Visions of Narcissus: On Genet, Freud, and Mark Hyatt’s “Love, Leda”
Mark Hyatt | Love, Leda | Nightboat Books | October 2024 | 144 Pages
“While he desires to quench his thirst, a different thirst is created. While he drinks he is seized by the vision of his reflected form. He loves a bodiless dream.”
— Ovid, Metamorphoses
“Never did I try to make of [my life] something other than what it was, I did not try to adorn it, to mask it, but, on the contrary, I wanted to affirm it in its exact sordidness, and the most sordid signs became for me signs of grandeur.”
— Jean Genet, The Thief’s Journal
Love, Leda, the recently published posthumous novel of the late poet, Mark Hyatt, is a picaresque account of urban life in the London demimonde of the 1960s. Published some fifty or so years after its author’s death by suicide in 1972, first in the UK in 2023, Love, Leda is now available for the first time in the US from independent publisher Nightboat Books. A self-professed romantic, its titular protagonist, Leda, is constantly teetering on the edge of living “down and out.” While he manages to steer clear of the total abjection of, say, a Jean Genet novel—prison, prostitution, begging—he is, like a typical Genet protagonist, largely estranged from his family and frequently broke. Mostly, he manages to get by through odd jobs, the largesse of his friends and occasional romantic partners, and his good looks.
Nearly everything that Leda encounters reminds him of himself. Throughout his wanderings, whether attracted, repulsed, or enraptured by them, the myriad denizens of Leda’s London become reflections of himself. Jean-Paul Sartre, in his introduction to Genet’s Thief’s Journal, writes, “Not all who would be are Narcissus. Many who lean over the water see only a vague human figure. Genet sees himself everywhere; the dullest surfaces reflect his image; even in others he perceives himself, thereby bringing to light their deepest secrets.” The same could be said of Leda: that unabashedly vain flâneur of the demi-monde who sees himself everywhere.
Genet and Hyatt both display an interest in ontological instability, explored via a narrator whose sense of self is highly responsive to their environment and fundamentally unstable. In Love, Leda, Leda’s self is the canvas upon which the novel’s characters fill. Leda’s psyche is porous. He struggles with self-regulation. At one point, he muses, “At this moment I can hardly understand myself, for I am stimulated by my own emptiness and have no idea how to develop the self in me.” And later, he exclaims: “My mind is no good at government. It adopts all.” Here we get a sense of the magnitude of Leda’s vanity, which would likely put even your most self-involved friend to shame.
As perhaps the archetypal figure of ontological instability, of the unregulated Ego in the extreme, the mythological figure of Narcissus haunts both Genet and Hyatt’s work. In Ovid’s famous account of the Narcissus myth in his Metamorphoses, Narcissus’s tragic downfall is that he is so consumed by his own reflection, unable to distinguish between himself and another, he falls in a futile, all-consuming love with himself, that “bodiless dream.” The motif of Leda as Narcissus is established early in Hyatt’s novel. We follow Leda through a typical morning routine: After a nocturnal tryst, he sneaks into his friend’s empty flat, where he stays occasionally, borrows his clothes, and draws a bath. “I feel flamboyant, undress, and walk around the flat in my nudity,” Hyatt writes. “Nursing my own love, narcissus without fault.”
And later, in a comedic scene, we stumble upon Leda self-reflexively staging himself as Narcissus, reenacting the myth:
I look through a cupboard full of junk and pull out a full-size mirror. Putting it in the bathroom, I first lay it on the floor and stand on it, but being dressed, find no desires for myself. I go back into the kitchen and drink the tea. In the bathroom, I turn off the tap and put a handful of bath salts in the water. I get undressed and stand back on the mirror, looking down at myself. There is nothing of me that I fancy, so I stand the mirror against the wall. I get into the bath, lying out straight and trying to make myself flat. But I can never do it. The mirror is steaming up and reflects nothing.
In his restaging of the myth, Hyatt’s protagonist is not felled by his self-love. He is not, as Narcissus is, turned by the Gods into a flower. Leda’s immersion in himself is neither total nor complete. The aforementioned scene of onanism is notably a failed one: Leda fails at getting himself off.
In his seminal paper on narcissism, “Zur Einführung des Narzissmus” (“On Narcissism”), Freud outlines two forms of narcissism: primary and secondary. Autoeroticism, for the infant libido, is the crucial component of the former: the child’s centering of their self as the sole object of satisfaction and stimulation. Secondary narcissism is perhaps closer to what we conventionally think of when we think of the stereotypical narcissist: self-centered to the point of delusion, which, for Freud, was often connected to other personality disorders, namely schizophrenia. It would be interesting to hear what an analyst’s diagnosis of Leda would be. He appears to get past the primary infantile narcissistic stage—he does seek out others for erotic pleasure—but whether he would avoid the label of secondary narcissism remains up for debate.
