Capital Murder: Emily Dickinson and the Case of the Missing Metonyms

Capital murder? Yes. In two senses. 

I refer to the notorious forgery of an Emily Dickinson poem fabricated by the homicidal fraudster and Mormon iconoclast, Mark Hofmann, whose inspired fakery – conceived to dupe academia – first surfaced in a catalogue of Fine Books and Manuscripts mailed to collectors by a major international auction house in 1997. Reportedly, the manuscript was sold for $21,000.

Left: Emily’s true pencilled script. (Circa her final decade.)

Right: Mark Hofmann’s forgery with line-breaks defined by
width of Emily Dickinson’s folded, lined, fascicle-style paper.
(Facing page, a graphologist belatedly denounces Forgery.) 

Commendable reverse-engineering? 

While commending the ‘reverse-engineered’ invention of a fellow fictionist, I find, however, I am compelled to take issue with at least three shortcomings in Hoffman’s criminal act of poetic personation. Since I am well-known as a fixated completist, I trust you’ll understand why these deficiencies in Hofmann’s attempts to replicate a venerated canonical style continue to rankle with me.

 

But first the verses. Can you spot the howlers?

 

                                        That God cannot be understood

                                        Everyone agrees

                                        We do not know His motives nor

                                        Comprehend his Deeds –

                                        Then why should I seek solace in

                                        What I cannot know?

                                        Better to play in winter’s sun
                                        Than to fear the Snow.

Surely – everyone agrees – a defining characteristic of Dickinson’s verse is the metonymic capitalisation of her motifs . . . they are the signature feature of her rhetorical devices.

So . . .  hang on! 

Blooper 1: Where’s the capitalised ‘H’ for His deeds? ‘Reverential capitalisation’ is a scriptural convention no devout 19th Century versifier would be without.

Blooper 2: As to the familiar capitalised Dickinsonian metonyms, where is the consistency that would balance the figuration of Life and Death as Sun and Snow?

Blooper 3: Conversely, it’s evident to me that Hofmann was naïvely overeager in his assumption that line-breaks in Emily’s manuscripts necessarily indicate capitalisation of the next line . (You can see in the example of her true hand, Left, the constraint of her notepaper width does NOT determine the capitalisation of her verses: Though the great Waters sleep, / That they are still the Deep, / We cannot doubt —) 

I suspect that Emily lived through a period of reappraisal as to personified nouns. I have always considered it curious that the four seasons in our language remain uncapitalised. Surely spring, when personified, takes a capital? And is feminine? (Emily sees Grass as Nature deserving of a feminine possessive determiner and pronoun . . . the Wind is a capitalised male, a metonym for God: The Wind does not require the Grass / To answer—Wherefore when He pass / She cannot keep Her place.)

By the late 19th Century, discriminatory capitalisation was a subject of fickle debate. As a certain flippant connoisseur pronounced in 1896, ‘Many are ready to talk of some crafts under the name of art, which must now be spelt with a capital letter – why it written with the capitalest of letters, I know no more than the artists.’

A criminal act of poetic personation.

With hindsight, it’s glib to claim special insights into this shabby affair of literary forgery BUT I do profoundly believe greater vigilance could have been observed on the purely textual details I’ve identified. 

Yes, the forger’s writing-paper was manufactured in Boston most probably in 1871, when Emily was in her forties. 

Yes, Emily often wrote in pencil (and, fortunately for forgers, pencil lead cannot be forensically dated).

Yes, the forger’s script replicated the hand of a poetess no longer cursive in her febrile latter years whose decline saw each character printed separately like that of a child. Nevertheless, there is a crudity in the hesitant execution that betrays the faker’s ineptitude.  (As an apparent holograph – especially the stumbled signing of her given name – the whole thing seems insincere.)

Yes and Yes, the verse itself  is an inspired enviable pastiche, despite its vague provenance.. 

