All of Mark Hyatt’s work—as a “filthily sexy” poet, in John Wilkinson’s words, and also as a writer of prose—was produced both because and in spite of his background. Incarcerated in prisons and asylums, illiterate into his adult life, othered by his Romani heritage, and also his sexuality—Hyatt’s work responded to a world in which he was rendered precarious, and yet insisted on pleasure.
Love, Leda—out today from Nightboat—is his only known novel. It survives, the same as Hyatt’s other work, because of the intervention of poets and lovers.
I spoke to Luke Roberts, an editor of both Love, Leda and Hyatt’s collection of poems, So Much For Life, about those interventions, and the intense, sustained intimacies that structured Hyatt’s life and work.
—Dante Silva
Dante Silva: How did you come to Mark Hyatt, and his work? Where did you find Love, Leda?
Luke Roberts: The shorter version of this story is that after dying in total obscurity in 1972, Hyatt’s work was kept just above the threshold of disappearance by a loose group of poets with connections to Cambridge. Through an unlikely twist of fate, they became the custodians of his archive, some 1700 pages xeroxed from manuscripts salvaged in the days before his suicide. But here’s the catch: these poets only met Hyatt—if they met him at all—towards the very end of his life. So there was an abundance of material but a scarcity of information. The most anyone seemed to know was a faint outline: he was gay, Gypsy, illiterate until adulthood.
Sam Ladkin started working on his selected poems in the late 2000s, and undertook the really painstaking editorial work of making sense of the archive. I was a student and fledgling poet then, with a diehard taste for lost poets, and I would keep stumbling across Hyatt’s work in ancient mimeo magazines, but it didn’t always stick. In the meantime there was a real eruption of queer experimental poetry in the UK. I started trying to piece together a lineage, and came back to Hyatt—via his sometime-boyfriend Harry Fainlight—as an important missing figure. Sam asked me to help and, with this new sense of an unfolding queer context, the editorial work became much easier.
The preservation of Love, Leda is thanks to Mark’s friend Lucy O’Shea, who—by another great twist of fate—turned out to live practically around the corner from Sam in Brighton. She got in touch out of the blue and asked if we were interested. She had typed the manuscript circa 1965 and kept it safe ever since. We had no idea it existed. I took photos of the whole thing and started reading it on the train back to London—I couldn’t quite believe how great it was. I’d been thinking of Hyatt as this wonderful poet, and now he was a wonderful novelist, too.
Dante Silva: I understand that Love, Leda is Hyatt’s only novel. It’s saturated with the sensibility of his poems (collected in So Much For Life, which you co-edited), which surfaces in the language; “the god of any telephone kiosk,” “operator of a giant machine which makes me miserable.”
How did you work with that language as you went about the editorial process? How similar is the novel—as it appears now—to what you found?
Luke Roberts: Lucy’s manuscript of Love, Leda was prepared for possible publication, so it’s very clean copy. It was almost definitely intended for consideration by Anthony Blond, who Hyatt was in a complicated menage-a-trois with in the early 1960s, and who was a very lively and scandalous publisher. But it took another sixty years to find a home.
It’s definitely written with a poet’s disposition, and maybe it helps that I edited from that disposition, too. The only significant decisions I felt I had to take were about some unwieldy paragraphs and occasionally modifying punctuation for clarity. Mark had a thing about semicolons, both in poetry and prose: often it seems like he’s second-guessing his own grammatical constructions, sometimes hesitant, sometimes with bravado. But I love the urgency of his prose, the pressure Hyatt places on communication and character. He lets desire warp and shape the language. And of course he’s also very funny, full of painful comedy.
Dante Silva: The novel’s presentation of sexuality is frank, straightforward. Hyatt has few contemporaries here, and still suggests the sex between men to be a common practice, a social relation as complex as any other.
What is the significance of sex in the narrative?
Luke Roberts: Oh! That’s a great question. Sex is how Leda navigates the world, gets from A to B. But it’s also how Leda escapes the world, or tries to, moving in the first pages beyond the city’s boundaries, and then circling back to chronicle the clubs, coffee houses, laundrettes, parks, even bombsites where sex takes place. This is a London still marked by the war and by the greyness and conformity of the long 1950s. But Leda is trouble! It’s as if in that opening on Dean Street in Soho, Hyatt sort of cruises the reader, keeps looking back to see if we’re following.
What makes the novel truly queer, I think, is that Leda’s sexual identity doesn’t really coalesce: it’s not a given, but rather, as you suggest, it’s a highly mediated social relation. And there’s a certain economy to that, also. I love the scene in the sheet-metal workshop, which veers between realist descriptions of labor and these wild readings and misreadings in dialogue with the other workers.
Because Hyatt’s literacy was so variable, I think the writing of Love, Leda must have been hard work. This is a story Hyatt really wanted and needed to tell. So there’s also a sense that he’s going to put it all in, go for broke. And of course, even after the partial decriminalisation of sex between men in 1967, actually representing gay sex was still fraught and subject to censorship. As late as 1976, Gay News would be prosecuted for blasphemy (!) for printing a homoerotic poem about Christ.
Dante Silva: I understand you’re at work on Hyatt’s biography. I’m curious what archives you’re looking towards, and how you read and interpret those archives—and whether that interpretation requires any intervention. How would you characterize the historical work at hand, as you and others present Hyatt’s work? How has it been received?
Luke Roberts: Yes, a biography is the idea, if it can all be pulled together. After So Much For Life and the UK edition of Love, Leda, several people who knew Hyatt got in touch. So the archive—which was mainly print, lots of textual breadcrumbs—suddenly has more people in it. This enriches everything, but it also raises the stakes of interpretation.
I feel like for my generation there’s a great interest in recovering that era before the living memory passes on. We grew up through Section 28, hostile legislation in education in place from 1988 to 2003, designed to suppress the “promotion” of queerness. This moves in parallel with the losses of the AIDS crisis, making the historical record full of absences and puzzles.
And there’s still a huge amount of homophobia in literary criticism. Michael Nott’s biography of Thom Gunn just came out—a really tremendous work of scholarship—and it’s had the most grudging reviews, treating Gunn’s sexuality as either trivial or unfortunate. Against that, I’m heartened by those independent presses and bookshops, all those scholars and historians and activists, who are continuing the project of LGBTQ+ liberation. That’s what makes it possible to meet Hyatt on something like his own terms—and here the beginning of his reception in the queer Gypsy, Romani, and Traveller community seems especially exciting. The response to Hyatt’s work has been overwhelming.
Dante Silva: What have you learned about Hyatt that surprises you?
Luke Roberts: Really the existence of Love, Leda is still the biggest surprise. But the other thing is how many paintings and drawings there are of him. I’m trying to track down the amazing nude portrait that you can see in the background of the author photo at the back of Love, Leda. That’s the holy grail.