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Stacy Schiff
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LOOKING
THROUGH LIFE'S LENS
Stacy Schiff ’78 ranks winning last year's Pulitzer Prize for biography "almost up there with getting a 6 in History 35" at Andover. This time, the high marks went to her critically acclaimed book Vera (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov). Biographies fascinate Schiff. "As a reader, I prefer history as seen through the lens of an individual life," she says. "As a writer, I appreciate the fact that lives come with a built-in narrative structure. There is a clear beginning, middle and end. And lives have themes—not always obvious ones." Although Schiff was interested in writing as long as she can remember, her initial focus was on editing. Following graduation from Williams College, she worked as an editorial assistant at Basic Books in New York, and later as an editor. At PA she recalls writing "papers, papers and more papers— mostly late at night, from desultory notes and never from outlines" on her father's old Royal typewriter. "I was encouraged along the way," she says, "but I remember feeling some consternation when, toward the end of his course on quest literature, English instructor Philip Zaeder advised, 'You should be a writer.'" When Schiff finally took his advice, she produced a biography of the dashing French pilot Antoine de Saint-Exupery, author of many classics of aviation literature. "I chose him because few writers have lives as rich, as dramatic as did Saint-Exupery, who obliges his biographer by crashing his airplanes all over the place. I thought it unfair that such an adventurous man should be remembered, in America at least, primarily as the author of The Little Prince," Schiff declares. During the four years it took to complete the book, Schiff pored over archival material in France. She also conducted interviews in that country and in the United States with friends and girlfriends from the early 1940s and with fellow pilots from his World War II days. Published in 1995, Saint-Exupery garnered rave reviews and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize that year. For Schiff it was time to refocus the lens. She soon began a biography of Vera Nabokov, wife of famed Russian writer Vladimir Nabokov. "She struck me as the greatest influence on one of the great writers of our time," Schiff explains. "The couple's marriage was exceptionally close; theirs was clearly a great love story. Yet Vladimir Nabokov's biographers kept writing around her." As Schiff discovered, there was a reason. A woman totally dedicated to her husband and his place in literature, Vera did everything possible to erase her enormous imprint and influence from the record. According to Schiff, one of the first people she interviewed, "a scholar who counted among the Nabokovs' more intimate family friends," warned her that she was attempting nothing less than a life of the Cheshire Cat, the elusive character in Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. She pressed on, searching archives and interviewing friends in the United States and across Europe. Among the triumphs was the discovery of the most personal of the Nabokovs' correspondence. Schiff had been told repeatedly that letters from the Nabokovs to a couple who had been their closest friends for 50 years no longer existed. While interviewing the couple's niece in Queens, N.Y., Schiff suggested they go upstairs to search for the correspondence. There, in the bottom of an old armoire in a spare bedroom—underneath some old corsets—Schiff unearthed the lost letters and, she says, felt the blood rush to her head. Schiff had a second find—smaller, but no less remarkable. In an archival folder, she found a postcard from the 1970s, on which a friend reminded Vera of a conversation they had a half-century earlier. "Vera had argued that a fat volume could be written on the influence and inspiration a wife brings to bear on her writing husband," Schiff recalls. "For one fleeting moment she seemed to smile on my curiosity." —Elaine Hines |
Copyright, Phillips Academy, 2001
