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

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?

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.