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

CHAPTER THREE A Search for Truth

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 …”’

Thrilled at the prospect of acquiring a handwritten, signed poem by Dickinson, Lombardo had immediately gone to the Special Collections budget to see if he could raise the $3,000–$5,000 he thought he would need to bid on the poem. Several things bothered him, though. First, the handwriting did not look like Dickinson’s. Second, the punctuation and page layout were not in the poet’s usual, unique style. The poem was also signed ‘Emily Dickinson,’ a form rare for the poet outside of legal documents. There was almost no information about the poem’s provenance.

Convinced that this was not an authentic Dickinson manuscript, Lombardo did a bit of research and quickly realized that what was being offered at auction was not an Emily Dickinson original at all. It was a version of the poem edited and transcribed by Mabel Loomis Todd, the poet’s first editor. Realizing that the auction was only days away, Lombardo had called the head of the Books and Manuscripts Department at Sotheby’s. His call was never returned. Lombardo then left a detailed message with another Sotheby’s employee, alerting the auction house to the error.

Lombardo assumed that, after his warning, the poem would be pulled from the auction. He was astonished, when the results of the auction were sent to him, to discover that the so-called ‘Autograph Transcription’ had been sold for $4,400. When he called again to find out what had happened, the story began to take on even more improbable twists. Sotheby’s informed him that they had contacted Ralph Franklin prior to the auction for his opinion, and that he had agreed that it was not a Dickinson original. Despite Franklin’s opinion Sotheby’s decided to leave the poem in the auction, but announce from the podium that item #2028 was not in Dickinson’s hand. But the phone bidders had no way of hearing the announcement. And one of them subsequently became the proud owner of a perfect example of Mabel Loomis Todd’s handwriting.

Had he become the victim of a similar deception? Perhaps he had misread things again, just as he had failed to see that under his father’s happy-go-lucky exterior there was a darker side. As his doubts about the poem rose, he felt his old ghosts returning. Perhaps the competence he thought he had built up over seventeen years at the Jones Library was an illusion. Perhaps his father’s Sicilian sense of fatalism had been right. No matter how good life might seem, the drought would come, the olive trees would die, and you would have to sell the farm.

To celebrate the return of the poem to Amherst, Lombardo had organized a gala reception at the Jones Library. A few days before the gala Lombardo was sitting on Amherst Common, a historic park in the center of the town. The Common was what had drawn Lombardo to Amherst in the first place. He remembered the first time he had driven here, how he had passed the Common and thought how beautiful it looked, with its rectangle of green grass framed by the historic brick buildings of Amherst College. In colonial times English Puritans had grazed their sheep here. And even today the Common was the focus of Amherst life. There were fairs and concerts, flea markets and poetry readings. The Common was where the heart of this community, which he had worked so hard to become part of, beat strongest.

Lombardo had just been to the Amherst College Library to collect a book he had ordered about Mark Hofmann: Richard Turley’s Victims, which the Church of Latter-Day Saints had commissioned in the wake of the murder case. As he sat in the sun outside the library, Lombardo began to leaf through the book’s lengthy appendixes. One of them was a list of Hofmann’s non-Mormon forgeries.

In 1986, as part of a plea-bargain arrangement Hofmann made with prosecutors in Salt Lake City, he had agreed to full disclosure about his forgeries: how many there were, how they had been created, to whom they had been sold. This eventually became a six-hundred-page ‘confession’ published by the Salt Lake County Attorney’s office. As usual, Hofmann only told part of the truth. In a second agreement reached with special investigator Michael George, he had then agreed to furnish a complete list of all his Mormon and non-Mormon forgeries.

In 1988 a list was discovered in Hofmann’s prison cell. The first page of this two-page document, which was handwritten in Hofmann’s chicken-scratch script, is headed ‘Mormon and Mormon-Related Autographs.’ It lists a total of sixty-one names, among them most of the founding fathers of the Mormon Church, including Brigham Young and Joseph Smith. A second, alphabetical list, headed ‘Forged Non-Mormon Autographs,’ had the names of twenty-three people, among them some of America’s greatest historical figures, like Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, Paul Revere, and Jack London. Emily Dickinson’s was the sixth name down, between John Brown and Button Gwinnett.

Lombardo’s mouth went as dry as sand. ‘As I looked over the Common it was entering my mind that, if this really was a forgery, I did not think I could be part of this town anymore,’ he recalled. ‘I would not be able to face people, knowing that I had caused all this.’

