Love, Leda

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Why has instinct made today an eye-opener, my mind issuing facts through my body with the result that I obtain no satisfaction?

Although declaring himself open to experience, this doesn’t appear to include the experience of work. For much of the novel consists of rather mundane accounts of the protagonist's daily life, spent crashing with various acquaintances and scrounging out a living doing casual jobs; having meaningless sex with a plethora of both male and female hookups in sometimes graphic detail. I rush in and out of the cars in the Strand, trying to make up for a friendship I had forgotten which is eating me. A frank, intimate portrait of a young working-class homosexual struggling to find meaning, work or just a good fuck in London, living between friends’ sofas and dingy bedsits, Love, Leda is a book without contemporaries. One man’s restless, meandering journey through the lonely streets of 1960s London, replete with existential longing, visceral desire and unrequited love.This newly discovered, never-before-published novel - which predates the Sexual Offences Act of 1967 - is a portrait of lost a Soho, as well as an important document of queer, working-class life, from a voice long overlooked. So good, a really special read - the narrative is aggressively poetic and and the descriptions of London from the 60s ring so familiar.

He tries to find a good time among the furtive but excitable underground gay scene, or in the cottages and building sites. As with Hyatt's own life, Love, Leda ends on a note of prolonged dissatisfaction that holds light to a kind of gut-wrenching reality we are only too eager to forget. 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. 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.

It’s own uniqueness is of interest itself, but also refreshing as it unfolds queer identity within a wider narrative of being lost in your twenties in a city. Interspersed with these are some rather jejune attempts to philosophize his worldview, in somewhat overly lyrical passages that don't bear too much scrutiny (Hyatt fancied himself a poet, and indeed published a meager amount of his output before passing. That this book—an unflinching portrait of working-class precarity and queer estrangement, desire, and loneliness—was only published in January this year, 50-odd years after the author's tragic death by suicide, is a testament to the many buried registers of gay life that remain unarchived, unacknowledged, and obscured to this day. It's nice to know our lives intersect in some way and the shocking nostalgia these pages elicit has some psychogeographic basis in fact.

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. He pushes the button and a loud riff sound, like jazz comes bellowing out from all sides of this two-roomed flat.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. 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. That means that with every subscription, we are supporting people in poverty to get back on their own two feet. It is a novel of gestures and glances, homosexuality being still illegal at this point, but once in private our characters embrace the life they’re never allowed to show. But too many people and the neon lights cause useless thoughts and unconscious problems in endless negative patterns and I am a slave to this sick nonsense so say to myself: ‘Sit down, jump up or go for a run.

He tries to find affection among the lonely, sexually frustrated middle-aged men and women who would swap care for the sight and touch of his young body. 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. After reading the forward I said aloud, “Wow that’s the best forward I’ve ever read, this has got a lot to live up to! Inwardly, I observe that I’m not suffering from leprosy; anyway, eyes were made for looking and as we’re not permitted to touch everything we fancy, we have to make do with sight alone. 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.He slows down and rests on my back as he ejects the cloud of his body into rip-roaring blood, and rolls off me, leaving an exotic smell behind him. I see a pop-star change into the dress of an emperor; a herd of poets in paradise playing roulette for beautiful women. In another section he reflects how “My own experience tells me that more love goes into the thought of homosexuality than the practice.