December 7–14, 2000

book quarterly

Paper Trail

Don Foster, word detective: Foster on the job.

Words are like fingerprints to Don Foster, whose new book Author Unknown recounts his adventures in attributional research.

by Frank Lewis

Many things about the Unabomber were baffling, but none more so than his method of choosing his victims. Throughout the nearly 18-year investigation into the man who mailed cleverly packaged explosive devices, virtually devoid of physical evidence, to university professors and business executives, FBI agents were at a loss to explain why previous victims had been selected, or who might be next.

Today, with Ted Kaczynski behind bars, it’s largely academic. (Pardon the pun.) But Don Foster believes he’s sorted out at least some of the method behind Kaczynski’s madness. And if clues can be teased out of Kaczynski’s rants, couldn’t the same types of analysis be applied to any work in which authorship is in question? They can, and they are, with surprising success, according to Foster’s fascinating new book, Author Unknown: On The Trail of Anonymous (Henry Holt).

An English professor at Vassar College and part-time practitioner of what he calls attributional research, Foster is one of the few people to have read nearly everything ever written by Kaczynski, possibly the most verbose serial killer of all time. The 35,000-word "manifesto" published in the New York Times, Kaczynski’s hand-written 200-pagen autobiography, the rest of the 22,000-odd pages found in Kaczynski’s cabin in the Montana woods after his arrest— Foster’s read more of it than anyone, save perhaps a few FBI agents and attorneys. And though he never met the man who became famous for killing through the mail, Foster feels like he knows Kaczynski in some small, strange way.

Foster noticed, for example, that Kaczynski had a thing for wood. And playwright Eugene O’Neill. Oblique references to both show up repeatedly on the parcels he shipped to intended victims. And, most importantly, Kaczynski was fascinated by the story of the Titanic. The self-styled anti-technology anarchist — who in letters tried to make his attacks seem like the work of a sophisticated terrorist organization — apparently loved the symbolism of a marvel of engineering meeting its demise after an encounter with a simple and entirely predictable natural phenomenon. This fascination apparently led Kaczynski to his first target, an engineering professor at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute whose name grabbed Kaczynski’s interest as much as his line of work.

"In 1912, it was an unwary Edward John Smith, captain of the Titanic, who steered that floating exhibit of modern technology into an iceberg," Foster writes in Author Unknown. "A half-century later, RPI’s Edward John Smith was among the first to develop an orbital guidance system for large spacecraft. Those Eugene O’Neill postage stamps [affixed to the package Smith received] were a typically sinister [Kaczynski] joke, a literary allusion, a warning to all Edward John Smiths: The Iceman Cometh — to take you down, to sink your technological society."

Foster goes on to demonstrate that even without the tip from Kaczynski’s brother, whose wife had recognized Ted’s addled world view in the manifesto published in the New York Times, the FBI could still have been led to Kaczynski by observing the clues strewn throughout his voluminous writings — everything from the manifesto to the mailing labels. They might well have nabbed him in one of the university libraries where, Foster says, he searched for victims’ names and addresses.

As Foster writes in the prologue, "Whether for literary or criminal investigation, words are my stock-in-trade. A criminal offender hoping to avoid detection may change his appearance, his job, his place of residence. When questioned, he may change his story. Writers, too, may lie, denying their responsibility for a controversial or profitable or incriminating text. But none of us can easily change our basic vocabulary, our personal store of available words. Human beings, in that respect, are the prisoners of their own language. We write from within a repertoire in which certain thoughts and words and spellings are available to us while others are not."

A compelling read with a sly wit, Author Unknown recounts the most high-profile of the many who-wrote-its Foster has studied and, often, solved. In addition to aiding the prosecution’s case against Kaczynski, Foster brought to light a previously unknown work of Shakespeare’s; outed Joe Klein as the author of Primary Colors; gleaned more from the infamous "talking points" from the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal than Kenneth Starr ever did; laid to rest a bizarre rumor involving reclusive author Thomas Pynchon and a self-described "bag lady"; and set the record straight on the authorship of one of the best-known American poems, "’Twas the Night before Christmas."

