Don Foster - Author Unknown. On the Trail of Anonymous

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Contents

CHAPTER ONE
Looking into Shakespeare

CHAPTER TWO
No, Really, He Is Anonymous

CHAPTER THREE
A Professors Whodunit

CHAPTER FOUR
Starr-Crossed Lovers

CHAPTER FIVE
Wanda, the Fort Bragg Bag Lady

CHAPTER SIX
Yes, Virginia, There Was a Santa Claus

For my father, David C. Foster

Prologue: On the Trail

JUST LEARNING

O this learning, what a thing it is!

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, THE TAMING OF THE SHREW 1.2.159

My office is what you would imagine an English professors office to be, piled high with student papers, and with writings I have studied by poets and playwrights, some still unknown. But intermixed with the literary texts are others by felons, zealots, or nameless resentniks whose identity or actions were of sufficient interest to the press, police, attorneys, or my fellow academics for someone to ask, Who wrote this thing? Two locked file cabinets, four drawers deep, are crammed with literary hoaxes, Internet libels, corporate shenanigans, terrorist threats, bogus wills, extortion letters, and anonymous harassmentsand thats just the stuff I have had to save.

Some of the texts are well known: Primary Colors, the Unabom manifesto and Kaczynski papers, the Lewinsky-Tripp Talking Points, the Atlanta-Birmingham Army of God letters, the JonBent Ramsey ransom note. Somewhere under all of that is my own work of comparing and analyzing great literature, of teasing out the identifiers that let us know with confidence that a found composition is, indeed, say, a lost Beethoven or, in my case, a lost work of Shakespeare.

The story I have to tell is least of all my own. It is the fulfillment of what most of us would recognize, at first, as clichs. But those clichs have turned out, to my surprise, to be powerful and prophetic, which may account for their endurance: They can run but not hide. The devil is in the details. We reveal ourselves most when we try to disguise ourselves. We make our destiny. Murder will out. It is the story of how my work in dusty libraries and forgotten stacks of manuscripts drew me into headline battles I might have done well to avoidbut I have had, at least, the consolation of a front-row seat. It is not about me, but of all the mysteries we will explore, the most preposterous is how I ever came to be involved in the often grim work of police detectives, the FBI, federal prosecutors, and public defenders. If the story I have to tell were fiction, where the truth does not greatly matter and where the blood is not real, the incongruity would be comical: What is this Shakespeare scholar doing at a desk in a police situation room or at a podium at the FBI Academy?

It is a story of how the study of the textual nuances of Shakespearean language propelled me onto the stage of public dramas, some tawdry, others ghastly and brutal. Events of the past few years have called me away from the eloquent lands of Dunsinane and Elsinore, where there prevails a sort of poetic quasi-justice, to investigate texts of terrorism, political intrigue, and murder, and anonymous writings having no other purpose than to obstruct justiceand back again, safely, to the two-dimensional world of literary study. It has been said that Shakespeare soars on poetry and litters the stage with carnage. But this carnagestabbings, bombings, slander, murderwas real.

WHAT AM I DOING HERE?

Raised on the Good Book, I discovered the Great Books while wandering the globe as a young adult. They came alive to me not in the classroom but in the world itself, where they were written. When my wife, Gwen, and I returned to California in 1977, Gwen enrolled at UC Santa Cruz while I took a teaching post that required no credential and paid $400 a month. It was where I learned about writing, though I was supposed to be teaching it. As director of the Soquel High School Writing Center, I trained the best students (volunteers who received academic credit) to assist the less capable. To visit the Center for help, students had to request a pass from their English teacher. Some came to better their writing skills, others to get out of English class. I did not really know each student by personality, but came to recognize them by their writing, in their problems, or in their brilliance: Briansmart but cant spell. Ellenbound to use passive voice. Justinpronoun reference, parallel construction. Some, like Shakespeares comic constables, Elbow and Dogberry, made fritters of the English tongue, though native-born. I remember one sophomore who could think of nowhere to go with his book report after his first sentence, which nonetheless sang and resonated with echoes of the ancient Anglo-Saxon: This book is fuct.

One must eat. I enrolled in San Jose State University for the simple purpose of getting a teaching certificate. Looking through the 1978 catalogs fall offerings, my eye was caught by a graduate course in Shakespeare taught by Professor Scott Hymas. He was a genial, pipe-smoking scholar of the old school, who neither published nor perished but was a damned good teacher, a master, one of the best Ive known. Since returning to the States I had spent my days with the expository prose of earnest, hardworking adolescents. My evenings and weekends were now spent with Shakespeare, who gave me back not just the Globe, but the world, in majestic verse and iambic pentameter. I put the real world on a back burner and forgot about it.

KNOCK, KNOCK

I was not looking for Shakespeare in 1984 when I found A Funeral Elegy by W.S., nor even looking for a good murder mysterythe poem is about a 1612 homicide victimnor did I immediately recognize the verse as creditable to the greatest writer in the history of the English language. Twelve years later, having connected W.S. with Shakespeare, I found myself on the front page of the New York Times, and hooked by my pants suspenders to a fast-moving train. I had to run fast to keep up. The arcane world of dusty archival libraries suddenly melted into a blur of political intrigue and criminal mayhem. This was not entirely un-Shakespearean in itself, but I was unprepared for the transition from academic discussions of fictional violence and cupidity to being a principal in cases involving corporate fraud or political scandal or homicidal violence.

The methodology I had used to ascertain the provenance of the Funeral Elegywhich is academic for Why I Pinned It on Shakespearewas immediately understood by prosecutors and other probers to be a useful tool for unmasking the identities and hidden hands behind terrorist tracts, blackmail letters, and the like. The scientific analysis of a texthow mind and a hand conspire to commit acts of writingcan reveal features as sharp and telling as anything this side of fingerprints and DNA. Although we disguise our writing voice, it can never be fully masked. After the crime, the words remain. Like fingerprints and DNA.

I should add that another clich soon to be proved to me was No good deed goes unpunished. Early in 1996 when I analyzed the text and concluded that reporter Joe Klein was the Anonymous author of Primary Colors, his colleagues forgave him for lying to their faces faster than he has me for telling the truth in New York magazine. But on the basis of that highly visible display of what was an arcane scholarly method, I have for the past several years been called into service, by press or police, as a gumshoe.