Opinion Prospero’s tempestuous family

Of the many memorable photos that have been published since Steve Jobs died,the most poignant was in The Wall Street Journal on Monday. The picture itself wasn’t anything special. This was just a head shot of Jobs staring out,with rimless glasses,aquiline nose,receding hairline and intense brown eyes.

It mesmerised because of its juxtaposition to a head shot of Jandali,Jobs’s 80-year-old biological father,who stared out with the same rimless glasses,aquiline nose,receding hairline and intense brown eyes.

Jandali told The Journal that,over the last year,he periodically sent some e-mails to the son he never met,wishing him happy birthday or better health. He said he got a couple of short replies. But a Jobs family friend disputes that. Jandali,a widower,reads books on an iPad and uses an iPhone 4. But the father of Jobs never met the father of Apple. The closest he got was downloading videos of Jobs introducing Apple products. He didn’t even learn Jobs was his son until around 2005.

When Jandali was pursuing his doctorate in political science at the University of Wisconsin in the early ’50s,he fell in love with a fellow graduate student named Joanne Schieble. She became pregnant,but her family did not approve of her relationship with a Syrian,so she put up her son for adoption. The boy was raised by Paul Jobs,a high-school dropout and machinist for a laser company in Los Altos and Clara,an accountant.

Once Joanne’s disapproving father died a couple of years later,she married Jandali. They had a daughter,who grew up to be Mona Simpson,the novelist. The couple divorced after a few years.

Like Shakespearean drama,where fathers haunt and where siblings are swept apart by a shipwreck only to learn later that the other is still alive,Steve and Mona met only in their mid-20s. Jobs began the hunt for his biological mother in his teens and was ready to give up when he finally discovered at 27 that he had a younger sister.

He was thrilled that she was an artist because he liked to think of himself as one. The computer whiz kid and the literary whiz kid grew close.

Simpson mined the theme of missing fathers for her critically acclaimed novels. She also wrote a novel inspired by her famous brother,A Regular Guy,which casts a gimlet eye on Jobs,who specialised in hot-cold emotional roller-coaster rides.

It’s about an emotionally disconnected,fruit-loving Silicon Valley biotech entrepreneur named Tom Owens,“a guy in jeans,barefoot in the boardroom.” He lives in a barely furnished mansion once owned by a copper baron,as Jobs did; he loses control of his company to suits,as Jobs did; he tried to decide whom to marry by asking friends which of his two girlfriends was more beautiful,as Jobs did; he belatedly forms a relationship with his out-of-wedlock daughter,as Jobs did.

She focuses on the painful central question about Jobs: How does the abandoned become the abandoner? When he cast off his own infant daughter he was the same age his parents were when they cast off him.

Three years after the novel came out in 1996,Lisa Brennan-Jobs,the daughter Jobs had with an old girlfriend,wrote a searing piece for The Harvard Advocate about how it took her two years to get up the courage to read her aunt’s book,which contains details like Jane (Lisa’s doppelganger) forging her father’s signature on her Harvard application.

“He was away on business,and it had to be done,” Lisa writes,adding about Mona: “It is a rare experience to find that someone unexpected has been holding captive moments of my past. I didn’t know that as I sought her consolations and took her advice,she,too,was taking. It was apparently a trade.”

The roman à clef jangled nerves in the family,but Mona and Steve were close again when he was dying.

Beyond the gushing encomiums for the Prospero of Palo Alto,there roiled a family tempest that might have even shocked Shakespeare.