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
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
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