Men Die

I was 14 when "Men Die" fell into my hands. The basic plot was so simple even a kid could follow it --- a Navy ammunition dump blows up, almost everyone is killed, a young officer returns to Washington to escort the commander's beautiful widow to the funeral. And it had just enough flashbacks to interest a lad with literary pretensions. But that's not why I read it. "Men Die" was hot. It had sex. Not the dreamy velvet romance-novel sex of "Gone With the Wind". But real sex, sex as the spillover of urgent lust, sex that made a young man with no prior history of self-abuse desperate to read a particular page over and over again, as much for the words as the deed. I mean: Delta. Unbutton. Slide. Naked. Page 152, if you're interested. Page 152 of a 184-page novel, to put it in perspective, which means that the real climax of the book --- for this reader, anyway --- was the connection between the lieutenant and the widow. Which is, when you think about it, a mirror to the eruption at the center of the book: the explosion that kills hundreds and leaves just six black prisoners and the lieutenant alive. A nice parallel metaphor, if you like that sort of thing. But I was, as I say, there for the sex. "Men Die" got terrific reviews, but it's been out of print for four decades, as has "The Underground City," the 768-page monster that was the first novel of H.L. "Doc" Humes. Now they're both back, along with a documentary film about Humes made with love and surprising objectivity by one of his daughters. Of the books, the clear winner is "Men Die" --- it's a thriller of sorts, about men who are on an island so foolishly stuffed with ammunition that doom seems inevitable, and how they live with that foreknowledge, and their relations with one another, and, as it turns out, their relations with the commander's wife. It's got some Joycean inner monologues, but in the main, it's a taut, disciplined book, hard to put down --- and that's excluding the pages of hot sex. A writer who can write a novel as satisfying as "Men Die" could have gone on to still greater books and a large reputation. Humes never published again. Instead, he went raving mad --- for the next three decades, he was a walking tragedy. Talk about a story! Humes grew up in Princeton, where he knew Einstein (they were neighbors). He went to MIT at 16. In his 20s, he moved to Paris and co-founded The Paris Review. In 1966, Timothy Leary gave him LSD, which may have unleashed his incipient paranoia. He'd always enjoyed making trouble --- he managed Norman Mailer's first campaign for Mayor of New York --- and now he upped the ante. He led protests in Washington Square Park and, famously, handed out $100 bills on the street, urging recipients to spend the money as quickly as possible. And then he took a swan dive into mental illness and became, more or less, a street person, sponging off college students for food, shelter and companionship. He died of cancer in 1992. He was 66. I don't