Doc

Immy Humes breezes through the details of her father's early life -- born in Arizona, raised in Princeton, NJ, entered MIT at the tender age of 16 -- then cuts to the good stuff: Humes' life in Paris in the heady post-war years (the setting of his first novel, The Underground City), where lived la vie boheme, hobnobbing with the likes of James Baldwin, William Styron and Richard Wright. Humes, along with writer Peter Matthiessen (who, unbeknownst to his circle of friends, was working for the CIA at the time), started first the The Paris News Post then, with Plimpton on board, The Paris Review. The relationship ended -- bitterly -- when Humes decamped for the States to pursue post-grad work in fiction writing at Harvard. He also married. Taking Matthiessen up on his dare to stop talking and write a novel instead, Humes wound up writing two -- his second, Men Die, was as well-received as The Underground City -- but would never complete his third: a thinly veiled memoir about a writer attempting to write a novel. He would, however, throw himself wholeheartedly into bizarre development projects like constructing paper houses and radio direction finders for boats before suddenly losing interest. Humes would also direct an experimental, early underground film entitled Don Peyote (Humes attempts to track down a print takes her from the labyrinthine basement of New York City's storied Anthology Film Archives to a woodshed in the San Fernando Valley). At the dawn of the 60s, Humes' management of hipster saint Lord Buckley landed him in the middle of the cabaret card furor, and Humes would later serve as Norman Mailer's campaign manager during the novelist's first bid to become mayor of New York City. But all the windmill tilting that once seemed so charmingly eccentric during the '40s and '50s took on a much darker tone during the turbulent '60s as Humes' utopian visions darkened with conspiracy theories and government paranoia. His downward spiral would lead to an LSD-induced psychotic break while living in London with his family; Immy, her sisters and their mother would return to the U.S. and begin a new life without him. After several years in Rome where he fathered a son, Humes resurfaced several years later at American universities serving as an unofficial itinerant instructor of sorts, moving from campus to campus, preaching "Humeism" and picking up converts and "Docolytes" along the way (the novelist Paul Auster offers a very funny account of his own while a student at Columbia University in the late 1960s). Hume's mental illness, however, was never far behind and his refusal to allow himself to be examined by a doctor meant his prostate cancer went untreated until it was too late.

The personal reminiscences are by turns funny and downright harrowing, and neither Immy Humes, her three sisters nor their mother disguise their ambivalence about the man they still call "Doc" -- he was at best an absentee father who whiled away his evenings in jazz clubs and cafes, smoking dope and playing chess until dawn. But their admiration and compassion is palpable beneath the sometimes harsh words (during his eulogy, Humes' son refers to his long-gone daddy as "an asshole, but no ordinary asshole"). The inclusion of interviews with several cultural giants who are no longer with us -- Mailer, Plimpton, Leary -- make this engaging documentary an even more valuable snapshot of a rich cultural moment that has long passed us by. leave a comment --Ken Fox