Norman Mailer once described Doc Humes, novelist and cultural figure, as
one of the few people I have ever met who was essentially, at bottom, more vain, more intellectually arrogant, than I was.
“Doc” is a PBS documentary premiering on December 9 by Immy Humes about her father Harold L. “Doc” Humes. He was a founder of The Paris Review, wrote two successful and acclaimed novels, The Underground City and Men Die, and ran Norman Mailer’s 1961 campaign for Mayor. “Doc” is also notable for featuring interviews with many now-deceased cultural and literary lights such as Norman Mailer, William Styron, Timothy Leary and George Plimpton.
See Tom Teicholz’ or Ronald K. Fried’s articles for more information.
The film
Doc aired on December 9, 2008, at 10 p.m. on PBS’s Independent Lens (Teicholz, Huffington Post, December 9, 2008). Its director, Immy Humes, was an Oscar nominee in 1992 (Fried, Daily Beast, December 8, 2008). The broadcast version ran 53 minutes; a 95-minute feature version, with more of Doc and an original score by Zev Katz and the Lenticulars, was announced on DVD (Doc Humes Institute, 2009). Besides Mailer, Styron, Leary, and Plimpton, the film’s witnesses include Peter Matthiessen, Paul Auster, Alan Cheuse, and Jonas Mekas (Doc Humes Institute).
Teicholz called it a story “of great talent unfulfilled,” and a family story of mental illness and reconciliation. Immy Humes found her father’s handwritten notes for an autobiographical novel he never wrote, and tracked down Don Peyote, a long-missing film he had made, a modern retelling of Don Quixote. Fried praised the film for avoiding the traps that await a daughter telling the life of a brilliant, difficult, and deeply ill father.
Doc
Harold Humes was born in 1926 in Douglas, Arizona, grew up in Princeton, New Jersey, and took his nickname from Doc Huer, the scientist of the Buck Rogers comics. After the Navy he went to Paris in 1948, where he published an English-language paper, the Paris News Post, and met Peter Matthiessen. Teicholz dates the founding of The Paris Review by Humes, Matthiessen, and Plimpton to 1952; Works and Days gives 1953. His novels were The Underground City (1958) and Men Die (1959); Random House had recently reissued Men Die when the film aired. In 1965, in London, he took LSD left him by Timothy Leary, and he never fully recovered or wrote again. He lived his last years in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and died of prostate cancer in 1992 (Teicholz).
Mailer and Doc
As Fried quotes it, Mailer’s judgment of Humes began with the word “brilliant.”
The campaign Humes is said to have run never reached 1961. Mailer announced at Brown University on November 17, 1960, that he was “running for mayor of New York next year”; three days later, in the early morning after a party at his West 94th Street apartment meant to launch the run, he stabbed his wife, Adele Morales, and the campaign collapsed. He would not actually run until 1969 (Works and Days, 1960).
The Paris Review that Humes helped found was where Mailer published “The First Day’s Interview” in 1961, his first self-interview, with Plimpton as the magazine’s editor (Works and Days).
Ronald K. Fried, whose name the original version of this post gave as “Arnold,” went on to be a 2010 fellow of the Norman Mailer Writers Colony; his play Two Mailers had a reading at the Players Club in New York in 2013 and was read at the Society’s 2015 conference.
In Works and Days
- William Styron — American novelist (1925–2006), author of Lie Down in Darkness (1951), The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967), Sophie’s Choice (1979), and the memoir Darkness Visible…
- George Plimpton — American writer, participatory journalist, and founding editor of The Paris Review; a longtime friend of Mailer who gave the remarks at Mailer’s August 1973 MacDowell…
- The Paris Review — American literary quarterly founded in Paris by Harold L. Humes, Peter Matthiessen, and George Plimpton.
- Ronald K. Fried — American novelist and journalist.