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


The true story of a brilliantly forged Emily Dickinson poem sold at Sotheby’s in 1997. The author’s detective work led him across America to a prison cell in Salt Lake City, where the world’s greatest literary forger, Mark Hofmann, is serving a life sentence for double-murder.When the author sets out on the trail of a forged Emily Dickinson poem that has mysteriously turned up for sale at Sotheby’s in New York, he finds himself drawn into a world of deception and murder. The trail eventually leads, via the casinos of Las Vegas, to Utah and the darkly compelling world of Mark Hofmann, ex-Mormon and one of the most daring literary forgers and remorseless murderers of all time. As the author uncovers Hofmann’s brilliant, and disturbing, career, he takes the reader into the secret world of the Mormon Church and its controversial founder, Joseph Smith.Deeply researched but with the narrative pace of a novel, Worrall’s investigation into the life and crimes of this charismatic genius is a real-life detective story you simply won’t be able to put down. On the way, you will meet an eclectic cast of characters: undercover detectives and rare book dealers, Dickinson scholars, forensic document experts, hypnotists, gun-dealers and Mormons.As the story reaches its gripping climax, Hofmann becomes trapped in the web of his own deceptions … and turns to murder.







The Poet AND THE Murderer

A True Story of Verse, Violence

and the Art of Forgery

SIMON WORRALL









Dedication (#ulink_55afbd46-5ac3-5958-884d-1ddea2c64661)


To my parents, Nancy and Philip; and to my beloved wife, Kate




Contents


Cover (#u0d09b967-938a-5df6-909e-79e3324c5738)

Title Page (#u74ddfb5c-8a39-5980-ab9f-82ec1d552608)

Dedication (#ulink_6c3d2412-9fcc-5939-84a6-d51e4fcc4520)

Introduction (#ulink_8252d5e3-a92e-599d-9cb6-984996ad28c3)

Prologue: The Poet and the Murderer (#ulink_56639e0d-6546-5c75-bb6f-6b3c0e8fd4ce)

Chapter 1 Emily Dickinson for Sale (#ulink_ade4b05c-0b46-5361-bf32-1ac715401367)

Chapter 2 A Riddle in a Locked Box (#ulink_cbd9fa33-8e4b-548a-93ac-5af441812748)

Chapter 3 A Search for Truth (#ulink_2122d4e0-12dd-5041-9fb9-2b1dff397c09)

Chapter 4 Auction Artifice (#ulink_80e95ce5-b3f3-58d6-a6db-e927549fdf24)

Chapter 5 In the Land of Urim and Thummim (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 6 The Forger and His Mark (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 7 The Magic Man (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 8 The Art of Forgery (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 9 The Salamander Letter (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 10 Isochrony (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 11 The Myth of Amherst (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 12 The Oath of a Freeman (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 13 A Dirty, Nasty, Filthy Affair (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 14 The Kill Radius (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 15 Cracked Ink (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 16 Victims (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 17 A Spider in an Ocean of Air (#litres_trial_promo)

Epilogue: Homestead (#litres_trial_promo)

Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)

Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)


‘The Heart wants what it wants – or else it does not care–’

Emily Dickinson



‘We have the greatest and smoothest liars in the world, the cunningest and most adroit thieves, and any other shade of character that you can mention…. I can produce Elders here who can shave their smartest shavers, and take their money from them. We can beat the world at any game.’

Brigham Young




Introduction (#ulink_c939fc92-6fc3-552e-9b8c-f6b5aea405b6)


It was a cold, crisp fall day as I walked up the driveway of the Emily Dickinson Homestead in Amherst, Massachusetts. A row of hemlock trees along the front of the house cast deep shadows on the brickwork. A squirrel scampered across the lawn with an acorn between its teeth. Entering by the back door, I walked along a dark hallway hung with family portraits, then climbed the stairs to the second-floor bedroom.

The word Homestead is misleading. With its elegant cupola, French doors, and Italian facade, this Federal-style mansion on Main Street, which the poet’s grandfather, Samuel Fowler Dickinson, built in 1813, is anything but a log cabin. Set back from the road, with a grove of oaks and maples screening it to the rear, and a large, concealed garden, it was, and is, one of the finest houses in Amherst.

The bedroom was a large, square, light-filled room on the southwest corner. One window looked down onto Main Street. From the other window I could see the Evergreens, where Emily Dickinson’s brother, Austin, and her sister-in-law, Sue Gilbert Dickinson, had lived. Halfway along the east wall was the sleigh bed where the poet had slept, always alone, for almost her entire life. She was less than five and a half feet tall, and the bed was as small as a child’s. I prodded the mattress. It felt hard and unyielding. In front of the window looking across to the Evergreens was a small writing table. It was here that Dickinson wrote almost all of her poetry, and the nearly one thousand letters that have come down to us. Poems came to this high-spirited, fiercely independent redhead in bursts of language, like machine-gun fire. She scribbled down drafts of poems, mostly in pencil, on anything she had to hand as she went about her daily chores: the backs of envelopes, scraps of kitchen or wrapping paper. Once she used the back of a yellow chocolate-box wrapper from Paris. She wrote a poem on the back of an invitation to a candy pulling she had received a quarter of a century earlier. The painstaking work of revision and editing was done mostly at night at this table. Working by the light of an oil lamp, she copied, revised, and edited, often over a period of several years, the half-formed thoughts and feelings she had jotted down while baking gingerbread, walking her invalid mother in the garden, or tending the plants in the conservatory her father had built for her, and which was her favorite place in the Homestead.

