Love, Leda by Mark Hyatt

Love, Leda Reviews

• 
  Vartika

  Mark Hyatt was a working-class gay poet who received no formal education and attained literacy only in adulthood, and Love, Leda, written in the years preceding the Sexual Offences Act of 1967, is his only novel. 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.
  
  Here, Hyatt tells the story of Leda, a twenty year old lad who, without a fixed address or purpose and led to ruin by his unrequited longing for a straight, married, man of god (a longing that leads to extended musings about the intercurrents between the worship of a Christian god and homosexuality), is forced to seek intimacy in unusual places and rely on the kindness (only sometimes offered without strings attached) of near strangers, older gay men and divorced women who deign to feed, clothe, and shelter him.
  
  Leda's story, narrated here in a poetic and idiosyncratic manner, is stark and revealing of the grey-white expanse of London in the 1960s—a world of tepid coffees cooling in chipped ceramic mugs, of dilapidated pre-war flats converted into shabby bedsits, of casual workers washing up cups for a day's living, and bars of jazz floating out from seedy Soho coffeehouses—and those who, like our protagonist, moved aimlessly about it. The narrator's detachment is presumably drawn, at least in part, from the author's own experiences in a world where sex is fraught with danger, love is harsh and disappointing, and friendships come at a price, and his rejection of drudgery belies drudgery of its own kind. 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.
  
  This is certainly an unusual book, both in its honesty about a furtive homosexual scene that would have been shocking to contemporaneous audiences (per the foreword by Huw Lemmey, for its mention of "not just gay men, but actual gay fucking, with hair and sweat and Vaseline included") and atypical style in which it is rendered. But in all its uniqueness, it is not just a notable work of queer but also working-class literature from the time, singularly intent on talking about the minutiae of (doubtlessly alienating) labour and everyday transactions, monetary and otherwise. Not a perfect novel by any means, but a frank one, and great all the same: it is lucky, incredibly lucky for us that it remains a lost work no more.
• 
  Doug

  3.5, rounded down.
  
  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. But people call it something different these days. The dead man becomes religion; the living becomes homosexuality. Either I am in the middle, neither one thing or the other, or I am a madman looking at life upside down. p. 111
  
  In one sense, the fact that this book was ever written, let alone published, is astonishing. Hyatt did not even learn to read or write till adulthood, composed this roman a clef circa 1965, describing his aimless and homeless existence with far greater candor than one finds elsewhere in those closeted days, and then committed suicide in 1972 at age 32.
  
  His manuscript then languished in the possession of a friend until just this year, when it was published for the first time. Thus, as a chronicle of what life was like in bohemian '60's Soho London, and its glimpse into the life of an unapologetic and unashamed bisexual, lends it far greater significance than it might otherwise merit on purely literary grounds.
  
  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. He also recounts his obsessive unrequited 'love' for a married straight (and religious) man, whose only interest in the titular pseudonymous Leda is to convert him to Christianity.
  
  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.) Had it been longer than its 163 pages, this would have become tedious, and towards the end I was indeed losing both patience and interest - but for the short amount of time it took to read, I am glad I took the journey.
• 
  Mia Tiger

  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!” And it did! So good, a really special read - the narrative is aggressively poetic and and the descriptions of London from the 60s ring so familiar. The style and setting reminded me a lot of The Lonely Londoners - just a snapshot of a bit of life that is so different yet so much the same.
• 
  Henry Hood

  A lost gem in queer literature which is tragically but forgivably rough around the edges.
  
  Love, Leda is an intensely introspective dive into the hidden worlds of Soho and gay dive bars or coffee shops in London during the 1960s. 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.
  
  If you loved Catcher in the Rye, The Bell Jar or Everything I Know About Love, you’ll love this book too. It does beautiful justice to the bewilderment you feel trying to find direction in life while making so many mistakes while you’re young.
  
  Some of the passages grappling with depression and Leda’s chaotic lifestyle are worth framing in a museum, whereas some passages of narrative are well worth forgetting. 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.
  
  It’s charming, depressing, witty and undeniably impressive. If, like me, you want an adventure, go to Gays the Word bookshop in Bloomsbury and pick up a copy for yourself.
• 
  Marko Theodore Mravunac

  "Must I be forever struggling in a sequence of mediocre events, only to find myself frustrated every time?"
  
