For the most part, he ignores his neighbors and has few, if any, close friends. He grants no interviews, does not speak at book-club functions, will not lecture on the college literary circuit. He does not answer letters, sign autographs, or meet with outsiders. Otherwise he has kept his respectful distance, completely isolated from the world at large. Through the years, the author has made news only with the piecemeal publication and performance of his works, and with such occasional events as his Nobel Prize for Literature in 1969, his late-in-life marriage to his “friend” Suzanne Dumesnil, and his rare attempts to stage and direct his own plays and film scripts. In a time when art has become synonymous with godliness, and the artist is an instant celebrity, Samuel Beckett has managed to remain aloof and insular. She has received fellowships from (among others) the Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundations and the Bunting Institute of Radcliffe College.Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Her biographies of Anaïs Nin and Simone de Beauvoir were also prize finalists. She received the National Book Award for Samuel Beckett: A Biography. He gave us word associations that we use in everything from children’s games to serious personality tests he taught us to talk about the complex, the archetype, the introvert and extravert he gave us the phrases ‘New Age’ and ‘the age of Aquarius’, and he gave us the concept of synchronicity that propelled me to write this book.”ĭeirdre Bair has been a literary journalist and university professor of comparative literature. She writes: “I am intrigued by how the individual influences the society in which he or she lived, and Jung was certainly among the most influential.

This is a fascinating portrait of the diverse decades that span Jung’s long life (1875-1961).įor Bair the choice for a biography about Jung was a form of intellectual inquiry. Bair has evoked the man in all his cynical self-interest, opportunism, moral ambiguity, paradoxical insecurity and charismatic hold on decades of disciples. Deirdre Bair meticulously assembled every scrap of information about Jung she could get her hands on, culminating in a big book which strikes Publishers Weekly as “a balance between damage control and deification” and suggests that in bulk and detail there is little more to say.

Samuel beckett deirdre bair