Correspondence with a Nephew

CORRESPONDENCE WITH A NEPHEW

By Lewis and Steven Turco

 

Steven Turco wrote (on 11/07/09):

 

Dear Uncle Lew,

    I read La Famiglia¹ over the last week on my work trip to Denmark (coincidentally, I surmised from your book that I am approximately 1/8 Danish). I must say I was quite enlightened by the amount of detail it gave me about my family history, especially my grandparents and obviously you. I've often wondered how Grandpa Luigi from Sicily found his way to be a Baptist minister in the U.S. He had quite a life, rich with experience, and overwhelming passion for his beliefs. I'm glad he had the opportunity to see the birth of a grandson and, although I don't remember him, the time we spent together in that first year apparently brought him great joy; knowing that will always live within me.

    Grandma Turco was very special to me. Dad and I and in later years Scott too would visit her almost every Friday evening. She'd greet me with kisses all over my face and have a plate of spaghetti waiting on the table. After dinner she'd always do her favorite trick for me and take out her dentures and put them in a cup of water. Obviously as a young child that scared the hell out of me but fascinated me at the same time.

    Her house was a mysterious adventure land for me, especially the attic, and I loved to explore it every time I visited. The old rooms, books, clothes, knick knacks everywhere stimulated my imagination to a degree that I will never forget.

    And then there was the typewriter. I'd spend endless hours typing away at stories I'd made up about friends, school and adventures that took me to all ends of the earth. I taught myself to type on that typewriter, one finger at a time, which is how I still type today, although I'm pretty fast at it. What I never really thought about and what struck me when reading your book was that typewriter was probably the same one that Grandpa Luigi used to write his weekly sermons. Thinking back now, I remember how Grandma would love to see me at that typewriter. She'd bring me cookies and help me if I had a question but never interrupted me as I "banged out" another story. Maybe it was just the sound of the typewriter that brought a sense of familiarity back into her household and gave her peace in a time of loneliness in her life. I sure hope it did.

One of the things I've always regretted was not spending more time reading your books. I always thought it was the coolest thing as a child to see your name on a book or better yet go to the library and look up one of your books and show one of my friends. On many occasions I would open the book and begin to read but very quickly become lost and/or confused and eventually just put it down. The poems that were sent at Christmas always struck me as "dark" and "non-joyous."

    I've never regarded myself as a "reader," but I've always as a child and an adult enjoyed reading for both enjoyment and educational purposes, though I could never seem to connect with your books. After reading La Famiglia, though, I not only have a better understanding of my family, its roots and fascinating history (on both sides), but of you, your experiences and the many reasons why you write what you do.

    I learned a great deal from this book, not only of who we are as a family but the trials, tribulations and hope and inspirations that affected many in our past and present and, more important, how it will positively influence the generations to come. I am extremely pleased that this book is dedicated to the future of the Turco clan and especially to my boys, who are the joy of my life.

    I attempted to write a book like this utilizing my past experiences and recollections, as I used to have a photographic memory, it just never fully developed.

Steve Turco

 

Dear Steve,

    I'm puzzled by several things you say in your letter. One of them is, "I used to have a photographic memory...." How can you "used to have" one of those? Short of a stroke, I would think it would be impossible to lose such a thing. It's just the way one's mind works. You seem to use that as an excuse for not writing the memoirs you planned to write. My memory is far from "photographic," but I remember enough things from my past to write memoirs. I'm sure everybody does. Take a look again at the memoir in La Famiglia that was written by my cousin Ann Badach.² She was never a writer, and that's the first thing she's ever published. The stuff she remembers is amazing and compelling.

    You also say, " I've never regarded myself as a 'reader' but I've always as a child and an adult enjoyed reading for both enjoyment and educational purposes."  Isn't that the definition of a reader?

    You say, too, "I'd spend endless hours typing away at stories I'd made up about friends, school and adventures that took me to all ends of the earth." So did I, but I never quit. I used to walk to school making up stories for my friends as we walked. How does one manage to lose interest in telling stories? It's baffling to me. What happened to you anyway? 