Hyatt seems to be playing with the figure of the narcissist and the historical usage, as Freud notes, of describing homosexual behavior as narcissistic. I think it is safe to say that while Leda may exhibit some narcissistic tendencies, he does not fully succumb to narcissism’s thrall. He does not, like Ovid’s Narcissus, become lost in his reflection. While he is unabashedly self-obsessed and vain, his narcissism has a specific function in the novel. One of the lesser acknowledged facets of Freud’s theory of narcissism was his recognition of positive aspects of narcissistic behavior. In a paper in the European Journal of Psychoanalysis on Freud’s theories of narcissism, Sergio Benvenuto writes, “Freud spoke of narcissism as a tactic, a libidinal position taken, for example, when a human being is in physical pain. A severe toothache will make anyone narcissistic, because drives will be concentrated on the hurting part of the body.” One can detect this same self-protective tactic in Leda, as a response to the often painful, hostile conditions he lives through. Rather than become paralyzed by self-obsession, Leda’s narcissism functions as a fuel, a balm, a solace. It is his very awareness of his beauty that allows him to survive in the repressive, homophobic society of postwar Great Britain.
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The novel follows a rough pattern: Leda does some kind of itinerant, menial work; has a night out at a venue where he does not feel welcome; has a hookup that goes badly; finds refuge at a friend’s place; and receives a good-natured lecture about his lifestyle habits. Then he sleeps, and the cycle repeats.
Although Leda is aimless and adrift, he doesn’t seem all that bothered by this apparent lack of direction, despite frequent admonitions from friends and strangers. Take the following exchange with coworkers at one of the many gigs he works in the novel, in this case, cutting sheet metal:
“Judging by your cards, you haven’t worked for years,” old Bill says.
“That’s true.”
“Then how do you keep on living?”
“I usually find a rich woman and live with her.”
“Don’t you find that degrading?”
“No.”
“Don’t you feel immoral?”
“No, why would I?”
“Well, I would, if I did that.”
“I live sheerly for myself, and not for other peoples’ thoughts.”
Leda’s philosophy towards work might be described as the following: Make enough to get by, but don’t expect spiritual fulfillment from your work. Regarding such ideas as a career or vacation, he is coolly detached, even cynical. Speaking to a friend and occasional female lover, Zara, he says:
“I’ve got to find myself a casual job and put some money in my pockets.”
“That doesn’t pay much, or does it.”
“Half a crown an hour, I think.”
“Twenty-five bob a day. It’s hardly worth it.”
“Twenty-five bob to me is what I call being semi-rich.”
“Then you’re a fool.”
A few lines later, Leda justifies himself:
“I’m happy happy at the moment. I need nothing more.”
“That’s because you’re still dreaming of Daniel.”
“I know. I love Daniel just for living.”
Beyond meeting his immediate material needs, Leda’s motivations are largely focused on his ultimate, and ultimately unrequited object of desire: Daniel, an older married man. The central conflict in the novel might be described as Leda’s romanticism clashing against his harsh everyday reality of living in working-class London as a gay man in the 1960s.
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Leda’s London is roughly the same one that its author inhabited. It was a London where homophobia was as casual as it was rampant, and homosexuality not just socially condemned, but highly criminalized. In England and Wales in 1954, there were over 1,000 gay men in prison for homosexual acts. Love, Leda was written on the cusp of the passage of the Sexual Offenses Act of 1967, a watershed moment for gay rights in the UK that decriminalized male homosexual acts. As Huw Lemmey writes in his foreword, “Love, Leda was written in that strange thawing of the sexual permafrost that came between the 1957 Wolfenden Report, with its recommendation to partially decriminalize sex between men, and its implementation in the Sexual Offences Act some ten years later.”
This “thaw” in attitudes towards homosexuality lends the novel an atmosphere of pervasive uncertainty. Leda’s position is still definitively on society’s margins, and he is aware that to some his behavior would be considered criminal, but his position does not seem fixed. The novel carries a sense of hope that the future may be different. “Now I look upon the world with optimism,” begins its final line.
The novel had a long, convoluted, fifty-plus year-long path to publication. Originally compiled by Hyatt’s close friend, Lucy O’Shea, the existence of the manuscript was unknown to scholars of Hyatt’s poetry until 2019, when Luke Roberts and Sam Ladkin, editors working on a posthumous collection of Hyatt’s poetry, learned of the novel through O’Shea’s correspondence. Here is a book that can truly be said to have been “rescued” from the archive.