I stood by the table imagining her working there, with her back to me, her thick hair piled on top of her head, the lines of her body visible under her white cotton dress. Then I hurried back down the stairs, crossed the parking lot to where I had left my car, and drove the three quarters of a mile to the Jones Library on Amity Street. There was a slew of messages on my cell phone. One was from a gun dealer in Salt Lake City. Another was from the head of public relations at Sotheby’s in New York. A third was from an Emily Dickinson scholar at Yale University named Ralph Franklin. I did not know it at the time, but these calls were strands in a web of intrigue and mystery that I would spend the next three years trying to untangle. It had all begun when I came across an article in The New York Times, in April 1997, announcing that an unpublished Emily Dickinson poem, the first to be discovered in forty years, was to be auctioned at Sotheby’s. I did not know much about Dickinson at the time, except that she had lived an extremely reclusive life and that she had published almost nothing during her lifetime. The idea that a new work by a great artist, whether it is Emily Dickinson or Vincent van Gogh, could drop out of the sky like this, appealed to my sense of serendipity. Who knows, I remember thinking, maybe one day they will find the original manuscript of Hamlet.

I thought nothing more about the matter until four months later, at the end of August, when I came across a brief four-line announcement at the back of the ‘Public Lives’ section of The New York Times. It reported that the Emily Dickinson poem recently purchased at auction at Sotheby’s for $21,000, by the Jones Library in Amherst, Massachusetts, had been returned as a forgery.

What sort of person, I wondered, had the skill and inventiveness to create such a thing? Getting the right sort of paper and ink would be easy enough. But to forge someone else’s handwriting so convincingly that it could get past Sotheby’s experts? That, I guessed, would be extremely hard. This forger had gone even farther. He had written a poem good enough for it to be mistaken for a genuine work by one of the world’s most original and stylistically idiosyncratic artists. Somehow he had managed to clone Emily Dickinson’s art.

I was also curious about the poem’s provenance. Where had it come from? Whose hands had it passed through? What had Sotheby’s known when they agreed to auction it? The illustrious British firm of auctioneers was much in the news. There were stories of chandelier bids and gangs of professional art smugglers in Italy and India. Had Sotheby’s investigated the poem’s provenance? Or had they known all along that the poem might be a forgery, but had proceeded with the auction in the hope that no one would be able to prove it was?

To find out the answers to some of these questions I called Daniel Lombardo, the man who had bought the poem for the Jones Library in Amherst. What he told me only heightened my curiosity. A few days later I packed a bag and headed north from my home in Long Island toward Amherst with a copy of Emily Dickinson’s poems on the seat beside me.

It was the beginning of a journey that would take me from the white clapboard villages of New England to the salt flats of Utah; from the streets of New York to the Las Vegas Strip. At the heart of that journey were a poet and a murderer. Finding out how they were linked, how one of the world’s most audacious forgeries had been created and how it had got from Utah to Madison Avenue, became an all-consuming obsession. In my search for the truth I would travel thousands of miles and interview dozens of people. Some, like Mark Hofmann’s wife, spoke to me for the first time on record. But I quickly discovered the ‘truth,’ where Mark Hofmann is concerned, is a relative concept. Whether it was his friends and family, or the dealers and auction houses who traded in his forgeries, all claimed to be the innocent victims of a master manipulator. Who was telling the truth? Was anyone? It was like pursuing someone through a labyrinth of mirrors. Paths that promised to lead out of the maze would turn into dead ends. Others that appeared to lead nowhere would suddenly open, leading me forward in directions I had not anticipated. Nothing was what it seemed.

Ahead of me, but always just out of reach, was the forger himself. William Hazlitt’s description of lago, in Shakespeare’s Othello – ‘diseased intellectual activity, with an almost perfect indifference to moral good or evil’ – applies in equal measure to the man who once said that deceiving people gave him a feeling of power. Mark Hofmann was not just a brilliant craftsman, a conjuror of paper and ink who fabricated historical documents with such technical skill that some of the most experienced forensic experts in America could find no signs of forgery. He was a master of human psychology who used hypnosis and mind control to manipulate others and even himself. He was a postmodernist hoaxer who deconstructed the language and mythology of the Mormon Church to create documents that undermined some of the central tenets of its theology. He was successful because he understood how flimsy is the wall between reality and illusion and how willing we are, in our desire to believe in something, to embrace an illusion. When the web of lies and deceit began to unravel, he turned to murder.

We are drawn to those things we are not. Journeying into Mark Hofmann’s world was like descending into a dark pit where all that is most devious and frightening in human nature resides. In the course of that journey I would hear many strange things. I would hear of golden plates inscribed with Egyptian hieroglyphs, and lizards that talked; of angels and Uzis. I would see the corruption beneath the glittering surface of the auction houses, hear lies masquerading as truth, and the truth dismissed as lies. I would encounter detectives and dissident Mormons; forensic documents experts and cognitive psychologists; shapeshifters and frauds. After three years spent trying to unravel the riddle posed by one of the world’s greatest literary forgeries, I feel that I have come as close to the truth as I can possibly get. It is for you, the reader, to decide what it means.




