Mark Hyatt, ‘Love, Leda’ – review
One man’s restless, meandering journey through the lonely streets of 1960s London, replete with existential longing, visceral desire and unrequited love.
Mark Hyatt is best known, if he is known at all, as a poet and Love, Leda is his only novel. Details of Hyatt’s life are sketchy. He was born in South London and only learned to read and write as an adult when he was living in Chepstow Villas, West London – a sort of bohemian gathering place for writers, artists and actors – where he lived with the writer, Cressida Lindsay, with whom he had a child. He began writing poetry in the 60s, but only published a handful in obscure magazines, despite being deeply involved with the literary scene and even dating the publisher, Antony Blond. His childhood was unhappy and in adulthood he attempted suicide more than once, and was very likely was subjected to ECT. Having moved to Lancashire with his then boyfriend, Atom, in the mid- to late 60s, he continued writing without much success and eventually killed himself just outside Blackburn in 1972, after the end of his relationship led to a prolonged period of crisis. The novel, previously unpublished, hardly seen by anyone in Hyatt’s lifetime, is thought to be his only extended attempt at prose fiction.
It is against this backdrop of a life spent wandering and dissatisfied that Love, Leda should be read. The protagonist, Leda, is a young, beautiful man without either a fixed address or an abiding purpose, but he has a smattering of friends to call on and an object of desire to focus on. The story opens with Leda picking up a man on Dean Street, inviting him to a coffee shop and then taking him to a country retreat in Sussex for an evening of drinking and awkward sex. Then Leda wanders from coffee shop to coffee shop, enjoying the company of various boys, sometimes finding casual work as a metal worker, a pot washer, a cleaner and a babysitter. Along the way, he spends some comfortable nights at the home of his friend, Thomas, whose flat he enters through an open window and whose clothes he shares liberally, who gives him money and remonstrates with him on his lifestyle choices, effectively acting as the moral conscience of the times. The story ends with a dismal trip to the seaside which ultimately confirms Leda’s worst fears about the emptiness of all life.
The novel is short, a mere 40,000 words, but is packed with little episodes that neither the reader nor the protagonist quite knows how to react to, interspersed with Leda’s ongoing reflections on his life. In one such episode, he picks up a guy on the Bayswater Road who takes him to an alleyway and roughs him up a bit, but it is unclear whether the violence is part of the sexual act, and indeed whether it is wanted by Leda, who walks away wounded but not entirely dissatisfied. In another, he derives an unconcealed pleasure from the pain he causes, even with Vaseline, after which he apologies to the man, a stranger after all, without much gusto. Hyatt delivers these episodes with a curious, simmering, even-handed control, where a certain eroticism is present but shrouded in poetry, writing as he was at a time when his desires were forbidden.
Hyatt’s detached style of short sentences and brisk descriptions is sometimes brutal, always unflinching in its honesty and eagerness to drive home the point without doubt. Phrases like ‘Work is all grief and semi-sweat’ and ‘I tremble and moan, then eat myself away, while the shell of my body is laughing’ lodge themselves in consciousness as the entire point of the novel. Much of what Hyatt is dealing with here is sensation – what it feels like to be alone, to drink strong coffee, to face rejection, to take a hot bath – and how that is experienced and processed by the subject.
A lot of the narrative is taken up by long passages where Leda merely pontificates on the meaning of life, coming out with quasi-philosophical lines such as ‘It’s hard for me to believe that I exist and at the same time to accept my delusions’. This must be viewed in the context of Hyatt’s life, where writing is a kind of exorcism, as these ruminations add nothing interesting to Leda’s story, even if they do flesh out the character’s uneasy preference for a life of aimlessness. The central point seems to be that, for Leda, any kind of settling down is giving up on freedom, even though freedom, which he has in abundance, comes at the price of loneliness. And then there is the incessant pining for Daniel, the heterosexual priest with whom he is in love, which is less a plot device than it is a symbolic marker for the social conditions of pre-1967 homosexuals in Britain. Daniel haunts Leda everywhere he goes, like the spectral threat of harm that followed men like Hyatt everywhere.
On the surface, Love, Leda is a straightforward narrative stroll around 1960s Soho, taking in the sights and the characters of the age in variously humorous, awkward and sinister encounters. But beneath that it is a treatise on dissatisfaction, although not with anything in particular; rather, it is a one man’s inner struggle to find purpose, if you like, but it is also a man’s – sometimes guilty – sense that nothing could make him happy and that even if it could, he does not deserve it. Leda, like Hyatt, one supposes, lurches from one small pleasure to another without really finding joy in anything – sex is fraught with danger, love is utter disappointment and friendship has a cost of its own.
The antidote to Leda’s dreary, sometimes chilling travels, which all seem to be directed at running into his unrequited love, is Hyatt’s sobering sense of reality: while it is not a feel-good story, it is a frank, if somewhat stark, exploration of the prejudices and challenges faced by gay men in the 60s and how, even in the midst of that, there are covert delights as Leda moves through London with the deft movements of a secret agent, undercover but in plain sight. In this sense, the novel is morally ambiguous and does not pass judgement on the times, which positively adds depth to Leda’s musings, as if the phenomenology of experience is more important that anything we can say about it, which is, of course, the one truth we do not express enough but that is the one thing that gives Leda courage.
Love, Leda, ISBN: 9781913512217, is published by Peninsula Press on 26 January 2023. Paperback, £10.99.
Read more of my reviews of the best queer books of 2023 here.