  I read this as part of my "30 books in 30 days" challenge (2024), and it was such a drag! I can't remember how I came across this book—maybe a friend recommended it—but it took me a while to find, and even longer to finally read. Although I understand and appreciate the historical context and significance of this book (and the fact that it was written and published is, in itself, astonishing), I found the overall experience disappointing. Despite its bluntness and occasional humor, I disliked the main character, and the general atmosphere was just too depressing. I enjoyed it far less than I expected.
• 
  Martyn Sanderson

  i can appreciate the importance of a novel like this and what it could have done if it’d been released in its time, but this was actually a real chore to get through. really didn’t gel with this unnecessarily complex & abstract writing style at all.
• 
  Tim

  How wonderful for this to be “found” and published so long after it was written. The introduction and explanatory text at the end were also well done and insightful.
• 
  Kirsten

  London never changes does it. This book has so many spectacular moments it really is a treasure <3
• 
  Eric Parker

  love how observational this is. all the mundane details paint such an illustrated picture of 1960s queer london. but i also adore the rural scenes and those outside of london, especially at the beach. reminded me of brighton rock in it’s description of british seaside towns and how lonely they can actually weirdly make you feel.
  
  some of my favourite quotes:
  “To me, people spend their whole lives walking around in circles, and when they stop, they talk of the things they would have done had they not done the thing they have done all their lives.”
  “I am far too feminine to be living in a man’s world.”
  “My own experience tells me that more love goes into the thought of homosexuality than the practice.”
• 
  Sam

  First of all, I think the significance of this book as a piece of unarchived queer fiction can't be underplayed. It is beyond important for this kind of work to be carried out so that we can unravel more queer textualities and lives.
  
  Secondly, this book is utterly fantastic. Full of idiosyncratic writing and starkly fleeting encounters, Leda's loneliness is gut-wrenching and the book's climax almost brought me to years.
  
  Absolute perfection — I have never read anything quite like it.
• 
  Eric Anderson

  It's always fascinating to read a re-discovered piece of queer writing. Though Mark Hyatt actively brought out poetry in the English bohemian scene of the 1960s, his novel “Love, Leda” has only been published posthumously this year. It's a fascinating snapshot of gay London life from that period in the time leading up to the Sexual Offences Act of 1967. The book's eponymous hero Leda has no fixed abode and bounces between male and female lovers while earning a bit of cash from low paid jobs in metal work and kitchens. He's estranged from his family and for good reason – when he feels obliged to visit with his parents and siblings there's a horrifically violent encounter with his disapproving father. The narrative veers from moments of raw emotional confession “Sometimes I find that I am humiliated by myself, and my thoughts get out of hand, becoming absolutely evil, and immediately I am nothing” to frivolous fantasies “during the long time of waiting for the train I appoint myself as Jesse James in full drag waiting for this very train and about to steal all the cash belonging to the G.P.O.” Moreover, it's fascinating following him as he navigates the back streets of Soho putting flowers in his hair and dabbing perfume behind his ears while dipping into the lives of outcast artists, dissidents and bored housewives. All the while he consumes countless cups of coffee and frequently lapses into poetic reverie.
  
  There's something refreshing about reading a novel that's so organic and unpolished. That's not to say the book isn't sophisticated because it contains some absolutely beautiful lines, vivid descriptions and thoughtful commentary. But I can imagine the narrative would receive a complete overhaul in a contemporary creative writing class because it's quite chaotic. Some of the passages and lines of dialogue feel disorientating with their convoluted logic. Perhaps if Hyatt had the chance to work with an editor these would have more clarity. But, on the whole, I think it's better that the text has been preserved in its raw emotional form. The fascinating forward and afterward explain how Hyatt came from a working class background and received very little formal education. Learning how drawn the author was to suicide, it's hard not to read the story as autobiographical. There are frank passages describing his sense of alienation. He laments at one point that “I am far too feminine to be living in a man's world.” In another section he reflects how “My own experience tells me that more love goes into the thought of homosexuality than the practice.” Though he may have heated and powerful hookups, none lead to a loving connection.
  
  This leaves him adrift and while he certainly possesses a melancholy streak, he also emits catty asides and biting humour along his journey. He even emanates a pissy arrogance when walking down the street and when someone bumps into him he indignantly muses “Why don't people look where I'm going? Walking into me like that.” There's a wonderful extended tragi-comic scene towards the end of the book when he's charged with looking after two little boys on a seaside trip. It's hilarious how indifferently he tends to them while they consume enormous amounts of sugar and cause havoc. But there's also a sadness to this as he's feeling so estranged from life: “I think I live without knowing myself and I laugh at the world to kill my pain. I cry because I can't understand it and I am constantly in dreams that somehow I hope time will not cure.” It's extremely touching reading such insights from a man so frankly discussing his queer experience from decades in the past and it's wonderful being immersed in this bygone urban landscape of Lyons' tea shops.
  