PROLOGUE The Poet and the Murderer (#ulink_db845748-c130-5d8d-964e-fbf78fa760d7)


He thought he had gone under deep enough, but as he followed the curve of the letter m, he felt a momentary tremor like the distant rumbling of an earthquake. It began deep in his cerebral cortex, then traveled along his nerve ends, down his arm, into his hand, until finally it reached his fingers. The tremor lasted only a microsecond, but it was long enough to cause a sudden tightening of the muscles like a rubber band stretching. As he reached the top of the first stroke of the letter m, and the pencil began to plunge back down toward the line, he had felt his hand tremble slightly.

Laying down the pencil, he began to slow his pulse. He relaxed his breathing and counted in patterns of seven as he pulled the oxygen in and out of his lungs. He imagined warmth circulating around his body like an ocean current, and he concentrated on funneling it into his fingertips. As the world contracted to a point between his eyes, he took a fresh sheet of paper and began to visualize the shape of each letter until he could see them laid out on the page in sequence, like an image projected on a screen.

He had spent days practicing her handwriting: the h that toppled forward like a broken chair; the y that lay almost flat along the line, like a snake; and that distinctive t, which looked like an x turned sideways. As he felt himself go deeper into the trance, he began to write. This time he wrote fluently and without hesitation, the letters spooling out of his unconscious in a continuous, uninterrupted flow. It seemed as though she was inside him guiding his hand across the page. As he signed her name, he felt an immense rush of power.

He got up and stretched. It was three in the morning. Upstairs, he heard the baby begin to cry and his wife’s footsteps as she went to comfort him. Crossing the darkened basement, he took down a plastic bag from a shelf where he had hidden it the day before, behind a pile of printing plates. After removing a length of galvanized pipe, he drilled holes into the skin of the cast iron end cap, threaded two wires through the holes, and attached an improvised igniter onto the wires. Then he packed gunpowder into the pipe and threaded on the remaining end cap. In the morning he would drive out to Skull Valley to test the bomb. He got out the two battery packs he had bought some days before at Radio Shack and took down an extension cord from a bracket on the wall. Then he packed everything into a cardboard box. He laid the box next to the poem. It was no great work of art, he thought. But it would do.




CHAPTER ONE Emily Dickinson for Sale (#ulink_9013a45c-5e5e-59a2-a7d1-a883d2cd7e76)


Daniel Lombardo, the curator of Special Collections at the Jones Library in Amherst, Massachusetts, had no idea, as he set off almost twelve years after the events of that night, to drive the fifteen miles to Amherst from his home near West Hampton, that the shock waves from that bomb were about to shake the foundations on which he had built his life.

It was a glorious day in May, and as he made his way over the Coolidge Bridge in his Del Sol sports car, with the top down and his favorite Van Morrison album playing on the tape deck, life felt about as good as it could get. Lombardo loved his job at the library. He was writing a book. He was playing the drums again. His marriage was fulfilling. As he dropped down over the hills toward Amherst, he thought about the announcement he was about to make to members of the Emily Dickinson International Society who had traveled to Amherst from all over America for their annual meeting. If things worked out as Lombardo hoped they would, if he could raise enough money, he was going to be able to make a lasting contribution to the community he had come to call home.

Lombardo vividly remembered the moment when he had first seen the poem. He was sitting at his desk on the top floor of the Jones Library, a large eighteenth-century-style house built of gray granite in the center of Amherst, leafing through the catalog for Sotheby’s June 1997 sale of fine books and manuscripts. Lombardo knew that original, unpublished manuscripts by Dickinson were as rare as black pearls. Indeed, it had been more than forty years since a new Dickinson poem had been found. In 1955 Thomas H. Johnson, a Harvard scholar, had published a three-volume variorum edition, fixing the Dickinson canon at one thousand seven hundred and seventy-five poems. But because of the unusual way that Dickinson’s poems have come down to us – she published almost nothing during her lifetime and was extremely secretive about what she had written (after her death many poems and letters were destroyed by her family) – there has always been a lingering feeling that new material may come to light. The year before, two unknown Dickinson letters had suddenly been found. Who was to say that new poems were not out there, hidden in a dusty attic in Nantucket or the back of a book in a decaying New England mansion?

The poem was listed in the Sotheby’s catalog between a rare 1887 edition of Charles Dickens’s Pickwick Papers, bound in green Morocco leather, and an original watercolor cartoon of Mickey Mouse and Pluto. The catalog described it as an ‘autograph poetical manuscript signed (“Emily”).’ The juxtaposition with Mickey Mouse would have delighted Dickinson, thought Lombardo, as he took out an Amarelline liquorice from the tin he had brought back from a recent trip to Sicily and settled back to read the poem.

It was written in pencil, on a piece of blue-lined paper measuring eight by five inches. On the top left corner was an embossed insignia. And the poem was signed ‘Emily.’ In red ink, at the top right corner of a blank page attached to the poem, someone had also written, ‘Aunt Emily,’ in an unidentified hand:

That God cannot

be understood

Everyone agrees

We do not know

His motives nor

Comprehend his

Deeds –

Then why should I

Seek solace in

What I cannot

Know?

