Imagine a writer who went to MIT at age 16, hung out with James Baldwin and Marlene Dietrich in the 1950s and Timothy Leary in the ‘60s, and was described as “alarmingly talented” by The New York Times after his first novel was published. Now imagine that writer completely disappearing from the public radar, his books falling out of print, and his old friends talking about how his work might have grown and changed had he “lived longer” – when, in fact, he was still alive.

Doc is the extraordinary true story of novelist Harold L. "Doc” Humes, who struggled with madness starting in the mid-1960s, yet functioned as a kind of guru, a prophet who went around to top colleges collecting acolytes and preaching about his ideas on anything and everything. After co-founding The Paris Review and writing the celebrated novels The Underground City and Men Die, Doc Humes experimented with LSD, endangered his wife and three children by his violent and unstable behavior, started a number of companies to build inexpensive paper houses in the Third World, got arrested for protesting cabaret laws, got hospitalized, developed radical alternative theories of physics, made a film called Don Peyote, started two new families, and began building a boat called the Judith. He started and abandoned projects on a seemingly daily basis. He also became paranoid that he was being followed by the FBI, and indeed, after his death a fat file proved that he had been watched closely since the ‘50s.

Doc is an interesting piece of filmmaking, a documentary account of a wild figure who was, according to filmmaker Immy Humes, “a kind of cultural Zelig, popping up everywhere, and [whose] story provides a fresh take on postwar cultural history, from New York intellectuals to the Beats and hippies.” It is also a daughter’s portrait of her father, with touching interview footage of the man struggling with illness in the final days of his life. Immy Humes has over 20 years of experience as a documentary filmmaker, and this work achieves a fine balance between intimacy and a broad, culturally and historically nuanced perspective.

Why was Doc erased from history? The writer Normal Mailer, one of Doc’s many famous friends, was “paranoid” himself, by his own account, and even became disturbed enough to stab his wife with a knife. Yet Norman Mailer is a household name, and the once equally promising H.L. Humes is long forgotten. With mental illness, Mailer tells Immy Humes, “There’s no real line. It’s a spectrum. And depending on your success in life, you’re either clinically insane or you’re not.” Rediscovering Doc Humes is like opening a series of fat files filled with essential, yet unknown secrets about the 20th century literary world. Doc’s centrality – his strange level of impact and importance – is so incredible that it almost seems like fiction. This great piece of biography, timed to correspond with the reprinting of Doc’s novels after almost 50 years, will bring a major writer back to life. Elizabeth Bachner
January 21, 2008