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Other Boys are ‘lost’ –
Had but the Tale a warbling Teller –
All the Boys would come –
Orpheu’s Sermon captivated –
It did not condemn.
The possibility that it had been sent to a child added to the poem’s charm. The image many people had of Dickinson was of a lonely, rather severe New England spinster who spent her life immured in the Homestead, under self-elected house arrest; the quintessential artistic genius, driven by her inner demons. It was how the public liked its artists. The poem showed another side to her that Lombardo felt was more truthful. Instead of the Isolata of legend, she appears as a witty, affectionate aunt sending a few quickly scribbled lines of verse across the hedge to her adored nephew.
Lombardo was particularly excited by the new poem because, although the Jones Library had a fine selection of manuscripts by another former resident of Amherst, Robert Frost, including the original of ‘Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,’ it had only a few manuscripts by the town’s most famous daughter. Almost all of Emily Dickinson’s letters and poems are at two far wealthier institutions: Amherst College, and the Houghton Library at Harvard University. Since becoming curator of Special Collections in 1982, Lombardo had devoted himself to building up the Jones Library’s collection of her manuscripts. The chance to buy a poem that the world had never seen was a unique opportunity.
After looking at the handwriting Lombardo did a cursory check of the paper. For this he consulted the classic two-volume work The Manuscript Books of Emily Dickinson, by Ralph Franklin, a Yale University scholar widely regarded as the world’s foremost expert on Dickinson’s manuscripts. The poem in the Sotheby’s catalog was written on Congress paper, which was manufactured in Boston. It was lined in blue and had an image of the Capitol embossed in the upper left-hand corner. According to Franklin’s book Dickinson had used Congress paper at two different periods in her life: once in 1871, and again in 1874. The poem in the Sotheby’s catalog was dated 1871. Lombardo told himself that it was absurd to think of buying the poem. The Sotheby’s estimate for the poem was $10,000–$ 15,000. But Lombardo was sure this would climb to as much as $20,000. The Jones Library had only $5,000. But in the days that followed, he became more and more excited at the prospect of acquiring the poem. He felt strongly that Dickinson’s works belonged in the town where she had created them. As William and Dorothy Wordsworth are to Grasmere, in England, or Petrarch is to Vaucluse, in France, Emily Dickinson is to Amherst: an object of pride and an industry. Each year thousands of Dickinson’s fans, from as far away as Japan and Chile, make the pilgrimage to the Homestead. Cafés offer tins of gingerbread baked to her original recipe. Scholars fill the town’s bed-and-breakfasts and patronize its restaurants. The poet’s grave is always decked with flowers.
Some years earlier Lombardo had had the idea of throwing a birthday party for Dickinson. On December 10 children from the town and surrounding area were invited to the Jones Library to wish the poet many happy returns and play games like ‘Teapot’ and ‘Thus Says the Mufti,’ which Dickinson herself played as a child. Dressed in period clothes – a top hat, burgundy-colored waistcoat, and leather riding boots – Lombardo would tell the children about the poet’s life, and how it connected to the town.
Lombardo did not have children himself, so he always enjoyed the occasion. At the end of the party one of the other librarians would appear from behind a curtain, dressed in a long white pinafore dress, black stockings, and black shoes. Of course, the older children knew it was just the librarian, dressed up in funny clothes. But he could tell by the light shining in the eyes of some of the younger children that they really believed it was Emily Dickinson herself. That’s what Dan liked to think, anyway.
He had acquired several Dickinson poems before, but they were not new poems, like this one. To acquire it would be the crowning event of his career. The fact that the Jones Library was a public library, not a university, where ordinary people could go in and see the poem, made him even more determined. By chance the annual meeting of the Emily Dickinson International Society was scheduled to take place at the Jones Library, and Lombardo decided to use the occasion to launch an appeal. The meeting took place in the large meeting room, a beautiful wood-floored reception room with a fireplace at one end of it. People had come from all over the United States. After a lunch of sandwiches and potato chips Lombardo gave a brief presentation on the poem and outlined what a marvelous opportunity this was for the library. As soon as he had finished his speech, a Dickinson scholar from Case Western Reserve University stood up and pledged $1,000. Others excitedly followed. A retired doctor who had traveled down from Kankakee, Illinois, to attend the meeting pledged $1,000. It was like a spark going around the room. Graduate students who could barely afford to pay their rent offered $100. By the end of the meeting Lombardo had pledges for $8,000. With the Jones Library’s $5,000 he now had $13,000.
Some of the scholars at the meeting privately doubted the quality of the poem. It seemed too trite, too simplistic, even for a first draft. But no one voiced their reservations. Everyone was swept along on a wave of euphoria. ‘We are all starting on a great adventure together,’ Lombardo thought.
He had no doubts about the poem’s authenticity. After all, it was being auctioned by the illustrious house of Sotheby’s, from whom he had bought several other manuscripts for the Jones Library. Over the weekend, however, he did one more thing to authenticate the poem: he called Ralph Franklin at Yale University’s Beinecke Library. Franklin is the world’s leading expert on Dickinson’s ‘fascicles,’ the improvised books she made by sewing together bundles of poems. Franklin’s Manuscript Books of Emily Dickinson is the definitive word on the subject. After her death Emily Dickinson’s fascicles were unbound and the poems pasted into scrapbooks, and Franklin spent years laboriously reconstructing the original order of the poems. Franklin told Lombardo that he had been aware of the poem since 1994, and that he was planning to include it in the new edition of his book, due to be published in late 1997. For Lombardo it was a gold seal of approval and he spent the rest of the weekend on the phone, trying to raise more money. News of the poem had gone out on the Internet, and pledges poured in. It helped that the stock market was in the longest bull run in its history. Several donors gave dividends from their investments.
By Sunday night Lombardo had raised $17,000. A meeting of the Friends of the Jones Library, a local support group, the day before the auction, brought even more money. One donor, a retired physicist from Alexandria, Virginia, called to say he wanted to double his donation. By Monday evening – the auction was the next day – Lombardo had $24,000. Less the commission that Sotheby’s would take, this meant that Lombardo had $21,000 to bid. For the first time, as he went to bed that night, he felt he had a real chance of being able to buy the poem.
