My two cents from 1907: Wow. There's much good writing and profoundness in this book review.

The squeaky wheel:  in Twain's "Extract from Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven, grief and the after-life are treated with tenderness and logic.

From the review, the  following passage has puzzled me: 

>"Twain's strongest comment hinting at the possibility of an afterlife came
> in 1889, the year Winny died, when he wrote to Livy "I don't know anything
> about the hereafter, but I am not afraid of it" (130), but he steadily
> moved away from any such belief thereafter."

Twain wrote his story of heaven (Stormfield) before 1889;  Twain allowed it to be published long after 1889, without revising it or adding cynical comments as far as I could detect.  



> Date: Mon, 18 Jul 2016 07:11:56 -0500
> From: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: BOOK REVIEW: _Continuing Bonds with the Dead_, Harold K. Bush
> To: [log in to unmask]
> 
>  The following book review was written for the Mark Twain Forum by Kevin
> Mac Donnell.
> 
> ~~~~~
> 
> _Continuing Bonds with the Dead: Parental Grief and Nineteenth-Century
> American Authors_. Harold K. Bush. The University of Alabama Press, 2016.
> Pp. 237. Hardcover $49.95. Ebook $49.95. ISBN 978-0-8173-1902-1
> (hardcover). ISBN 978-0-8173-8954-3 (ebook).
> 
> 
> Many books reviewed on the Mark Twain Forum are available at discounted
> prices from the Twain Web Bookstore. Purchases from this site generate
> commissions that benefit the Mark Twain Project. Please visit <
> http://www.twainweb.net>
> 
> 
> Reviewed for the Mark Twain Forum by
> Kevin Mac Donnell
> 
> 
> Copyright (c) 2016 Mark Twain Forum. This review may not be published or
> redistributed in any medium without permission.
> 
> 
> 
> Twenty-three year old Daniel Bush, were he to read this book, would not be
> able to put it down, and would be grateful. He'd be proud of his father for
> writing it. But the grim truth is that Daniel Bush will never read this
> book. There is no twenty-three year old Daniel Bush; he died seventeen
> years ago at the age of six. Like every other dead child he did not leave
> this life by himself: He took with him the hopes and dreams of his parents,
> leaving the reality of their lives topsy-turvy in his wake, in complete
> astonishment that they did not immediately capsize and drown in the
> bottomless depths of grief. Unlike adults, when children step from the
> sunlight of this world, they cast long shadows, everlasting. Where is
> redemption to be found in such a shadow?
> 
> 
> If the reader does not believe in redemption at the beginning of this book
> he will recognize it by the time he reaches the Epilogue and reads Hal
> Bush's own summary of what he set out to do: "In this book, I've shown and
> analyzed some of the horrors a handful of our most famous writers
> experienced, horrors very familiar to me. But I've also documented the
> constructive ways that these deaths affected the worldviews and the
> writings of the surviving parents. I've considered how a child's death may
> have influenced the direction and content of the writer's production
> afterward, perhaps much more than has previously been thought" (193).
> Redemption takes many forms, and as Bush readily admits, the writing of
> this book was itself an act of redemption.
> 
> 
> This is not a speculative work of scholarship. This is a story from the
> front lines told by a combatant who has squarely faced death and survived
> to tell the tale. Somebody who has not experienced such grief firsthand
> could easily be misled by some of the myths clinical research has
> identified about the grief that follows the loss of a child. Contrary to
> the common myth, the wound does not scar over and completely heal. Closure
> never comes. Bizarre and terrifying irrational thoughts that would be
> considered pathological in other contexts are normal reactions to the death
> of a child. The physical manifestations of this grief are painful and real.
> All of the other elements of grief are present, as well as nightmares and
> magical thinking. It is not unusual for the meaning of life to be
> vanquished, or for the pain to increase with time instead of fading.
> Spiritual faith will be challenged, and faith can evaporate altogether, but
> it can also strengthen, as can marriages, contrary to conventional wisdom.
> In fact, recent studies have shown that the number of divorces due to
> bereavement have been wildly exaggerated. Finally, although parents
> sometimes grieve in different ways, it is most common for a lost child to
> be held in loving memory to the end of a parent's life, the parental bond
> enduring unbroken, generating beneficial work and a positive life rich with
> meaning and purpose, as most of the examples in this book illustrate.