  
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• 
  Siobhan Markwell

  The tag lines publishers use to sell books often say "startling prose". I can't think of a better way to describe the reading experience that is Love, Leda. The words punch you in the face as you read and then stroke and calm you again. I bought this as a "shall I, shan't I" add-on to an excellent guided walk. Only two out of twenty of us had read the book. It sat on the book pile for a few weeks. It's a lost novel. Hyatt was a working-class gay poet, who only learnt to read and write properly when he moved into a bohemian nest of writers and actors in his twenties.
  
  The book is a walk around the London streets of my earliest childhood. Colours, the insides of buses, Lyons Corner House (with nan), rapidly cooling, pre-prepared teas and coffees lined up in white, ceramic cups and saucers for convenient service, chatty locals and bomb sites. Mark lived in Streatham as a kid and wrote this in 1965. I was born and taken home from South London Women's Hospital (now the Maudsley) to our soon-to-be-demolished flat in Streatham, at the very top of the stairs in the sort of palatial home that no-one could afford in the post war years so divided into crookedy, privately-rented living spaces. I can see my white socks, just below grubby knees, with their rhythmic pattern of holes ascending like the bubbles in lemonade. It's nice to know our lives intersect in some way and the shocking nostalgia these pages elicit has some psychogeographic basis in fact.
  
  Mark was living an altogether different life. His fleeting sexual encounters with both men and women are rendered life-size with vaseline and details of the grey-white British body of the 1960s no-one under fifty remembers. Torremolinos was a thing by 1976. He tells one lover "you've got a tide mark". (Hello nan. I've got a bit better at washing these days.) Equally he takes a friend's children to the seaside...bet it was Brighton...and feeds them nothing but sugar all day and sinks into the melancholy that was to destroy him.
  
  No spoilers, but the writing is unusual and memorable. It hits the mark much more often than it misses and some of those misses would be fixed by a time machine back to mid-sixties London, but in some ways, the book is a time machine back to mid-sixties London.
• 
  Scott JB

  I liked this well enough, but it also felt like a slightly thinner, queerer version of some of Under the Net, without the sturdier philosophical ideas that underpin Murdoch's London picaresque.
  
  Some of its elements work well: the class consciousness brought to the mid-20th trope of the drifting city vagrant, so that you really feel the desperation, the feeling of being trapped without recourse to a more materially supported life, and how the narrator's sexuality impacts this issue and can't be separated from it; and I liked a lot of the imagery and the occasional flourishes of language. Some great moments of slumming it in 60s Soho as well - jazz bars and Lyons tea houses.
  
  But the structure is a little too drifting, flatly episodic - characters come and go, and it takes Hyatt a while to introduce Daniel, and there isn't the right kind of internal life at times, so Leda just sort of wanders into things and coincidences, and it saps the narrative energy. I wasn't sure the philosophical passages really got to the heart of the questions about the nature of love and the spiritual/religious part of mankind that the novel seemed to be asking; and it feels haphazard at times, a random assemblage of events with little cause and effect. I do understand this is the reality of this person's life, but before it escalates into a suicide attempt, the writing becomes quite spare - I do this, I do that - and repetitive, and could have done with some tightening. It made the penultimate scene feel like it came out of nowhere, rather than like an inevitable culmination of the action and the ideas that had come before.
• 
  Jay

  'I am sick with myself. If I were God, I'd make men like myself.'
  
  Whilst the extent to which Mark Hyatt's 20 year old protagonist, wrapped in self-loathing for both his lifestyle, sexuality and feelings of unrequited love is autobiographical is difficult to know for certain, Love, Leda reads in many ways like great auto-fiction.
  
  Set most likely in late 50s or early 60s London, Love Leda inhabits a vivid whirlwind of emotion, place and personality that, given a strong biographical overlap, surely works from a core of personal experience of some kind or another. Given Mark Hyatt's struggles with his mental health whilst alive and his eventual suicide in 1972, one can speculate that the internal workings of such a jaded figure can't be too far from his own.
  
  He views the world like no other. Large men are described as 'heavy with living' and elderly bohemians as 'having too many lines on their face to still be alive.' Its protagonist Leda is regularly amusing and razor sharp, but not necessarily always likeable - he is at times rude and arrogant, living with no fixed address and floating between benefactors. He is often caught up in feeling which he cannot control and sex is viewed often as a way to inflict pain on himself as much as it is a release or a way of sharing intimacy.
  
  Yet this is always undercut by a self-awareness that is deep in its expression. Mark Hyatt's phrasing is completely idiosyncratic and given he learned literacy later in life, it makes it all the more impressive. A real powerhouse of a book.
• 
  Callum Morris-Horne

  3.5.
  
