H. L. Humes - Scientist, novelist, activist, inventor, filmmaker, architect, prophet, healer, and madman Harold L. 'Doc' Humes was, by all accounts, an exhilarating, infuriating and terrifyingly brilliant man

H. L. Humes, The Underground City: A Novel, Random House, 2007. 
The Doc Humes Institute
read it at Google Books








Back in print after nearly fifty years–the acclaimed fiction debut of novelist H. L. Humes, co-founder of The Paris Review



“Immensely intelligent and energetic, intensely dramatic and melodramatic, heroically overwritten yet sharp, insightful, and precise, The Underground City is an astonishing book by a writer of abundant gifts whose resurrection is long overdue.” –Peter Matthiessen



It is the late 1940s and Paris is in turmoil. A man named Dujardin is sentenced to death for treason, sparking general strikes and threats of riots across the city. In the meantime, John Stone, a war-weary American and former secret agent, finds himself being investigated as a suspected Communist. What has brought these two men to their fates? H.L. Humes spins a thrilling account of the French underground during the last years of World War II, and the events that lead to the Dujardin affair. His many memorable characters include Adriane, loved by both Stone and Carnot, a fanatic Communist; Bruce Sheppard, the American ambassador to France, a statesman of vision and compassion; and Solange Récamier, the sophisticated young Parisian widow who finds meaning in trying to salvage Stone’s broken life.

The Underground City displays H.L. Humes’s youthful literary skill and a striking capacity for fast-paced narrative. This is a brilliant tour de force.



“A major achievement . . . [The Underground City] attains its full stature in poetry and truth. . . . [This is a] many-sided, absorbing novel, written on a grand scale, that holds the reader’s attention from the first to the last of its many pages.” – New York Herald Tribune



“Magnificent . . . [The Underground City] has verisimilitude and scope, action and depth of emotion.”– Chicago Tribune



“A work of power, maturity and distinction.” – Newsweek


A great amorphous novel, this, in which a newcomer to the field of fiction attempts too much, and achieves a rather confused melodrama with political implications. There's the making of three books here:- one, the story of the baffling resistance forces in southern France, when friend scarcely knew friend from enemy, when the De Gaullists and the Communists worked often at odds, when help from the English, from the Americans ended in supplying the wherewithal for civil warfare; two, the story of the Dujardin affair, built up by the Communists after the war's end to augment anti-American feeling, and to involve in suspicion some against whom they wanted to take action; three, the story of Stone, former American O.S.S., whose first hand witness against Dujardin made him a target for suspicion, a subject of investigation in Washington, and a man no longer able to fill a job anywhere- a victim of his own earnest desire to serve. The author falls of his own weight of material into confusions that baffle the reader. He drags too many polemics into his dialogue, turns what might have been straight adventure with a cynical commentary on the wages of valour into now a defense, now an attack, on attitudes engendered by the war. At times it makes exciting reading, but the finale leaves a bad taste in the mouth, and a sense of excess of matter smothering what there is of distinction in the manner.  - Kirkus Reviews


Humes’ novel opens in post-war Paris. Dujardin, a former collaborator, has been on trial for his alleged role in a massacre of a French village during the War. Major John Stone, an American, testified against him and he was condemned. Stone, born Giovanni Sasso (which translates literally as John Stone) in Trenton, had two talents as a child. He was a very competent linguist and a skilled cellist. When he won a cello competition, he was sent to Paris to study. He returned home when his mother was ill – she died before he arrived home and he stayed there, even after his father lost everything in the Wall Street Crash. He gave up his music though, after studying and becoming a teacher, he took it up again as a high school bandmaster. When France fell to the Germans, he joined the army. After the war he worked in France for the US Graves Commission, as a civilian.
The novel starts both with the Dujardin affair and Stone’s background. Dujardin had allegedly been responsible for the massacre of an entire village. He had been arrested by the Americans and confessed. His trial was straightforward and he was condemned. However, he later claimed that the confession had been beaten out of him by the Americans. -The Modern Novel
read more here


