Harold L. Humes

Doc [four stars] Dir. Immy Humes. 2007. N/R. 98mins. Documentary.

Humes died of prostate cancer at St. Rose's Home in New York City in 1992.

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.

Commercial mortgage broker Olen Soifer confirms Humes' presence as a "drop-in" at his apartment in West Long Branch, New Jersey in the spring of 1970: "Three of us shared a 1-BR apartment while attending Monmouth College (now Monmouth University) that semester. We picked up 'Doc' when he was hitch-hiking, and took him back to our apartment because he had no place to stay...and that extended into him "crashing" with us for months. He regaled us with stories about himself: that he had attended M.I.T.; that he had invented and promoted paper houses; that he was a published author; that he had founded The Paris Review; that he was an associate of (and had taken LSD with) Timothy Leary; that the government was spying on him; and so on. But, while he intrigued us, we thought, at first, that these were the ravings of a lunatic...though, an appealing one. Then, a roommate, Michael, started researching 'Doc" and, much to our utter amazement, we found out that most, if not all, of these "fantasies" were completely true. Active in the anti-Vietnam movement, we all found ourselves at an antiwar rally at Princeton U. on May 4, 1970. During the rally, the news came through of the Kent State shootings. As the crowd was told that one, then 2, 3 and 4 students had been shot dead by the US National Guard, the enraged crowd was all set to march en masse to, and burn down, the ROTC building at Princeton...and 'Doc' proved his ability to influence us. Without warning, he leaped up onto the speakers' stage and exhorted the crowd to: "Stop! Think! What you are about to do! Such an act will only demonstrate the shootings might be appropriate retaliation for that very sort of action." And, with a few words, he caused us to "think twice" and he restrained us from such violence. Some time after that day, by the end of the semester, 'Doc' "split" and we never saw him again!"

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 campus.

By 1968, he was in Paris in time to be jailed in the demonstrations that were part of the student revolution there.

He had one son in Italy in 1968, and another, Devin Lomon-Humes - an artist - with the cellist Glynis Lomon, in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1977.

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 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.

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 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 University, Princeton University, Bennington College, Monmouth College (now University) and Harvard University, dependent on both his family and on students who were fascinated by his mixture of erudition and mental illness.

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 wrote two 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.

After returning to the United States, Humes studied fiction writing with Archibald MacLeish at Harvard Extension School, ultimately graduating with an Adjunct in Arts degree (equivalent to a standard baccalaureate degree) in 1954.

In 1954, he married Anna Lou Elianoff, daughter of the linens designer Luba Elianoff. They had four daughters. She divorced him in 1966; in 1967 she married Nelson W. Aldrich Jr., who had worked at The Paris Review as an editor.

He attended MIT, and did a stint in the United States Navy, but left in 1948 to go to Paris.

After Humes's death, a Freedom of Information Act request on the part of Humes's daughter Immy Humes revealed that the U.S. government had been spying on him from 1948 to 1977, perhaps implying his paranoia had more basis in fact than had previously been assumed.

Harold Louis Humes, Jr. (May 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.