Better to play

In winter’s sun

Than to fear the

Snow

With his elfin features, bushy, russet-brown beard, and shoulder-length hair, Dan Lombardo looks like one of the characters in Tolkien’s The Hobbit. He weighs one hundred pounds and stands five feet two inches tall. Getting up from his desk, he walked over to the imposing, cupboardlike safe standing in the corner of his office. It was taller than he was, made of four-inch-thick steel, and had a combination that only he and the library’s director knew. Inside it were manuscripts worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. Spinning the wheels of the combination lock until the door clicked open, Lombardo took out several Dickinson manuscripts and laid them on his desk.

One was a letter from 1871. The other was a poem called ‘A Little Madness in the Spring,’ which Dickinson had sent to a friend, Elizabeth Holland, in 1875. Written on the same kind of notepaper, in a similar hand, it bore an uncanny resemblance to the poem in the Sotheby’s catalog. It was even written in pencil and signed ‘Emily’:

A little Madness in the Spring

Is wholesome even for the King

But God be with the Clown –

Who ponders this tremendous scene –

This whole Experiment of Green –

As if it were his own!

Lombardo compared the handwriting. Emily Dickinson’s handwriting changed radically during her lifetime. Yet the handwriting from within each period of her life is generally consistent. Lombardo was not an expert, but the handwriting in both poems looked the same. The tone and content of the poems seemed similar as well. The high-water mark of Dickinson’s poetry had been reached the decade before. By the 1870s the flood of creativity that had given the world some of the most heart-powerful and controlled poems ever written in the English language had begun to recede. Dickinson was in her forties. Her eyesight was failing. Her creative powers were declining. Many poems from this period are just such minor ‘wisdom pieces’ as this one seemed to be.

The fact that the poem was signed on the back ‘Aunt Emily’ suggested to Lombardo that it had been written for a child, most probably Ned Dickinson, the poet’s nephew. In 1871 Ned would have been ten years old. He lived next door to her at the Evergreens, and Dickinson, who never had children of her own, adored him. The feeling seems to have been reciprocated. Ned frequently ran across from the Evergreens to visit his brilliant, eccentric aunt. On one occasion he left his rubber boots behind. Dickinson sent them back on a silver tray, their tops stuffed with flowers.

Perhaps this new poem was a similar gesture, thought Lombardo. He knew she had sent Ned other poems that playfully questioned religious beliefs, like one sent him in 1882. It was also written in pencil and signed ‘Emily’:

The Bible is an antique Volume –

Written by faded Men

At the suggestion of Holy Spectres –

Subjects – Bethlehem –

Eden – the ancient Homestead –

Satan – the Brigadier –

Judas – the Great Defaulter –

David – the Troubadour –

Sin – a distinguished Precipice

Others must resist –

Boys that ‘believe’ are very lonesome –

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 …”’

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.

The mention of Kenneth Rendell was reassuring. A tough, ambitious man, with showrooms on New York’s Madison Avenue and in Newton, Massachusetts, Rendell has built one of America’s most successful historical manuscripts businesses. His flair for self-promotion and his immense experience have made him the dealer of choice for some of the richest collectors in the world. Among them is Bill Gates, for whom Rendell is building one of the world’s most important collections of historical documents. When Gates bought Leonardo da Vinci’s celebrated notebook, the Codex Leicester, for $30.8 million in 1994, it was Rendell who was bidding for him. Rendell is also an acknowledged expert on forgery. His book Forging History is a classic. He has also testified in numerous high-profile cases. Indeed, it was Rendell who exposed another celebrated forgery case, the Hitler Diaries, and his testimony at Hofmann’s preliminary hearing in 1986 was crucial in establishing a motive for the two murders. Rendell was away in the South Pacific when Lombardo called, but his office in Boston said they would be happy to forward him a fax. A fax came back from Tahiti saying that he had declined to authenticate the poem for Sotheby’s. Later it would become clear that not only had Rendell never authenticated the poem, he had never even seen it.

Kiffer also told Lombardo that he had consulted a woman named Jennifer Larson about two questionable documents in the catalog for the May 1997 sale, which took place one month before the Dickinson poem was auctioned. Larson is a respected rare books dealer and former chairperson of the Ethics Committee of the Antiquarian Booksellers Association of America. Since the late eighties she has also devoted herself to researching Hofmann’s non-Mormon forgeries to prevent his fakes from contaminating the trade she loves. According to Kiffer, Larson had not raised any concerns about the Dickinson manuscript. Of course. He had never asked her about it.

Lombardo tried to locate Larson in San Francisco, where she ran a store called Yuerba Buena books. She had moved. He made a follow-up call to the Gallery of History, in Las Vegas. Initially, Gareth Williams had told him that the poem had come from a dealer in California who had died. Now he claimed that he was ‘not familiar’ with a Dickinson poem at all. When Lombardo asked to speak to Tammy Kahrs, the archivist who had faxed Ralph Franklin the poem in 1994, Williams said she was dead.

A few days later, Williams called back, this time in an agitated mood. He said that maybe the Gallery of History had had a Dickinson poem, but he could not recall the details. He also made it clear that Lombardo’s inquiries were not welcome. When Lombardo asked him to check back through the records for any information about the poem’s provenance, Williams told him that he could not. The computers were down.