h. l. humes–harold Humes to the FBI, Doc to the rest of us–published two novels in the late fifties before going crazy. The Underground City, 755 pages on France’s occupation and postwar paroxysms, made him a literary star, but as his mind left this world, so, seemingly, did his work. When Humes died in 1992, The Underground City had been out of print for thirty-four years.
It seemed too ignoble a fate for the man who cofounded The Paris Review, especially given the recent revelation that Humes’s paranoid complaint–that the CIA was closing in on him–was sorta-kinda true: Peter Matthiessen, one of the other PR founders along with George Plimpton, was a CIA agent. Which isn’t to say he spied— Matthiessen claims he used the CIA to pay for plane tickets to Paris–but it was the final cut on Humes’s thin tether to reality. The author spent the rest of his life holding forth in college quads, dismissed as a beatnik burnout.
The Underground City was recently republished, and it deserves to be followed. Though populated by spies, turncoats, reporters named Striker and agents named Stone, the novel uses espionage the same way Matthiessen used the CIA: for a free trip to Paris. The plot circles around the case of Dujardin, a French officer who slaughtered an entire village to impress the German occupancy. At the novel’s outset, a year after the liberation, Dujardin is on trial for war crimes, and the French Communist party has opportunistically taken up his cause, arguing that he is really a patriot being martyred by the United States, which wants to maintain control over France because they’re, like, imperialists. Enter Agent Stone, Code Name Dante, the sole survivor of the massacre and the only one who can impugn Dujardin. Stone becomes a scapegoat for the Communists and a patsy for the Americans, and is burdened by the infidelity of his own memory. In the moral bedlam that followed World War II, which saw the world imagine punishments for unimaginable crimes, Stone personifies the problems of knowledge and truth, and the ways both are manipulated by those who seek to claim or maintain power.
That’s the first third, anyway. The meat of the novel is a four-hundred-page flashback that follows Stone/Dante on the lead-up to the massacre. Stone functions less as a character than a proxy, sneaking us through the streets of Paris and the fields of France to more interesting fare: the wonderful Carnot, a Communist spy who skirts the blurry line between idealism and efficacy; Ambassador Shepphard, a statesmen given to autumn musings on life and war; and his estranged son Berger, who is, inexplicably but delightfully, a French monarchist trying to return the Louis line to the throne. To name just a few: Humes’s novel is huge, not just in page count but in seating capacity. One of its joys is the room it makes for bit players, who function as foils for the subterfuges of the main characters. In one memorable scene, Stone and Carnot argue over the fate of the French populace while Henri, the loutish brother of an operative, is locked in a closet to keep him from the booze. The stage directions are subtle, but their implications unavoidable: a world war is waging over the right for Henri to drink a bottle of burgundy a night, but those who claim to fight on his behalf don’t even let him in on the discussion. It’s enough to make a guy like Henri get drunk, ruin their operation, and never appear in the novel again.
Needless to say, much of this doesn’t add up to anything. Humes is interested less in the intricacies of his plot than its forward momentum, and the book blows by in big bursts of prose. For instance, here comes a plane:

As it approached it increased until its hugeness made it seem that it would surely fall. The winglights swept over the brown winter grass and came rippling toward the paved runway, as the machine felt its way down, the beams sweeping onto the wet pavement as the plane roared closer, flaps down, braking hard against the sluggish air; as it came toward the administration building its silver size and speed suddenly became real. Eating up the distance in seconds, it roared down the fleeting length of airstrip and swept immensely past the tiny group of men, one huge wheel glancing the earth a smoking kiss. The wings lurched slightly and lifted with the bounce; then there was a final yelp of rubber, and big plane was down. Overhead, the passenger flood lights went on, bleaching the staging area in brilliant white light.

And that’s just a plane landing. Any writer who can bring something out of the sky and set it down like that has earned the right to prattle on about man’s place in the universe for forty pages at a time, which, don’t worry, Humes does.
Alas, as a street protestor warns, MEN DIE. Humes dispatches most of his characters with dignity, but the more he pushes eastward, towards a different scale of death, the less all of his philosophical gobbledygook comes off as charming. Humes only glances at a concentration camp, in a sub-drama involving a Jewish spy Stone may or may not have impregnated, and runs away before he really sees anything. For a novel so portentous in its musings on men’s fate, this squeamishness at the camps is cowardly.
A lesser book would have been ruined by it. Humes recovers, and though the novel’s last third is knotted by the inevitable tying of loose ends, he still finds time to take a grand drunken tour of the Paris sewer system. Wading through the organized excrement that flows beneath the city could have left the reader holding his nose at the symbolism, or knee-deep in Virgilian allusions. But Humes just lets us enjoy this unusual ride. The section is a novella in-and-of-itself, and it’s brilliant: after seven hundred pages of fighting and death, this mucking around is, paradoxically, like a breath of fresh air, a reminder that life seeps on, even after the wars.
Humes’s sanity lasted long enough for one more novel. After that, he was good only for theories on massage cures for heroin addicts and the government cloud that was after him, following as a believer the fictions he had so successfully conjured as an author. Or, as the reporter Striker says about the agent Stone, “He’s not really a tragedian, because he’s in the tragedy himself.” –Evan McMurry
http://frontporchjournal.com/the-underground-city/



