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