist and "Wobbly", he later professed anarchism and became an associate of the Sydney Push
Sydney Push
The Sydney Push was a predominantly left-wing intellectual sub-culture in Sydney from the late 1940s to the early '70s. Well known associates of the Push include Jim Baker, John Flaus, Harry Hooton, Margaret Fink, Sasha Soldatow, Lex Banning, Eva Cox, Richard Appleton, Paddy McGuinness, David...
during the 1940s, with connections to many other Australian writers, film makers and artists. Hooton's constant attitude and literary style was extravagant, provocative and explicitly outrageous,.
Early life
Hooton was born in DoncasterDoncaster
Doncaster is a town in South Yorkshire, England, and the principal settlement of the Metropolitan Borough of Doncaster. The town is about from Sheffield and is popularly referred to as "Donny"...
, Yorkshire
Yorkshire
Yorkshire is a historic county of northern England and the largest in the United Kingdom. Because of its great size in comparison to other English counties, functions have been increasingly undertaken over time by its subdivisions, which have also been subject to periodic reform...
, England
England
England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...
His father was Levi Hooton, a railway shunter, and his mother's maiden name was Margaret Lester-Glaister. He had an older brother, Frank.
At the age of 16 he arrived in Sydney on 28 October 1924, on the ship Demosthenes as part of an Empire scheme, the Dreadnought Trust, with fifty-nine other boys. After humping his swag around much of New South Wales
New South Wales
New South Wales is a state of :Australia, located in the east of the country. It is bordered by Queensland, Victoria and South Australia to the north, south and west respectively. To the east, the state is bordered by the Tasman Sea, which forms part of the Pacific Ocean. New South Wales...
and Queensland
Queensland
Queensland is a state of Australia, occupying the north-eastern section of the mainland continent. It is bordered by the Northern Territory, South Australia and New South Wales to the west, south-west and south respectively. To the east, Queensland is bordered by the Coral Sea and Pacific Ocean...
through the Great Depression
Great Depression
The Great Depression was a severe worldwide economic depression in the decade preceding World War II. The timing of the Great Depression varied across nations, but in most countries it started in about 1929 and lasted until the late 1930s or early 1940s...
, in 1936, just as his first pieces of writing were being published, Hooton was introduced to the poet Marie E. J. Pitt living in Melbourne
Melbourne
Melbourne is the capital and most populous city in the state of Victoria, and the second most populous city in Australia. The Melbourne City Centre is the hub of the greater metropolitan area and the Census statistical division—of which "Melbourne" is the common name. As of June 2009, the greater...
and carried on a correspondence with her for the next eight years.
Literary development
Hooton's first book of poetry, These Poets, appeared in 1941, published at his own expense in a small print run of up to 400 copies, most of which Hooton either gave away or swapped. It struck a chord with readers, receiving much critical acclaim.In 1943 Hooton met the authors Nettie Palmer and Miles Franklin
Miles Franklin
Stella Maria Sarah Miles Franklin, known as Miles Franklin was an Australian writer and feminist who is best known for her novel My Brilliant Career, published in 1901...
while they were travelling through Newcastle
Newcastle, New South Wales
The Newcastle metropolitan area is the second most populated area in the Australian state of New South Wales and includes most of the Newcastle and Lake Macquarie Local Government Areas...
. Through Miles Franklin he was introduced to the writings of Carl Sandburg
Carl Sandburg
Carl Sandburg was an American writer and editor, best known for his poetry. He won three Pulitzer Prizes, two for his poetry and another for a biography of Abraham Lincoln. H. L. Mencken called Carl Sandburg "indubitably an American in every pulse-beat."-Biography:Sandburg was born in Galesburg,...
and the American literary scene. Moving to Sydney in 1943 Hooton submitted a book of poems titled Leave Yourself Alone to a publisher without success. Later he self-published Things You See When You Haven't Got A Gun. In a new magazine, untitled, unpretentious and called simply No. 1., the poetry of Hooton, A. D. Hope
A. D. Hope
Alec Derwent Hope AC OBE was an Australian poet and essayist known for his satirical slant. He was also a critic, teacher and academic.-Life:...
, and Gary Lyle was featured. Hooton and Hope also featured in No. 2.
Hooton's Things You See When You Haven't Got A Gun was reviewed by Max Harris in one line in the Ern Malley
Ern Malley
Ernest Lalor "Ern" Malley was a fictitious poet and the central figure in Australia's most celebrated literary hoax. The poet, and his entire body of work, were created in one day in 1944 by writers James McAuley and Harold Stewart as a hoax on Max Harris, Angry Penguins, the modernist magazine he...
issue of Angry Penguins
Angry Penguins
Angry Penguins was an Australian literary and artistic avant-garde movement of the 1940s. The movement was stimulated by a modernist magazine of the same name published by the surrealist poet Max Harris, who founded the magazine in 1940, at the age of 18....