He had no choice. Two days later, on July 30, this eagerly awaited new work by the town’s most famous daughter came home to Amherst. Several hundred people crammed into the Special Collections section of the library to witness its unveiling. Dickinson scholars who had flown in from Washington or Virginia mingled with local people who had walked across the Common. There were state representatives and local writers, as well as professors from the area’s numerous colleges, like Smith and Vassar. A Dickinson family descendant, Angela Brassley, the great-great-granddaughter of Samuel Fowler Dickinson, the poet’s grandfather, had even flown over from England with her husband and two children. They were photographed standing proudly next to the poem. There were children and flowers everywhere.

Lombardo gave a speech in which he celebrated the numerous coincidences that had enabled the library to buy the poem (some felt that the hand of God had been at work), and thanked all those who had contributed money. He then introduced the actress Belinda West, who had been asked to read the poem. Her reading, he said, would symbolically send Dickinson’s lost words into the world and make a connection with the elusive poet. After the reading a local musician, Sean Vernon, sang an arrangement of the poem that he had created for the acoustic guitar. This was followed by a classical arrangement by New York composer Leo Smit, who had once worked with Aaron Copland. Smit could not attend the event, but he had sent a copy of the score the poem had inspired him to write. ‘It was one of the most beautiful things we have done at the library,’ said Lombardo. ‘It was like people filing through to see the Pietà.’

The analogy is apt. Since the rise of the cult of the artist-as-hero, dating back to the birth of Romanticism at the end of the eighteenth century, literary manuscripts have replaced the relics of the saints as powerful talismanic objects. When James Boswell, the biographer of Samuel Johnson, found himself standing in front of what he believed to be the original manuscript of King Lear, in London, on February 20, 1795 – it was, in fact, a forgery by William Henry Ireland – he knelt down on the floor and kissed it. ‘I shall now die contented,’ he said, ‘since I have lived to see the present day.’

For Dickinson aficionados the discovery of a new poem may not have been quite such an overwhelming experience. But it was nonetheless an epiphanous moment. In the last thirty years a cult has grown up around Dickinson’s work and life, as powerful as the cult that surrounded Shakespeare in Samuel Johnson’s day. Her literary stock has risen so fast that, in the opinion of the celebrated critic Harold Bloom, she is, with Walt Whitman, America’s greatest poet. Her idiosyncratic idiom appeals to postmodern ears. Like Sylvia Plath she is seen as an avatar of female consciousness. Her solitary life echoes with today’s lifestyles. Dickinson was the girl who never grew up. She did not marry or have children. She never entered the messy world of adult sexual relations. In a postmodern, postfeminist world of frayed gender relations, this inner exile is seen as a form of heroism, her decision not to marry the only smart choice.

As a result one of the world’s most private poets has spawned a sprawling, global community of devotees. There are more than 67,000 entries in a dozen languages on the Internet, including a hypertext poetry room, where you can see her poems as they appeared in the fascicles and a virtual reality tour of the Homestead. There are chat rooms where you can discuss your favorite poems. There are lesbian Web sites where you can read the steamy verses it is claimed she wrote to her sister-in-law, Sue Dickinson. You can download her recipes for black cake or gingerbread or purchase a Dor-A-Bil doll, complete with woodblock torso, for $19.95.

The thirty-nine words on this sheet of blue-lined paper brought the guests at the Jones Library as close as it is possible to get to her. This is especially true in the digital age where everything is available, and nothing is special. Whether it is Picasso or pornography, the data flooding across our screens is just that: data. You cannot touch it or feel it. It is gone in a second. An original manuscript, whether it is the piece of paper on which Paul McCartney scribbled down the words to ‘Hey, Jude,’ or a poem by Emily Dickinson, connects us in a visceral way to the past and brings us as close as it is possible to get to the men and women who have changed the world and given voice to the thoughts and emotions we ourselves cannot articulate.

For the people crowding around the poem the idea that Amherst’s most famous daughter had held this piece of paper in her hand, had shaped and formed each letter, then signed it with her name, folded it, and sent it to a child, moved them in a way that no reproduction could match. In an age obsessed with celebrity and lacking in greatness, it was also a token of how high the human spirit could rise. ‘She is like an eleventh-century mystic,’ said Lombardo. ‘And what she has left behind are like the parables of the saints, because they can be universally applied. You feel she is speaking to you very personally.’

