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
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