It was a hot summer night. There was no moon and barely a breeze. Outside in the garden a raccoon scratched at a trash can. Next to him his wife lay on her side, breathing quietly. Lombardo closed his eyes and tried to sleep. But he could not stop thinking about the auction. He was a small-town librarian up against some of the wealthiest academic institutions and collectors in the world. Everyone in Amherst would be watching him. He could one day leave his work behind and feel that he had made a real contribution to his community. At the same time he was gnawed by a feeling of insecurity that he might let everyone down.
For most of his life Lombardo had felt like an outsider. As a young man he used to say to his friends that all he really wanted to do was have time to read and hike. He wasn’t completely serious. There were plenty of other things he liked doing, but there was some truth in his claim. Books were his passports to the world, a place where his imagination could roam free. Hiking was his way of staying connected to the earth. Walking along a back-country path, surrounded by trees, and water, and light, and animals, he felt both humbled and enlarged. Humbled, because in comparison with the vastness of the universe he felt like the tiniest atom. Enlarged, because he knew he was part of the great continuum of life. His hero in high school had been Henry David Thoreau. Lombardo must have read Walden Pond fifteen times. If he went hiking, he usually took his well-worn copy with him. It was more than a book. It was a guide to life, and he dreamed of living the spare, simple existence that Thoreau had lived.
As he lay in bed, worrying about what the next day would bring, he remembered an incident from his boyhood in Wethersfield, Connecticut. Lombardo had grown up in an Italian-American family. His father, Jimmy, who had come to America from Sicily as a child, had been the town barber. Everyone knew and liked Jimmy. He was the sort of warm, happy-go-lucky man that everyone would stop and greet as he walked down the street.
Lombardo adored his father. On summer evenings he would sit on the back stoop listening to him playing the mandolin, singing the Sicilian love songs with which he had courted his mother on the other side of the world. When, at the age of five, he heard that his father had been elected president of the local barber’s union, Dan assumed that he had been elected president of the United States.
There was, however, another side to his father that Dan came to know about only later: a dark, fatalistic side that he had carried with him to the New World from his native Sicily; a feeling that, however good life might seem at the moment, the drought would come, you would lose the farm and spend the rest of your life eating beans. He suffered from depression, and could not wait for the summer to come each year so he could return to Sicily and play his mandolin under the stars, in cafés that looked over the Mediterranean. One year, Jimmy came home from Sicily and suffered a breakdown and was diagnosed with bipolar disorder.
The discovery of his father’s breakdown traumatized Lombardo. If he had been so wrong about his father, how could he be sure that anything was what it appeared to be? This sense of dissonance between his own perceptions of the world and how things really were, the feeling that he was never quite sure what was real and what was not, undermined his ability to direct and manage his life.
Like most nonconformists in the sixties, Lombardo grew his hair long and rebelled. He learned to play the drums. At the University of Connecticut he immersed himself in the works of Thoreau and his contemporaries, like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Emily Dickinson. Dickinson’s withdrawal from the world of getting and spending had chimed with the zeitgeist of the sixties and with Lombardo’s own search for meaning in his life. He tried teaching, but the rigidities of the school system alienated him. After a brief time spent in Puerto Rico, and a stint on a commune in Massachusetts, he found the life he had been looking for at the Jones Library.
At the time of his arrival, in 1982, the Jones Library’s rich collection of literary and historical manuscripts was languishing in obscurity, the victim of budget constraints. The books, photographs, and manuscripts were poorly cataloged, and dispersed over nine rooms on two floors. Lombardo lobbied long and hard for funding. Working with an architect, he then oversaw the restoration of the second floor of the library where the Special Collections were housed. Lombardo wanted to make the people of Amherst feel that the Special Collections department was not just for scholars and academics but belonged to everyone. He helped design a large exhibition space and a reading room with armchairs and Persian rugs on the floor. Using old photographs and other archive material, as well as their manuscripts, he organized permanent exhibitions on both Emily Dickinson and Robert Frost, which became destinations for travelers and school groups, as well as scholars.
He wanted people to experience these writers not as the remote historical figures of academic study but as flesh-and-blood people who had lived and worked in the town, just like them. He began to write a weekly column in the Amherst Bulletin about every aspect of the history of the town. It was not the usual quaint version of local history. Lombardo was interested in the nitty-gritty of life, not the poetic illusion. He described the lives of prostitutes and the abuse of opium. He wrote about the entertainers who had passed through the town and the conditions in the surrounding factories. Readers loved these stories and clipped them from the paper. When Garrison Keillor came to Amherst to broadcast Tales of Lake Wobegone, he wove several of Dan’s stories into his monologues.
Meanwhile, Dan went on improving the Special Collections department. He oversaw the installation of state-of-the-art climate-control systems; equipped a paper conservation studio; and ushered in the digital age by computerizing the cataloging and indexing of the library’s manuscripts. He doubled the size of the historic photograph collection, broadening its scope to include rare photos of African Americans at end of the nineteenth century, as well as photos from across the country and from Europe. Lombardo always felt that culture should not be the preserve of dead white people of European origin. He arranged for the donation of the Julius Lester Collection, the archives of a prominent African American writer and activist with close connections to Amherst. And he augmented the Frost and Dickinson collections with manuscripts he acquired at auction and through rare book and manuscript dealers. With each successfully completed project his self-confidence grew. The more he learned, the surer he felt of the decisions he made. The more others trusted and believed in him, the more he trusted and believed in himself.
He could not go to the auction personally – he was leaving on a long-planned trip to Italy the next day – so he had arranged to bid by phone. The poem was Lot 74. Sotheby’s had advised him that bidding would begin at 2:30 P.M. and had arranged to call him two lots before. At 2:00 P.M. Lombardo installed himself in the director’s office in the basement of the Jones Library. All calls come in there, and Lombardo wanted to be sure that he had an open line. On the desk in front of him he had a sheet of figures that told him at each point of the bidding what Sotheby’s 12.5 percent commission would add on.
