The Beat Century — post 7 of 100. Hettie Jones, How I Became Hettie Jones (1990).
Jones co-founded the magazine and press that first published Ginsberg, Kerouac and di Prima, then spent decades uncredited; her 1990 memoir recovers that work while reckoning with an interracial marriage the era could not accommodate.
The Beat Generation reached print because particular people ran mimeograph machines, kept subscription lists, corrected proofs and paid printers. Hettie Jones was one of those people, and for a long stretch of the 1950s and early 1960s she was one of the most consequential. Her 1990 memoir, published by Grove Press, is the record of that labour and of the marriage it was entangled with.
The title carries the book’s whole structure. It is not How I Met the Beats. It is an account of becoming a particular person under a particular name — a name acquired by marriage, retained after the marriage ended, and belonging to a man who by then had discarded it himself.
Hettie Cohen of Laurelton, Queens
She was born Hettie Cohen in Brooklyn on June 15, 1934, and raised in a Jewish family in Laurelton, Queens. At Mary Washington College in Virginia, where she went in 1952, she encountered antisemitism directly — an experience the memoir treats as formative, and which supplies part of the equipment she brings to what follows.
Downtown Manhattan after college offered the standard route for a literate young woman: clerical work at Partisan Review, proximity to writing without much prospect of being counted as a writer. What was not standard was her marriage in 1958 to LeRoi Jones, the African-American poet later known as Amiri Baraka. Her family disowned her. The memoir is unsentimental about what an interracial marriage cost in New York in 1958 and about raising biracial daughters in a city that had opinions about them.
Yugen and Totem Press
In 1957 the couple founded the literary magazine Yugen, which ran until 1963, and launched the imprint Totem Press. Between them they published early work by Ginsberg, Kerouac, Burroughs, Philip Whalen, Diane di Prima and others. They were among the first editors to put the Beat writers in front of readers, at a moment when established houses were not interested.
The division of labour is the memoir’s quiet centre. Hettie Jones did much of the editing, typing, layout and business management. In the standard histories, Yugen is LeRoi Jones’s magazine. This is the specific mechanism by which women disappear from literary history: not by exclusion from the room, but by doing the unglamorous half of the work in it. Her account is notably free of self-pity about this, which makes it more damaging rather than less.
The magazine’s name is worth pausing on. Yugen is a Japanese aesthetic term for a profound, mysterious sense of the beauty of the universe — a suggestion of depth beneath a surface. For a mimeographed downtown magazine run out of an apartment on a shoestring, it was an unusually confident piece of branding, and it signalled exactly the seriousness with which its editors took work that established publishers were declining to touch.
The End of the Marriage
The marriage deteriorated through 1964 and 1965 as Baraka moved toward the Black Arts Movement. He fathered a child with Diane di Prima while still married to Jones, then divorced her and moved to Harlem. The break was political as much as personal: the Black Arts programme he was building had no place for a white wife, and the assassination of Malcolm X in February 1965 marked the turn.
Jones handles this without either exonerating her husband or reducing his politics to a personal betrayal. She grants the historical seriousness of what Baraka was doing while declining to pretend it did not leave her with two children and no money. That double vision — holding a political argument and a private injury in view simultaneously without collapsing either into the other — is the memoir’s chief technical accomplishment.
Her Own Work, Eventually
Jones kept working. She wrote and edited for decades, taught extensively, including in a long-running writing workshop at a New York State women’s prison, and published poetry: her collection Drive won the Poetry Society of America’s Norma Farber First Book Award in 1999 — a first book at sixty-five, which is its own comment on the arithmetic of a life spent making other people’s work possible.
How I Became Hettie Jones was widely noticed on publication. The New York Times listed it among its Notable Books of 1990 and carried it in its recommended summer reading and “Noted With Pleasure” columns. Jones died in Philadelphia on August 13, 2024, aged 90.
The Work After the Marriage
The memoir covers roughly a decade and stops. What followed was another fifty years of working life that the Beat framing tends to obscure. Jones raised two daughters alone, supported them by freelance editing and writing, and produced a substantial body of her own work — children’s books, non-fiction, and the poetry that eventually appeared in Drive.
Her longest sustained commitment was teaching writing in a New York State women’s prison over many years, work she pursued well into her eighties and which produced published anthologies of her students’ writing. It is a continuation of the same instinct that ran Yugen: the conviction that the useful literary act is often getting somebody else’s words into print. She simply chose harder cases the second time.
The Credit Question, Sharpened
Alongside Joyce Johnson’s Minor Characters and di Prima’s later memoir, this book helped open a scholarly field. Studies of the Beats had effaced or excluded Elise Cowen, Johnson, Joanne Kyger, Hettie Jones and di Prima, and academic work including Girls Who Wore Black and Women Writers of the Beat Era proceeds from ground these memoirs cleared.
Jones’s case is the sharpest of them because her contribution is the most documentable. Johnson can be described, however unfairly, as a witness. Jones co-founded a press and a magazine whose catalogue is a substantial portion of early Beat publishing. The question her book poses is not whether women were present — it is why the person who edited and produced the work is remembered, when she is remembered at all, as somebody’s wife.
The couple founded the literary magazine Yugen, and launched the publication house Totem Press.
Wikipedia, Hettie Jones
Where to go next
Read it with Joyce Johnson’s Minor Characters for the same streets and the same decade, and with di Prima’s Recollections of My Life as a Woman for the third side of a tangled triangle.
Previous: Allen Ginsberg, Howl and Other Poems. Next: Jack Spicer, My Vocabulary Did This to Me. One hundred books from the Beat Generation and the writers around them — the ones who got famous, the ones who got written out, and the ecological writing that grew out of the same soil. A new one every other day.
Sources
- Hettie Jones — Wikipedia
- How I Became Hettie Jones — Grove Atlantic
- About Hettie Jones — Academy of American Poets
- Hettie Jones (1934-2024) — The Allen Ginsberg Project
CD Damitio writes at indignified.substack.com — essays on utopias, dystopias, and the spaces between. Free to read. No algorithm, no sponsored content. His books can be found on Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/stores/CD-Damitio/author/B001JP7NWA
CD Damitio writes INDIGNIFIED — utopias and dystopias explored. Free to read.
