Harry Hogg

Summary

Harry Hogg recounts his life journey as a writer, from his abandonment at birth to his current reflections on life and love in his seventies, marked by a steadfast belief in his destiny as a writer and a life filled with diverse experiences.

Abstract

Harry Hogg's biography is a tapestry of resilience and self-discovery, chronicling his early beginnings as an orphan and his adoption at age eight. His life's narrative includes a period of activism with Greenpeace, a stint as a songwriter following the influence of Leonard Leconte, and a nomadic lifestyle that took him across the world. Through it all, Hogg maintained an unwavering faith in his writing vocation, guided by an internal conviction that his path was predestined. Now in his seventies, Hogg resides between California and Scotland, reflecting on a life lived in pursuit of artistic expression and the intimate knowledge that, despite human connections, each person remains an individual island of thought and experience.

Opinions

Hogg believes in the inevitability of his success as a writer, viewing his journey as part of a grand design.
He values the solitude inherent in the writing process, acknowledging that despite close relationships, individuals ultimately harbor their own private thoughts.
Hogg looks back on his youth with nostalgia, reminiscing about the simplicity of young love and the music that soundtracked his life.
He considers his life successful primarily because he is loved, suggesting that personal relationships are of utmost importance to him.
Hogg's experiences have taught him that memories and shadows are enduring, outlasting the transient nature of life's moments.

Prosaic Biography of No One in Particular

Writing stories has been like unraveling the greatest puzzle, yet its journey of discovery has kept me whole and safe and driving on toward this day when evenings, like forever, start fleeting, going fast. I never once gave up believing I had what it takes to be a writer, and with each winter’s passing, as moons fell, the suns rose, I was blessed with a growing knowledge, a whispered message that said: do not worry, it will happen, it’s been planned. Nothing is happenstance. Do not hurry. Do not pause to catch a breath. So, I always knew.

I was abandoned at birth, found well wrapped, well fed, under a bush on Gant’s roundabout outside the Odeon cinema in Gant’s Hill, Essex, UK. I grew into childhood in Red House, Ripon, in North Yorkshire. A Barnardo orphanage. I was adopted by a Scottish couple in 1957. I was eight years old. From that day my soul grew up on the Isle of Mull, an Inner Hebridean island off the west coast of Scotland.

I have lived a life, having several legal names, been locked up, beaten and battered in different parts of the world as a Greenpeace activist. After Paris, I was eighteen, after Leonard Leconte, I wrote songs. I did not bother scrawling each and every new address on cloud or curb stone. I simply roamed. I wrote, as I traveled, a serenade passing midnights, sonatas for faces that time erases but does not forget. I dropped poems in the laps of strangers, even laps I knew. But this music spread around you, notes, half notes, written long ago, grew and grew, were saved, because I always knew one song would find me out and hold me accountable.

I’ve learned in my life that every writer is alone. That is what I have learned, in time. Don’t get me wrong. I love a woman and when I wake up in the night, and she is there next to me, and I can touch her and maybe wake her, feel her move, I appreciate my life the way it is. But, in the end, nothing changes the truth: she doesn’t know, in that dark, what I am thinking in my heart of hearts, and I don’t know the same sense of her. This is the truth. We are all separate islands. I am a writer and, in certain moments, the possessor of secret knowledge. A holder of hidden things.

Today, I live between homes in Mendocino, California, and the Isle of Mull. I love the sunset colors, evenings that lengthen the shadows of who I once was; remembering all those times on the island when no shadow was visible. Lately, I sleep late, seldom seen in the scarlet mornings, or walking amid the gold behind the trees. I depend on sunset more than sunrise, even when no sunset comes, I like to fill my head with all the sunshine past.

I wish I could gather up the summers that have forgotten my shadow, fill a bag and take them down to the shore, not forgetting how beautiful winter can be, retracing my footsteps in the sand of what was then my time.

I seem to have run through my life so fast, I missed the things worth stopping for. I never gave thought to where I was going, or with whom. I was just running. Things change, shadows stay, and memories are never so old they cannot dart down cliffs like butterflies, or grow like marigolds, or dazzle like dandelions.

I’m told by writers and tutors alike, ‘Write what you know.’

Something of what I know is written into every story.

Easing comfortably into my seventies, soothed by the evening glow of Macallan, and love, I spend a lot of energy looking back to my youth. I met girls at a café with a juke box. I prided myself on knowing the avenue of success with the girls. For it was the girls, with their deep throat sighs and wearing their hearts on their sleeves, who dictated what was played on the juke box. They danced around their handbags and I, wearing my drainpipe trousers, stood around imagining I was Cliff Richard or Elvis. I didn’t know about drugs, or tattoos, only ever wanting to fall in love. If my life has any success, it is this. I’m loved.