> 
> 
> Death will come to each of us sooner or later, but in the meantime it lurks
> in our literature, inspiring a steady stream of books on the topic for more
> than a century. The same year that Mark Twain died, his publisher issued
> _In After Days_, a collection of fascinating essays on the afterlife (and
> faith, and grief) by William Dean Howells, Julia Ward Howe, Henry James,
> Thomas Wentworth Higginson, and others. Books on death in literature, or
> death and writers, have continued ever since. Almost simultaneous with
> Bush's book, Katie Riophe has published _The Violet Hour_, a look at how
> various twentieth century authors--Susan Sontag, John Updike, Maurice
> Sendak, Sigmund Freud, and Dylan Thomas among them--have faced death
> themselves. But Bush's book is clearly focused on precisely what is said in
> the subtitle: nineteenth century writers coping with the deaths of their
> children.
> 
> 
> The five authors who are the focus of this book are Harriet Beecher Stowe,
> Abraham Lincoln, William Dean Howells, Mark Twain, and W. E. B. Du Bois.
> This is a thoughtful representative cross-section of American authors who
> lost children and found varying degrees of redemption in their work and
> writings. Bush had plenty of grief-stricken nineteenth century parents to
> choose from: Twain's friend John Hay, who had served as Lincoln's private
> secretary, lost a son; and Twain's wealthy benefactor, Henry Rogers, lost a
> daughter only a few years before Twain lost Susy. Twain's brother Orion
> lost a daughter when living in Nevada. Twain didn't think James Fenimore
> Cooper could write authentically about Indians, but he might have given
> Cooper a pass on grief: Cooper lost his first son and one other child.
> Henry Wadsworth Longfellow lost a daughter, and a few years later his
> daughter's mother in a hideous accident caused by a carelessly dropped
> match by another of his daughters. James Russell Lowell lost two daughters
> and a son, followed by their mother, and when the Civil War came a few
> years later, he lost three nephews who were like sons to him. Ralph Waldo
> Emerson lost a son and years later had him exhumed to view the corpse,
> perhaps an extreme example of trying to come to grips with the reality of
> his loss. Ambrose Bierce lost two sons, one a suicide and the other an
> alcoholic. Herman Melville lost his son, a suicide just down the hall in
> the middle of the night. Fanny Fern and Bronson Alcott each lost a child,
> and the list could go on. Child mortality rates may have been high in the
> nineteenth century but that did not lessen the grief of parents. Bush
> mentions most of these other authors, but the five he chose to study in
> depth are well-chosen. Their lives intersect at some points, their
> responses to grief are interestingly similar and at times seemingly
> disparate, but all of them reflect the evolution of typically American
> responses to grief when facing the loss of a child.
> 
> 
> Bush's introduction reviews the history of grieving in America, changing
> funeral rituals, evolving psychological theories on grieving, and explains
> what distinguishes parental grief for a lost child from other forms of
> grieving. The experience of death in the nineteenth century was raw and
> real. Children died at home instead of hospitals, and families performed
> their own funerals as often as did undertakers. Clergy offered spiritual
> support more often than psychologists prescribed how to grieve. Nineteenth
> century Americans confronted death and maintained positive continuing bonds
> with the dead through memorials, social work, and writing. But with time
> American responses to death became more and more clinical,
> professionalized, and domesticated, and the continuing bonds practiced in
> the nineteenth century were replaced with Freudian theory that encouraged
> severing ties and moving on. Death became something to be tamed and even to
> be made invisible. Bush points out that the culture of death is coming full
> circle and the "continuing bonds" --a phrase coined by Dennis Klass in
> _Continuing Bonds: New Understandings of Grief_ (1996)--is being replaced
> by the theory of "posttraumatic growth" which recognizes the presence of
> the dead in the lives of the grieving and how that presence can yield
> constructive results out of the trauma.
> 
> 
> But before that can happen, a death must be "realized." This word crops up
> repeatedly in nineteenth century accounts by those grieving a death, and
> had a particular meaning that is overlooked by the modern reader. Twain
> captured that meaning perfectly when recording his reaction to reading the
> telegram that informed him of Susy's death: "It is one of the mysteries of
> our nature that a man, all unprepared, can receive a thunderstroke like
