Lowry refers to " a hooting siren called from a ship coming in, Hoo! ah hoo! in his novel Ultramarine (Pg. 82). The phoneme recalls T.S.Eliot's unfinished chamber musical Sweeney Agonistes: Fragments of an Aristophanic Melodrama - first published in the Criterion in 1927 as Wanna Go Home Baby?:
And you wait and the turning of a lock
for you know the hangman's waiting for you
And perhaps you're alive
And perhaps you're dead
Hoo ha ha
Hoo ha ha
Hoo
Hoo
Hoo
According to Rachel Blau Duplessis - hoo is short for an allusion to hoodoo (See Hoo 'Hoo Hoo Some Episodes in the Construction of Modern Male Whiteness' in Chapter 23 Poetry and Cultural Studies ed. Marion Damon and Ira Livingston). Duplessis also identifies the phoneme in Vachel Lindsay's 'The Congo' (1914) and Wallace Stevens's 'Bantams in Pine Woods' (1922)
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