Now that quirky profile
documentaries are as common as remakes of Japanese horror flicks, filmmaker
Immy Humes scored a real coup for Doc in finding a legitimately strange cult figure with a
fascinating backstory that hasn't been told before. Equal parts J.D.
Salinger-style literary eccentric, Syd Barrett-style drug-crazed lunatic, and Zelig-style historical interloper, Harold
Louis "Doc" Humes Jr. also was Immy's father, a role that inspired slightly
less public enthusiasm than his stints as a novelist, Paris Review founder, filmmaker, political
activist, and guru. There's nothing bitter, though, about the affectionate,
affecting Doc.
Born with a brilliant analytical
mind—a friend fondly recalls him saying, "Someone ask me a question, I
feel like explaining something"—Humes went to MIT at 16. But an
all-consuming wanderlust brought him to post-war Paris, a magical place where
counterculture types could while away the days in cafés rubbing shoulders with
ambitious young writers like James Baldwin, Richard Wright, and George
Plimpton. The remainder of Humes' life plays like a sort of shadow history of
the possibilities and limitations of a fringe hipster existence in the second
half of the 20th century. Humes wrote two acclaimed novels—The
Underground City and Men Die?—in the late '50s, but he was
mostly given to pursuing hopeless, quixotic efforts ranging from building cheap
paper houses for Third World countries to managing Norman Mailer's campaign to
become mayor of New York City in 1961. (Fittingly, Humes also tried to make a
silent, jazz-scored movie based on Don Quixote, called Don Peyote.) Introduced to LSD by Timothy Leary
in 1966, Humes eventually deteriorated into violent paranoia, which killed his
writing career and alienated him from his wife and three daughters. He spent
the next two decades living near elite East Coast college campuses and
accumulating a small army of "Docolytes" willing to trade spots on their
couches for rambling lectures on media masquerades, massage techniques, or any
subject currently captivating his overactive mind.
In spite of her deeply personal
connection to her subject, Immy Humes doesn't appear to have an ax to grind in Doc. She handles the
Humes' troubled home life delicately, and makes it secondary to her father's
public misadventures. Doc makes an aggressive case for Humes being a lost literary
genius—both his books were recently reissued—but he's more like a
master bullshit artist who was able to endlessly re-invent himself because he
could talk a blue streak. More notable perhaps for who he knew than what he
did, Humes always commanded an audience, even among his famous friends. As Doc observes, most
crazy people are repellent, but H.L. Humes was magnetic.