> that and live. There is but one reasonable explanation of it. The intellect
> is stunned by the shock and but gropingly gathers the meaning of the words.
> The power to realize their full import is mercifully wanting. The mind has
> a dumb sense of vast loss--that is all. It will take mind and memory
> months, and possibly years, to gather together the details and thus learn
> and know the whole extent of the loss." In these words Bush recognizes
> Twain as a fellow member of the club nobody wants to join. Twain's words
> are as clear a description as were ever written of the initial trauma that
> must be absorbed, confronted, processed, and eventually accepted before the
> reality of the loss is truly comprehended. In this context, to _realize_
> something is not merely to understand it, but to confront something and
> move it from a state of unreality all out of time, and make it real in the
> present. The clinical term for this processing period is "latency" and the
> process can take many forms and consume widely varying lengths of time, as
> demonstrated by the authors whose stories are told in this volume.
> 
> 
> The chapter on Howells immediately precedes the chapter on Mark Twain, and
> their experiences are superficially parallel. Howells lost his daughter
> Winny in 1889, seven years before Twain lost Susy. Winny, like Susy, was a
> moody artistic intellectual young woman with a distinct talent for writing,
> and like Susy she died in her 20s with neither of her parents present. But
> Howells was far more nineteenth century in his response to the loss of
> Winny. Like Mark Twain, he frankly recorded his grief and his lost daughter
> haunts his writings, especially _A Hazard of New Fortunes_ (1890), as Bush
> expertly delineates. But unlike Twain, Howells held out hope for a reunion
> in some kind of afterlife, and was able to maintain a bond with his
> daughter in this way through his faith.
> 
> 
> Twain's strongest comment hinting at the possibility of an afterlife came
> in 1889, the year Winny died, when he wrote to Livy "I don't know anything
> about the hereafter, but I am not afraid of it" (130), but he steadily
> moved away from any such belief thereafter. As Bush concludes "with the
> passing on of the baton from Howells to Mark Twain, do we see the radical
> shift from nineteenth century sentimentalism and its vague afterglow, into
> a modern, hardened temperament for whom reunion with the dead was itself
> almost certainly a dead hypothesis" (127-128). But even if they differed in
> their beliefs in an afterlife, they shared what Bush calls an
> "anti-imperial friendship" (157) and both expressed empathy for the parents
> of children killed in war--Mark Twain in "A War Prayer," and Howells in
> _Editha_. Also like Howells, Twain's writings, even more than a decade
> after Susy's death, still reflected Twain's initial response to her death.
> Among other works, Susy's presence may be detected in _Christian Science_
> (1907); Twain, Livy, and even Clara had blamed Susy's "unnecessary" death
> on "fools" who practiced mental science and spiritualism (139). Bush also
> makes a convincing case that even Mark Twain's late work on his
> _Autobiography_ from 1906 to 1909 was prompted by a growing desire to
> immerse himself in the past using what Twain called a "systemless system"
> of autobiography that reflected his continuing struggle with a world filled
> with good and evil, ruled not by a just God but by an absentee landlord,
> with the result that Twain could not formulate a satisfactory theodicy, but
> instead moved toward nihilism, all the while continuing his bond with Susy
> by exercising his better angels, his powerful social conscience, which was
> Susy's legacy (162).
> 
> 
> Twentieth century critics have sometimes treated Twain's grief over the
> death of Susy with some impatience, hinting that it was excessive or
> unhealthy, even morbid. Although Bush does not berate these critics, this
> book certainly provides much needed perspective, a corrective to such
> dismissive attitudes that reflect mid-twentieth century cultural views on
> grief rather than those in Twain's lifetime. Twainians will of course be
> most interested in the chapter on Mark Twain, and most will convince
> themselves to read the chapter on William Dean Howells. This review has
> necessarily focused on Mark Twain, and the complexities of this subject
> have been briefly described (and certainly over-simplified), so the reader
> will do well to read this book from start to finish to gain a proper
> context and the fullest insight. Twenty-three year old Daniel Bush
> (1993-1999) would have loved this book, as would have fifteen year old
> Colin Thomas Waters (2001-2001), the grandson of this reviewer, and so will
> all readers.