The next piece in the puzzle fell into place when Lombardo reached Jennifer Larson at her new home in Rochester, New York. The documentation she faxed Lombardo – documentation that she could have made available to Sotheby’s, if they had asked – was enough to make any reputable dealer not want to touch the Dickinson poem. Included in it was a copy of Hofmann’s travel records, which the police had put together for the trial. These placed Hofmann in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1983 and 1984. Perhaps Hofmann had traveled to Cambridge to visit the Houghton Library at Harvard, which holds the largest number of Dickinson manuscripts.

Larson also told Lombardo that she had spoken to a TV reporter from Salt Lake City named Con Psarris, who had made a number of programs about Hofmann’s forgeries. In October 1990, while researching a possible Emily Dickinson connection, he had sent Hofmann the text of the poem that had appeared in Axelrod’s book, querying whether it was a forgery. The poem began ‘That God cannot be understood,’ but Psarras had slightly misquoted the remainder of the poem. Hofmann had replied from his jail cell with the pedantry of a university professor. ‘The E. Dickinson item referred to is a forgery,’ he wrote via his lawyer, Ron Yengich. He then wrote out the authoritative version of the text, emending several points of punctuation and capitalization. It was the poem Daniel Lombardo had bought at Sotheby’s.

The evidence against the poem began look compelling, if not complete, but Lombardo had to be sure. He contacted Robert Backman, a clinical graphologist with twenty years of experience with the Department of Defense (during World War II he worked on forgeries that appeared as propaganda). Backman came to Amherst to examine the poem. One of the things that made it so hard to prove either way was that the poem was written in pencil. Ink can be subjected to cyclotron tests and chemical analyses. But there are no forensic tests for pencil.

The pencil was first developed in the Renaissance, when artists began to use styluses made of silver or lead for ruling lines or drawing. The first mention of the lead pencil as we know it today came in a treatise on fossils published in England in 1565. A year earlier, in the village of Borrowdale, in Cumbria, a violent storm had uprooted a giant oak tree. Beneath it was found a vast deposit of almost pure graphite, and the pencil was born. At first, sticks of graphite were simply inserted in a wooden sheath. But by the middle of the next century these crudely made wooden pencils had been replaced by pencils made of ground graphite dust mixed with adhesives. Later, clay was added and the pencil leads were fired in kilns to increase their hardness and uniformity. Apart from manufacturing improvements the only development since then has been the introduction of the mechanical pencil in 1822. As a result it is almost impossible to date documents written in pencil.

Backman knew this. Even the phrase ‘Aunt Emily,’ which had been written in a different hand, on the back of the manuscript, in red indelible pencil – and not, as Sotheby’s listed it in their catalog, in red ink – appeared to be authentic. Like Franklin and Lombardo before him he concluded that the paper was right. The handwriting also appeared to be genuine. But when Lombardo told him that the document had once been in the hands of Mark Hofmann, Backman shook his head and said, ‘Well, that changes everything.’

If the experts could not tell a Hofmann forgery, how could Lombardo ever determine the truth about the poem? And if he could not definitively prove to Sotheby’s that the poem was a forgery, he would not be able to force them to return the library’s money. The circumstantial evidence strongly suggested the poem was not authentic. But each time Lombardo looked at the poem he found it impossible to believe that a forger could have got inside Emily Dickinson’s mind, and simulated her handwriting, so seamlessly and completely as this.

Lombardo’s next call, to David Hewitt, a journalist with the Maine Antiques Digest who had written two in-depth features about the Hofmann case, confused him even more. Hewitt told him that Hofmann was a compulsive liar and a braggart, and that on several occasions, in an attempt to win favor with the parole board, had even confessed to forgeries that he had never executed. Was the Emily Dickinson poem one of his false claims? Where was the truth?

Both Dan Lombardo and Ralph Franklin had read the report of a forensic scientist named George Throckmorton, who had done extensive examinations of Hofmann’s forgeries at the time of the 1986 trial, using an ultraviolet lamp and a high-powered stereo microscope. The Beinecke Library had both. So, on a hot day in the middle of August, Lombardo packed ‘That God Cannot Be Understood’ into his briefcase, along with about $100,000 worth of other Dickinson manuscripts from the Jones Library’s collection, and set off in his car for New Haven.

Franklin and Lombardo worked in a darkroom in the basement of the Beinecke Library. As the poem had been written in pencil, there would be no telltale signs of chemical tampering with the ink. But there might be on the paper. Under ultraviolet light any attempt to age the paper artificially with chemicals would cause it to fluoresce. Would this be the proof they were looking for? It wasn’t. The paper did not fluoresce. When they looked at the poem under the ultraviolet lamp, they thought that they detected a slight opalescent blue smear, like a brushstroke, around the boss mark. Franklin was not certain, but he sensed that something was not quite right with the embossed image of the Capitol stamped on the top left-hand corner of the page. There were also splotches along the edges of the document in that area, as though some sort of chemical had been spilled there. Had Hofmann applied a chemical to the paper to make it ‘take’ the boss mark better?

