Harold L. Humes - Work

Work

In Paris, Humes owned an English language magazine called The Paris News Post, edited by Leon Kafka. Humes recruited the young American blueblood Peter Matthiessen as literary editor, not knowing until much later that Matthiessen was working for the CIA at the time. Together they founded The Paris Review, a literary journal, and soon brought in George Plimpton, who would remain its editor for fifty years.

Humes studied fiction writing with Archibald MacLeish at Harvard, graduating in 1954.

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.

He also directed Don Peyote, a movie starring Ojo de Vidrio, and designed and built a paper house, which he hoped would be an affordable housing alternative. Although never successfully marketed, the paper house was widely regarded as a substantial improvement over his earlier plans for living inside a hollowed out ox carcass.

Humes was reputed to have worked for several years as a meteorologist in London.

He managed Lord Buckley, the great spoken word artist; fought the New York City Police Department over the Cabaret Card Laws; and was Norman Mailer's campaign manager for Mailer's first run for New York City mayor—a campaign that was aborted by Mailer's stabbing of his wife.

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 started a third novel, titled The Memoirs of Dorsey Slade, but never finished it.

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.

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

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.

The novelist Paul Auster described him as "a ravaged, burnt-out writer who had run aground on the shoals of his own consciousness." Humes once camped on Auster's sofa and did not leave for some time until politely nudged along. He would "wheel around and start addressing total strangers, breaking off in midsentence to slap another fifty-dollar bill in someone's hand and urge him to spend it like there was no tomorrow."

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.

"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." Perhaps some of Mr. Humes' 'paranoia' was not so far-fetched after all.