Lombardo disliked telephone bidding. Things move so fast, and there are no visual cues as to how many people are bidding or who they are. But he had bid at auctions before, both by phone and in person, and been successful. Working as a drummer on studio sessions had also taught him about pressure. One mistake, a mishit cymbal or a slip of the foot, can ruin a take. As the minutes ticked toward 2:30 P.M., his heart began to beat faster. Finally the phone rang. A woman speaking in a low voice told him that the auction had reached Lot 69. In the background he could hear the voice of the auctioneer on Madison Avenue. He imagined the limousines lined up along the curb outside and the liveried doormen ushering in the rich and powerful collectors who lived on Central Park and spent more on travel than he earned in a year.
Bidding at a Sotheby’s auction was like playing in a high-stakes poker game. There was the same adrenaline rush and the same feeling of euphoria when your bid was accepted. Every time Lombardo had been involved in an auction and been successful, he had felt an enormous high. His bidding strategy was never to be in on the early stages so as not to heat up the auction.
There was a write-in bid for $8,000, and the bidding on the poem started there, jumping in increments of $500 in seconds. The young woman at the end of the line kept asking, ‘Do you want to bid? Do you want to bid?’ But Lombardo held back and grew more and more anxious. If this did not stop soon, he thought, it would spiral beyond his budget of $20,000. But at $15,000 the pace of the bidding slowed. And at $17,000 Lombardo jumped in. In poker you say, ‘Hit me.’ At Sotheby’s the word is ‘Bid.’ Lombardo’s first bid was immediately countered by one for $18,000. Lombardo bid again. One more bid and he would have to get out. His invisible opponent bid $20,000. Lombardo bid $21,000. It was his last bid, and he felt sure that whoever he was bidding against would keep going. But at $21,000 the hammer came down. Lot 74 was coming home to Amherst.
‘I went out and told everyone who was waiting outside the door,’ he recalled, ‘“We got it!” And they all started hugging me and crowding around. People were so excited. They all felt a sense of personal involvement. It was a privilege to be part of this. I was being flooded with congratulations and warmth. It was as though the sky had opened up, a lightning bolt had come down, and God said, “This is your moment.”’
Helped by a group of volunteers, he spent the rest of the afternoon calling members of the Emily Dickinson International Society. Twenty-four hours later he boarded a plane to Italy. The trip with his family – to Rome, the Adriatic, and the medieval hill towns of Umbria – was an important family occasion. His aging mother would probably be seeing the relatives she had grown up with for the last time. As the plane sped toward Italy, he felt, literally, on top of the world.
On his arrival back in Amherst, the first thing Lombardo did was to go through all the articles that had been written about the poem. People in Amherst had already started to come into the library to see it, even though red tape at Sotheby’s meant that it would take several more weeks to arrive. In the meantime Lombardo began to organize an exhibition for the end of July, with the theme of how to date a poem. He would draw attention to similarities in the handwriting with two other Dickinson manuscripts the library owned. So, he wrote a brief essay about the paper and the boss mark. And, again, he consulted with Ralph Franklin at the Beinecke Library.
According to Franklin the handwriting exactly matched the date given by Sotheby’s, 1871. Lombardo was particularly curious to know who had written the words ‘Aunt Emily’ on the back of the poem. They were in a different hand. Unlike the poem, which was written in ordinary black lead, the words ‘Aunt Emily’ were in what appeared to be red pencil. Lombardo’s first supposition was that they had been written either by Ned or Martha Dickinson, the poet’s nephew and niece. He had samples of Martha’s handwriting at the library. For Ned’s handwriting he contacted Brown University, who sent him photocopies of letters that Ned Dickinson had written to his sister. Neither matched.
This did not especially worry him. Dickinson had numerous cousins, on both her father’s and mother’s side. Perhaps the poem had been written for one of her cousins in Boston, Fanny or Lou Norcross. Perhaps one or the other of them had written ‘Aunt Emily’ on the back of the poem, then filed it away as a memento of her illustrious relation.
Lombardo also wanted to present to the public as much information as he could about the poem’s provenance. In the historical documents world the chain of transactions known as provenance is the gold standard of authenticity. But provenance is much more than a simple list of commercial transactions. It is the story of a document or a book’s journey across time, and the people whose lives it has touched.
To find out as much as he could about the poem’s provenance, Lombardo called Marsha Malinowski, one of the two Sotheby’s employees who had handled the sale. Malinowski was a senior expert in the Department of Books and Manuscripts, and vice president of Sotheby’s. She was charming. She told Lombardo how delighted she was that the poem was going back to Amherst and that she would be happy to try and find out who had consigned it for auction. But for the moment all she could say was that it had come from a collector, who had got it from a dealer in the Midwest. Who had died.
Three days later Lombardo was sitting at his desk in the Jones Library when the phone rang. It was a long-distance call from Provo, Utah. The man at the other end of the line introduced himself as Brent Ashworth. He said that he was an attorney and that, in his spare time, he was a keen collector of historical documents. Ashworth also mentioned that he was the chairman of the Utah branch of the Emily Dickinson Society.
Lombardo assumed that he was calling to congratulate him on the purchase of the poem. People had been calling or e-mailing for weeks. What Ashworth had to say was not, however, cheerful. One day, in Salt Lake City, in 1985, Ashworth told Lombardo, he had been offered an Emily Dickinson poem for $10,000 by a forger named Mark Hofmann. Ashworth was not one hundred percent sure that the poem was the same one that Lombardo had just bought at Sotheby’s, but he was pretty certain it was.
