Harold L. Humes
Encyclopedia
Harold Louis Humes, Jr. (April 11, 1926 - September 10, 1992) was known as HL Humes in his books, and usually as "Doc" Humes in life. He was the originator of The Paris Review literary magazine, author of two novels in the late 1950s, 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
Timothy Leary
Timothy Francis Leary was an American psychologist and writer, known for his advocacy of psychedelic drugs. During a time when drugs like LSD and psilocybin were legal, Leary conducted experiments at Harvard University under the Harvard Psilocybin Project, resulting in the Concord Prison...

, and he became paranoid and sometimes delusional. After this, he no longer published 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
Columbia University
Columbia University in the City of New York is a private, Ivy League university in Manhattan, New York City. Columbia is the oldest institution of higher learning in the state of New York, the fifth oldest in the United States, and one of the country's nine Colonial Colleges founded before the...

, Princeton
Princeton University
Princeton University is a private research university located in Princeton, New Jersey, United States. The school is one of the eight universities of the Ivy League, and is one of the nine Colonial Colleges founded before the American Revolution....

, Bennington
Bennington College
Bennington College is a liberal arts college located in Bennington, Vermont, USA. The college was founded in 1932 as a women's college and became co-educational in 1969.-History:-Early years:...

, and Harvard
Harvard University
Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...

, dependent on both his family, and on students who were fascinated by his mixture of erudition and mental illness.

Early life

Humes was born in Douglas, Arizona
Douglas, Arizona
Douglas is a city in Cochise County, Arizona, United States. Douglas has a border crossing with Mexico and a history of mining.The population was 14,312 at the 2000 census...

. His father was a chemical engineer from Michigan who studied at McGill
McGill University
Mohammed Fathy is a public research university located in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. The university bears the name of James McGill, a prominent Montreal merchant from Glasgow, Scotland, whose bequest formed the beginning of the university...

. His mother, Alexandra Elizabeth McGonnigle, came from Montreal. Both parents were Christian Science
Christian Science
Christian Science is a system of thought and practice derived from the writings of Mary Baker Eddy and the Bible. It is practiced by members of The First Church of Christ, Scientist as well as some others who are nonmembers. Its central texts are the Bible and the Christian Science textbook,...

 practitioners.

Humes grew up in Princeton, New Jersey
Princeton, New Jersey
Princeton is a community located in Mercer County, New Jersey, United States. It is best known as the location of Princeton University, which has been sited in the community since 1756...

, graduating from Princeton High
Princeton High School (New Jersey)
Princeton High School is a four-year comprehensive public high school in the Borough of Princeton, New Jersey, United States, operating as part of the Princeton Regional Schools district, which serves all public school students in the Borough of Princeton and Princeton Township...

. 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
Buck Rogers
Anthony Rogers is a fictional character that first appeared in Armageddon 2419 A.D. by Philip Francis Nowlan in the August 1928 issue of the pulp magazine Amazing Stories. A sequel, The Airlords of Han, was published in the March 1929 issue....

, a popular comic strip.

He attended MIT
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is a private research university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts. MIT has five schools and one college, containing a total of 32 academic departments, with a strong emphasis on scientific and technological education and research.Founded in 1861 in...

, and did a stint in the United States Navy
United States Navy
The United States Navy is the naval warfare service branch of the United States Armed Forces and one of the seven uniformed services of the United States. The U.S. Navy is the largest in the world; its battle fleet tonnage is greater than that of the next 13 largest navies combined. The U.S...

, but left in 1948 to go to Paris.

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
Peter Matthiessen
Peter Matthiessen is a two-time National Book Award-winning American novelist and non-fiction writer, as well as an environmental activist...

 as literary editor, not knowing until much later that Matthiessen was working for the CIA
Central Intelligence Agency
The Central Intelligence Agency is a civilian intelligence agency of the United States government. It is an executive agency and reports directly to the Director of National Intelligence, responsible for providing national security intelligence assessment to senior United States policymakers...

 at the time. Together they founded The Paris Review, a literary journal, and soon brought in George Plimpton
George Plimpton
George Ames Plimpton was an American journalist, writer, editor, and actor. He is widely known for his sports writing and for helping to found The Paris Review.-Early life:...

, who would remain its editor for fifty years.

Humes studied fiction writing with Archibald MacLeish
Archibald MacLeish
Archibald MacLeish was an American poet, writer, and the Librarian of Congress. He is associated with the Modernist school of poetry. He received three Pulitzer Prizes for his work.-Early years:...

