Responses and Reactions I
Mailer's first appearance in Commentary — and the inaugural installment of a bi-monthly column of the same name running December 1962 through October 1963 (six installments total: 62.22, 63.16, 63.17, 63.18, 63.19, 63.20), devoted mainly to commentary on Martin Buber's Tales of the Hasidim. Partial reprint in The Presidential Papers (63.37) and in 98.7.
“Responses and Reactions” I. Commentary, December 1962, 504–6. Column. First of a series of six bi-monthly columns (December 1962–October 1963) devoted mainly to commentary on Martin Buber’s Tales of the Hasidim.
Mailer’s first appearance in Commentary — the journal edited since 1960 by Norman Podhoretz, with whom Mailer’s literary friendship runs back through Podhoretz’s “Norman Mailer: The Embattled Vision” essay in Partisan Review (Summer 1959) and the period of their close intellectual exchange in the early 1960s. The Commentary contract gives Mailer a regular New York intellectual platform to balance the Esquire “Big Bite” column running simultaneously: from December 1962 through December 1963 Mailer publishes one column per month in Esquire (62.18, 62.19, 63.2 through 63.13 — fourteen installments) and one bi-monthly column in Commentary (62.22, 63.16, 63.17, 63.18, 63.19, 63.20 — six installments).
The “Responses and Reactions” column takes Martin Buber’s Tales of the Hasidim — Buber’s translated and reframed collection of Hasidic stories about the Baal Shem Tov, the Maggid of Mezeritch, Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav, and the great Hasidic masters — as its principal occasion. Each installment selects a story or set of stories from Buber and works outward into Mailer’s own theological position-pieces. The column is one of the deepest published windows into Mailer’s evolving theology — a personal Manichaean theism with the Devil as an active rival of an embattled God, a position fully developed in The Presidential Papers and the much later The Gospel According to the Son (97.8).
Rpt: The Presidential Papers (63.37, partial), 98.7.
Related pages
- 1962 | Commentary | martin-buber | The Presidential Papers
- Responses and Reactions II (63.16) | Responses and Reactions VI (63.20)
- The "Big Bite" (62.18) | The "Big Bite" (62.19) | The "Big Bite" (63.2) | The "Big Bite" (63.13) | Responses and Reactions I (62.22) | Responses and Reactions III (63.17) | Responses and Reactions IV (63.18) | Responses and Reactions V (63.19)