Next Franklin examined the poem under a stereo microscope, with a powerful raking light shone from the side. This would show the boss mark in better relief. The roof of the Capitol building on the boss mark looked flat. In other examples of boss marks from Capitol stationery Franklin had brought for comparison, there appeared to be a cupola on the roof. On its own this might not have been enough, but in conjunction with the slight fluorescence this tiny flaw made Franklin and Lombardo suspicious. Or perhaps there was a Congress boss mark they did not know of. Perhaps it was the right boss mark, and the paper had simply not been impressed as strongly as usual. Was that why the cupola seemed faint? Every answer led to fresh questions.

Franklin also used the stereo microscope to study the capital E in the word Everyone, which he felt showed signs of hesitation. When we write, the pen or pencil moves fluently and unhesitatingly across the page, touching and lifting from the paper rather like a plane landing and taking off. We don’t pause to think about what we are doing. If we do, we usually make a mistake. Forgers are not writing naturally, however. They have to think about what they are doing, and they often give themselves away by making awkward pen-lifts or hesitating in the middle of a letter. Was the slight hesitation Franklin had detected the telltale sign that the poem was a forgery?

A few days later Lombardo reached a man named Shannon Flynn. Flynn, a jovial Irish-American from Salt Lake City, had negotiated many of Hofmann’s business deals and acted as his courier. Flynn was also a crack marksman and firearms expert. When Hofmann was arrested, the police had found a cache of weapons at Flynn’s apartment: a lugged rifle, a Magnum .357, and an Uzi that had been converted to fully automatic status.

If anyone had told Lombardo when he became curator of Special Collections at the Jones Library that he would one day be making phone calls to a man in Salt Lake City whom the police had questioned for ten hours as a suspected accessory to a double murder, he would have laughed. When he reached Flynn at a Salt Lake City gun shop named Pro Arms and Ammunition, he also realized, for the first time, that he was frightened.

As it turned out, he had nothing to fear. All charges relating to the murders had eventually been dropped against Flynn, and since Hofmann had gone to jail, he had made it his policy to be completely transparent with both the media and the DA’s office. To Lombardo he confirmed that, in 1985, he had flown from Salt Lake City to Las Vegas, on Mark Hofmann’s behalf, to deliver what purported to be a poem by Emily Dickinson to Todd Axelrod, of the Gallery of History.

Lombardo now felt he had enough circumstantial evidence to prove the poem was a forgery. Though David Redden of Sotheby’s had said there was no connection, direct or indirect, to the Gallery of History, it now seemed to Lombardo almost certain that the poem had indeed come from Las Vegas. He knew that Axelrod had bought it from Hofmann. Ipso facto, unless Axelrod had not told Sotheby’s where he had originally obtained the poem, they must have known of or suspected a Hofmann connection.

Lombardo faxed David Redden, at Sotheby’s, a one-page letter detailing his suspicions. Redden did not even bother to return his calls. Instead he had an underling, Kimball Higgs, respond. ‘It certainly looks like a forgery,’ Higgs said offhandedly. ‘It’s our problem. Please send the poem back.’ And the $24,000? Higgs told Lombardo that there should be ‘no problem’ about that. But when Lombardo asked for Sotheby’s agreement in writing that they would return the library’s money, Higgs declined.

Six days later Lombardo met with the board of trustees of the Jones Library in Amherst. It was a moment he had been dreading. He had kept his doubts, and all the research he had done, secret. Now he was about to tell his community and the world that the Emily Dickinson poem was a fake. The members of the board of trustees reacted with a mixture of shock and sympathy. One person burst into hysterical laughter at the sheer absurdity of what had been done to them. ‘I was heartbroken,’ recalled Lombardo, ‘just completely heartbroken that I had let so many people down.’ But this was no time for self-pity. Lombardo notified Sotheby’s that in forty-eight hours he would be issuing a press release stating that the poem was a forgery, and that he would like by that time their assurance in writing that the Jones Library would receive a full refund. A few days later, Sotheby’s complied with his demand. ‘There was no apology. No embarrassment,’ said Lombardo tartly.

‘It was as if this was just a little blip in their daily business. Just routine.’




CHAPTER FOUR Auction Artifice (#ulink_648e34f9-76f3-5a23-8183-ebfca65a5ddb)


Though Sotheby’s counts among its board of directors two lords, an earl, a marquess, and Her Royal Highness the Infanta Pilar de Bourbon, duchess of Badajoz, it has, since its foundation in London in 1744, auctioned numerous works of art, and manuscripts, that have turned out to be forgeries.

The small print in their catalogs does include a guarantee of authenticity, albeit one limited to five years. But if anything proves to be ‘wrong,’ Sotheby’s (and this applies to all the auction houses) can always say, as they routinely do, that they are merely the agents for the sale and, therefore, not directly responsible. The onus is on you, the purchaser, to satisfy yourself that the article you buy is genuine. The codes of secrecy by which auction houses conceal the identity of both consignor and purchaser add a further level of obfuscation. Caveat emptor.

It is a familiar ritual: a stolen painting, or a fake Chippendale chair, passes through the salesroom. Doubts are raised. The auction house returns the consignor’s money, disclaims its responsibility to police the market, then six months or a year later the same happens all over again. In 1997 an exposé by Channel 4 actually showed a Sotheby’s employee in Milan smuggling an Old Master painting out of Italy: one instance of a cynical and widespread pattern of abuse by which unprovenanced art from Italy and India, much of it stolen by organized gangs of grave robbers, had been, with the full knowledge of Sotheby’s, put under the hammer at its UK auction house.

