Stacy Schiff has a pretty good track record as a biographer, on three remarkably different subjects. Her first, a study of the enigmatic French flier and author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, was a 1995 Pulitzer Prize finalist; her second, Vera, about the hugely influential but invisible-by-choice wife of Vladimir Nabokov, actually won the prize five years ago. And now her book about the years Benjamin Franklin spent in Paris cementing French support for the American Revolution, A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America, has just been published by Henry Holt to immediately enthusiastic reviews.
Schiff, in the midst of a busy week promoting her new book, squeezes PW in a for a breakfast meeting in a cozy Greenwich Village café and begins to talk instantly with the rapid-fire, witty and endlessly allusive style that makes Improvisation such a pleasure to read. "All editors are failed writers—or is it the other way round?" she begins. And as a former editor herself (at Simon & Schuster) she had wanted, she said, to commission a biography of Saint- Exupéry, but couldn't find an appropriate author, so decided to do it herself. "I knew what would make a good book, and I could write a great proposal; I could do one for you if you like," she laughs. So she began sneaking out of the office to read up on the French pilot at the New York Public Library. "I found out what a bad pilot he was, and also how quotable—and really, all we knew about him was The Little Prince, hardly typical."
So, buoyed by a husband who was willing to support her, and with Lois Wallace in hand as an agent—"I wanted someone I hadn't dealt with as an editor"—she left S&S in 1989 and began work. "Research was heavenly. No one had written about him from the American side, so I could talk to all these young American airmen who'd known him only as a pilot who didn't speak their language—wonderful witnesses." It took her four years of work, and Ashbel Green at Knopf published it. Overjoyed when she was one of three finalists for the Pulitzer, she was brought down to earth by her ever-realistic agent: "Stacy, that means you lost."
From there it was a long step to the story of Vladimir Nabokov's formidable helpmeet, Vera. "I didn't want to write the same book twice so I looked for a really different subject. I think of Nabokov as the pre-eminent novelist of the 20th century, but it seemed to me there was a hole in his story. I'd seen the draft of a previous bio of Nabokov in which Vera had gone through it crossing out references to herself at every opportunity, so there was obviously a great deal going on behind his pages." It wasn't easy, however. "Women keep terrible documentation about themselves anyway, whereas men are much easier; and with Vera it was worse. She kept everything about him, but threw everything about herself away."
Still, Schiff had some lucky breaks. She had heard that the novelist tried to burn the manuscript of Lolita, fearing a hostile reaction, and that Vera had rescued it from their backyard incinerator in Ithaca, and found a Cornell student who had actually witnessed the event. And although Nabokov was widely recorded, she had no idea of Vera's voice—until their son, Dimitri, came up with an answering machine tape, on which she could be heard. This time the Pulitzer judges came through—and fortunately at the moment the book, which had been edited for Random by Bob Loomis, came out in paperback. "So I guess it helped a bit."
The proposal for A Great Improvisation was actually sold before the prize, and was the source of a considerable feeding frenzy. According to Wallace, Random's offer was "insufficient," and when the bidding was thrown open there were a number of others. But, Schiff says, "Holt said they wanted it desperately—and all authors love the idea of that." Wallace accepted Holt's offer, though it was not the highest, and neither agent nor author has regretted it.
For this book, Schiff wanted a subject that had been "hugely covered, but where I could do some off-the-road driving," and Franklin's lengthy sojourn in Paris, and the weird assortment of people he dealt with there, from the celebrated playwright Beaumarchais to diplomats, spies, a wily Paris police chief and sundry adventurers and opportunists, seemed to provide the ideal scene. Franklin would also, she thought, be more truly himself, and essentially American, in this sophisticated European setting, and this turned out to be true.
The book involved a much bigger cast than Schiff had ever worked with, and also thrust her into an arena—the history of the Founding Fathers—that has become a major academic preserve, and the subject of a number of big recent bestsellers by male authors like Joseph Ellis, Ron Chernow, Edmund Morgan and David McCullough. Schiff figures she may get some flak on both counts: the fact that she is a woman in what has been largely a male domain (though she delights to note that one of the great Franklin scholars, Claude-Anne Lopez, is a woman), and her lack of appropriate academic credentials. "But I think it helps to be a generalist, and not to know the scholarly terms." She thinks of the book as "a sort of giant caper, in which I can show the foibles of both sides. It's amazing, for example, how inept the Continental Congress was—it's remarkable that America ever got to be born at all."
Since that seems in not much doubt, the obvious next question is what's next on her zigzag biographical course? Here Schiff is unaccustomedly reticent. Holt doesn't want her to say anything at this point, beyond the fact it's an 18th-century American subject. Obviously, if she hews to her course, one far from Franklin.
