Plimpton's Crazy Co-Conspirator

In many ways, Doc Humes was a kind of Norman Mailer gone wrong. Like Mailer, Humes was precocious: he enrolled at MIT at the age of 16, did time at Harvard, and while still in his twenties, published two highly praised novels, The Underground City and Men Die, both recently reissued by Random House. Like Mailer, Humes conceived of himself as a public intellectual and creative troublemaker whose duty it was to follow his paranoid instincts, making headlines along the way. It was Humes who managed Mailer’s short-lived 1961 New York mayoral campaign. He also instigated what the press called a “beatnik riot” in Washington Square Park and helped overturn New York’s oppressive “cabaret card” laws which were used to hassle the likes of Billie Holiday and Lenny Bruce.

Courtesy of the Humes family

But while Mailer reclaimed his muse after a brief period of literary floundering, Humes stopped writing by the mid 1960s. He spent his considerable intellectual capital elsewhere: making a silent film called Don Peyote; inventing and manufacturing a waterproof, fireproof house made of paper; taking LSD with Leary; advocating for medical marijuana and massage therapy; hanging out; talking too much; fathering children; and eventually going insane. In l969, Humes showed up at Columbia University handing out thousands of dollars from a recent inheritance in a kind of Yippie-like social protest. Shortly thereafter, he camped out in the apartment of a Columbia student named Paul Auster. It seems Doc always had an eye for good casting.

In the film, these incidents pile up at a rapid pace, leading inevitably to Humes’ breakdown and, finally, his death in 1992 from prostate cancer. He left behind six children by three different mothers—and a world of hurt. Yet his daughter’s film is untarnished by recriminations or self-pity. It is both personal and dispassionate, and it constitutes a kind of counter-history of a generation of writers. Among its revelations: the little-known fact that while Matthiessen was helping start the Paris Review, he was also, like so many privileged types of his generation, working for the CIA. This news, of course, fits eerily into Doc’s paranoid worldview, as do the details of Humes’ FBI file, cited at the close of the film.

Doc does not set out to redeem its subject. Instead, it conveys with artistry and compassion the exceptional life of a troubled genius while capturing a moment in the country’s literary history. No father deserves more.

Ronald K. Fried is the author one book of non-fiction and two novels. His work as television producer has earned five New York Emmy Awards. He recently completed a new novel about the TV industry.