 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 novels, The Underground City (Random House
Random House
Random House, Inc. is the largest general-interest trade book publisher in the world. It has been owned since 1998 by the German private media corporation Bertelsmann and has become the umbrella brand for Bertelsmann book publishing. Random House also has a movie production arm, Random House Films,...

, 1958) and Men Die (Random House, 1959). Humes was mentioned in Esquire
Esquire (magazine)
Esquire is a men's magazine, published in the U.S. by the Hearst Corporation. Founded in 1932, it flourished during the Great Depression under the guidance of founder and editor Arnold Gingrich.-History:...

magazine (along with John Updike
John Updike
John Hoyer Updike was an American novelist, poet, short story writer, art critic, and literary critic....

 and William Styron
William Styron
William Clark Styron, Jr. was an American novelist and essayist who won major literary awards for his work.For much of his career, Styron was best known for his novels, which included...

) 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. Although never successfully marketed, the paper house was widely regarded as a substantial improvement over his earlier plans for living inside a hollowed out ox carcass.

Humes was reputed to have worked for several years as a meteorologist in London
London
London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...

.

He managed Lord Buckley
Lord Buckley
Lord Richard Buckley was an American stage performer, recording artist, monologist, and hip poet/comic...

, the great spoken word artist; fought the New York City Police Department
New York City Police Department
The New York City Police Department , established in 1845, is currently the largest municipal police force in the United States, with primary responsibilities in law enforcement and investigation within the five boroughs of New York City...

 over the Cabaret Card Laws
New York City Cabaret Card
From Prohibition until 1967, a permit called the New York City Cabaret Identification Card was required of all workers, including performers, in New York City nightclubs. Their administration was fraught with politics, and some artists' cards were revoked on specious grounds. For many performers,...

; and was Norman Mailer
Norman Mailer
Norman Kingsley Mailer was an American novelist, journalist, essayist, poet, playwright, screenwriter, and film director.Along with Truman Capote, Joan Didion, Hunter S...

's campaign manager for Mailer's first run for New York City
New York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...

 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
Hashish
Hashish is a cannabis preparation composed of compressed stalked resin glands, called trichomes, collected from the unfertilized buds of the cannabis plant. It contains the same active ingredients but in higher concentrations than unsifted buds or leaves...

, emergency-massage techniques, flotation exercises and breath work, which he claimed - 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 United States by April, 1969, which is when he gave away many thousands of dollars in cash on and around the Columbia University
Columbia University
Columbia University in the City of New York is a private, Ivy League university in Manhattan, New York City. Columbia is the oldest institution of higher learning in the state of New York, the fifth oldest in the United States, and one of the country's nine Colonial Colleges founded before the...

 campus.

The novelist Paul Auster described him as "a ravaged, burnt-out writer who had run aground on the shoals of his own consciousness." Humes once camped on Auster's sofa and did not leave for some time until politely nudged along. He would "wheel around and start adressing total strangers, breaking off in midsentence to slap another fifty-dollar bill in someone's hand and urge him to spend it like there was no tomorrow."

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 for the night.

"After Doc died of cancer in 1992, Immy [his daughter] filed a Freedom of Information Act request that eventually turned up a thick file. It turns out that the U.S. government was keeping tabs on Doc, from 1948 to 1977." Perhaps some of Mr. Humes' 'paranoia' was not so far-fetched after all.

Personal life

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, Devin Lomon-Humes - an artist - with the cellist Glynis Lomon, in Cambridge, Massachusetts
Cambridge, Massachusetts
Cambridge is a city in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, United States, in the Greater Boston area. It was named in honor of the University of Cambridge in England, an important center of the Puritan theology embraced by the town's founders. Cambridge is home to two of the world's most prominent...

 in 1977.

Philosophical and/or political views

Humes was a passionate and early advocate of medical marijuana.

In some ways, he was the original hippie.

Sources


External links

  • The Doc Humes Institute
  • Paul Auster
    Paul Auster
    Paul Benjamin Auster is an American author known for works blending absurdism, existentialism, crime fiction and the search for identity and personal meaning in works such as The New York Trilogy , Moon Palace , The Music of Chance , The Book of Illusions and The Brooklyn Follies...

     reading a long passage about Humes from his memoir Hand to Mouth http://www.theparisreview.org/viewaudio.php/prmMID/5250
  • Doc an Independent Lens
    Independent Lens
    Airing weekly on PBS through ITVS, the Emmy Award-winning series Independent Lens introduces new drama and documentary films made by independent filmmakers. Past seasons of Independent Lens have been presented by hosts Angela Bassett, Don Cheadle, Susan Sarandon, Edie Falco, Terrence Howard, Maggie...

     film perspective on the Life of HL Humes by his daughter, Immy Humes.
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