At the center of Widener Library there is a room that is always quiet. Heavy bound books, encased behind glass doors, sit dusted but unread. Lamps illuminate each of the study areas along the two polished tables, yet the chairs remain empty. In the corner of the room, an elderly man eyes visitors from behind a massive desk and then returns to copying numbers in a ledger.

Neither the son from the Class of '06 who drowned on the Titanic nor his mother who donated the Harry Elkins Widener Memorial Library in his name would dare venture now beyond the confines of Harry's Memorial Room. The sheer chaos of life, of Harvard graduates--once the only students allowed to use the huge facility--having to share carrols or "stalls" as they are affectionately called, with undergraduates and visiting scholars, would have been too difficult for the Wideners to handle.

However, graduate scholars still predominate among those who frequently haunt the library's corridors. Grad students such as Richard K. Garner, who will receive his masters in Soviet linguistics this month, wouldn't have deceived Mrs. Widener into believing that order in her library still reigned. He's one of hundreds of students who can be seen scurrying around from the catalogues to the stacks throughout the summer. You most likely can spot Garner near shelves filled with Slavic literature. Garner says that he has always been "fascinated by linguistics and loved Russian literature" as an undergraduate at Princeton and so he decided last year to continue his studies in Slavic. Because he really wants to teach, Garner tries not to worry about the academic job market. Besides, he says, "I want the education no matter what."

In the past few months, however, Garner began to have doubts. "I specialized too quickly," he said the other day. "I don't feel equipped to really compare things although I am equipped to analyze them. I should have gotten a broader education." Garner feels "boxed in" and he blames his claustrophobic feeling on the professionalism which he believes Harvard encourages. So Garner will transfer to the University of Chicago next year where he hopes to write a dissertation for the Committee on Social Thought. "It's kind of intellectual history, only broader," he said, pleased with the vagueness.

Somehow what's wrong with Harvard's graduate education is conveyed in the bodiless atmosphere of the Widener stacks, Garner suggested. "The thing you're here for is largely the library. The big privilege is to have a book shelf on your stall. You commune more with books than with people. Garner, who is a native of Oklahoma and speaks with the slightest trace of a southern accent, laughed. "But at least I got to see the spring through my Widener window, even if I wasn't a part of it," he said.

At first glance, the propriety governing Charles Montalbano's operation of the stacks also would have met Mrs. Widener's approval. "The beauty of working in Widener and being assigned to a stall is that you can charge books to it and leave them there without having to run and retrieve them," Montalbano, the curator of the Widener and Pusey stacks, said the other afternoon. Last year Montalbano assigned stalls to each of the 640 Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (GSAS) students, 208 non-GSAS Harvard grad students, 137 visiting scholars, and four undergraduates who requested places. "And there hasn't been a crowding problem since I came in 1968," Montalbano said. Although his system gives priority to GSAS students writing theses, Montalbano said that he has at times bent the rules in order "to make people happy." "Policies are man-made and we're here for service." Even so, Mrs. Widener would have been shocked to see a grad student writing a novel or an assistant professor concluding a study of intimacy in her stacks.

"A scholar!" Carl M. Asakawa exclaimed a few weeks ago as he poured himself a drink. Asakawa was explaining that although he had been aided by Edwin O. Reischauer, University Professor, and Ross Terrill, associate professor of Government, in his efforts to gain access to the stacks, he has spent his time there doing research for his future novel about the experience of Japanese-Americans during World War II. Unlike Garner, what bothers Asakawa about Widener is not the atmosphere but the price paid by a visiting scholar to rent a stall. "There were good books on what happened during General MacArthur's administration in Japan, but it cost me about $165 for three months, so I xeroxed a lot of things and left," he said.

In the first ten chapters of his novel, already written, Asakawa begins to trace the histories of a Japanese-American family in an urban setting "who tried to escape being Japanese" and a family of farmers who remained tied to the land and tried to perpetuate ancient Japanese traditions. Asakawa said he will show that when the war started both families had "the same intention of sending money home."

It is Asakawa's first novel and he says "what stays and what changes and what brought about that change" is a concern emerging from his own experience as a member of an isolated Japanese-American family in Yellow Springs, Ohio. "It was a very intellectual, predominently Jewish community and if you didn't know how to talk, you were pretty much caught dead," Asakawa said. Consequently, his parents, aware of their American "cultural lackings" and eager to assimilate, encouraged their children to perform un-Japanese customs such as holding conversations at the dinner table.

Both his parents are now apologetic about depriving him of his Japanese cultural background, Asakawa said, and his father, a businessman, encouraged a group of his Japanese-American friends to support his son while he writes. "There's an active interest among Asian-Americans to see something written," Asakawa said. "Tradition keeps your identity in a lot of ways. And in recent years it has become popular to encourage separate communities of ethnics to develop." But, he added, "a novel doesn't work just because you are an ethnic, unfortunately."

Because he is impatient and not sure how much longer he can keep the maps of turn-of-the-century San Francisco and Seattle inside his head, Asakawa wants to finish his novel soon. He said he is anxious to write about Brazil, where more Japanese are settled than anywhere else outside of Japan and where many old values are maintained. But after finishing his novel he says he will probably take a routine job for a while for the sake of his "sanity."

Dr. Elizabeth W. Mark '52 waited 27 years to enter Widener's halls. But when she rented a stall last year to write her dissertation for Boston University on sex differences and the need for intimacy, she found the library somewhat disappointing. "Working in Widener is a very lonely endeavor," Mark said last week. "And eating in the Faculty Club, which was convenient, was even worse since I often had to eat by myself." Although she was strongly motivated to do a doctorate both to extend "the depths" of her knowledge and for her resume, Mark found it difficult to shut out life inside the library and write every day.

Mark says that her work as leader of the women's groups at the Radcliffe Institute, as a family counselor for the United Way Agency, and as a practicing psychologist inspired her to work on her thesis. And she says the results, based on projective techniques, have helped her to understand men. "In middle class marriages, men and women become best friends. But men don't have the experience with intimate disclosure that women have," Mark, who was herself married while in college, said, "'What does she want me to talk about?' the husband asks. And she says, 'Why can't he say what he means?'"

Some material for another Widener-based thesis was gathered first-hand. The hierarchy of the Sufi movement, a mystical Muslim sect based in Mauritania and Senegal, has shifted from white to black domination of the past 40 years as the religion continues to spread to central Africa. David Sharry, a sixth year graduate student in near Eastern Studies and Anthropology, thinks he understands why. But, he says, "it's not the kind of thesis where I'm constantly looking for books--there isn't very much written on the subject." Instead, Sharry has culled his data from a series of visits he made to the continent, beginning with his 1974 stay with the Mauritanian Moorish ("Mauritanian means 'white Moor'") family. His hosts introduced the brotherhood into the Sahara and have been instrumental in its spread across black Africa.

"People were much more cooperative in Senegal than in Mauritania where the first question asked was 'Are you a spy?'", Sharry said, the Moors, Sharry concluded, were baffled by his questions because he showed no "commitment" to Islam. Regional politics has played a tacit role in Sharry's thesis because the Spanish government refused to grant him permission to do social research in the disputed Spanish Sahara. Anyway, Sharry said he doesn't believe "the members of this movement are very strong in Spanish Sahara."