JAC Volume 12 Issue 2

I first met Don when I came to Kansas State University to interview for a position in composition/rhetoric. I don't remember when I was first introduced to him, the thin ascetic gentleman with the long face and the thinning red hair, but I do remember the first time I had to deal with him: it was during my presentation to the faculty. I had chosen to adapt a section of my dissertation on stylistic theory and the late writing of Henry James, hoping thereby to bridge the gap between comp/rhetoric and literature for a faculty which, I had been informed, contained a number of people who were suspicious of comp/rhetoric as a discipline.

The talk seemed to go well, even though I was very nervous: people laughed in the right places and nodded sympathetically in others, especially when I complained of the difficulties in dealing with James' late style. I remember how badly my hand shook when I took a drink from the glass of water I had been provided.

The questions afterward were friendly and not particularly pointed, so I had reason to relax. But then Don asked me what I thought of the maxim, "The style is the man." In the back of my mind, I knew that Don's text The Versatile Writer promoted the idea of writers' finding their own unique voice, and I knew that in situations like this—not just because I was supposed to be a rhetorician but because my career was on the line—I had to temper my views to suit my audience. I may have known all this, but I was two years out of graduate school, flush with the love of current theory, and my answer wasn't very temperate. I said rather emphatically that I thought we create different selves with each different style we use; certainly, I doubted whether there were any clear stylistic features that were constant in a writer's style across purpose, genre, and context. This is what I believed and still believe, but I said it brashly.

Don came up to me afterward and told me straightforwardly that he thought I was wrong. He said it matter-of-factly, without the slightest hint of combativeness or condescension: I was wrong. I remember that he gave me some sort of explanation, not a defense of his position or an argument against my position but an explanation. And I came to understand, after my initial stab of panic that I had blown my chances for employment, that he was articulating the differences in our views. Don did not agree with me—indeed he was adamant that writers did have unique voices—but he found it important to explain our differences, and in doing so he granted me a certain amount of respect.

That episode has come to represent for me what made Don Stewart the man he was. Don was frank to the point of bluntness, enjoyed immensely the give-and-take of argument, but was always fair and never held the mistaken ideas of his opponents against them.

Don had his blind spots. He was always suspicious of certain areas of composition research, including a number of the fields I studied: linguistics, learning theory, empirical research in pedagogy. When we both published articles in the same year critiquing certain aspects of collaborative learning, Don complimented me, as I complimented him, but he hinted to me that he just didn't understand why I had felt the need to deal with the empirical work on the subject: it wasn't worth the trouble.

When I became director of the Freshman Writing Program, Don showed little interest in or even patience with the problems of administering a writing program; he wished me good luck and gave me no advice. I understand that he had helped administer the writing program back in the 1970s and had not liked it much. Occasionally, when we met in the halls, he would, without any prompting, commiserate with me about what a thankless job administration was and note that someone had to do it.

Don was an excellent historian of rhetoric, arguably our best historian of late-nineteenth-century rhetoric and writing instruction. But he was not always a very practical rhetorician—that is, a person who could avail himself of the best possible means of persuasion. He believed overwhelmingly in the appeal of reason and was often disappointed when more emotional parochial concerns seemed to sway his audience against him. His long and detailed memos to the faculty arguing for an undergraduate course to introduce composition and rhetoric to English majors and to increase the number of graduate courses in our M.A. in Language, Composition, and Literature are legendary in the department, but they did not have much effect. Don argued that rhetoric was the great tradition in Western education, that writing is one of the major responsibilities of English departments, not just a "service course," that our undergraduate English majors are woefully unprepared to teach writing in the public schools or to go on as graduate teaching assistants when their primary responsibility would be to teach freshman composition.

I doubt if many of our faculty dispute such notions, although many do resist the idea that writing courses are not "service" to the university rather than part of the central mission of the English department. The truth of Don's propositions may not have been the issue. The issue may have been how to accommodate what many faculty perceive as the lesser mission to teach writing with the more exalted mission of teaching literature. These faculty members may not have needed arguments; they may have needed to be reassured that their own vision of mission was not under attack; they may have needed to feel some sense of accommodation with what they perceived as increased obligations to teach what they were not interested in and not trained for. Particularly in his argumentative memos, Don did not always sound reassuring and accommodating.

But in the end, perhaps, it is not our professional selves that matter. It is how we live and die. Aristotle believed that the end of human beings is happiness and that we achieve happiness through the exercise of virtue. Don Stewart was a virtuous man: he concentrated on the essentials of life: his family, his profession, his violin. He worked at being good—a good father and husband, a good teacher, a good scholar, a good musician. He had no time for the ephemeral, the trendy.

Don was diagnosed as having multiple myeloma the year after I was hired. And so he began a regimen of regular chemotherapy and blood transfusions. He missed class as little as he could, and almost every time I called him at home he was at the computer, working on his writing.

Gradually over the years the cancer began to wear away at him. He became thinner and even more gaunt. In the summers he had long worn a pith helmet to protect his head from the sun, but now his wearing the helmet was even more necessary, as his hair became even thinner. He began to hunch over and had to wear an elastic waist band to support himself. Later he used a three-pointed cane. In the end, his wife Pat was pushing him to class in a wheelchair, and, when Don couldn't make it to class personally, she delivered taped lectures that Don had prepared in the hospital.

Through it all he was as frank and garrulous as ever. Asked about his health, he would give an honest appraisal of his current state: "Oh, my platelet count was down last week, so I had a transfusion on Saturday," or "The latest tests weren't encouraging so I had some more chemotherapy on Tuesday. Knocked me out for three days, like it always does, but now I'm fine." But always he came back to issues: the state of the undergraduate course in comp/rhetoric in the Undergraduate Curriculum Committee, someone's article in CCC or JAC, the progress of his book on Fred Newton Scott.

In the month before he died, I called Don to talk about the candidates we were interviewing in comp/rhetoric. I asked him how he was holding up, and as always he gave me an honest assessment of his health. Then he went on. He said that he was not afraid of dying, that he had led a good life, with family he loved and a worthwhile profession he enjoyed. He was sorry that he might not finish the biography of Scott he had been working on for years, but that was the way life was: he did not expect to live forever. But he did say, straightforwardly, without any sense of self-pity, that he was afraid of the pain.

Don Stewart's legacy to composition/rhetoric is in his published writing, in his influence on the field. But beyond that, Don Stewart taught many of us how to live. He also taught many of us how to die.

Kansas State University
Manhattan, Kansas