The Dispatches program and the subsequent media exposure – a headline in The Times read, ‘Sotheby’s and the Art of Smuggling’ – seemed to have a sobering effect on the company. In March 1997, with much fanfare, Sotheby’s announced a $10 million inquiry to be run out of the New York office, under the direct supervision of its glamorous new chief executive, Diana D. Brooks.

Only later would it become clear that just as Ms. Brooks was asking the world to believe that such cases of malpractice were isolated, not systemic, Sotheby’s was being shaken by allegations that its chairman, Alfred Taubman, had negotiated a commission fixing deal, with Christie’s in London. Those charges led to Ms. Brooks’s resignation and charges of fraud and malpractice being leveled against Taubman, for which he would face a possible term in jail.

Taubman’s attempt to fix commission fees was motivated by naked greed. By the mid-nineties Sotheby’s – and Christie’s – had turned what in the eighteenth century was regarded as a rather grubby and dishonorable trade into a multibillion-dollar industry. Like owning a Porsche or a house in the Hamptons, raising a paddle at an auction had come to be regarded as an essential rite de passage of the very rich. And as the longest bull market in history began its vertiginous climb, prices went through the roof. In 1996 a pretty enough, but not great, John Singer Sargent painting called ‘Cashmere’ sold in New York for $11.1 million. In the same year a sculpture by a minor French artist, titled ‘Petite Danseuse de Quatorze Ans,’ sold for $11.9 million.

The rare books and manuscripts department is the poor cousin at Sotheby’s. The big money is in fine art and jewels. Rare books and manuscripts also take a long time to catalog. As a result there is enormous pressure to turn over as much volume as possible. ‘Everything is hype these days,’ said Justin Schiller, a well-known dealer of antiquarian books. ‘In the old days you would collect things with true value. Today people don’t know what to collect, so you have things like Diana’s dresses selling for $250,000 or a Honus Wagner baseball card for $500,000. It’s not what the auction houses are making on these things. The real value is in the publicity.’ Splashy, one-of-a-kind items like an unpublished Emily Dickinson poem are worth far more than the commission. They generate headlines. And bring in the punters.

The hunger for hype, combined with a captive clientele, has created the perfect environment for what Samuel T. Coleridge called, in a different context, the willing suspension of disbelief. This operates just as powerfully with the purchaser.

‘There is an incredible desire on the part of people to believe that something they have purchased is real,’ Jennifer Larson said. ‘It is what you think you have and want to believe you have – not what you really have – that matters.’

Mark Hofmann knew this too. He once said of his Mormon forgeries that they were documents he felt could have been part of Mormon history. He also said that deceiving people gave him a feeling of power. More than greed, this hunger for power – the power to shape and change history – seems to be ultimately what drove him. His forgeries found willing buyers because they told stories people wanted to hear.

The auction houses also tell stories, in the form of the narratives they publish in their catalogs. The most appealing stories of all have an element of mystery and romance: like the elderly woman who cuts the back off an old picture frame and finds a John Singer Sargent painting; or the bank clerk who stumbles on a priceless Washington letter while leafing through a dusty archive during her lunch break. The public loves these stories as they love stories of buried treasure. They appeal to the side of us that wants to believe in Lady Luck, in coincidence, and serendipity.

Facts that might take away from the attractiveness of a painting or manuscript, raise suspicions about its authenticity, or comprise the owner’s desire for anonymity, are carefully excised from the stories that the auction houses tell. The catalog for the auction at which the Emily Dickinson poem was sold, for instance, cited august individuals and institutions like Randolph Hearst as consignees. It did not mention the Gallery of History in Las Vegas.

Something similar had already happened. When Hofmann was arrested in 1985, his possessions were seized to pay off his creditors. Hofmann was not just a forger. He was also a serious book collector. And when police raided his house in Salt Lake City, they found a magnificent collection of antiquarian children’s books. The person chosen to dispose of Hofmann’s children’s books was a book dealer in California named Mark Hime. From him the books found their way to a well-known New York collector by the name of Richard Manney. A few years later Manney consigned his collection to Sotheby’s for sale.

The books appeared in Sotheby’s October 11, 1991, catalog as the Richard Manney Library. Detailed provenance was given to reinforce the importance and legitimacy of the collection. But one name was missing: Mark Hofmann’s.

These were not the first Hofmann items that Sotheby’s had sold either. In October 1985, only two weeks after he was arrested for murder, a Daniel Boone letter, supposedly written during the Indian Wars in Kentucky, was put under the hammer for $31,900. It came with a wonderful story of Boone’s heroism on the American frontier. But the manuscript was consigned by a Salt Lake City businessman named Kenneth Woolley, who had in turn bought it from his cousin, Mark Hofmann. If anyone had looked closely they might also have noticed that the letter was dated April 1.

Ken Farnsworth, one of two lead investigators for the Salt Lake City DA’s office, had called Sotheby’s at the time, to warn them about the Boone document. Hofmann was already behind bars. But having seen numerous lives shattered by Hofman’s forgeries, Farnsworth was determined to get as many of them as he could off the market. He contacted antiquarian book dealers all over America. He contacted the New York Public Library and the Library of Congress and the American Antiquarian Society. He visited the British Library. He even went to Paris and alerted one of France’s leading historical documents dealers.

