posted on 05 Mar 2023

Love, Leda by Mark Hyatt

Mark Hyatt is largely remembered, if he’s remembered at all, as a minor poet who lived on the fringes of the bohemian set in London of the 60s. He committed suicide at the very early age of 32 and left behind a legacy of unpublished manuscripts and papers. Included in this heritage was the draft of a novel, Love, Leda, which has now been brought to a modern readership by Peninsula Press. No-one, I think, will read this and believe that it’s a lost literary masterpiece but what is certainly indisputable is that it captures an important social moment and provides a frank and unflinching portrait of gay life in the years immediately before partial legalisation.

20 year-old Leda – it’s the only name we know him by – is a social and sexual vagabond who begs and blags his way from day to day, living off friends, doing the very occasional casual job and drifting into bars and clubs. It’s a life filled with potential intimacies that can only be mediated and negotiated by body language – a nod of the head, a look or a gesture that will subvert the illegal act of men finding each other for sex.

Once out of the public view and off the street, Leda’s world is described without inhibition but with very little joy. Leda keeps up a façade of bouncing energy and devil-take-the-hindmost but there are very few moments when that seems much more than an act from someone with a fairly thick skin. Leda rejects conventional notions of morality and refuses to be bound by society’s expectations – qualities that endear him to his friends but which outrage his family. The few visits he pays ‘home’ are always teetering on the edge of meltdown and violence – and physical violence between father and son does actually erupt.

There is no direction to Leda’s life beyond the immediate gratification and he’s savvy enough to understand that for himself. Part of his problem is that he is in fact in love – or maybe in obsession. The focus of his almost monomaniacal attention is the religiously inclined heterosexual, Daniel with whom he flirts and is always rebuffed – finally with devastating consequences.

As a novel there are plenty of things that prevent it quite taking off: it’s one-paced, lacking in any significant character development and ultimately two-dimensional. But none of that should distract from the really valuable insights it gives into the lives of the gay community of that time. Leda’s life represents a brave and significant two-fingered salute to orthodoxy and the establishment but it somehow feels that Leda’s small victories are always destined to be pyrrhic.

Reviewing the book for The Big Issue, Barry Pierce captures an essential truth:

“Perhaps Love, Leda offers us more value as a cultural document rather than a novel on its own terms, but through its candid exploration of a world truly in the past Hyatt offers us an open and frank account of gay life that is years ahead of its time.”

 

The book is available in paperback only at £10.99 and early copy come with a limited edition map of Leda’s London haunts.

 

Terry Potter

March 2023