The Poet and the Murderer: A True Story of Verse, Violence and the Art of Forgery

CHAPTER TWO A Riddle in a Locked Box

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.