     "I taught myself to type on that typewriter, one finger at a time...." So did I. The Navy taught me to touch-type, but when in high school I worked at the Meriden newspaper, most of the journalists used the hunt-and-peck method, just as you and I and your grandfather did.

    Finally, you write that the Xmas cards I sent every year "always struck me as 'dark' and 'non-joyous.'" Where did you get the idea that writers are supposed to write stuff that's "joyous"? The world is a dark place, Steven, and that's what I often write about. Just this past week: people gunned down at Fort Hood; the D.C. sniper executed; more soldiers killed in Afghanistan, etc., etc. Have you ever read Gray's "Elegy in a Country Churchyard," the most popular poem in English literature? T. S. Eliot's "The Waste Land," perhaps the greatest poem of the 20th century? Keats' "Ode on a Grecian Urn"? Shelley's "Ozymandias," Poe's "The Raven," just to name a few exceedingly popular ones? Even the "joyous" poet Walt Whitman wrote "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd" and "A Noiseless, Patient Spider." 

    I'm attaching a book review titled "Happy Days" that appeared in the New York Times Book Review last Sunday.

Love, Uncle Lew

 

HAPPY DAYS

By Hanna Rosin

(New York Times, November 5, 2009)

 

BRIGHT-SIDED: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America, By Barbara Ehrenreich, 235 pp. Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt & Company, 2009. I must confess, I have waited my whole life for someone to write a book like “Bright-Sided.” When I was a young child, my family moved to the United States from Israel, where churlishness is a point of pride. As I walked around wearing what I considered a neutral expression, strangers would often shout, “What’s the matter, honey? Smile!” as if visible cheerfulness were some kind of requirement for citizenship. I must confess, I have waited my whole life for someone to write a book like “Bright-Sided.” 

Now, in Barbara Ehrenreich’s deeply satisfying book, I finally have a moral defense for my apparent scowl. All the background noise of America — motivational speakers, positive prayer, the new Journal of Happiness Studies — these are not the markers of happy, well-adjusted psyches uncorrupted by irony, as I have always been led to believe. Instead, Ehrenreich argues convincingly that they are the symptoms of a noxious virus infecting all corners of American life that goes by the name “positive thinking.”

What started as a 19th-century response to dour Calvinism has, over the years, turned equally oppressive, Ehrenreich writes. Stacks of best sellers equate corporate success with a positive attitude. Flimsy medical research claims that cheerfulness can improve the immune system. In a growing number of American churches, confessions of poverty or distress amount to heresy. America’s can-do optimism has hardened into a suffocating culture of positivity that bears little relation to genuine hope or happiness.

Ehrenreich is the author of several excellent books about class — “Nickel and Dimed” is the best known. In this book she also reaches for a conspiratorial, top-down explanation. “Positive thinking,” she maintains, is just another way for the conservative, corporate culture to wring the most out of its workers. I don’t exactly buy this part of her argument, but the book doesn’t suffer much for the overreaching. I was so warmed by encountering a fellow crank that I forgave the agenda.

Ehrenreich’s inspiration for “Bright-Sided” came from her year of dealing with breast cancer. From her first waiting room experience in 2000 she was choking on pink ribbons and other “bits of cuteness and sentimentality” — teddy bears, goofy top-10 lists, cheesy poetry accented with pink roses. The sticky cheerfulness extended to support groups, where expressions of dread or outrage were treated as emotional blocks. “The appropriate attitude,” she quickly realized, was “upbeat and even eagerly acquisitive.” The word “victim” was taboo. Lance Armstrong was quoted as saying that “cancer was the best thing that ever happened to me,” while another survivor described the disease as “your connection to the divine.” As a test, Ehrenreich herself posted a message on a cancer support site under the title “Angry,” complaining about the effects of chemotherapy, “recalcitrant insurance companies” and “sappy pink ribbons.” “Suzy” wrote in to take issue with her “bad attitude” and warned that “it’s not going to help you in the least.” “Kitty” urged her to “run, not walk, to some counseling.”