  Written in the mid 60s but only published recently, ‘Love, Leda’ is a poetic portrait of working-class queerness and of a sordid Soho now vanished. 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. The prose itself is erratic and neurotic, like Leda himself; it can sometimes read a bit like “I went here…I went there…I did this…I did that…I thought about God for a bit”, but there are some magnificent lines and it’s an interesting slice of pre-1967 Sexual Offences Act life on the fringes. The book itself is quite short and just about manages to not overstay its welcome; indeed, I found the majority of it propulsively readable.
• 
  Nicki Markus

  Although only a short, quick read, Love, Leda still packs a punch. It offers a sympathetic portrayal of a young man struggling to define himself and a fascinating snapshot of LGBT life in 1960s London. It is a frank tale that doesn't pull any punches in its depiction of the ups and downs of Leda's existence, and it comes across as honest and open, bleak at times but with glimpses of hope between the dark clouds. I would recommend this book to fans of LGBT fiction that presents a realistic view of everyday life in the recent past without shying away from the darker aspects the characters face. I am giving it 4.5 stars.
  
  I received this book as a free eBook ARC via Edelweiss in exchange for an honest review.
• 
  Jordan

  I dearly wanted to go enjoy this book, but unfortunately only partially succeeded. As a window into the life of a gay man in 1960s London it was vaguely interesting, but the monotony started to wear on me towards the end.
  
  Near the beginning of the book, Leda seemed to me an arrogant little sod who I struggled to understand. I grew to enjoy him as the book progressed, though I think the writing style made this difficult at times. It seemed very sideways to me, with some of the internal monologues bordering on the absurd.
  
  Still, all in all it was a decent read, with a couple of nice lines and an interesting setting.
• 
  Greg Sinclair

  Love, Leda might just break your heart. It’s a potent mix of mundane observations on people and place, evocatively bringing alive early 60s London. But then it will work itself into very poetic reflections of self-loathing, or a terrifying scene of family violence rooted in homophobia, or numerous passages of sad longing from one man who realises another man will never return his love.
  
  The afterword by Luke Roberts, who discovered this unknown gem when researching the author, is excellent. It is here that your heart will break as you realise that much of the content of the novel is probably based on Hyatt’s own story.
• 
  Sloane

  Astonishing for its candid depictions of gay sex in the early 60s, it is important that this novel was rediscovered and published. It also provides a detailed account of working-class London at the time - the scenes of Leda as a gay man working at the construction company or at the canteen were striking. But I found the narrator's increasingly melodramatic self-reflection so exasperating and his pursuit of a straight man, which accelerates his self-loathing to the point of a suicide attempt, so pointless...
• 
  Tanith Pyner

  To come across such a lucid, compelling and tragic time capsule of working class gay life, so well preserved and perfunctoral of modern times, is really quite a marvel. ‘Love, Leda’ follows our misanthropic eponymous lead skirt the streets of Soho, borrowing money off friends, random hookups and traipsing around London with no purpose or goal. Reflecting the author’s brief but brilliant life, this is a gem of a read both in substance and in historian queer storytelling.
  
  So pleased to have this as my final read of the year. 🥂
• 
  Regina

  More of 3.5 rating. Liked lots about this, but was very frustrated about the way the middle aged woman's body was described in such a derogative tone and it felt like the male characters had more space for variations within their gender bracket than the female ones. Of course those brackets were quite narrow in the time the novel is set in, but the male gaze of the time is very palpable.
• 
  Eleanor Jackson

  At times, love Leda is not an easy read, with no chapter structure and long paragraphs which blur into an unevenly paced timeline. However this book comes from such a unique perspective and is beautifully written and has fortunately been rediscovered. A must read for anyone with an interest in queer British literature as it offers a near new opinion on an important period in queer history.
• 
  Larry

  Raw and uncompromising, "Love, Leda" sort of lost me early on with the mundane details and the repetitive narrative. While I doubt this will stick with me in the long run, I can't deny that the ending together with the story of the author and how the book was published were more impactful than I expected. 7/10
• 
  Dean Mackerel

  really really enjoyed. i folded a lot of pages to find particular bits i will want to return to again; the intro and authors biography are really good and important to. mark hyatt my heart hurts for u
• 
  Nella

  I found this quite a challenging read, mainly due to the meandering nature of Hyatt's writing. The narrative was unconventionally structured and difficult to follow. But this unconventionality is one of the beautiful details of this book too. It makes it emotive, sad, painful and honest.
• 
  frankie

  rediscovered beautiful time capsule of 1960s london and an almost autobiographical account of the wanderings and musings of the speaker. loved it a lot, really enjoying my readings this week and exploring queer spaces i do not know enough about!
• 
  Roadtotherisingsun

  Very underwhelming. Had some interesting descriptions of the underground gay scene in London in the 1960s. But the story doesn’t really go anywhere and the aggressive style of writing didn’t really do it for me.