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‘happening’; he was interested in finding out what lay underneath it.”
    Through her broadcast work Bacal became familiar with London’s West Indian community and started to frequent a cellar club on Wardour Street in Soho, the Flamingo. On Friday nights, after hours, it transformed into a club-within-a-club called the All-Nighter. It began at midnight, although anybody who was anybody knew it did not get going until two A.M . “It was, theoretically, a very dodgy place but it was actually magical,” said Bacal. “There was so much weed in the air it was like walking into a painting of smoke.” She and Harold Pascal, another of the Montreal set who was living in London, would go there most Friday nights. The music was good—calypso and white R & B–jazz acts like Zoot Money and Georgie Fame and the Blue Flames—and the crowd was fascinating. Quite unusually for the time, it was 50 percent black—Afro-Caribbeans and a handful of African-American GIs; the white half was made up of mobsters, hookers and hipsters.
    On the first night Leonard went with Nancy to the club, there was a knife fight. “Somebody called the law. Everyone was stoned and dancing,” she recalls, and then the police arrived. “I don’t know if you’ve ever been to any of these sleazy joints, but you don’t want to be there when they turn on the lights. Suddenly all the faces were white. The incident didn’t last long, but we were all pretty shook up. I was worried about Leonard, but he was cool.” Leonard loved the place. After a subsequent visit, Leonard wrote to his sister, Esther, saying, “It’s the first time I’ve really enjoyed dancing. I sometimes even forget I belong to an inferior race. The Twist is the greatest ritual since circumcision—and there you can choose between the genius of two cultures. Myself I prefer the Twist.” 1
    With the first draft of his novel finished, Leonard turned his attention to his second volume of poems. He had gathered the poems for The Spice-Box of Earth the year before and, at Irving Layton’s recommendation, had given it to the Canadian publisher McClelland & Stewart. Literally. Driving to Toronto with a friend, Leonard handed his manuscript to Jack McClelland in person. McClelland had taken over his father’s company in 1946 at the age of twenty-four and was, according to the writer Margaret Atwood, “a pioneer in Canadian publishing, at a time when many Canadians did not believe they had a literature, or if they did have one, it wasn’t very good or interesting.” 2 So impressed was McClelland by Leonard that he accepted his book on the spot.
    Poets are not especially known for their salesman skills, but Leonard worked his book like a pro. He even instructed the publisher how it should be packaged and marketed. Instead of the usual slim hardback that poetry tended to come in—which was nice for pressing flowers in but expensive to print and therefore to buy—his should be a cheap colorful paperback, said Leonard, and he offered to design it. “I want an audience,” he wrote in a letter to McClelland. “I am not interested in the Academy.” He wanted to make his work accessible to “inner-directed adolescents, lovers in all degrees of anguish, disappointed Platonists, pornography-peepers, hair-handed monks and Popists, French-Canadian intellectuals, unpublished writers, curious musicians etc., all that holy following of my Art.” 3 In all, a pretty astute, and remarkably enduring, inventory of his fan base.
    Leonard was sent a list of revisions and edits and given a tentative publication date of March 1960, but the date passed.
    In the same month, Leonard was in the East End of London, walking to the tube station from the dental surgery where Mrs. Pullman worked, where he had just had a wisdom tooth pulled. It was raining—Leonard would say “it rained