H. L. Humes, Men Die, Random House, 1959.
read it at Google Books


Just before World War II, Lieutenant Everett Sulgrave is stationed at a Navy ammunitions base in the Caribbean, along with Commander Hake—an anguished, intimidating leader nicknamed “Admiral God”—and Hake’s right-hand man, the enigmatic Lieutenant Dolfus. Dolfus has dark premonitions that soon come true when a massive explosion destroys the island. Sulgrave and five black enlistees with scores to settle are the only survivors. Now Sulgrave must contend with his memories and his reality, with the aftermath of the tragedy and the beginning of his volatile affair with Hake’s widow, and with his disturbing past and the abyss that is his future.
Infused with intrigue, symbolism, and mounting drama, Men Die, back in print after more than forty years, showcases H. L. Humes’s astounding versatility, proving itself a timelessly intense and exciting read.

“Humes’s novel is tersely and convincingly composed, and while it echoes other works [it] never seems derivative, the result perhaps of its powerfully made scenes . . . and the essentially clear and direct nature of Humes’s prose.”—Alan Cheuse, from the Introduction

“Clean writing, crisp description . . . Every page of Men Die implies an underlying sense of doom for mankind; yet every page is also immensely readable.”—Time

“Hume [was] sublimely confident and alarmingly talented.”—The New York Times

“[An] achievement of dazzling virtuosity.”—Partisan Review


H. L. Hume's first novel The Underground City, published last year, was a powerful if discursive story of the implications of war. This second novel does not match the first in length but is fully its equal in vigorous complexity. Shortly before World War II Lt. Everett Turner Sulgrave was stationed on the island of Manacle Shoal Rock when the Navy was stocking the island with munitions as an advanced submarine base. He was among the three white officers in charge of Negro construction groups whose Commander was a violent racist and drunk, a raging maniac. Bitter with the suspicion that his command was a punishment, desperate over the alienation of his wife and his conviction that his aide Dolfus is in love with her, Commander Hake pushes his men beyond their capacities and blows up the entire outfit. Only Sulgrave and a few prisoners escape. At Hake's funeral Sulgrave meets his beautiful wife Vannessa, they become lovers and she reveals a tortured history which includes an early seduction by Dolfus, her husband's eventual impotence, the death of their son and her involvement in the death of every man she loved. Pearl Harbor takes Sulgrave away from her mistaken in his certainty of survival. Suggesting, where it does not explore, every devious labyrinthine area of Freudian symbolism, this remains a consistently compelling book. - Kirkus Reviews

“Somewhere on the bookshelf between forgotten and neglected, between the tragic and the strange, stands the reputation of the American writer Harold L. Humes,” writes Celia McGee an article in the 13 January 2007 edition of the New York Times:

The Third Man of the postwar Paris expatriate crowd — he was a co-founder of The Paris Review in 1953, with Peter Matthiessen and George Plimpton — Doc Humes, as he was known, went on to produce two novels in the late 1950s that placed him at the head of a new generation of writers to watch. But in the '60s he succumbed to a mental illness that left him paranoid and peripatetic. Yet to those who remember him, he remained so brilliant that even in madness he dazzled, delighted, educated and touched.
Now 'Doc' a documentary by an Oscar-nominated filmmaker (one of Mr. Humes's daughters) and fresh awareness among several publishers is raising hopes that Mr. Humes's long out-of-print novels will finally resurface.

If availability of his books is any measure of a writer’s neglect, Humes is currently up in the top ranks. Neither of his two novels are available (even used) on Amazon, and a search of AddAll.com today produced a sum total of two copies each of The Underground City and Men Die.
Alan Cheuse wrote an essay on The Underground City in Rediscoveries II and Ted Morgan named it as one of Antaeus magazine’s “Neglected Books of the 20th Century”. Time magazine wrote of Men Die,

A talented young first novelist named H. L. (for Harold Louis) Humes last year produced an almost classic example of the ambitious book that tries to say too much. The Underground City was at once a war novel, a treatise on right and wrong, an indictment of the human condition. Its 755 pages were too many and too tiring. Now, in less than one-quarter the wordage. Author Humes, 33, has produced a new book that gives off more significance than his first could even suggest….
Author Humes does his work in flashbacks, not the smooth ones of a Marquand, but brusque revelations carved out like sections of a monument to doom. Unfortunately, he also chooses to interpolate interior monologues, which prove only that he has not read James Joyce well enough. But these form a minor irritant compared to the book’s merits — clean writing, crisp description, and a surprisingly accurate sense of the bitter relationships, mostly unspoken, between the enlisted Negroes and their commander. Author Humes is no optimist. Every page of Men Die implies an underlying sense of doom for mankind; yet every page is also immensely readable.