According to Luke Robert’s afterword, certain events in Leda’s life mirror Hyatt’s. Hyatt was born in South London in 1940 and took his own life in 1972. Hyatt likely shared with his protagonist a domineering, violent familial upbringing. Both grew up in poverty and lived an itinerant life. Both would attempt suicide. However, Leda as narrator manages to lift us beyond the cold, bare facts of his life. Love, Leda is, I’d venture, stranger and more fantastical than the life of its author likely was. So while there are biographical similarities, it would be a mistake to read Love, Leda as a straight roman à clef. If Mark Hyatt wanted to write a straightforward autobiography, he would have done so. The form of the novel was likely more welcoming for Hyatt, the poet. Unlike, say, Robert Lowell’s direct autobiographical style, Hyatt’s poetry, while striking in its emotional candor and vulnerability, tends to eschew explicitly stating personal details.[4] Perhaps the vehicle of the novel allowed Hyatt, via his larger-than-life literary creation, Leda, to depict truths and memories, wounds literal that may have been too painful to depict head on.
Again I am reminded of Genet. Sartre writes of Genet in the same introduction to A Thief’s Journal: “His autobiography is not an autobiography; it merely seems like one; it is a sacred cosmogony. His stories are not stories. They excite you and fascinate you; you think he is relating facts and suddenly you realize he is describing rites.” I’d argue that Leda can be seen, à la Sartre, as the center of the “sacred cosmology” of the novel. As one reads Love, Leda, it becomes clear that this is no straightforward autobiography. Through a kind of ecstatic solipsism, Leda builds his own narrative of himself, at a remove from the harsh realities of the outside world. “I abandon myself from this sham of a world,” Hyatt writes, “and bury myself deep in the treasures of the heart.” Throughout the novel, Leda constantly invents and reinvents the mythology of himself, as if writing his own hagiography.
This is not a novel without flaws. I confess that by its end, the repetitive, episodic structure started to wear on me. But given its posthumous publication, I am inclined to assess the novel based on what I think Hyatt attempted to achieve with it, with the understanding that the book we hold in our hands may not be the one Hyatt intended for us to read, if indeed he planned for us to read it at all. It would be a gross reduction to call Mark Hyatt simply “Britain’s Genet.” To do so would be to erase the important differences between the two and neglect the aspects—his self-taught background, his work as a poet, his highly idiosyncratic prose style—that make Hyatt unique. Beyond their similarities on paper, these two rough contemporaries—two gay men writing about the respective underbellies of their milieux in books that were often not traditionally published at the time—do seem to share an aesthetic and philosophical kinship.
Although they would lead drastically different careers—with Hyatt’s being tragically cut short after his death by suicide and Genet living out his final years to a ripe old age in the Middle East—they can be seen as two sides of the same coin. In both of their work, imagination, or willful “illusioning,” becomes a transformative force that allows a marginalized person—poor, queer, and criminalized—to exist, and at times even to thrive, in otherwise unbearable conditions. The question that Love, Leda seems to pose, with its tragic ending, is how long one can sustain this line of thinking. For Genet, against all odds, and especially when one considers the “occupational hazards” of his lifestyle, his life and career would be long. Hyatt, tragically, would not share the same fate.
Radical, provocative, groundbreaking, controversial: These adjectives could be used to describe Hyatt and Genet to varying degrees. Both writers could be considered radical simply for the fact that, at a time when their existence was criminalized, they chose to document the substance and tenor of their lives in all their beauty and squalor. But beyond any so-called identity politics, even beyond a capital “p” politic, what comes to the fore after spending time with their work is the radical quality of their imagination. Whether dismissed as solipsism, mania, or narcissism, Genet and Hyatt’s work demonstrates the transformative potential of re-imagining one’s reality, especially in the face of a criminalized existence.
Neither offers an easy way out. One finds no homilies, no utopias in Hyatt and Genet’s work. This is not the cliche “imagine” of John Lennon, but something necessarily more solitary and inward—the imagination of the exile, the outcast. This is the imagination of the margins, which makes it all the more resilient and remarkable, sustained despite disregard and contempt from mainstream society. Read today, when our world seems to be sliding frighteningly closer to the one Hyatt was writing from, his work provides a kind of solace, a grim hope: No one’s coming to save us, except ourselves.
[1] For a sampling of Hyatt’s poetry, see the following: https://brooklynrail.org/2023/12/poetry/Mark-Hyatt/