Writing My Father's Biography, 1990s-2000s, by Randy Summers

From MemoryArchive

Who: Randy Summers
What: Writing My Father's Biography
When: 1990s-2000s
Where: Martinez, California

Introduction

My name is Randy Summers, and I was born in Houston, Texas, in 1945, and now I live in Martinez, California. This following piece, originally done on the computer, printed, and sent via USPS to my father, was written in April, 2004, not quite a month after heart surgery for me at age 58 (five-way bypass.) The title, "The world is round! The story will be told!" is one I liked then, and one I still like. Pax to Tom Friedman of the New York Times op-ed pages.

At the time of writing this piece, we were planning a nice party for my father's ninetieth birthday in Houston. As part of the preparations, my father had been nagging, cajoling, and exhorting myself and my two younger brothers to write his autobiography for him. He said it would be easy, that in fact the book was already written, that it was really just a matter of editing and organizing. We were calling it the Post-It note method of book writing: to start, simply jot all major formulations each on a post it note (drawn from his existing papers, old memos, letters, documents, citations, etc.), then clean off the dining room table, lay down all the sticky Post-It notes in order, and then have the best typist, er, keyboardist, available type up the book, take the disk to Kinkos, and order the desired number of copies. My Dad was a big believer in "desk-top publishing," and by all rights, there should be a brass plaque at his favorite copy machine at the Kinkos right there on Westheimer Road near Bering in Houston.

Well, alack, that autobiography is still yet to be written. We did have the nice party at Willie G's seafood house on Post Oak Lane, took up a whole room for luncheon, with a party of sixty friends and family, many of them knowing my father since before he was married in the thirties. But, we never got the book written in time for his birthday. Daddy died in November of 2004. Many of us think even though his health had been failing for two years or more, he had rallied for his ninetieth birthday, and especially the party. All along I was telling him that we'd get the book done. There is no doubt in my mind that today he would still champion the Post-It method of book writing, but now he would use wikipedia.com to check references, and rather than Kinkos and copy machines, he would tell me to use MemoryArchives. The following piece is typical of the exchanges between us over the last thirty years or so. Like David Hume, I can safely say that my father passed for a man of parts. When he retired, a banner at the party said a Man for All Seasons.

"The world is round! The story will be told!"

Besides my physical exercises (walking twenty minutes straight through at least once a day), I have resumed some writing exercises - conditioning activities if you will, towards writing your autobiography. In order to prepare for this task I have found it necessary to study a little about Kazakhstan. Also, to round out these "conditioning exercises," I am also familiarizing myself with the one of the lesser-known books of the twentieth century's most notorious child pornographer, Vladimir Nabokov, who of course wrote Lolita. It is his 1962 novel Pale Fire. Instantly, one thinks of agon and heterologic: "pale" is not the sort of modifier that soon comes to mind for something as hot, vivid, and immediate as "fire." For someone whose long career has covered such a wide range of endeavor as yours, seemingly disparate and unrelated subjects as a nation out in the middle of nowhere, and a lesser book of a minor writer of snickering notoriety from forty years back, rather than being absurd references, are in fact essential topics, to prepare for writing a book to be called The Autobiography of Frank Summers, as Written by His Three Sons.

Who would be the author of a book with a title like that anyway? How would the book be written anyway? (You recall I have said that the book, or at least most of it, has already been written; and you recall my so-called "Post-It Note" methodology.) It looks like the Russian émigré novelist Nabokov may have beaten me (us) to the punch by some forty years! His 1962 novel Pale Fire is divided into four parts. Being mindful that the title itself is problematic, the relations of the four parts to one another is part of the story of the book, if the book has a proper "story." The first part is an introduction by a scholar-editor explaining the background of an autobiographical poem called "Pale Fire." This is the poet's unpublished major work, which the scholar-editor purports to publish posthumously in the second part. The poem is divided into four cantos, and it indeed comprises the second part. The third part, the longest and most complex, consists of the scholar-editor's idiosyncratic line-by-line commentary and notes on the text of the poem. The fourth and last section is a kind of Index to the poem, with capsule descriptions of the major people and places named in the text. So, immediately the questions are: What is this book about? It is a novel; what is the story? Who is the author? the poet who wrote the masterpiece four cantos "Pale Fire"? the scholar-editor who arranges its publication from the original manuscript posthumously? or, Vladimir Nabokov?

What has Kazakhstan got to do with all this? For one thing it is not necessarily in the middle of nowhere, and therefore irrelevant. In fact, starting when JFS was some forty-three years old, Kazakhstan has literally been in the midst of things. One of the most important events in the life of anybody who was already born in 1957 was when Soviet Russia stupefied the world with the launching of Sputnik early 4 October 1957, from a spot in Soviet Central Asia that nobody had ever heard of. A quick look at the map reveals that Kazakhstan is indeed not in the middle of nowhere. But, rather it is right in the midst of things in human history, pre-Space Age or post-Space Age. It has been called the "navel" of Asia - indeed, country lands like India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Russia, Mongolia, China, and Tibet are not far away. With mountains breaking up the steppes and lakes of the vastness of the Asiatic landform, despite its stark beauty and exoticness, it has long been the crossroads of the curve of history - from the horse-footed hordes of Genghis Khan to the high-powered-rockets that take things and people into space.

The area due north of the northern tip of India (a disputed area still - is it India? Pakistan? Kashmir?), but south of the frozen tundra of Siberia, is actually its own little set of Balkans. Besides Kazakhstan, there is Kirghizstan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan. The crossroads of history is not a far-fetched designation: the main street of Bishkek, the capital of Kirghizstan, is called Silk Road Street. Marco Polo passed through here. Most people read Marco Polo's Travels for entertainment and wonder. A seaman named Christopher Columbus read it, made marginal notes, and used the information contained, to calculate the overland distance from Europe to Japan. He thought the world was actually round. A little while after him, Magellan's expedition sailed around the world. The Soviets have many photographs taken from space confirming that Columbus was right, as though additional proof is needed.

Anyhow, this is a flavor of the nature of my "conditioning exercises" for writing a book, as I say, has already been essentially written from the Post-It notes. How I came across these two disparate topics, Nabokov's 1962 novel, and the geography of deep central Asia, is itself a story. But, I'll save that for a follow-up Post-It note.