Though writing primarily about his own successes in Author Unknown, Foster manages not to sound boastful or self-important. More important, he keeps the writing light, peppering it with clever word plays ("… the Unabom Task Force put ‘Wu’ and Wu together," referring to a mysterious note in a Unabomber package and a person named Wu in Ted Kaczynski’s past) and a fondness for the occasional vulgarity or double entendre: "…Monica [Lewinsky], voicing frustration with [President Clinton], repeatedly complains [in e-mails] of neglect in the two-word phrase ‘FUCK ME!!!!’ (A dramatic irony: Linda Tripp, who received these messages, did just that. [Clinton], never.)"

And though he denied it in an interview, Foster also seems to have used the book to exact some revenge from those who have attacked his work in the past. "I’d like to think I’m not like that," he says, without specifically denying — a distinction he should appreciate — that he loved making some former critics eat their words.

Foster didn’t set out to be a literary "sleuth," as he is sometimes described, to his chagrin, in the media. He came to attributional research quite by accident, while researching Shakespeare’s sonnets for his doctoral dissertation in 1983. In the course of studying the conventions of book dedications and prefaces of the time, he was struck by the Shakespearean feel of an unattributed early 17th-century poem, "A Funeral Elegy."

"What first startled me was the poet’s dedicatory epistle," Foster writes. "Signed ‘W.S.,’ the 135-word salutation is closely modeled, in structure, length and phrasing, on Shakespeare’s dedication letter in The Rape of Lucrece, modeled in turn on the one in Venus and Adonis. Having already looked at thousands of book dedications and prefatory epistles, I had not seen another so closely resembling Shakespeare’s."

Excited by the potentially career-making discovery, Foster shifted gears on his dissertation, and later published his meticulously researched findings through a university press. But coming in the wake of another, much-hyped Shakespeare attribution that quickly turned into a monumental embarrassment for its proponents, Foster’s book generated little interest ("[T]he whole planet had come to view ‘Shakespeare discoveries’ as a phenomenon not unlike Elvis sightings," he writes). That is, until 1996, when the New York Times came calling, and turned Foster’s find into a front-page story that, quite unexpectedly, made him the center of yet another raging Shakespeare controversy. Scholars and enthusiasts far and wide piled on, not bothering to disguise their contempt for Foster for believing that a poem so uninspired could be the work of the Bard of Avon.

"While the first parodies of ‘A Funeral Elegy’ appeared on the Internet, reporters from New York to Melbourne clamored for stories on the ‘new’ Shakespeare poem," he writes. "The circus parade had begun, not of my own making, but there was no stopping it."

The unwanted attention also prepared him for his next unsought assignment. In early 1996, identifying the mysterious author of Primary Colors, a thinly veiled fictionalization of Bill Clinton’s first presidential campaign, had become an obsession in Washington and in the national media. It had to be an insider, but who? Foster reluctantly agreed to help New York magazine trace the writer. After examining writing samples from "suspects," Foster eventually zeroed in on Newsweek columnist Joe Klein. The chapter on how he did it provides the best glimpse into Foster’s methods.

"Anonymous [as Primary Colors was credited], like any anonymous writer, revealed a good deal about his way of viewing the world, about himself, and about his purpose for writing," Foster writes. For example, after two readings he was convinced that the author had once greatly admired the Clintons, but became disillusioned; had "some issues about blacks and women"; and was plagued by sexual anxieties.

Later, he began to compare writing samples from some of the many suspects to the book. He was about to give up when Joe Klein’s work for Newsweek registered a hit. "Bingo!" Foster writes. "Anonymous’ vocabulary was all over Joe Klein’s journalism, and vice versa." Both showed repeated use of adjectives ending in -y (cartoony, dorky, sleazy) and -ish (hawkish, puckish, warmish). Both seemed to love colons and dashes and sentences beginning with "and then" or ending with "sort of." Both used the phrase "tarmac-hopping" to refer to the practice of holding campaign rallies at airports. Foster scoured databases and the Internet, but could not find the phrase used anywhere else.

Foster even speculated that the fictional black narrator’s opening sentence — "I am small and not so dark" — was a clever joke. Klein is German for small. Joe Klein is a fairly small guy, and, unlike the book’s protagonist, not black.

Half the chapter is devoted to Klein’s emphatic denials and the media circus that ensues, complete with a helicopter ride from Vassar’s campus for an interview with CBS News that goes badly for Foster. As he writes in the prologue, his work bears some similarities to dismantling bombs: "[I]f I should get it right, my reward is a sigh of relief. If I make a mistake, I’d better duck, fast."