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2 Bohemian Immersions ON MONDAY, OCTOBER 13,1958,Jones and Hettie Cohen were married in a Buddhist temple in New York City.1 Jones’s decision to marry a white woman was his clearest articulation of ethnic “outsiderness” and perhaps even social marginality. The marriage produced two daughters. Raised in New York City, Hettie Cohen had come to Greenwich Village after attending Mary Washington College in Virginia. According to Theodore Hudson, she had gone south to get away from the ethnically parochial expectations of her family and milieu (i.e., to marry “a nice Jewish boy”).2 Like LeRoi, Hettie wanted to be ethnically cosmopolitan and had come to the Village in search of such a lifestyle. In her autobiography, the former Hettie Cohen, now Hettie Jones, provides a revealing excursion into the Greenwich Village bohemian life of the late 1950s and early 1960s.She discusses the manner in which her life as a woman and particularly as a bohemian wife and mother restricted her opportunities to edit, write, and otherwise engage her mind in ways available to her husband, LeRoi. Her autobiography is an important corrective to the prevailing view of Baraka’s life in theVillage in which she becomes the invisible backdrop to a “genius-at-work.”3 Several months before their marriage, Hettie and LeRoi began editing and publishing Yugen, a literary journal.4 The title was a Japanese word meaning “profound mystery.”5 Jones launched the journal as an outlet for the avant-garde writings that he found so interesting.6 In producing the journal, an implicit division of labor developed between LeRoi and Hettie. Jones acted as the journal’s primary literary editor while Cohen was in charge of production . Hettie’s previous experiences as the subscription manager of the Record Changer and the business manager of the Partisan Review prepared her for this endeavor. Perpetually short of funding for the journal, Hettie functioned as a one-woman production unit. She typed the first issue on a rented IBM typewriter and laid it out on the kitchen table in the apartment she shared with Jones. The initial issue included contributions from Philip Whalen, Ed James, Judson Crews, Diane Di Prima, Jack Micheline, Allen Ginsberg, LeRoi Jones, and others. Hettie described the range of authors whose articles were published in Yugen: 44 From a quick first look at Yugen 4 you’d say Beat, as the three Beat gurus— Kerouac, Corso, and Ginsberg—were represented. Except the “New consciousness in arts and letters” was more inclusive. Like Basil King, Joel Oppenheimer , and Fielding Dawson, the poets Robert Creeley, John Wieners, and Charles Olson were out of Black Mountain College, where Olson was the last rector. Frank O’Hara, like the painters he knew, was a poet of the “New York School.” Gilbert Sorrentino lived in Brooklyn, Gary Snyder in Japan, Ray Bremser in a Trenton, New Jersey, prison.7 In hindsight, it is rather amazing that such youthful and relatively unpublished writers such as Hettie Cohen and LeRoi Jones would presume to edit a poetry magazine. Their presumption was facilitated by their membership in an art world outside the interests of established literary journals. The very novelty of the “new writing” gave Cohen and Jones an editorial entrée. Fortunately for them, Allen Ginsberg passed on the name of the journal to Beat writers and other potential contributors. In certifying their journal by attaching his imprimatur to it, Ginsberg aided the young editors in their quest to publish what they deemed to be the best of the new. Yugen published eight issues from 1958 to 1962. Concerning the journal, Beat poet Diane Di Prima wrote: The early issues were very rough, both in content and format: great things and real junk, side by side. I used to go over to his house on 20th Street and paste them up with his wife Hettie. The later issues became more professional looking, and also the writing was more professional. It had become a regular little magazine instead of something done out of somebody ’s living room.8 As publishers of an important “little magazine,” LeRoi and Hettie gained access to the Village’s inner circles and Beat literary communities and became friends and acquaintances with major Greenwich Village intellectual figures. Their apartment on West Twentieth Street became an unofficial artist salon. According to one student of the period, the Joneses’ party guest included the habitués of the Cedar Bar, the painters who showed in the new...

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