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 This review may not be published or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.