, 'Our anarchist bull careers madly through his intellectual fog.'
"Sydney Push" milieu
In Sydney after World War IIWorld War II
World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
, Hooton was drawn to the intellectual circles of Sydney University, the Sydney Push
Sydney Push
The Sydney Push was a predominantly left-wing intellectual sub-culture in Sydney from the late 1940s to the early '70s. Well known associates of the Push include Jim Baker, John Flaus, Harry Hooton, Margaret Fink, Sasha Soldatow, Lex Banning, Eva Cox, Richard Appleton, Paddy McGuinness, David...
and the wider artistic society of the Lincoln coffee lounge, described by Richard Appleton
Richard Appleton
Richard Appleton was an Australian poet, raconteur and editor who became editor-in-chief of the Australian Encyclopaedia and, in 1987, was co-editor with Alex Galloway of the posthumous Lex Banning poetry collection There Was a Crooked Man...
as the "Mecca of the Australian arts", and the Tudor Hotel. Appleton and others have noted Hooton's opposition to the generally favoured realist philosophy of Professor John Anderson
John Anderson (philosopher)
John Anderson was a Scottish-born Australian philosopher who occupied the post of Challis Professor of Philosophy at Sydney University in the years 1927-1958. He founded the empirical brand of philosophy known as Australian realism...
and its activist offshoot, the Libertarian Society.
When Anderson's realist philosophy held intellectual sway at Sydney University, Hooton attacked vehemently philosophy and universities (he claimed sometimes that Anderson was his main enemy, although he defended Anderson when he thought he was being wrongly attacked). To a literary world influenced by people such as JoyceAppleton explained: "Hooton held that polemic was an art form and that all poetry should be didactic", an obtuse view which, coupled with his paradoxical debating style, brought Hooton into conflict with Libertarians (who especially revered Joyce's UlyssesJames JoyceJames Augustine Aloysius Joyce was an Irish novelist and poet, considered to be one of the most influential writers in the modernist avant-garde of the early 20th century...
, YeatsWilliam Butler YeatsWilliam Butler Yeats was an Irish poet and playwright, and one of the foremost figures of 20th century literature. A pillar of both the Irish and British literary establishments, in his later years he served as an Irish Senator for two terms...
, PoundEzra PoundEzra Weston Loomis Pound was an American expatriate poet and critic and a major figure in the early modernist movement in poetry...
and EliotT. S. EliotThomas Stearns "T. S." Eliot OM was a playwright, literary critic, and arguably the most important English-language poet of the 20th century. Although he was born an American he moved to the United Kingdom in 1914 and was naturalised as a British subject in 1927 at age 39.The poem that made his...
, Hooton decried them as anti-artists, philistines and charlatans. He admitted only a few people as poets, including WhitmanWalt WhitmanWalter "Walt" Whitman was an American poet, essayist and journalist. A humanist, he was a part of the transition between transcendentalism and realism, incorporating both views in his works. Whitman is among the most influential poets in the American canon, often called the father of free verse...
, WildeOscar WildeOscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde was an Irish writer and poet. After writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, he became one of London's most popular playwrights in the early 1890s...
and Henry LawsonHenry LawsonHenry Lawson was an Australian writer and poet. Along with his contemporary Banjo Paterson, Lawson is among the best-known Australian poets and fiction writers of the colonial period and is often called Australia's "greatest writer"...
.
Ulysses (novel)
Ulysses is a novel by the Irish author James Joyce. It was first serialised in parts in the American journal The Little Review from March 1918 to December 1920, and then published in its entirety by Sylvia Beach on 2 February 1922, in Paris. One of the most important works of Modernist literature,...
) and with more purist
Purist
A purist is one who desires that an item remains true to its essence and free from adulterating or diluting influences. The term may be used in almost any field, and can be applied either to the self or to others. Use of the term may be either pejorative or complimentary, depending on the context...
ic poets such as Lex Banning
Lex Banning
Arthur Alexander Banning was an Australian lyric poet.Disabled from birth by cerebral palsy, he was unable to speak clearly or to write with a pen. "Yet he overcame his handicap to produce poems which were often hauntingly beautiful and frequently ironic, and gave to other, younger poets a strong...
, James McAuley
James McAuley
James Phillip McAuley was an Australian academic, poet, journalist, literary critic and a prominent convert to Roman Catholicism.-Life and career:...
and A.D. Hope.
