One man’s restless, meandering journey through the lonely streets of 1960s London, replete with existential longing, visceral desire and unrequited love. One of the commentators in the exhibition suggests that had the novel been published in the author’s lifetime, it could have been remembered as one of the great working-class literature of the time. Because their guilt and self-pity is a sickness inbred in them, draining them; so they have to numb themselves with hollow sexuality and the din of the jukebox; inflate their shallow little egos into seeing themselves as supreme men of tomorrow, which they’ll never be. At times, love Leda is not an easy read, with no chapter structure and long paragraphs which blur into an unevenly paced timeline. That means that with every subscription, we are supporting people in poverty to get back on their own two feet.

Love, Leda also contains a fair amount of violence and reference to suicide so readers should be aware of this. His sexuality, too, is less than linear: occasional, functional liaisons with women likely having a touch of autobiography, if Hyatt’s own life is an indicator. 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? The focus of his almost monomaniacal attention is the religiously inclined heterosexual, Daniel with whom he flirts and is always rebuffed – finally with devastating consequences.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. 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. Daniel haunts Leda everywhere he goes, like the spectral threat of harm that followed men like Hyatt everywhere. 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 am without an address so I sit on the floor out of sheer tiredness and join them (the learned ones).

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. Not for the coffee itself but because they have paper serviettes and I can drop a line to Terry in Bristol.His head goes under the pillow and pulls out a tube of lubrication, to reduce the friction and half of the pain. In his pursuit of the bohemian, Leda leads a nocturnal life of smoky bars, jazz clubs, and the odd dalliance with a woman. 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. 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.

You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. He tries to find a good time among the furtive but excitable underground gay scene, or in the cottages and building sites.An absorbing, melancholy odyssey of love both transactional and yearned-for, the publication of Love, Leda honours a unique literary voice rediscovered.

It could be the zoo or the people, but I’ve never given thought to the matter and I never found pleasure in a zoo in my life. By turns, audacious and affecting, Hyatt’s semi-autobiographical novel gives us a handful of days in the company of Leda, depressed narcissist and self-proclaimed ‘social bum’. 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. 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.Leda is unattached to a home, job or partner but finds moments of comfort and intimacy among a community of gay men and divorced women. Most purchases from business sellers are protected by the Consumer Contract Regulations 2013 which give you the right to cancel the purchase within 14 days after the day you receive the item. He committed suicide at the very early age of 32 and left behind a legacy of unpublished manuscripts and papers.