The Poet and the Murderer: A True Story of Verse, Violence and the Art of Forgery. Simon Worrall
at Yale University’s legendary Beinecke Library.
CHAPTER TWO A Riddle in a Locked Box
From the outside the Beinecke Library looks like a stage set for a George Lucas movie. Designed by one of the most celebrated architects of the twentieth century, Gordon Bunshaft, who also created the Lever House and several other of New York’s most famous skyscrapers, the Beinecke is a black glass cube lined with one-and-a-half-inch-thick translucent panes of Vermont marble that change color as the sun moves around the building. Extending vertically through its center, like a spinal column, is a six-story-high glass shaft housing one of the world’s most valuable collections of rare books and manuscripts. Among its treasures are a copy of the Gutenberg Bible and one of the jewels of medieval illuminated mansucripts, the Savoy Hours. Its literary works include such gems of Anglo-Saxon culture as the original manuscripts of W. B. Yeats’s poem ‘Among Schoolchildren,’ Thomas Hardy’s Far From the Madding Crowd, and James Boswell’s Life of Johnson. It has rare sixteenth- and seventeenth-century printed works from Germany, France, and Italy; the world’s largest collection of playing cards; and a priceless bequest of Tibetan Buddhist manuscripts, including the Lhasa edition of the Kanjur in one hundred volumes that was personally donated by His Holiness the Fourteenth Dalai Lama in 1950.
The person responsible for the safety and well-being of these cultural treasures is a dapper, intensely focused man with a compact, muscular body, cropped gray hair, gray-blue eyes the color of the Atlantic in winter, and skin as white as the parchment he spends his life handling. For the last twenty years Ralph Franklin has also tirelessly edited one of the twentieth century’s great works of literary scholarship and detective work: the definitive, three-volume edition of Emily Dickinson’s poems.
Though Franklin had not said so the first time Dan Lombardo had called him, he had seen the poem three years earlier, in 1994, when it was faxed to him by Tammy Kahrs, chief archivist at the Gallery of History in Las Vegas.
Like Lombardo, Franklin was not particularly impressed by the quality of the poem. It read, he thought, like a Hallmark card. That could be explained by the fact that Dickinson appeared to be writing for a juvenile reader. Masterpiece or not, the idea that a new Dickinson poem, the first in forty years, had surfaced set Franklin’s blood racing. If it were to be authentic, it would be an exciting addition to the new edition of the poet’s works that Franklin was preparing.
On the phone that day Tammy Kahrs had sounded more like a country singer than a bibliophile to Franklin, but she seemed to know what she was talking about. One thing that particularly impressed Franklin was that, according to Kahrs, the previous owners of the manuscript had dated it to 1871. As Franklin knew better than anyone, dating manuscripts by Dickinson was extremely complicated. That the previous owners had ascribed such a precise date suggested to Franklin that the poem had originally come from a descendant of the Dickinson family. In the back of Franklin’s mind stirred the hope they might have other new poems.
The fact that the poem originated in Las Vegas, a city better known for slot machines than sonnets, did not overly trouble him. Manuscripts, he knew, can turn up anywhere, and the Gallery of History seemed to know quite a bit about this poem. According to Kahrs the paper was lined, and the embossing had the word Congress over a picture of the Capitol. Franklin knew that Dickinson had used numerous different letter papers at different times in her life. They came from mills all over New England, like Bridgeman and Childs in Northampton, Massachusetts. Some were embossed with a queen’s head or a flower set in an oval. Some bore the imprint of an eagle’s head. In 1871 she was frequently using Congress paper. Such precise knowledge, Franklin knew, is not easy to come by, particularly when the writer in question was someone as private as Emily Dickinson.
Most writers leave behind them a paper trail of letters, diaries, and publications from which a chronology of their work can be reconstructed. We know, for instance, when William Wordsworth wrote The Prelude. We know where the poet was living, what events in his life precipitated the poem, where it was first published, how much he received for it, what others said about it at the time, and where it fits into the arc of his life and work.