Yet his presence was compelling and characteristically welcomed by those who would otherwise be in disagreement. Many years later, Germaine Greer
Germaine Greer
Germaine Greer is an Australian writer, academic, journalist and scholar of early modern English literature, widely regarded as one of the most significant feminist voices of the later 20th century....
noted his influence on her:
...Harry, the utopian anarchist who had admired her red stockings, who believed people were perfect and who was not weighed down by the tremendous forces the anarchistic pessimists felt bore down on them all the time. "Alas, I understand him much better now," she said, twenty years later. "... but I think a lot of the things I've done since I've done out of a desire to please Harry Hooton..."
While Hooton was living a very bohemian life in Sydney, he was connecting with literary people in Japan, India, Greece, South Africa, England, France, New Zealand, and the USA. Hooton had corresponded with counter-culture figures in California
California
California is a state located on the West Coast of the United States. It is by far the most populous U.S. state, and the third-largest by land area...
, and with Tuli Kupferberg
Tuli Kupferberg
Naphtali "Tuli" Kupferberg was an American counterculture poet, author, cartoonist, pacifist anarchist, publisher and co-founder of the band The Fugs.-Biography:...
who would later form the rock group The Fugs
The Fugs
The Fugs are a band formed in New York in late 1964 by poets Ed Sanders and Tuli Kupferberg, with Ken Weaver on drums. Soon afterward, they were joined by Peter Stampfel and Steve Weber of the Holy Modal Rounders...
. He contributed to many periodicals and journals in addition to those he brought out himself. "He has published not only in Australia but in London
London
London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...
, San Francisco, Chicago
Chicago
Chicago is the largest city in the US state of Illinois. With nearly 2.7 million residents, it is the most populous city in the Midwestern United States and the third most populous in the US, after New York City and Los Angeles...
, New York
New York
New York is a state in the Northeastern region of the United States. It is the nation's third most populous state. New York is bordered by New Jersey and Pennsylvania to the south, and by Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont to the east...
, etc, and has had some material translated into Greek. He is far better known overseas than he is here".
Anarcho-technocracy
Hooton argued that man should have power over things, including machines, but never over other men, applying to himself the term "anarcho-technocrat". "He regarded the age of man as passed, and sees the age of the machine as the proper object of pursuit... In his quest for power over machines, Hooton is a technocrat, and in his opposition to power over men, he is an anarchist."Hooton never completed his philosophical treatise, titled Militant Materialism
Materialism
In philosophy, the theory of materialism holds that the only thing that exists is matter; that all things are composed of material and all phenomena are the result of material interactions. In other words, matter is the only substance...
, although he did complete six of its eight chapters. His ideas were magically simple. Leave man alone, man is perfect. Concentrate instead on matter. He formulated what he called Anarcho - Technocracy : 'The Politics of Things'.
Hooton saw proof copies of the last book published during his lifetime, It Is Great To Be Alive, published by Margaret Elliott (Margaret Fink
Margaret Fink
Margaret Fink is a prominent Australian film producer noted for her important role in the revival of Australian cinema in the 1970s....
), just before he died of cancer in 1961.
An 83-minute experimental film, Harry Hooton - Outsider Poet was made by Arthur and Corinne Cantrill in 1969. In the soundtrack, Hooton outlines his social philosophy in a series of recordings made shortly before his death in 1961.
Further reading
- Hooton, Harry Anarcho–Technocracy The Politics of Things (Précis, from 4-page pamphlet, c.1953) At Radical Tradition, Takver.com
- May, James Boyer "Concerning a Maker" Essay on Hooton in Selected Essays and Criticism, London 1957
- Soldatow, Sasha Hooton, Henry Arthur (1908 - 1961) Australian National Dictionary of Biography, 1996]
- Hooton, Harry Geometry for Beginners (It is better to prefer than to prove) & It'll Be All Wrong in the End (Two poems published in Beloit Poetry Journal, 1953, 1954)
- Hooton, Harry Poetry or Not Essy published in The Australian Quarterly Vol. 15, No. 3 (Sep., 1943), pp. 87-96
- Hooton, Harry Poetry and the New Proletariat Essay published in the Australian Quarterly Vol. 18, No. 2 (Jun., 1946), pp. 96-104
- Hooton, Harry The Dictatorship of Art Essay published in The Australian Quarterly Vol. 21, No. 1 (Mar., 1949), pp. 61-71
- Coombs, Anne "Sex and Anarchy: the Life and Death of the Sydney Push", Viking, Ringwood, Victoria, 1996.
- Harcourt, Bill,"The Push", The National Times, 3 February 1975.
External links
- Harry Hooton: The Outsider Poet Description of 1970 film at ACMI
- Leser D. Margaret Fink: Her wild, wild ways Australian Women's Weekly, Jan 2007 (Download from Davidleser.com)
- Hooton, Harry Biography and other information at AustLit, The Australian Literature Resource (Full access requires subscription)