Ashworth told Lombardo something else: that when he’d seen the poem in the Sotheby’s catalog, he’d immediately called Selby Kiffer, the other Sotheby’s employee who had handled the sale. Ashworth had done business with Kiffer, a young, upwardly mobile manuscripts expert at Sotheby’s, for many years, and wanted to warn him of the Hofmann connection. Like Malinowski, Kiffer is a senior expert in the Department of Books and Manuscripts and a vice president (in the catalog for the June 3 sale, he was also listed as being in charge of business development). Because Kiffer had always been so zealous in reporting stolen books to the FBI, his nickname at Sotheby’s was ‘Special Agent Kiffer.’ Kiffer insisted to Ashworth that he had had the poem ‘checked out.’ When Ashworth asked who had checked it out, Kiffer mentioned Ralph Franklin, at Yale University.
Lombardo put down the phone and stared out the window. He had a hollow, empty feeling in the pit of his stomach. Mark Hofmann, he remembered, was a Salt Lake City rare documents dealer who had created a string of sensational forgeries of Mormon historical documents in the early 1980s that undermined some of the central tenets of the church’s teaching. His most famous forgery came to be known as the Salamander Letter. It purported to have been written more than a century earlier by Martin Harris, the scribe who had helped Joseph Smith, the prophet and founder of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, write the Book of Mormon from a set of golden plates Smith claimed to have found in the ground in upstate New York. According to the founding legend of the Mormon religion Smith had been led to the golden plates by an angel. Hofmann’s forgery completely undermined that legend. In it he had portrayed Smith as a money-grubbing prospector who found the plates while digging in the dirt for gold. Instead of divine intervention Hofmann’s letter had described black magic and cabalism. The Mormon Church had bought the document for $40,000 in the hope that it would never be made public.
It was well known that Hofmann had also produced a string of literary forgeries nearly always of American icons, charismatic historical figures who touched a deep chord in the national consciousness, like Abraham Lincoln, Betsy Ross, or Daniel Boone. Had Hofmann, Lombardo wondered, also created an Emily Dickinson poem?
As well as being a brilliant forger, Hofmann was a master of deceit who delighted in the mayhem caused by his lies. On the outside he was a fresh-faced, bookish man who would go unnoticed in most crowds. He dressed conservatively, usually with a white shirt, tie, and jacket. He was a knowledgeable and respected dealer and collector of rare books and historical documents. He was a happily married family man who had spent thousands of dollars assembling one of America’s finest collections of rare children’s books, including a signed first edition of Alice in Wonderland, as a patrimony for his four children. Underneath this guise of normalcy, however, was another person whom Hofmann hid from everyone, including his wife and children. When he found himself entangled in his own web of lies, he had mutated into a cold-blooded psychopath.
Lombardo still believed, and wanted to believe, that the Dickinson poem was genuine. Maybe the man who had called him from Salt Lake City was a kook and this whole thing a practical joke. Lombardo checked on Ashworth and found that far from being crazy, he was a widely respected member of Salt Lake City society, an attorney, and a serious collector of historical documents. Between 1981 and 1985 he had also bought nearly half a million dollars’ worth of rare manuscripts from Mark Hofmann. ‘I was over at Hofmann’s house all the time,’ Ashworth told Lombardo over the phone. ‘I usually went up on Wednesdays and he’d pull out something juicy he wanted to offer me. On one of those days he pulled out this Emily Dickinson.’
The poem’s agnostic sentiments had jarred with Ash-worth’s Mormon faith, and he had passed on it. Then, in the late eighties, several years after Hofmann had been sentenced to life imprisonment for murder, Ashworth had seen the Dickinson poem again. It was lavishly framed and selling for between $35,000 and $40,000, in an upscale historical-documents store in the Georgetown section of Washington, D.C. The store was called the Gallery of History, part of a Las Vegas-based chain owned by a man named Todd Axelrod.
The historical-manuscripts business was traditionally the curious obsession of a few hundred fanatics. There were big collectors, like Malcolm Forbes and Armand Hammer, who amassed collections worth millions of dollars, but for most people old parchment was about as exciting as, well, old parchment. Dealers generally went into the business because they loved history and culture. Few expected to make a killing. Todd Axelrod, the son of a publisher of books on domestic pets from Neptune City, New Jersey, took this rather tweedy cultural backwater and turned it into a multimillion-dollar, mass-market business. After making a fortune as a securities broker on Wall Street, he moved to Las Vegas and, in February 1982, opened the first of a number of boutique-style stores. Crisscrossing America by plane, Axelrod then set about trying to corner the market in historical documents. In all he spent more than $3 million assembling one of the nation’s largest private collections of Americana: a hundred thousand historic documents preserved, as Axelrod liked to boast, to Library of Congress standards. Among this treasure trove was Abraham Lincoln’s letter to Grace Bedell, the young girl who had suggested he grow a beard to help him win the presidency. The price tag was $1.25 million. Not everyone could afford an Honest Abe. So Axelrod made sure that there was something for every taste and pocketbook. There were signed photos of Elvis. Movie buffs could buy memorabilia from Gone With the Wind. For sports fans there were clip signatures from Lou Gehrig or Ty Cobb. Some of Axelrod’s inventory came from a young historical-documents dealer in Salt Lake City named Mark Hofmann.
In the first twenty-two months of operation Axelrod’s company turned over $1.4 million and Axelrod began to open other stores in Los Angeles, Dallas, Washington, D.C., and Costa Mesa, California. All were situated in the same kind of upscale shopping malls. All featured costly metallic fronting, lavish display cases, track lighting, and state-of-the-art climate control systems. Axelrod’s target customer was a new, eighties breed of collector who did not want to keep their purchases tucked away in vaults or safety deposit boxes, as old-style collectors had. They wanted to see their money hanging on the wall. It was all about ‘impact.’ A John F. Kennedy letter, matted in gray suede and framed in silver, could lend an air of probity to the boardroom of a futures trader on Wall Street. A collection of John Paul Jones memorabilia, encased in a gold frame, could make the new rich entrepreneur who owned everything feel that he even ‘owned’ a piece of history. Competitors referred to Axel-rod’s company as Autographs R Us.
