Biography

180 biography Vol. 9, No. 2 for his brother sometimes appears makes his account seem partial, his overall view of his brother, as Mr. Millard concludes, seems true. Mr. Millard's edition of the biography represents a substantial improvement over the earlier published versions. Millard presents an accurate, discretly modernized text, with extensive, well-informed notes. These includes some revealing passages which appeared only in the earlier manuscripts of the life. Millard's introduction is also admirable. It presents the best brief biography of Roger North, a fine essay on the "General Preface," which sets it in the context of eighteenth-century ideas and practices of biography, and a perceptive analysis of North as a biographer. Millard's writing is always lucid and his scholarship thorough. This volume represents an important part of the current reassessment of Roger North, who seems finally to be coming into his own as a biographer and man of letters . In recent years, there have been several significant scholarly editions of his works. John Wilson published Roger North on Music (1959), F. J. M. Korsten edited a collection of North's previously unpublished essays in 1981, and Howard Colvin and John Newman edited Roger North's writings on architecture in the same year. It is to be hoped that Mr. Millard will continue his efforts and give us new editions of the two other biographies, of Francis and Dudley North, and of Roger's autobiographical memoir, "Notes of Me." Robert W. McHenry, Jr. University of Hawaii Katerina Clark and Michael Holquist. Mikhail Bakhtin. Cambridge Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1984. pp. xvi + 398; $25.00. Even within our eclectic, uncertain and acutely self-conscious critical community, literary biography remains the one genre which can apparently still claim some kind of authority over its subject. Critical articles and books appear by the hundreds, but the scholarly biography generally holds a place of privilege as the most informed word on a writer's life and works. A number of valid reasons lie behind biography's special status. The sheer amount of time biographers spend researching and writing a life insures that if nothing else, they have thought for a while about their subject. The power of minutiae also has its effect. Despite the proverbial woods-for-the-trees, anyone who knows what Jack London was doing every day of his life develops a kind of intuitive understanding which almost has to pay off critically. Finally, literary biographers often have written as critics about their subject, gaining in the process a reputation solid enough to earn the essential help of various relatives, private collectors and publishers. All these credentials don't rule out the possibility of a dull, sloppy or stupid book, but for the most part, the biographer stands out as the one critic on an author whose judgment can't be ignored. As co-authors oÃ- Mikhail Bakhtin, a biography of the 20th Century Russian intellectual whose writings on language and literature have recently exerted a strong influence on scholars in a variety of disciplines, Katerina Clark and Michael Holquist would seem to have all the credentials necessary to write a first-rate biography. Their expertise as translators and Slavic scholars gives them a certain immediate authority over those of us who like Paul de Man "ignore the Russian language" (100), and the many interviews Clark and Holquist conducted with Bakhtin's friends and disciples REVIEWS 181 grant their book that depth of familiarity with its subject which strictly critical works almost by definition lack. Clark, and particularly Holquist, were also well-known Bakhtin scholars long before writing his biography. As editor and co-translator of The Dialogic Imagination, editor of the forthcoming The Architectonics of Answerability and Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, and indefatigable champion of Bakhtin's cause in critical introductions and critical essays, Holquist has become America's bestknown authority on the writer he calls "one of the leading thinkers of the twentieth century" (xv). And yet, for all Clark's and Holquist's undeniable learning and enthusiasm, Mikhail Bakhtin is a frustrating, uneven, and at times virtually unreadable biography. Part of the problem lies in the Bakhtin phenomenon...