The experience led her to seek out other arenas in American life where an insistence on positive thinking had taken its toll. One of the more interesting chapters concerns American business culture. Since the publication of Dale Carnegie’s “How to Win Friends and Influence People” in 1936, motivational speaking has become so ubiquitous that we’ve forgotten a world without it. In seminars, employees are led in mass chants that would make Chairman Mao proud: “I feel healthy, I feel happy, I feel terrific!” Corporate managers transformed from coolheaded professionals into mystical gurus and quasi celebrities “enamored of intuition, snap judgments and hunches.” Corporate America began to look like one giant ashram, with “vision quests,” “tribal storytelling” and “deep listening” all now common staples of corporate retreats.

This mystical positivity seeped into the American megachurches, as celebrity pastors became motivational speakers in robes. In one of the great untold stories of American religion, the proto-Calvinist Christian right — with its emphasis on sin and self-discipline — has lately been replaced by a stitched-together faith known as “prosperity gospel,” which holds that God wants believers to be rich. In my favorite scene of the book, Ehrenreich pays a visit to Joel and Victoria Osteen’s Lakewood Church in Houston, now the nation’s largest church. She arrives a week after a court has dismissed charges against Victoria, accused of assaulting a flight attendant who failed to deal promptly with a stain on her first-class airplane seat on the way to Vail. One would think, Ehrenreich suggests, that the largely working-class, multiracial crowd might sympathize with the working stiff on the plane who happened to be African-American. But no, Joel is shown dabbing his eyes on the video screen, and Victoria crows about the “banner of victory over my head” as the crowd cheers.

“Where is the Christianity in all of this?” Ehrenreich asks. “Where is the demand for humility and sacrificial love for others? Where in particular is the Jesus who said, ‘If a man sue you at law and take your coat, let him have your cloak also?’ ” Ehrenreich is right, of course, in her theological critique. But she misses a chance to dig deeper. I have spent some time in prosperity churches, and as Milmon F. Harrison points out in “Righteous Riches,” his study of one such church, this brand of faith cannot be explained away as manipulation by greedy, thieving preachers. Millions of Americans — not just C.E.O.’s and megapastors but middle-class and even poor people — feel truly empowered by the notion that through the strength of their own minds alone they can change their circumstances. This may be delusional and infuriating. But it is also a kind of radical self-reliance that is deeply and unchangeably American.

Hanna Rosin is a co-editor of Slate’s women’s Web site, DoubleX, and a contributing editor at The Atlantic.

Thanks for the response, Uncle Lew. The "photographic memory" line was just a jab at humor, a pun (not fully developed), I didn't mean it literally. I do read a fair amount of books so I guess I would be considered a reader, but my point was more that even if I do consider myself to be a reader I don't currently have the passion to make it more of a priority in my life. Maybe someday that will change, but for now I feel satisfied with the balance I choose between my home life, work life and how I fit my reading into both.

I never lost interest in telling stories, I love to tell stories, I just chose to do it verbally, it saves time.

The world is what it is. It's as bright as it is dark. For every horror story that happens on a daily basis there is a story of love and kindness as well. Life is short, I choose to focus on the things in this world that make me smile, laugh and bring me happiness. I know the ugliness is out there, but why would I want to bring that into my life? I've chosen early on in my life to be a decent person with a positive outlook. To do that I choose to surround myself with people, books, art, places that bring me "joy" rather than listening or reading about the depressing horrors of our society. Fortunately I've never had any severe hardships in my life that would turn me to the "dark" side like some of the authors you mentioned (Gray had an abusive father, Eliot had a nervous disorder) but if I did, I believe that it is still my nature to turn them into positive aspects (as Lance Armstrong did with his cancer) and continue to see the good in life. And although some of these authors that you mentioned may be highly regarded academic poets, they were certainly not people I would want to emulate my life after (Shelley abandoned his pregnant wife and child to run off with a 16 year girl and Poe was an alcoholic drug user.)

