Love, Leda

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Walking up the steps he opens the street door, leads me along a dark passage into a back room and turns on a yellow light. His manuscript then languished in the possession of a friend until just this year, when it was published for the first time. Finance is provided by PayPal Credit (a trading name of PayPal UK Ltd, Whittaker House, Whittaker Avenue, Richmond-Upon-Thames, Surrey, United Kingdom, TW9 1EH). They’ve worked out that it was probably written in the mid 1960s, and that the novel is set over a fortnight in the early 1960s. 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.

Jobs in a factory and cafeteria are short lived, chiefly because ‘the fact of the job kills what is provisionally me. It’s an endearing jumble of a book mixed in with sexual encounters previously avoided in contemporary literature, and characters that may never have been found in a heteronormative canon. At times, love Leda is not an easy read, with no chapter structure and long paragraphs which blur into an unevenly paced timeline. Surely if one's self can love Christ for what He was and what He did, then one's self should be able to love modern man. However this book comes from such a unique perspective and is beautifully written and has fortunately been rediscovered.Hyatt is an important literary parent to everyone writing queer London, dreaming of lives free of drudgery and asking what the point of living is. His voice is straightforward and endearing, allowing the reader to stay close behind his distant gaze and feel his loneliness in a city full of people.

I, the brave one, god of any telephone kiosk, walk down Dean Street, see the man of the day; raincoat, shoulders round, hair black, falling out; heavenly blue eyes cast down into his own hell.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.

This novel is a record of the queer bohemian, underground world at the time in which Hyatt was writing in, and which Hyatt himself circulated in and out of. Sit down near the window and I’ll bring you a coffee,’ says the boy and makes his way to a small counter. Conscious that he’s probably experienced more in life than his own (estranged) father has, and more, ‘it’s no wonder I get bored with life from time to time.Leda, our protagonist and narrator, is a bed-hopping bohemian, languishing over an unrequited love and failing to fit in anywhere; his freedom and financial situation dependent upon the generosity of strangers and his more stable friends. Yet Hyatt declines to use Leda’s homosexuality as device to shock the audience; while it would be too much to say Leda is proud of his sexuality, he certainly isn’t ashamed of it or himself. Love, Leda is a short novel by Mark Hyatt (1940 -1972), published posthumously in 2023, having been unearthed some 51 years after the author’s death. And then there is Daniel, a buttoned-up man of the Lord, for whom Leda nurses an unrequited obsession - one which sends him spiraling into self-destruction.