Harold L. Humes
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| Harold Louis Humes, Jr. | |
|---|---|
| Born | April 11, 1926 Douglas, Arizona, U.S. |
| Died | September, 1992 New York, NY |
| Occupation | Novelist Journalist Editor-in-chief Teacher |
| Nationality | American |
Harold Louis Humes, Jr. (1926-1992) was known as HL Humes on his books, and usually as "Doc" Humes in life. He was the originator of The Paris Review literary magazine, author of two critically-acclaimed novels in the late fifties, and a gregarious fixture of the cultural scene in Paris, London, and New York in the 1950s and early 1960s. He was a champion talker, activist, filmmaker, architect, and contemporary Don Quixote. In 1966, in London, he took large amounts of LSD, which was given to him by Timothy Leary, and he became paranoid and sometimes delusional. After this, he no longer did any writing. When he returned to the US in 1969, he reinvented himself as a "guru on campus," a self-appointed visiting professor, and spent the next 20-odd years living on or near-campus at Columbia, Princeton, Bennington, and Harvard, dependent on students who were fascinated by his mixture of erudition and mental illness and also dependent upon his family.
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[edit] Early life
Humes was born in Douglas, Arizona. His father was a chemical engineer from Michigan who studied at McGill. His mother, Alexandra Elizabeth McGonnigle, came from Montreal. Both parents were Christian Science practitioners.
Humes grew up in Princeton, New Jersey, graduating from Princeton High. It was there that he won his lifelong nickname, when his classmates dubbed him Doc after "Doc Huer," a brilliant scientist/nutty professor in Buck Rogers, a popular comic strip.
He attended MIT, and did a stint in the US Navy, but left in 1948 to go to Paris.
[edit] Work
In Paris, Humes owned an English language magazine called The Paris News Post, edited by Leon Kafka. Humes recruited the young American blueblood Peter Matthiessen as literary editor, not knowing till much later that he was working for the CIA at the time. Together they founded The Paris Review, a literary journal, and soon brought in George Plimpton, who would remain its editor for fifty years.
Humes studied fiction writing with Archibald MacLeish at Harvard, graduating in 1954. He participated in Leary and Alpert's LSD experiments while there, and later continued his own experiments, guiding the first LSD experiences of several famous literary friends.
He wrote two well-regarded novels, The Underground City (Random House, 1958) and Men Die (Random House, 1959). Humes was mentioned in Esquire magazine (along with John Updike and William Styron) as among the nation's most promising young novelists.
He also directed Don Peyote, a movie starring Ojo de Vidrio, and designed and built a paper house, which he hoped would be an affordable housing alternative.
Humes was reputed to have worked for several years as a meteorologist in London.
He managed Lord Buckley, the great spoken word artist; fought the New York Police Department over the Cabaret Card Laws; and was Norman Mailer's campaign manager for Mailer's first run for New York City Mayor -- a campaign that was aborted by Mailer's stabbing of his wife.
In 1964 Humes wrote a paper entitled "Bernoulli's Epitaph" espousing a theory of the shape of the universe as that of a spherical vortex, noting as an aside that a cross-section of a spherical vortex looks like a yin-yang symbol...
He started a third novel, titled The Memoirs of Dorsey Slade, but never finished it.
By 1967, Humes had developed a detoxification method for heroin addiction that involved, in his terms, micro-doses of LSD, medical-grade hashish, emergency-massage techniques, flotation exercises and breath work, which he clained if done correctly would lead to a rebirthing experience over a 3-5 day length of time. He was practicing these techniques in what he termed 'crash-pad clinics' in Rome, Italy.
By 1968, he was in Paris in time to be jailed in the demonstrations that were part of the student revolution there.
He was back in the US by April, 1969, which is when he gave away many thousands of dollars in cash on and around the Columbia University campus.
Humes also frequented the Princeton University campus in the Spring of 1970. He would entertain groups of students with elaborately wrought, delusional accounts of the F.I.D.O. computer system (a supposed underground maze of interconnected computers, run by the Government); disappearing and reappearing "lenticular" clouds (claimed by Humes to be heat sinks for alien UFOs); and systems for decoding the supposed hidden messages embedded in the "snow" that would fill a television screen after a broadcast television station had signed off the night.
[edit] Marriage and children
In 1954 he married Anna Lou Elianoff, daughter of the linens designer Luba Elianoff. They had four daughters. (She divorced him in 1966 and married Nelson W. Aldrich Jr in 1967, who had worked at the Paris Review as an editor.)
He had one son in Italy in 1968, and another in Cambridge, MA in 1977.
[edit] Death and afterward
Humes died of prostate cancer at St. Rose's Home in New York City in 1992.
[edit] Philosophical and/or political views
Humes was a passionate and early advocate of medical marijuana.
In some ways, the original hippie, a pioneer in the burgeoning field of hypnopornography.
Anxiety-tension epidemic...microwaves...FIDO...
In later years on recounting his memories of MIT, he spoke especially highly of his professor Norbert Weiner, the author of the book Cybernetics.
[edit] Bibliography
- The Underground City (Random House, 1958)(Random House, 2007)
- Men Die (Random House, 1959)(Random House, 2007)
[edit] References
- Celia McGee, Burgeoning Rebirth of Bygone Literary Star, The New York Times, 1/13/07
- Alan Cheuse, article about Doc's books in the anthology Rediscoveries II (1988?)
- Paul Auster, From Hand to Mouth, a memoir of early failure; recounts his encounter with Doc in 1969
- Gay Talese, Looking for Hemingway, an Esquire article from the early 60's about The Paris Review crowd, reprinted in Talese anthology
[edit] Reviews
- Time Out NY:
Doc [four stars] Dir. Immy Humes. 2007. N/R. 98mins. Documentary.
Immy Humes's absorbing documentary about her father, H.L. Humes, could have been subtitled Portrait of the Artist as a Madman. The elder Humes, known affectionately as Doc, was a cultural meteor blazing through the 1950s and early '60s.... in Doc, he emerges as a quintessential countercultural figure, embodying both the exuberance and the excesses of the times. More poignantly, Immy Humes finds redemption for the father who was often too preoccupied or too sick to tend to his family. "[You] never fall out of love with anybody that you've ever loved," he tells her shortly before his death. "I've done exhaustive research on that subject.… And it has exhausted me." (Now playing; Film Forum.) —Tom Beer
[edit] See also
[edit] External links
| Persondata | |
|---|---|
| NAME | Harold Louis Humes, Jr. |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | H.L. Humes; Doc Humes |
| SHORT DESCRIPTION | American novelist and counterculture figure |
| DATE OF BIRTH | 1926 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Douglas, Arizona |
| DATE OF DEATH | 1992 |
| PLACE OF DEATH | New York City |
