Love, Leda
- Brand: Unbranded
Description
The miserable, stuffy greyness of Britain, the twitching curtains and tutting old ladies on damp double deckers, the bigoted policemen and the weak, milky cups of tea – these are the things that define the world Leda inhabits, one that seemed like it could go on for ever. While Leda should not be read as a fully autobiographical work, Hyatt himself grew up poor and working class, and had a violent relationship with his father, which draws many close parallels with this novel. At times, love Leda is not an easy read, with no chapter structure and long paragraphs which blur into an unevenly paced timeline. I aspire to nothing because I exist, and the study of religion is like the study of the dreams I never had. 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.
We’re here to help you find that book that you can’t put down, the book you’ll push on all your friends, the book that’ll change your life. The story ends with a dismal trip to the seaside which ultimately confirms Leda’s worst fears about the emptiness of all life. 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). Acerbic yet wistful, indecent, caffeinated, raw, suddenly profound – a hip flask of a novel, brimful of phenomenal lines. Other gays are neither radical heroes nor the pathetic, self-hating fairies of, say, Mart Crowley’s Boys in the Band.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.
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. Not for the coffee itself but because they have paper serviettes and I can drop a line to Terry in Bristol.
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.
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. I haven’t written to him for some time now and I feel he needs the tranquillity of love in a letter. Included in this heritage was the draft of a novel, Love, Leda, which has now been brought to a modern readership by Peninsula Press. He gets up and sits down in the corner facing me; the kind of man that imagining he might have a mild touch of VD, goes and tells some sympathetic girl friend for the sake of being with it. 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.
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. 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.
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. His selected poems, So Much For Life, edited by Sam Ladkin and Luke Roberts, is forthcoming with Nightboat Books (2023). Why has instinct made today an eye-opener, my mind issuing facts through my body with the result that I obtain no satisfaction?This leaves him adrift and while he certainly possesses a melancholy streak, he also emits catty asides and biting humour along his journey. 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. Make yourself at home, but close the door if you go out,’ he says quietly, and closes the door on himself. While the ‘Note on the text and the author’ tells more about the life and writing career of Hyatt, who is best known for his poetry.
- Fruugo ID: 258392218-563234582
- EAN: 764486781913
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