Had Mark Hofmann forged the poem then sold it to Todd Axelrod in Las Vegas, as Ashworth had suggested? Had Axelrod then passed it onto Sotheby’s? If that were the case, thought Lombardo, why had Sotheby’s made no mention of this when he had called them to ask about the poem’s provenance? Why had Marsha Malinowski said that it came from a dealer in the Midwest? The more he worried over the details, the more unsettled Lombardo felt. It was not just that he might have bought a forgery. Hofmann was a convicted double-murderer who had savagely killed two innocent people. The poem would be tainted with blood. If he had, indeed, bought a Mark Hofmann forgery, it would be not just a disaster for the library. Lombardo might as well empty out his office drawer.
But perhaps Ashworth was mistaken. He could not exactly recall the words of the poem he had seen in 1985. Perhaps Hofmann had forged an Emily Dickinson poem, but not this one. Surely, he reasoned, no forger could ever acquire this level of knowledge about Emily Dickinson. It was not just the paper and the handwriting. It was those two words, ‘Aunt Emily.’ No forger would know this most private and secretive of poets well enough to know that though she kept almost everyone else in her life at arm’s length, she had always felt at ease with children. It would have taken Hofmann months, if not years, of research to get to this level of intimacy with her. But Lombardo had to be sure if the poem was genuine. And if anyone could tell him whether it was or not, it was Ralph Franklin, at Yale University’s legendary Beinecke Library.
CHAPTER TWO A Riddle in a Locked Box (#ulink_22db9fb0-c649-5e71-95e6-3083cc81c62b)
From the outside the Beinecke Library looks like a stage set for a George Lucas movie. Designed by one of the most celebrated architects of the twentieth century, Gordon Bunshaft, who also created the Lever House and several other of New York’s most famous skyscrapers, the Beinecke is a black glass cube lined with one-and-a-half-inch-thick translucent panes of Vermont marble that change color as the sun moves around the building. Extending vertically through its center, like a spinal column, is a six-story-high glass shaft housing one of the world’s most valuable collections of rare books and manuscripts. Among its treasures are a copy of the Gutenberg Bible and one of the jewels of medieval illuminated mansucripts, the Savoy Hours. Its literary works include such gems of Anglo-Saxon culture as the original manuscripts of W. B. Yeats’s poem ‘Among Schoolchildren,’ Thomas Hardy’s Far From the Madding Crowd, and James Boswell’s Life of Johnson. It has rare sixteenth- and seventeenth-century printed works from Germany, France, and Italy; the world’s largest collection of playing cards; and a priceless bequest of Tibetan Buddhist manuscripts, including the Lhasa edition of the Kanjur in one hundred volumes that was personally donated by His Holiness the Fourteenth Dalai Lama in 1950.
The person responsible for the safety and well-being of these cultural treasures is a dapper, intensely focused man with a compact, muscular body, cropped gray hair, gray-blue eyes the color of the Atlantic in winter, and skin as white as the parchment he spends his life handling. For the last twenty years Ralph Franklin has also tirelessly edited one of the twentieth century’s great works of literary scholarship and detective work: the definitive, three-volume edition of Emily Dickinson’s poems.
Though Franklin had not said so the first time Dan Lombardo had called him, he had seen the poem three years earlier, in 1994, when it was faxed to him by Tammy Kahrs, chief archivist at the Gallery of History in Las Vegas.
Like Lombardo, Franklin was not particularly impressed by the quality of the poem. It read, he thought, like a Hallmark card. That could be explained by the fact that Dickinson appeared to be writing for a juvenile reader. Masterpiece or not, the idea that a new Dickinson poem, the first in forty years, had surfaced set Franklin’s blood racing. If it were to be authentic, it would be an exciting addition to the new edition of the poet’s works that Franklin was preparing.
On the phone that day Tammy Kahrs had sounded more like a country singer than a bibliophile to Franklin, but she seemed to know what she was talking about. One thing that particularly impressed Franklin was that, according to Kahrs, the previous owners of the manuscript had dated it to 1871. As Franklin knew better than anyone, dating manuscripts by Dickinson was extremely complicated. That the previous owners had ascribed such a precise date suggested to Franklin that the poem had originally come from a descendant of the Dickinson family. In the back of Franklin’s mind stirred the hope they might have other new poems.
The fact that the poem originated in Las Vegas, a city better known for slot machines than sonnets, did not overly trouble him. Manuscripts, he knew, can turn up anywhere, and the Gallery of History seemed to know quite a bit about this poem. According to Kahrs the paper was lined, and the embossing had the word Congress over a picture of the Capitol. Franklin knew that Dickinson had used numerous different letter papers at different times in her life. They came from mills all over New England, like Bridgeman and Childs in Northampton, Massachusetts. Some were embossed with a queen’s head or a flower set in an oval. Some bore the imprint of an eagle’s head. In 1871 she was frequently using Congress paper. Such precise knowledge, Franklin knew, is not easy to come by, particularly when the writer in question was someone as private as Emily Dickinson.
Most writers leave behind them a paper trail of letters, diaries, and publications from which a chronology of their work can be reconstructed. We know, for instance, when William Wordsworth wrote The Prelude. We know where the poet was living, what events in his life precipitated the poem, where it was first published, how much he received for it, what others said about it at the time, and where it fits into the arc of his life and work.
None of this applies to Emily Dickinson. ‘I found (the week after her death),’ wrote her sister, Lavinia Dickinson, in May 1886, ‘a box (locked) containing seven hundred wonderful poems, carefully copied.’ None of these seven hundred poems, or the other one thousand and eighty-nine that would later be located, was dated. Only twenty-four had titles. Only ten had been published in her lifetime, and those against her will. Publication, Dickinson once famously wrote, was ‘the Auction / Of the Mind of Man.’ She preferred what she called her ‘Barefoot Rank.’
