Denizens of Widener

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."

In contrast, the thesis of Jose Barba-Martin, a second year graduate student of Spanish-American literature, is far more traditional and almost seems removed from life. But over the phone with the sound of a baby crying in the background, Barba-Martin said last month he has chosen to put his savings into "my time to get a Ph.D." For him, writing a thesis is "not only a matter of planning but also of other human needs. It's a matter of time and a matter of discipline and you have to plan for more time than you think you will need." Sometimes he is able to "close himself off in a room" but more often he chooses to work in Widener in order to have the "continuity" and the "sequence" which he feels are important for any writer.

Barba-Martin described his thesis on Domingo F. Sarmiento, the 19th century Argentinian president, diplomat, and writer as "not a very erudite, but a necessary work." Sarmiento, a man who wrote so much that "he didn't have time to number the pages," published two different versions of his biography of his illegitimate son. The earlier edition, Barba-Martin said, deals mostly with the child's personality. The second edition, cast against a chaotic background of Sarmiento's own public life, serves as a vehicle for the statesman's ideas about education that were influenced by the American Horace Mann. Barba-Martin said his study of the two texts is quite "technical," yet when he speaks of Sarmiento he describes not the style of an author but "basically a man of essential ideas and will." One of the things that most appeals to Barba-Martin about Sarmiento is the president's own identification with "men who were doers." "He lived the idea of the Romantic man as a fact," Barba-Martin said.

His own "more or less conservative" education while a child in Mexico and then as a more advanced student of the classics in Spain and Italy, taught Barba-Martin to "enjoy literature as fiction and also as thought." He said he has "definitely found much greater ability" here among the students in his section of Hum 55 than he did at either Tufts or the University of Massachusetts. And Barba-Martin feels he must work harder, especially on the "style of the prepared lecture," before he is ready to teach. Like his thesis, Barba-Martin predicts that his teaching will be a "modest but necessary contribution."

Then there are those scholars who not only bring their lives to Widener but, in fact, find it difficult to separate the two. Whether or not he "tries to become an American" next year, Fawzi Abdulrazak, a native of Iraq, will continue to work in the library. He must because Widener, where he edits the annual bibliography of Arabic historical writings, is what he calls "my country." Neither his classes at B.U. where he is working towards a masters in African history, nor his work as an Arabic specialist at the near Eastern Studies Center, serves as such faithful reminders.

The problem in America, Fawzi, as he prefers to be called, said at lunch in the Widener staff room last month, is that everyone tries to assimilate. "The minute you get to this country you are busy. The minute you get up you go to work then you go home, eat, watch the news, and go to sleep. There is no time for your own private studies. Life goes on. You see nothing." Still, Fawzi expressed no regrets about leaving Iraq "not really for political reasons," but in order to marry his American wite whom he met while they were both working in Algeria. Fawzi said that his decision to leave the land, which his family has farmed for centuries, was not one that many Iraquis would make. Most Iraqui emigrants go to England, he said. He has considered asking his parents to join him here, but it would be difficult for them to leave Iraq because "in our country the establishment is very important and you take a great risk to be a stranger."

Fawzi's fear that loss of tradition can result in a decline in the quality of life, reminiscent of Carl Asakawa's theme, is a favorite topic of another Widener scholar and one of Fawzi's friends who joined him for lunch that day. This retired rabbi and teacher, who asked that his name be withheld, has camped in a Widener stall since 1958 investigating the relationship between customs and daily life for the Jews of the late Middle Ages. His scholarly interests, the rabbi said, lie in examining customs as a basis for case study and in putting customs in a typological framework.

As he drank a cup of strong tea, the rabbi explained that the association of tradition and scholarly pursuits has been an integral part of his life since his Midwestern boyhood. There his father, an East European immigrant, educated himself each night with Bancroft's History of the World while fostering in the boy a "love of learning" of the past and of tradition. The rabbi suggested that his early congregation was an expression of that love but he found that, during the McCarthy era, he would have more freedom working with college students. Consequently he served as rabbi of two college Hillels during the fifties while working for his doctorate at Columbia. Now in Widener, with one book published and future writings on the way, the rabbi said he has made a "second home" in the library. "No doubt coming here helps me to preserve the ideals or the framework for the ideals I had as a child."

Endurance in the face of odds marks the story of the Jews in early modern Europe, the rabbi said. It is a similar endurance and a willingness to always begin again which makes him admire one of his friends, another Widener scholar who sat sipping coffee at the same lunch table. The woman, who also asked that her name be withheld, has been a Ph.D. mathematician and physicist in her native Austria, an antiquarian and linguist after an attack of polio, the coordinator of an African education project, the author of an article on the artist Oskar Kokoschka, and is currently a student of plants. She explained her activities without the rabbi's serious tone in what she called a characteristic "lighter vein."

"I'm an Aries and Aries people never stick to a subject," she said. "Yesterday I did physics, today botany, tomorrow who knows what?"

The woman said, "One has to study and study and study and then still something is left if you've studied enough." Still, her daily translation of missionaries' writings describing narcotic plants of the new world which, she said, she types out "with one finger," seems to have been inspired by a personal rather than a scholarly interest. Both her father and her sister whom she joins every summer in Switzerland, are "real botanists" and the woman tends 39 plants in her apartment. She claims that she knows more about plants than any graduate student and in fact seems faintly suspicious of the grad breed since she reported that a divinity student whom she once knew asked her to write his thesis for him on the uses of episcopalian priests' habits. Yet the child of Aries also insisted that it is the graduate students and not she about whom The Crimson should be writing because graduate students write their own books while she is "only translating." Her one principle in life, she said is "not to be conspicuous."

Blair Axel '76, one of the youngest stall-dwellers, envisions Widener as both the scholar's idea of a home and Mrs. Widener's idea of a temple of knowledge. "It's really Siberia down there," Axel said last week. He estimated that he spent 10-12 hours a day inside a C-level stall while working on his thesis which deals with the founding of The Nation, an intellectual journal of the post-Civil War period. "The walls are bedrock. I sat there shivering and turning pages. The only problem was falling asleep." He laughed, "I haven't been able to work so well since I had that one bare bulb over my desk in Greenough freshman year."

One night when he was pulling what he likes to refer to as "cold turkey" in Widener, Axel "overstudied" and, failing to hear the announcements of closing time, got locked inside the building. By the time Axel reached the fourth-floor checkout desk the library was completely dark and quiet; he could hear his heels clicking against the cold floor. Axel said he was scared but couldn't bring himself to call for help. "It was 21 years of conditioning versus my fears for survival." The fears won. An elderly janitor found Axel and let him out. Now the student still describes Widener as a "palace," but one that is filled with recognizable people.

Axel concluded that Widener is a "world in itself. The reading room is the living room. The catalogue room is the kitchen or pantry. The stacks are where you know you go to work." A vision of life. But it is in a certain sense a vision of order. Maybe Mrs. Widener would have approved after all.