While people came over to congratulate him on acquiring the poem, Lombardo had a sickening feeling in his stomach. He had almost called off the gala. As it was, he asked most of his closest friends not to attend. He had told only two people in the room of his suspicions about the poem: the director of the Jones Library, Bonnie Isman, and his wife, Karen. As he listened to speaker after speaker heap praise on him, he imagined the disbelief and shock the people who were now congratulating him would feel, if they knew what he knew. The worst of it was having to put on that smiling face and pretend that this was the most exciting moment of his career, how thrilled he was to have acquired this wonderful treasure for the people of Amherst.

He knew that if it became public that Hofmann had once owned the poem, its authenticity would always be questioned. He also knew that, despite everything he had achieved at the library, this, and this alone, would be what people would remember him for. He would be remembered as the curator who took $24,000 of the library’s money and spent it on a fake.

He imagined how quickly the congratulations he had been receiving would turn to sneers; how fast his efforts would be branded as egotism. People would say that he had landed himself, and them, in this mess because of his vanity and inexperience; because he liked the limelight and liked reading his name in the papers. Some people, he knew, were only waiting for an opportunity to bring him down. That was the other side of small-town life. Everyone was in everyone else’s business. Emily had known that. Eventually she would not even leave her house, so frightened and disgusted was she by the rumors and backbiting, the matrons in black tut-tutting on the street, those mean-spirited shrews, who all claimed to be good Christian women, whispering about Sapphic love and secret meetings she was supposed to have with married men.

If the poem were a Mark Hofmann forgery, it would not only mean the end of his life in Amherst, it would also annihilate his faith in his profession. Lombardo had no illusions about how institutions functioned. Whether they were governments or auction houses, institutions were always liable to corruption. But he had always clung to a belief that the individuals who worked in his profession were people of integrity who did their job because they had a genuine love of manuscripts and history. Why had Sotheby’s not done their research and found out the link to Hofmann? Why had Marsha Malinowski said the poem had come from the Midwest, when it had probably come from the Gallery of History in Las Vegas?

Lombardo had never seriously considered keeping quiet. There had been moments when he had thought that perhaps he should just ignore Ashworth’s call and tell Franklin that, after this latest examination they had performed, he felt satisfied that the poem was genuine. If it were a forgery, it had been so masterfully done that no one would ever know the difference. But as he watched his neighbors and colleagues file out of the library into the balmy summer air, as he shook hands with people whom he would see on the street corner in the morning, or meet at Labor Day parties, he knew that he could not do that. He owed them the truth.

The first thing he did was call the Gallery of History in Las Vegas. Gareth Williams, a senior company employee, was at first friendly and helpful. He told Lombardo that he was familiar with the poem and that the Gallery had acquired it sometime before 1994. But when Lombardo asked Williams if the Gallery of History would mind going back into their records to check who had bought the poem, Williams grew testy. He told him that the computers were down. As to the provenance, as far as Williams could recall, the poem had come from California, as part of the estate of a collector. Who had died.

The so-called ‘dead man provenance’ – a bogus history created to disguise a manuscript’s true origins – is one of the oldest tricks in the historical documents trade. And this was now the second corpse Lombardo had stumbled upon. Marsha Malinowski had told him that the poem had originally come from a dead dealer in the Midwest. But she had made no mention of the Gallery of History in Las Vegas, even though Lombardo now knew from Franklin that the poem had been there three years ago; and that, at an earlier date, it had been seen by Brent Ashworth hanging on the wall with a price tag of between $35,000-$40,000 in another one of Todd Axelrod’s stores. Had she just forgotten to mention it? It would seem unlikely that she had not known of the Las Vegas connection. After all, Sotheby’s prides itself on its expert evaluations of the things it sells. But now he was being told that the poem had come from a dead collector in California. The corpses were multiplying. Was Malinowski lying? Was the Gallery of History lying? Were they both?

Lombardo was enmeshed in a cruel paradox. By proving the poem was a forgery, he would be proving that his finest hour had actually been his greatest blunder. There was one way to save his reputation and the reputation of the library, though: uncover the poem’s true origins. For that, he would need all the expertise he had accumulated over the years. His search for the truth was an opportunity in another, more personal way. By proving that the poem was genuine, or not, he would be proving to himself and others that he could indeed distinguish between what was real and what was not. In so doing he would at last be able to lay his ghosts to rest.

