One can only wonder what effect Mark Hyatt’s only known novel, Love, Leda, would have had on British culture had it found a publisher and reached bookshop shelves when it was written, in the middle of the 1960s. 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. It might well have been explosive and remembered as one of the great works of working-class literature of the time alongside works by authors and playwrights such as Alan Sillitoe, Shelagh Delaney or Bill Naughton. But instead it is passed down to us as an orphan, a great lost work, a time capsule.
In grand historical terms, the 1960s were a great turning point for British society. Between 1964 and 1970 a Labour government undertook sweeping reforms to domestic social legislation, transforming the face of the country in an attempt to produce, in the words of the reforming home secretary Roy Jenkins, “a more civilised, more free and less hidebound society”. New acts of parliament changed the laws on divorce and abortion, and made contraception available on the NHS; attempts were made to address racism and discrimination through a series of race relations acts; capital and corporal punishment were abolished, and strict censorship laws were chipped away at or overturned. Love, Leda was written in that strange thawing of the sexual permafrost that came between the 1957 Wolfenden report, with its recommendation to partially decriminalise sex between men, and its implementation in the Sexual Offences Act some 10 years later.
In retrospect, these changes in the relationship between state and citizen were transformative. It was an attempt to unstuff the class-bound, moralising culture that had choked British life since the Victorian era, and free people to think, and act, for themselves. For many social conservatives on the left and the right, that was the start of the rot. Yet for those living through it, change was stuttering, sometimes piecemeal, and the consequences of liberalisation were neither inevitable nor predictable. 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.
The novel’s protagonist, Leda, is sick of all this an he’s looking for something else. He tries to find culture and conversation around the emerging trendy coffee bars and jazz clubs of Soho, but instead finds only poseurs and beatniks, straight middle-class students who call themselves existentialists but seem scared by Leda’s own hopeless embrace of life. He tries to find a good time among the furtive but excitable underground gay scene, or in the cottages and building sites. He tries to find work washing dishes or as a sheet metal worker, but it bores him. 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. And he tries to draw love from the most barren of places: a straight man.
In 1965, any mention of gay sex – not just gay men, but actual gay fucking, with hair and sweat and Vaseline included – would have been shocking for most contemporary readers. One only need look at the work of Hyatt’s contemporaries, working-class writers such as Delaney and Joe Orton, to see how the mere suggestion of homosexuality was a profoundly taboo-breaking literary gesture. 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. At best it is a source of pleasure, excitement, transgression; sometimes it is merely a curious character trait, a peccadillo. “My own experience,” Leda muses “tells me that more love goes into the thought of homosexuality than the practice.” Other gays are neither radical heroes nor the pathetic, self-hating fairies of, say, Mart Crowley’s Boys in the Band. This frankness makes Love, Leda a singular work; a contemporary portrait of working-class gay London in the years running up to decriminalisation that neither flatters nor sensationalises. In doing so, Hyatt transforms gay sex and love from an abject taboo to a deeply human intimacy.
It’s so tempting to rewrite history, to imagine the febrile power Hyatt’s book would have held in the hands of a young gay reader had it found a contemporaneous publisher. To think of how it might have shocked, appalled and beguiled in turn, and perhaps even found itself the subject of an obscenity trial. As with any lost work, we think of what might have followed it had Hyatt not decided to take his own life in 1972, or had a new generation of writers found it.
Yet to see lost works only as counter histories obscures the value that they still have for the contemporary reader. In his sympathetic approach to the struggles of a working-class homosexual, clearly drawn from his own experience, and his tender portrayal of how the reality of sex presses upon personal relationships, Hyatt produced a powerful story of desire, depression and listless youth that still resonates. It’s thanks to his remarkable frankness that Love, Leda remains fresh, tender, even erotic, some 60 years after it was written.
• This piece is taken from Huw Lemmey’s introduction to Love, Leda by Mark Hyatt published by Peninsula (£10.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