Imagine if Picasso had never exhibited during his lifetime but that, after his death, his paintings were simply found piled in his studio, without dates or titles or any other clues as to when they were painted, who for, where, or why. The riddle Emily Dickinson left behind was made even more complex because of the confused and haphazard way in which her poems were eventually published. The first person to bring out an edition was the wife of an astronomy professor at Amherst College named Mabel Loomis Todd. A pretty, vivacious woman with limpid brown eyes, she had been the secret mistress of Dickinson’s brother, Austin Dickinson. Working with one of Dickinson’s closest friends, the editor Thomas Wentworth Higginson, she produced three popular selections of Dickinson’s poetry between 1890 and 1896.
Todd might have gone on to bring out a complete edition, if it had not been for a strip of land that Austin Dickinson left her at his death in 1895. Outraged by this affront to the family’s name, Lavinia Dickinson, the poet’s sister, sued Mabel Loomis Todd successfully for its return. Relations were even frostier between Susan Gilbert Dickinson, Austin’s widow, and Mabel Loomis Todd, his former mistress, both of whom possessed substantial quantities of poems and letters. The ill feeling was passed to the next generation. Between 1914 and 1945 Martha Dickinson Bianci, Sue’s daughter, and Millicent Todd Bingham, Mabel’s daughter, fought a bitter battle over Dickinson’s legacy, bringing out competing editions of the manuscript materials they had inherited from their warring mothers.
All these early editions were flawed. Poems were ordered according to the whim of the editors who took Dickinson’s jazzy, idiosyncratic rhyme schemes and highly unusual orthography and changed them to suit late-nineteenth-century tastes. The Harvard scholar Thomas Johnson eventually restored Dickinson’s unique voice and style, and established a chronology for the poems.
Johnson’s edition also plucked a shy girl from Massachusetts out of her self-chosen seclusion and turned her into the It girl of modern American poetry. ‘I like, or at least I admire, her a great deal more now,’ the poet Elizabeth Bishop wrote to Robert Lowell in 1956, ‘probably because of that good new edition, really. I spent another stretch absorbed in that, and think … that she’s about the best we have.’
But Johnson’s variorum edition was not published until almost seventy years after Dickinson’s death, and it did not resolve all the tangled editorial problems she left behind her. Johnson had only been able to consult Photostats of many of the poems, and so there were errors in the transcriptions. Other versions of the poems began to surface, and in the rapidly growing academic industry that had sprung up around Dickinson, debate raged about everything from the dating of the poems to the layout of the words on the page. A new referee was needed.
Ralph Franklin, the ambitious, quick-witted director of the Beinecke Library, whose work on Dickinson’s manuscripts went back to the late 1960s, was the person chosen for the job. The first thing he did was to go back to the original manuscript books in which Dickinson had stored her poems. Having scribbled down a draft of a poem, usually in pencil, Dickinson would set about the exacting work of revision and editing. This was done mostly at night, sitting at the table in her bedroom on the second floor of the Homestead. The process of editing and revising a poem might go on for months or even years. Only when she was completely satisfied did she write a finished copy of the poem. This time she wrote in ink, not pencil; and instead of the scraps of kitchen paper or backs of an envelope she used for drafts, she wrote the final versions of her poems on a sheet of notepaper already folded by the manufacturer to produce two leaves. She had a large collection of such papers from all over New England. Sometimes she chose a piece of laid, cream-colored paper; sometimes it was a wove white paper with a blue rule. When she had accumulated four – sometimes it was six – of these sheets, she would stack them on top of each other. She would then take a thick embroidery needle threaded with string and make two holes through the sheets, forcing the needle through the paper, from front to back. Then she threaded the string through the holes and tied it firmly at the front. A wonderful poem written in 1861, during a personal crisis that had affected her eyesight, shows how closely, for Dickinson, making poems and the act of sewing were connected:
Don’t put up my Thread & Needle –
I’ll begin to Sow
When the Birds begin to whistle –
Better stitches – so –
These were bent – my sight got crooked –
When my mind – is plain
I’ll do seams – a Queen’s endeavor
Would not blush to own –
Dickinson referred to these stitched booklets of poems in down-home Yankee fashion as ‘packets.’ It was Mabel Loomis Todd, her first editor, who, more grandly and pretentiously, referred to them as ‘fascicles,’ from the French word fascicule. In fact, there is nothing grand about them. Dickinson had probably learned to make such packets of documents at Amherst Academy, where she had gone to school. There were no ring binders in those days, so students were taught to keep their writing assignments in little homemade manuscript books. When she died, forty of these packets of poems, which constitute one of the great literary treasures of the world, were found squirreled away in her room. Hundreds more poems were found on separate, unbound sheets.
Though none of the poems was dated, and none had titles, their order in the fascicles would have given a reliable chronology. Unfortunately, when Mabel Loomis Todd set about creating her first edition – and, almost certainly, to enable her to weed out and destroy poems that would have shocked and offended Dickinson’s contemporaries – she took a pair of scissors, cut the threads Dickinson had sewn through the pages, and unbound them.
For his landmark two-volume edition of the fascicles, The Manuscript Books of Emily Dickinson, which was published in 1981, Franklin spent years reconstructing the order of the poems. Working like a forensic document examiner, he painstakingly reconstructed Dickinson’s ‘workshop.’ He studied the paper she used, the watermarks, and any manufacturing defects, like wrinkles, that might indicate the order of the sheets. He looked at discolorations on the paper to identify the first and last page of a fascicle, knowing that the inner leaves would be much cleaner. He examined stain marks, where the poet had spilled some chamomile tea while she worked, or some water as she fed the plants in her room. Sometimes these stains formed a pattern over several sheets, and by fitting them together Franklin was able to work out which page had been bound up next to which. He looked for smudge patterns in the ink, where Dickinson had inadvertently drawn the sleeve of her dress, or her hand, across the page. He examined the puncture patterns of the needle holes she had driven through the page, and signs of stress in the paper caused by the pressure of opening a fascicle against the tension of the stabbed binding. Using a microscope, he examined the curvature along the edge of each sheet, and the damage around the binding holes, clues that might reveal which order the sheets had been stacked in. But most of all he studied the poet’s handwriting.