Again Lombardo turned to Ralph Franklin. Franklin had by this time become increasingly fascinated with finding out the truth about the poem himself; and he told Lombardo that he would call Sotheby’s. It was a generous thing to do. As director of the Beinecke Library, Franklin was one of Sotheby’s most important customers. If he got on the wrong side of this story, it could ruin their relationship.

Franklin called David Redden, a man he had known for many years. The worldwide head of books, manuscripts, and collectibles, Redden is one of the most senior and experienced members of Sotheby’s staff. He is on the board of directors. He is also one of Sotheby’s most experienced auctioneers. When van Goghs or Monets go under the hammer for tens of millions of dollars, the suave, debonair David Redden is likely to be the person calling the bids.

Franklin wanted to press Redden about the poem’s provenance. Though there had been no mention of it in the catalog, Franklin suspected that the Emily Dickinson poem had been consigned by Todd Axelrod, of the Gallery of History in Las Vegas. Redden insisted that the poem had not come from the Gallery of History.

Franklin was not convinced. If Marsha Malinowski’s account of the provenance was true – that the poem came from a collector who got it from a dealer in the Midwest who had died – it had changed hands four times between late 1994, when Franklin first saw it, and 1997, when it was auctioned. But Franklin knew that, in the rare manuscripts business, things just did not move that fast. Had the poem been consigned by somebody on behalf of the Gallery of History? Franklin asked Redden. Redden said it had not. He said that it had been consigned by ‘an individual’ who, he told Franklin, had no connection either direct or indirect to the Gallery of History in Las Vegas.

Franklin still felt uneasy. And on August 3, some days after his conversation with Redden, he told Lombardo that he had decided to withdraw the poem from his book. It was a bitter blow. Franklin’s belief in the poem had been the I-beam on which Lombardo’s own hopes had rested. Now it had been removed. But Franklin did not stop helping Lombardo. He checked and rechecked his copy of the manuscript. He read up on Hofmann and the Mormon murders. He conferred almost daily with Lombardo. Soon these two very different men – a patrician academic from Yale who dressed in Armani suits and loved the opera, and an antiestablishment liberal from Amherst who wore jeans and John Lennon signature glasses, and loved rock and roll – were becoming fast friends. They joked about being Watson and Sherlock Holmes. They shared their anxieties. Franklin had tried to call Tammy Kahrs, the archivist from the Gallery of History who had first contacted him about the poem. Apparently she was dead.

Both men had by now acquired copies of the revised 1986 edition of Todd Axelrod’s book Collecting Historical Documents, and on page 198 they found the text of what claimed to be ‘an unpublished poem, handwritten by Massachusetts poetess Emily Dickinson,’ neatly framed and illustrated with the famous daguerreotype of the poet. The print was in a minuscule font, too small to read with the naked eye, but under magnification it became clear that this was the poem Lombardo had bought at Sotheby’s.

The discovery was important because it established a detailed provenance for the poem. It showed that Axelrod had not just recently acquired it from someone else but had bought it sometime in the mid-1980s, not long before Hofmann was convicted of murder. He still had it at the end of the eighties when Brent Ashworth, who had already been offered the poem by Hofmann for $10,000, saw it for sale in one of Axelrod’s galleries. And it was still in Axelrod’s hands in 1994, when Tammy Kahrs contacted Franklin.

On August 4 Lombardo called the illustrious auction house on Madison Avenue to say that, given the numerous suspicions surrounding the poem, it was now their responsibility to prove its authenticity. The Marsha Malinowksi Lombardo reached by phone that day was not the breezily cheerful woman he had spoken to six weeks earlier. Her voice was shaky, and when Lombardo mentioned Hofmann, she grew defensive. There was, she said, ‘absolutely no question’ of the poem’s authenticity. She also insisted that several experts had studied the poem, among them a well-known expert on forgery, Kenneth Rendell.

Later that day Lombardo spoke to ‘Special Agent Kiffer.’ Unlike Malinowski, Kiffer was calm and reassuring. He insisted that Sotheby’s guarantees what it sells. When Lombardo raised his suspicions about Hofmann, Kiffer sought to placate him by explaining that, before he became a forger, Hofmann had been a legitimate dealer of historical documents. Kiffer did not mention Rendell, but he did say that ‘ten to fifteen’ manuscript experts had examined the poem.