Text: Richard Beale Davis, “A Tribute,” Papers on Poe, 1972, pp. 3-6

[page 3, unnumbered:]

Richard Beale Davis

UNIVERSITY OF TENNESSEE

 

A Tribute

 

JOHN WARD OSTROM, in whose honor this book was written as a testimonial of the high regard present and past colleagues and students hold for him, has been known to the present writer for more than a third of a century. The earliest recollection is of witty and wise comments from him in a particularly appropriate and beautiful academic setting, among the architectural masterpieces of Thomas Jefferson's University of Virginia. It was our custom on spring evenings to sit for a while after dinner — with perhaps a pipe — on the steps of the Rotunda, then the University Library, before we went inside to the more disciplined joys of graduate study. There was perhaps a comment on the valor, or the gargantuan and peculiar appetites of Beta, the campus canine mascot, who was in sound and view fifty yards away as he routed triumphantly a canine interloper or an errand boy who had dared to set paw or foot within that sacred rectangle, the Lawn. Or there might be a touch of wistfulness as we spoke of families left at home, in John especially for the lovely Melva back in Gettysburg. Or from John particularly sound advice to a very slightly younger but less experienced fellow-student. Already Ostrom had seen more of the world than the rest of us, specifically the strange and exotic world of Asia and Japan, where he had lived and taught for two years. And he had college instructional experience already behind him. In these middle years of the Great Depression he knew [page 4:] better than we what we seemed to be facing in the future, and he managed, perhaps inadvertently, to convey to us how worthwhile our projected life might be, and how stimulating.

And there is another cluster of memories, of three impecunious graduate students who haunted an old Charlottesville bookshop which contained great treasures of Americana of all descriptions. The proprietor and original collector had died and an outsider had bought the stock. He wanted to get rid of most of it before he packed the rest for shipment. John Ostrom and I were two of those three students, and probably his library of American literature, like mine, had its beginnings in the minor classics and forgotten editions of great authors we picked up for ten cents or anything up to a dollar. Within the past year a New York bookdealer wrote me about a book presented to an American by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, a book I bought for a quarter in that collection (how the New Yorker found I had it still do not know). But of such circumstances are scholars made.

These are memories of graduate school outside the classroom, for I do not believe that John Ostrom and I were ever in the same lecture course or seminar. Only later did I meet Melva and Jodie (Betty Jo), the latter then a lively little girl possessing something of her father's wit and mother's charm.

Though we kept up a desultory correspondence between graduate school and World War II, John and I did not meet again until in the early 1940's he was at The Citadel in South Carolina and I at an institution nearby. Then our whole families exchanged weekend visits — a pleasant practice terminated by our war activities. When peace came, or VJ Day, John had gone to Wittenberg and soon after I moved to another university. Since then our meetings have been at the Modern Language Association, with further communication by telephone and letter and my one brief and for me most pleasant visit to Wittenberg. Our mutual friend, Professor Minnie Cate Morrell, has also been an intermediary who has kept us posted on each other through the years.

John Ostrom's academic career has been quiet, unostentatious, useful, and yet genuinely distinguished. Born in New York state, educated at Gettysburg College (B.A. and M.A.) and the University of Virginia (Ph.D.), he has taught at his two alma maters in Pennsylvania and Virginia, at Augustana in Illinois, at The Citadel in South Carolina, and for the past twenty-six years at Wittenberg. At Wittenberg he rose from assistant to full professor, was for more than a decade departmental [page 5:] chairman, and for the last ten years has, as senior member of the department, conducted classes and seminars at Springfield and conferences and workshops all over Ohio. He has incited and inspired numbers of students to go on for graduate work. How many I do not know, but individuals among them have come to us, each marked by what we may call incentive, or in more recent parlance, convinced of the relevance of study of American and English literature.

In his several textbooks on English composition, from 1933 to 1968, he has recorded for practical use, from his own experience and perception, how one learns to write. These volumes, which go back to his early career at Gettysburg in his 1933 Building Complete Ideas, include the 1946 Controlling Ideas, the 1953 The Craft of Composition, and the 1958 and 1968 Better Paragraphs. They have been widely used throughout the country. These books sprang from the pragmatic, down-to-earth side of their author's academic mind, though they are no less imaginative than his scholarly books. His checklists and edited collections of the correspondence of Edgar Allan Poe, culminating but by no means concluding in the 1948 Letters published by Harvard University Press, are known and quoted wherever the English language is spoken. I personally have seen them referred to or translated at least in part in India and Japan and half a dozen European countries. The meticulous and inclusive Letters, especially in its 1966 revised (supplemented) form, is likely to remain standard for several generations.

To supply further evidence than his books that the beginning and end of instruction in college English lies in teaching and mastering the techniques of writing, Ostrom has been most active in the English Association of Ohio (in which he has served in many capacities, including that of president), in the National Council of Teachers of English, and in the Ohio College Association. As coordinator of workshops and chairman of discussion groups he has practiced what he preaches in his textbooks and has added perhaps a bit more.

As a good citizen of an academic and civil community he has also assumed other duties and responsibilities. Faculty committees, from Executive and Graduate to Athletic, have consumed the time men in some other professions might have used for recreation. He has thus been a strong faculty influence in administrative academic affairs, a proper and appropriate function of the scholar-teacher. Along with these campus activities have gone fruitful labor in church and civic affairs. [page 6:]

For all this he has had more than a modicum of recognition, though never quite equal to what he has deserved. He has been elected to Phi Beta Kappa and other honor societies, received a major prize for a major book, and been awarded the degree of Doctor of Letters by Gettysburg College. His name appears and his career is summarized in Who's Who In America, Who's Who in the Midwest, and Who's Who in Education. As already suggested, his widest recognition has come from his significant work on a great American author.

The present book is a further attempt to honor a major teacher and scholar. It has grown out of the eagerness, and ultimately the capacity, on the part of colleagues at Wittenberg and former colleagues and students and other friends throughout this country to undertake this labor of esteem. In this gathering of examples of scholarly endeavor in areas in which he has been interested, John Ostrom is receiving the final accolade which may be conferred by his peers, a festschrift. Wittenberg University is to be congratulated, and envied, for having on its faculty for so long a period such a fine example of homo sapiens academicus.