Immy Humes has also set up a website, The Doc Humes Institute, to promote Humes and her documentary. You can also read a short sketch of Humes’ life and work at Wikipedia. - https://neglectedbooks.com/?p=137







[Humes is] one of the least-known and most enigmatic members of his writing generation....
[His] are rare books in the best sense, great feasts and fiestas, and my reencounters with them have convinced me that in the raw instinctual days of early recognitions my admiration for Humes’ writing was not at all misplaced. I recommended them at nineteen because I found the books thrilling in ways that I could not at the time explain. Today, in my late forties, I find them just as thrilling, and in addition I can offer a few ideas as to why.
The Underground City stands as one of those rare birds of American fiction, a true novel of ideas that never lacks for credible characters and a powerful realistic plot. Humes divides the book into three large chunks, and by the way in which he sets his scene, with a vast canvas of cloud and sky on the opening of the day above Paris about a year or so following the end of W.W.II, he seems to have nothing less in mind than the desire to create a monumental story of epic range...
...we encounter a broad cast of characters and become engaged in a masterly setup for a dramatization of the world of modern Western geopolitical affairs. Just as the trial will rip open the wounds on the French body politic still fresh from the war, the large central portion of the novel gives us the narrative of Stone’s undercover work during the war—a dense, dramatic novel with the novel that may be the best story of the Resistance told by anyone in English.... 
Humes’ treatment of the military and political aspect of the events would have alone been brilliant enough, but he underlays these public matters with the burning psychology of personal motives, stories of lost sons and troubled fathers...
There is, too, a philosophical level to the book, the presentation of a number of warring philosophies of history and politics, from the fated notions of the ambassador on through the paranoid psychohistorical theories of the Communist manipulator Picard (which, as critic James Bloom has recently pointed out in a brief note on Humes, perhaps the only critical notice that the book has received in the thirty years since its publication, portends the now-fashionable strategies of paranoiac fiction as exemplified in the work of Thomas Pynchon.) Moreover, there is a rich mythological overlay to the story, beginning with the ambassador’s descent from the heavens at the beginning of the book on through the central return back in time to the years of the Resistance in the Stone Resistance narrative, as well as a lot of seeming counterparts among various characters to figures out of European poetry and myth, including the physical descent into the underworld of the sewers made by Stone (“Dante”) in the final section of the novel.
If The Underground City appears deceptively at first look to be one of those loose and baggy monsters of which Henry James complained, the compactness of Men Die, published less than a year later, might give the initial impression of simplistic story-telling about a complex period, the months leading up to the US entry into the Pacific War. The Underground City seems almost wholly anomalous in its essence, a work that no other American writer tried to write before Humes...
It’s unclear to me why neither of these novels is now in print, except that perhaps when Humes himself went, in his own way, “underground,” there was no one else partisan enough to lobby on behalf of further editions. Taken together they not only give us a picture o the Cold War mentality that augments the dramatic vision in Mailer’s Barbary Shore and Vance Bourjaily’s Hound of the Earth, but show the hand of a writer whose inventive projections and first-rate narratives deserve to see the light of day again. The books are good enough to become part of the education of all the good readers in the house. -  Alan Cheusehttp://www.dochumes.com/novels

A biography of literary figure Harold Louis "Doc" Humes by his daughter, DOC tells the story of a life crammed full of ideas about politics, literature and protest. Exploring Doc's paranoia and mental illness, this homemade, improvisational piece sheds light on an original mind as well as the cultural history of postwar America.


watch it here




“A national treasure—America’s greatest living paranoid…” —Timothy Leary




Filmmaker Immy Humes presents a portrait of her father, the legendary forgotten novelist and counterculture icon Harold Louis "Doc" Humes. Doc’s friends and family—including Norman Mailer, George Plimpton, Timothy Leary, William Stryon, Peter Matthiessen, Paul Auster, and Jonas Mekas—weaving together a story of politics, literature, protest and mental illness, shedding light on an original mind as well as the cultural history of postwar America.
http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/doc

“He was brilliant. He was one of the few people I have ever met who was essentially, at bottom, more vain, more intellectually arrogant, than I was.” —Norman Mailer

