On Screen

Harold “Doc” Humes was a flat stone, skipping across the surface of
the late 20th-century literary world. He covered a lot of ground, but
never plunged very deeply into anything. He founded the Paris
Review but soon left to study writing at Harvard, wrote two highly
praised but soon-forgotten novels (The Underground City and
Men Die), managed Norman Mailer’s mayoral campaign, and spent
the final 20 years of his life as a paranoid hobo-savant who bummed
around Columbia, Princeton, Bennington, and Harvard, wheedling his way
into students’ apartments to lecture on philosophy, marijuana, clouds,
massage, and government conspiracies for days at a time. He fathered
several children—by several women—who barely remember him.
Though he was on speaking, drinking, and smoking terms with James
Baldwin, Norman Mailer, George Plimpton, Timothy Leary, and Peter
Matthiesson, he never ascended to their pantheon. Doc is more notable
for his absence than his presence.

This rehabilitative documentary, made by his daughter Immy Humes,
wants to change that. Cobbled together from interviews with his family
and famous friends, Doc covers his innovations, patents,
writing, arrests, film project (an adaptation of Don Quixote entitled Don Peyote), heroically long lectures, and descent into
madness and cancer.

Doc’s tragedy was to be less successful than the people who
surrounded him, and Doc‘s most interesting moments are
confessional asides by the documentary’s more august contributors:
Mailer regretting that he stabbed his second wife at a party (Doc was
in the room), Matthiesson squirming while explaining that he worked as
a CIA agent and used the Paris Review as his cover, and all of
them wishing the world had been kinder to Doc, and vice versa. The
documentary’s redemptive mission is only partly successful. We learn
that he threw his weight behind several important cultural
undertakings, but that his mental illness—for which he refused
treatment until the bitter end—caused him to beat at least one of
his wives, neglect his kids, and be more interested in himself than
anything. Such are the dangers of exposure.