 

    I agree with Barbara Ehrenreich 100%. There is a lot of "positive thinking" bullshit out there that can cloud peoples' minds and affect their judgment, especially in corporate America. I see it every day. I don't think that just because I have a "positive outlook" on life that good things are going to come to me, or I'm going to become wealthy or not get sick, those things are going to come to me because I work hard and take care of myself. I'm a realist, I always have been, but I see no reason why I can't be a realist with a positive attitude.

Love. 

Steve

 

Ah, Steve,

    Nobody ever asked you to be anything but "a decent person with a positive outlook." I've always known you to be that, and it's one of the reasons I'm so fond of you. You're a lot like your dad, who is the same sort of person. He's a very decent guy and I've always been very fond of him, too. But I don't understand why you would condemn people like Gray and Poe and whoever for being who they are and writing out of their experience and their humanity. I've always thought I am a decent person too, who likes to surround himself with art, music, and all the things you mention, as well. That doesn't prevent me from seeing that the "balance" you mention doesn't seem to me to be a balance unless I'm able to observe and write about the rest of life. I can sing a happy song, but I can also sing a sad song, and the only thing I demand of any song is that it tell me the truth and be beautiful.

    Case in point: One of my colleagues at Oswego was a German Jewish economist named Richard Heiss. He was married to another native German called Jo Heiss. He came to SUNY Oswego in 1961, four years before I arrived, and he was active in the Oswego Opera Society for which Jean and I sang in the chorus most years. Jo was a ceramicist and a member of the Oswego Art Society like my Xmas card partner George O'Connor. While we were in Oswego last month I thought about them, wondered if they were still alive at ages 89 and 87 respectively. I thought about them while we were on our daily walk in Breitbeck Park at the bottom of the hill where we live on West 8th Street because we used to run into Dick and Jo sometimes when they walked there as well.

    On Monday last, while we were driving back to Dresden, Dick and Jo Heiss each took massive amounts of prescription narcotics, but before she died Dick shot Jo in the back of the head with a pistol. People found their bodies a couple of days later. The police determined that no third party was involved. Dick and Jo were also decent people, usually with positive outlooks. They did volunteer work and had many friends, but they had no children, no other known family in the U. S. Why would a good old couple die by murder-suicide at a great age? They must have hurt a great deal — why else would they have so many narcotics on hand? — and it was known that they were ill.

    Here's the question: What should I think about them? Should I dismiss them for their unforgivable actions? Maybe they were somehow psychically injured by having grown up in Nazi Germany. Maybe a husband should never be forgiven for killing his wife, no matter what the reason. But I understand how Dick and Jo could have done this to themselves (they injured no one else), because I'm getting old, too. Should I reject the idea of writing a poem for them? Because that's been revolving in my mind for a couple of days now as I read the developing story on-line in the Oswego Palladium-Times and hear from other colleagues via e-mail. Or should I just dismiss them from my memory as being unworthy subjects for an elegy? Because if I write it and do it well, I will show the few people who read it how human Dick and Jo Heiss were, and how sad their passing is.

Lew

 

Uncle Lew,

    I guess it comes down to what "balance" means in each individual's life.  For me, I tend to balance out the good stuff with the great stuff and shield out the bad stuff. You take it all in and go from there. I guess that's what makes the world what it is.

    Sorry to hear about your friends. I'm sure whatever you write will be honest and lasting.

Steve

_____

¹La Famiglia: The Family, Memoirs, by Lewis Turco, New York, NY: www.BordigheraPress.org, VIA Folios 57, 2009, 196 pp., ISBN 978-1-59954-006-1, trade paperback.

²Ibid., “A Letter to My Cousin,” by Ann Badach, pp 185-189.