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