All these institutions were extremely cooperative. But when he contacted Sotheby’s he was met with a wall of silence. At first he was told that the auction house would provide the name and address of the consignee of the Boone letter if he (Farnsworth) provided a written account of his findings. When he forwarded a letter detailing his suspicions, he was told that Sotheby’s would only comply with a subpoena from a court. Mike George, another Salt Lake City investigator who worked on the Hofmann case, remembers similar problems. ‘At Sotheby’s we were met with “Don’t want to talk to you, don’t care what you have to say.”’

One person did care, it seems. Mary Jo Kline, the Sotheby’s employee who handled the sale of the Boone letter, informed the head of the the rare books and manuscripts department that in the future she would never again catalog anything that had passed through Hofmann’s hands. Her boss acquiesced and, as far as Kline was concerned, agreed to a larger policy decision: never to handle anything with Hofmann provenance. Three years after that, in a move that shocked the closely knit historical documents world, Kline’s boss thanked her for her pains by terminating her. His name was David Redden. Redden was still at the helm twelve years later when, a month before Sotheby’s auctioned the Dickinson poem, they advertised two other Hofmann forgeries in their May 1997 catalog. One was a minor Daniel Boone autograph. The other was a sensational item: a Reward of Merit, ‘one of only three ever discovered,’ signed by Nathan Hale.

When he saw the Hale document in the catalog, Brent Ashworth, who would later alert them to a possible Hofmann connection with the Dickinson poem, called Selby Kiffer and told him that he had seen the Hale manuscript in one of Todd Axelrod’s stores and believed it was also a Hofmann forgery. As he would a month later with the Dickinson poem, Kiffer denied that the document came from Las Vegas. He seemed to have taken Ashworth’s warnings seriously, though, for on May 2 Kimball Higgs contacted Jennifer Larson by fax. ‘Here are two lots that Brent [Ashworth] brought to our attention as possible MH [Mark Hofmann] originals. He felt sure about the Hale and less positive about the Boone. If you have an opinion we would love to hear it.’

Larson faxed back a raft of documentation. The first item read: ‘Appears on Mark Hofmann’s holographic list, “Forged Non-Mormon Autographs.”’ This was the list found in Hofmann’s prison cell in Draper, Utah, in 1988.

Both Daniel Boone and Nathan Hale were on the list. So was Emily Dickinson. Sotheby’s withdrew the Boone document but kept the far more valuable Hale autograph in the auction. It was put under the hammer for $27,000. After the sale, as doubts about it began to multiply, Selby Kiffer told the Maine Antiques Digest that Kenneth Rendell had ‘authenticated’ the Hale document. When Rendell learned of this, he was incensed. ‘I am meticulously careful about not expressing opinions on things we do not sell,’ insisted Rendell. ‘It was totally inaccurate.’ In a letter to the Maine Antiques Digest, Marsha Malinowski distanced herself from Kiffer’s assertion that Rendell had ‘authenticated’ the Hale manuscript, and Kiffer would later apologize to Rendell for misusing his name. (No such apologies were made to Daniel Lombardo, however, even though Malinowski had claimed to him that Rendell had also authenticated the Emily Dickinson poem.) Not only had Rendell never authenticated the Reward of Merit, he had found it highly questionable when he had seen it at Sotheby’s public display before the auction. ‘There was a coloration I didn’t like about the document, a shifting of the ink that reminded me of some of the Mark Hofmann stuff.’ Rendell said nothing to Sotheby’s. But having spotted the effect on the Hale manuscript, he decided that, however cheap it would be, he would not bid on it.

One of the people who had nearly bought the Hale document was the well-known New York book dealer Justin Schiller. Schiller had almost been bankrupted by his dealings with Mark Hofmann in the 1980s, something that was well known to everyone in the trade. But during a phone call to Selby Kiffer at Sotheby’s a week before the May 19 auction, when Schiller had made known his interest in acquiring the document and sought to find out its provenance, Kiffer had made no mention of a Hofmann connection. ‘When you buy from an auction house like Sotheby’s, you assume that there is a legitimate title, and that everything else has been validated by the auction attorneys,’ said Schiller. ‘So unless I had been alerted by the auction house that there could have been a problem, I would not have suspected anything. I trust the system.’ In this case his trust was misplaced. For by the time he called, Sotheby’s had received enough evidence from Jennifer Larson of a Hofmann connection to make even the rankest amateur not want to touch the Nathan Hale Reward of Merit. Larson had told Sotheby’s, for instance, that in an interview with Mike George, Hofmann had stated that he forged two printed documents by Hale: Rewards of Merit with Hale’s inscription on them, signed to the better students he was teaching. Larson also alerted Sotheby’s to the fact that a similar Nathan Hale document had been sold at auction by Charles Hamilton in August 1983, and that among the evidence seized by Salt Lake City police was a record of a registered shipment from Mark Hofmann to Charles Hamilton dated July 13, in other words three weeks before the auction. Finally, she enclosed a letter written to her by Hofmann from jail, on June 29, 1990. ‘Your note reminded me of the Nathan Hale “Reward of Merit” which I failed to mention in my letter of June 25,’ writes Hofmann. ‘It is, indeed, a forgery.’




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