None of this applies to Emily Dickinson. ‘I found (the week after her death),’ wrote her sister, Lavinia Dickinson, in May 1886, ‘a box (locked) containing seven hundred wonderful poems, carefully copied.’ None of these seven hundred poems, or the other one thousand and eighty-nine that would later be located, was dated. Only twenty-four had titles. Only ten had been published in her lifetime, and those against her will. Publication, Dickinson once famously wrote, was ‘the Auction / Of the Mind of Man.’ She preferred what she called her ‘Barefoot Rank.’
Imagine if Picasso had never exhibited during his lifetime but that, after his death, his paintings were simply found piled in his studio, without dates or titles or any other clues as to when they were painted, who for, where, or why. The riddle Emily Dickinson left behind was made even more complex because of the confused and haphazard way in which her poems were eventually published. The first person to bring out an edition was the wife of an astronomy professor at Amherst College named Mabel Loomis Todd. A pretty, vivacious woman with limpid brown eyes, she had been the secret mistress of Dickinson’s brother, Austin Dickinson. Working with one of Dickinson’s closest friends, the editor Thomas Wentworth Higginson, she produced three popular selections of Dickinson’s poetry between 1890 and 1896.
Todd might have gone on to bring out a complete edition, if it had not been for a strip of land that Austin Dickinson left her at his death in 1895. Outraged by this affront to the family’s name, Lavinia Dickinson, the poet’s sister, sued Mabel Loomis Todd successfully for its return. Relations were even frostier between Susan Gilbert Dickinson, Austin’s widow, and Mabel Loomis Todd, his former mistress, both of whom possessed substantial quantities of poems and letters. The ill feeling was passed to the next generation. Between 1914 and 1945 Martha Dickinson Bianci, Sue’s daughter, and Millicent Todd Bingham, Mabel’s daughter, fought a bitter battle over Dickinson’s legacy, bringing out competing editions of the manuscript materials they had inherited from their warring mothers.
All these early editions were flawed. Poems were ordered according to the whim of the editors who took Dickinson’s jazzy, idiosyncratic rhyme schemes and highly unusual orthography and changed them to suit late-nineteenth-century tastes. The Harvard scholar Thomas Johnson eventually restored Dickinson’s unique voice and style, and established a chronology for the poems.
Johnson’s edition also plucked a shy girl from Massachusetts out of her self-chosen seclusion and turned her into the It girl of modern American poetry. ‘I like, or at least I admire, her a great deal more now,’ the poet Elizabeth Bishop wrote to Robert Lowell in 1956, ‘probably because of that good new edition, really. I spent another stretch absorbed in that, and think … that she’s about the best we have.’
But Johnson’s variorum edition was not published until almost seventy years after Dickinson’s death, and it did not resolve all the tangled editorial problems she left behind her. Johnson had only been able to consult Photostats of many of the poems, and so there were errors in the transcriptions. Other versions of the poems began to surface, and in the rapidly growing academic industry that had sprung up around Dickinson, debate raged about everything from the dating of the poems to the layout of the words on the page. A new referee was needed.
Ralph Franklin, the ambitious, quick-witted director of the Beinecke Library, whose work on Dickinson’s manuscripts went back to the late 1960s, was the person chosen for the job. The first thing he did was to go back to the original manuscript books in which Dickinson had stored her poems. Having scribbled down a draft of a poem, usually in pencil, Dickinson would set about the exacting work of revision and editing. This was done mostly at night, sitting at the table in her bedroom on the second floor of the Homestead. The process of editing and revising a poem might go on for months or even years. Only when she was completely satisfied did she write a finished copy of the poem. This time she wrote in ink, not pencil; and instead of the scraps of kitchen paper or backs of an envelope she used for drafts, she wrote the final versions of her poems on a sheet of notepaper already folded by the