Few people’s handwriting has changed more throughout their lifetime, and revealed more, than Emily Dickinson’s. If you compare the handwriting of her first poem, ‘Awake ye muses nine, sing me a strain divine,’ a forty-line valentine bubbling with girlish high spirits, written when she was nineteen, with poems written around the 1870s, when she was in her forties, it is hard to believe that they are written by the same person.
In 1871, the date of ‘That God Cannot Be Understood,’ Dickinson was middle-aged – she was born on December 10, 1830 – and roughly halfway along the trajectory of her handwriting’s evolution. In the course of dating Dickinson’s poems Franklin had created a series of charts showing the different letter forms and shapes the poet used at different times in her life. The first thing he did when he received the fax containing the poem from Las Vegas was to compare the letter forms with those on his charts.
Everything checked out. There were, for instance, two different forms of the letter d in the poem: one, in the word God in the first line, looked like a six turned backward. The other, in the word should, in the ninth line of the poem, was radically different. The two elements of the letter had split apart, making it look like a backward-sloping c and an l. Franklin knew that Dickinson had used the one form before this period (the early 1870s), and another form later. Exactly around the year 1871, though, she had used both forms. That’s Dickinson’s d! he thought as he looked at the final letter of the word comprehend.
There were also two forms of the letter e. One looked like the number three, written back-to-front. It appears, capitalized, at the beginning of the word Everyone, in the third line of the poem, and in the signature, ‘Emily.’ The same unusual form also appears in lowercase in the word solace. Other words in the poem contained a more usual form of the letter. Franklin’s charts showed him that, in 1871, Dickinson was using both forms.
Even the way the sheet of paper was folded conformed to the way Dickinson had sent her poems. At this time Dickinson generally folded her letters in thirds. The fact that two thirds of the left-hand sheet of the bifolia on which the poem was written was missing suggested that there had been wear in those places, and that eventually the page had been torn away.
Despite these minute details suggestive of authenticity, Franklin had a number of questions. He asked the Gallery of History to fax him the measurements of the manuscript, in millimeters, across the fold and along the top. He also asked for detailed provenance information and how the Gallery of History had dated the poem to 1871. Out of curiosity he also asked the price.
He was out when the Gallery of History called him back, but the information his assistant relayed to him further confirmed that the poem was genuine. They were unwilling to release any information on the poem’s provenance. But Franklin knew that, in the rare-documents business, such discretion was not uncommon. Many owners do not like to release their names, for fear of publicity or for tax reasons. And the measurements were exactly right. As far as the 1871 date was concerned, the Gallery of History claimed that they had dated the poem based on research done on the boss mark on the paper by a scholar named Elizabeth Witherell. This surprised Franklin, because Witherell was a Thoreau scholar, not a Dickinson scholar. But, who knows, thought Franklin, perhaps Witherell had a large supply of nineteenth-century paper. In fact, Witherell had never seen the poem.
The price of the poem was $45,000. There had never been any discussion of Franklin doing an authentication, so when, during one of their conversations, Tammy Kahrs asked him if he would mind if they used his name when they sold the poem, he was flabbergasted. As far as he was concerned, he had supplied the Gallery of History with general information about the poem’s possible historical context and his view of the handwriting. But he had not given any opinion as to its authenticity.
Despite the slight uneasiness caused by this incident, and the lack of provenance information, Franklin felt sure enough that the poem was genuine that he made tentative plans to include it in his new edition. There were some minor copyright issues – the fax from the Gallery of History came with a standard disclaimer prohibiting the distribution or copying of all communications – but he would deal with those later, closer to publication, which had tentatively been set for 1997. He thought nothing more of the matter until he saw the poem in the Sotheby’s catalog in May of that year.
Franklin was on vacation in Switzerland when Brent Ashworth called him from Salt Lake City. Franklin knew Ashworth because he had conferred with him about a previous Dickinson poem that Ashworth had bought, and he regarded Ashworth as a reliable source of information. Ashworth told Franklin what he had told Lombardo: that he had been offered the poem by Mark Hofmann in 1985, and that he believed it was a forgery.
Like everyone in the historical documents trade Franklin knew Hofmann’s reputation. Shattering as it was, though, the news did not definitively prove the poem was a forgery. After all, it was well known that Hofmann had also handled genuine manuscripts. But when Ashworth told him that he had subsequently seen the poem in one of the Gallery of History’s boutique stores, Franklin’s heart skipped a beat. If it were true, he realized that he might have unwittingly become involved in a chain of illicit transactions that stretched from a murderer in Salt Lake City to a historical documents dealer in Las Vegas, and then onto him. It was not the sort of company a distinguished scholar at Yale University was used to keeping.
Franklin also knew from bitter experience the damage a forgery can wreak on the lives of people involved in the rare manuscript world. He had seen friends and colleagues tear each other apart over one of the twentieth century’s most celebrated fakes: the Vinland Map. The map, which resides at the Beinecke Library, surfaced in 1957 in clouded circumstances. It purported to be the original map used by Leif Eriksson on his voyage of discovery to the New World. Scholars took sides for or against its authenticity. Even after forensic tests revealed that, in a crude attempt to simulate age, the forger had put yellow-brown ink underneath the map’s black ink outlines, controversy continued to rage, leading to bitter divisions among friends and colleagues that will never be resolved.
It seemed to Franklin that he might have become entangled in an even more sensational case of forgery: a forgery that had homicide as one of its components. Not only was Franklin’s reputation as the foremost expert on Emily Dickinson’s handwriting at stake, but also his position as one of Sotheby’s most important customers. According to Ashworth, when he had called Sotheby’s to warn them about the poem, they had named Franklin as one of the ‘experts’ who had vetted the poem. If that were true, it would be a grievous breach of professional trust. Franklin had not authenticated the poem for Sotheby’s. Indeed, he had had no formal contact of any kind with them prior to the auction.
