ACCORDING TO a news report, the Unabomber has a 548-page book on the list of a small publisher, who's quoted as saying that parts of the book are "disarming, even funny."
"Disarming" may be an unfortunate choice of words, but I can testify that "funny" could be applicable. That's because I recently came to realize that I was the Unabomber's original editorial patron. It came as a shock to discover that his only non-polemical piece to see the light of day had appeared in the "Phoenix Nest," my humor column that ran in Saturday Review for a number of years.
I was made aware of this when we moved a short time ago, and I began to throw out a kitchen midden of memorabilia. Some items I felt I had to keep as collectibles, like my mother-in-law's recipe for hazelnut cookies and my father's draft notice for the army of Czar Nicholas II. Others I thought I could toss out en masse, like the paperwork for "Phoenix Nest."
This column was a miscellany of humor written by contributors who received an honorarium for their work. Which was responsible for the basketful of cancelled checks I was discarding without too much thought. Some checks were made out to the illustrious -- James Thurber, George S. Kaufman, Ogden Nash, Peter DeVries, and the like. Others were made out to writers yet uncelebrated. All had in common the gift of wit. Trust me.
By pure chance, I spotted one cancelled check made out to an author named Kaczynski. Kaczynski? Theodore J. Kaczynski. The Unabomber!
I hadn't kept the decades old Saturday Review issue, but the catacombs of Columbia's Butler Library turned up microfilm of a satire entitled "The Wave of the Future." In the future, speculates Kaczynski, cities will be covered by "vast domes" to control the climate. The only question is whether these domes should be opaque or transparent.
Kaczynski votes for transparent domes "so people can look at the sky" -- not the haphazard heavens we are familiar with, but a sky defined by "cloud control." On the premise that "it is not good for science to have no control over something," Kaczynski sees a future when the technologists will have control over everything, including the shape of cloud formations. "Clouds will be timed so accurately that you will be able to set your watch by them. . . . And if anybody doesn't like all this, the psychologists of the future will be able to fix him so he does like it."
It would be helpful to find a clue to criminality in the Unabomber's satire. Especially since David Gelernter, Kaczynski's most articulate casualty, is my favorite social critic. But with this piece as Exhibit A, I can find no more sociopathic symptoms than in Orwell or Swift. Maybe I'm a poor psychobiographer.
Kaczynski bristles at the management of society by technocrats. "The Wave of the Future" is a prophetic swipe at a nanny-state that has tried to monitor everything from ozone depletion to toilet flushing. Can't find fault with that. Somewhere along the way, however, it's obvious that Kaczynski plunged disastrously off the rails.
My conclusion is inconclusive. A writer's bad vibrations (like those of Ezra Pound) are sometimes packaged with the product. But criminal tendencies don't always surface in an author's work. O. Henry's short stories don't dwell on his jail time for embezzlement, you can't tell from the historical novels of Anne Perry that she was an accomplice to a murder, and, yes -- the Unabomber could write funny. Go figure.
Martin Levin is a writer in New York.