DOC is an unorthodox portrait of the life and times of the almost forgotten, yet fascinating literary and counter-culture figure Doc Humes. Featuring a generation of cultural luminaries, from Timothy Leary to Norman Mailer, the film tells a moving story about the man who founded The Paris Review, wrote two great novels and then, after becoming mentally ill in the 1960s, reappeared as the original Hippie Philosopher King. A stylistically original take on a literary mind DOC is a political and personal tale filmed over many years by Immy Humes, an Academy Award–nominated filmmaker and Doc’s daughter.
Harold L. Humes, known by the nickname “Doc,” was brilliant and precocious (he went to MIT at age 16). In Paris after World War II, he founded The Paris Review—a magazine he envisioned as “by writers, for writers, with an emphasis on the act of writing itself.” He then wrote two acclaimed and ambitious political novels about war and what it does to people: one in 1958 and the other one year later, in 1959. The books were well received—The New York Times described Humes as “alarmingly talented”—but after the second book, he never wrote again. (Thanks to the film, Random House has recently republished both titles, The Underground City and Men Die, after decades out of print.)
A stellar cast of Doc’s family and friends—including writers George Plimpton, Norman Mailer, Peter Matthiessen, William Styron and Paul Auster; avant-garde filmmaker Jonas Mekas; and the pied piper of LSD, Timothy Leary—recall an extraordinary man who defied all categories and expectations.
After winning fame as a novelist, Doc quickly moved from one fascination to another. As Gay Talese writes, he “hit on a theory of cosmology that would jolt Descartes; played piano in a Harlem jazz club; shot a movie called Don Peyote, a Greenwich Village version of Don Quixote; and invented a paper house that was waterproof, fireproof and large enough for people to live in.”

“I didn’t know whether to kiss him or kill him!” —William Styron

With Jonas Mekas and others, he created the New American Cinema Group, which sought ways to have movies break away from “boredom” and incorporate new forms of creativity. He led crusades for free expression and against police brutality and helped abolish the “cabaret card” laws, notorious rules long used by the NYPD to bar artists—from Billie Holliday to Thelonious Monk to Lenny Bruce—from performing. He lived a wild, creative life that included leading a beatnik riot in Washington Square Park, championing the use of medical marijuana and managing Norman Mailer’s infamous 1961 run for mayor of New York.
By the mid-1960s, Doc was unable to write. And after taking a lot of LSD in London with Timothy Leary, he began showing signs of mental illness. He thought that he could intercept thoughts, that he could see dangers others could not and that he was being followed. He believed the CIA, among others, was spying on him. (One of the film’s most startling revelations is that the CIA had infiltrated The Paris Review crowd; Peter Matthiessen was, in fact, a CIA agent when he helped found the magazine.)

“The man talked a blue streak, chewing our ears off with a monologue that resembled nothing I had ever heard before. It was the rant of a hipster visionary neo-prophet.” —Paul Auster

Doc reinvented himself, yet again, turning up on the Columbia University campus in 1969 giving away cash in a notorious piece of proto-performance art. For 25 years, Doc lived on or near college campuses, especially his alma mater Harvard, as a kind of resident crazy genius, surrounded by student acolytes who took care of him. He preached that we live in a society run by fear and shadowy powers, and that protest, the arts and healing—especially relaxation techniques using massage and marijuana—are necessary practices to preserve human freedom. Immy Humes, in Doc’s own words, “puts a frame around the wreckage” in this affectionate, yet disquieting portrait.
After Doc died of cancer in 1992, Immy 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.
Update
From filmmaker Immy Humes:
Many people I interviewed have died since I filmed them, because it took a long, long time to put this film together. So, starting with the main character, my father Doc Humes who passed away in 1992, a whole generation of famous American cultural figures followed him out the door, from Timothy Leary to William Styron, George Plimpton and Norman Mailer. It’s quite sad for me to watch the film now, as I miss all of them. I think that their generation did have a special something: they were into living large, thinking large, being engaged with values and ideas, acting out and taking risks. For better and for worse, they were different people than we are.

Scientist, novelist, activist, inventor, filmmaker, architect, prophet, healer, and madman Harold L. 'Doc' Humes was, by all accounts, an exhilarating, infuriating and terrifyingly brilliant man. His Oscar-nominated documentarian daughter Immy Humes has gathered testimonials from luminaries including Norman Mailer, William Styron and Timothy Leary... Fascinating, wryly distanced documentary. Casual footage from the era captures the excitement of liberation and the headiness of artistic ferment...Immy imaginatively segues from unexpected angles, mapping out the complex historical, cultural and personal synapses that link the man to his times... – Ronnie Scheib, Variety

Fascinating Doc, so many memories...he was, as said above, infuriating and terrifyingly brilliant...he had answers to all of our questions and talked non-stop because there was so much to tell us...but sometimes he would just take out his flute and charm us like Pan...utopia is the only way out, yes, Doc, you are right... - Silvia Escorel