As Franklin puzzled over what to do, an event that had occurred at the end of May, only days before the poem was auctioned at Sotheby’s, took on new significance. Franklin had traveled down from New Haven to New York to look at the poem during the public preview. These public previews take place a few days before an auction, and give dealers and collectors a chance to study the books and manuscripts they are thinking of bidding on. To study manuscripts Franklin uses a ‘linen tester’: a powerful magnifying glass used by textile merchants to assess the quality of linen. So, having removed the poem from the glass case in which it was being displayed, Franklin set it down on a table and examined it. Up until now he had only seen a faxed copy of the poem. But with the original in front of him he was able to study the paper and handwriting with far greater accuracy. Everything tallied, as he expected it would, as far as the writing was concerned. He now turned his linen tester to the embossing in the top left-hand corner. Under magnification he could see quite clearly that this was, indeed, one of two kinds of Congress paper that Emily Dickinson had used in the 1870s.
While he was studying the boss mark, a Sotheby’s employee he knew came up and engaged him in conversation. ‘It was mostly small talk,’ Franklin said, ‘but I suppose that they could have interpreted from that conversation that I thought the poem was genuine.’ Was this what they had meant when they told Ashworth that the poem had been ‘checked out’ by Ralph Franklin? That he had seen it at the public preview and not voiced doubts about it? If so, it would be a cynical misuse of his reputation. For Sotheby’s and the other auction houses know that the scholars and experts who come to their public exhibitions never opine on a document or a painting (unless it is to say something affirmative) for fear that, at a later date, an irate collector may sue them.
When he had first seen the poem, he had studied it for signs of authenticity. Galvanized by Ashworth’s call, Franklin now began to look at it from the opposite point of view. ‘I kept looking and looking for what would show a forger’s hand,’ he said, ‘and I finally came up with a few anomalies. One of them is the capital T in the first word of the poem. Normally it slants down in Dickinson. And these T’s do not slant down.’
Franklin’s charts showed that Dickinson had sometimes written her T in the way it is reproduced in the poem. Examples of this form, however, were rare, and dispersed over many documents. Here, there were three in one poem. ‘It is as though one found a formula and repeated it,’ he said. ‘But can you prove that she did not write this because there are three of them sitting here like this? What is proof?’
Franklin was facing a question that plagues forensic document examiners. Unless a forger makes a crass and obvious mistake like using ink or paper that had not been manufactured at the purported date of the document, it is often extremely difficult to prove forgery. And there were no such signs here. The poem also passed the key test of authenticity: those minutely varied characteristics that make each person’s handwriting unique. According to Franklin’s charts this was Emily Dickinson’s handwriting.
Or was it? Another detail that Franklin focused on was the capital E in Everyone, in the third line of the poem. There was an awkwardness to it that, Franklin felt, showed signs of hesitation, as though the writer had momentarily lifted the pencil. Was this the telltale sign of forgery he had been looking for? Or had Emily Dickinson just burped at that moment?
CHAPTER THREE A Search for Truth (#ulink_64c82243-6127-5bdc-9d3d-dde4b42f735e)
In the summer Dan Lombardo likes to go kayaking. After Ashworth told him about the possible Hofmann connection, however, the kayak stayed in the garage. He lived on the phone. He ransacked Amherst’s libraries for information about Hofmann. Until he had found out who had written ‘Aunt Emily’ on the poem, and could trace it back to its original owner, he would not rest. A librarian was about to turn sleuth.
He clung to the fact that Ralph Franklin still believed in the poem. On July 25, less than a week before the poem was due to be exhibited publicly for the first time, he asked Franklin to come to Amherst to have another look at it. Working in a room Lombardo had specially set aside for him, Franklin again studied the handwriting, letter by letter, serif by serif, using samples of Dickinson’s handwriting that he had brought with him.
One of the details he focused on was the ligatures of vowels and following consonants. From the Latin ligare, meaning to tie or bind, a ligature is the flange linking two or more letters, like -an or -em or -en. In 1871 these ligatures were fracturing and by the end of her life Dickinson would be printing each letter individually, with no connecting strokes joining them. In ‘That God Cannot Be Understood’ both versions were present. ‘You have the word cannot with -an linked,’ Franklin pointed out, ‘and you have cannot with the -an open. You even have it rendered in the same word.’
How could a forger possibly get all this right? The fact that Hofmann had worked in Utah made it seem even more unlikely. For the first time Franklin and Lombardo began to wonder whether Hofmann’s source for the forgery had been Franklin’s own two-volume edition of Dickinson’s fascicles. It had been published in 1981, four years before Ashworth said that Hofmann had offered him the poem for $10,000.
One detail made that seem unlikely. Nowhere in Franklin’s two-volume edition was there a poem signed ‘Emily.’ Like her handwriting Dickinson’s signature was not something constant or stable. It shifted, and changed, according to the year, occasion, or her mood. Sometimes she signed herself, formally, ‘Emily E. Dickinson’ (the E stands for Elizabeth); sometimes ‘Emily E.D.’; sometimes ‘E. Dickinson.’ When she was writing to close friends, or children, she signed herself ‘Emily,’ ‘Emilie,’ ‘Emily E,’ or on one occasion simply as ‘E.’ In a letter to her close friend Thomas Wentworth Higginson, she closed: ‘Your Gnome.’
The signature at the bottom of ‘That God Cannot Be Understood’ was exactly right for 1871. This, combined with the fact that Dickinson only rarely signed poems with her first name, and no examples were in his book, suggested to Franklin that his edition of Dickinson’s manuscripts was, after all, not the source of the handwriting. And that therefore the poem was probably genuine. ‘I remember Ralph pounding on the table after he had looked at the poem,’ said Lombardo. ‘He kept saying, “It has to be genuine! It has to be! No one could know all these minute details about Dickinson’s handwriting!” At the same time, he was cautioning me. After all, Vermeer and van Gogh have been forged. Why not Emily Dickinson?’
Lombardo recalled an incident that had happened a number of years earlier. In January 1990 he had opened another Sotheby’s catalog and found himself staring at what seemed to be an original Emily Dickinson poem. It was described in the catalog as an ‘Autograph Transcription signed, 1½ sides of an 8vo. card (c. 1859), beginning: “Heart not so heavy as mine …”’