 

(In fact, may I recommend the brilliant prize-winning short story, Fascicle 41 by Anna McGrail, published in 2016 in The London Magazine, which most ingeniously questions the provenance of Dickinsonian forgeries up to the point of casting doubt on the provenance of the story’s protagonists themselves.                                                          See:https://www.thelondonmagazine.org/article/fascicle-41-by-anna-mcgrail/               May I presume to recommend the reader should memorise Hofmann’s verse then read Fascicle 41, which was maybe Anna’s intention in her artful game. Unlike Hofmann’s skullduggery, her plot line is unbeatable.)

 

Em Dash. Separatrices where she drew breath.

That my immersion in Dickinsonian speculations began many, many years ago is manifest in my writing of A Room to the End of Fall (composed in my late 20s and finally published in A Bad Case, 2014, by Salt). I quote an extract to demonstrate how period diction – as Hofmann’s pastiche exemplifies – can add colour and tone to sustain a momentary verisimilitude . . . momentary, that is, until the Deconstructionists start tearing it apart.

Here is an extract from the fictional Theresa Ollivante’s fictional novel, An Auroral Stain. . . 

An Auroral Stain was conceived as a postbellum detective story and built on the fictitious premise of a private investigation by a housebound Emily Dickinson intent to solve the mystery of a serving-woman’s suspicious death, ably assisted by Maggie, her faithful Irish maid; my central conceit has the young colleen and her phobic mistress sleuthing as a sort of composite Massachusite Nancy Drew.
          In those early months, I wrote most of the core passages of An Auroral Stain.
          Was it the muffled chiming of the bells from those Irishtown churches on each street corner or the sheer drudgery of my austere day-to-day routines that I found conducive to the mapping of the febrile psyche of the Belle of Amherst and the quaint notions of her resourceful Irish maid?
          Sometimes I would hear the faint strains of a fiddle diddlydeeing and it was as if the once-hidden roots of a deep-set tree were exposed raw above ground.
          Anyhow, the brogue of those Irishtown denizens must have still been ringing in my ears when I wrote:

“A sneeze as long as Nebuchadnezzar!” Maggie scolded as she took her mistress’s wet cape and hat.                                                                                        The maid had been kneeling on the homestead veranda, whitewashing a garden bench in a curious atavistic ritual, as if to welcome a long-lost relation to a hooley.                                                                                                      She took Emily by the elbow and led her, half-fainting, to her room.            That night she attended her mistress in her delirium, hearing her call out strange imprecations: “Refuse the mediciners, damn you! Why are our people backslidden!”                                                                                              So wild and convulsed was her expression she was raving a jeremiad.         “There is no medicine against death!” she gasped. “Take heed, girl, of the promise of a man, for it will run like a crab!”                                                   “By the cross,” Maggie exclaimed, “there is fey blood i’ ye’re head! The poor darlin’s brain’s on fire and full of proclamations!”

         In my notes to my novel I encoded “Emily” as “Em Dash,” both on account of her mercurial nature and of her all-pervasive typographical separatrices that signal the places where you should catch your breath before resuming her spare end-stopped verses.

See also:  

Miss Emily Dickinson Communes with the Great Dictator Mr John Milton . . . http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2019/10/miss-emily-dickinson-communes-with.html

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Hanged by a comma. 

See also: Oscar Wilde, apostrophiser of boys but not punctuation . . .  https://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2011/10/wilde-apostrophiser-of-boys-but-not.html

David’s Lyre Music
for Jonathan
 
The greatest beauty is unenjoyed.
On fruit ungarnered from the stem
falls dew from dawns as unalloyed
as lips unkissed whose savage charm
is stainlessly uncharactered
by the corruptibility of self regard.

Notes: Visual/tactile evidence. Printed letterhead (Cobalt Blue): Cadogan
Hotel, Sloane Street. (Twice folded from size 22cm width x 17.6cm height.)
Holograph letter superscribed above left margin with: Saturday April 6/
For Charles Matthews/Ah! Lest I speak it’s [sic] name! [Presumed date: April 1895.]
Verse: David’s Lyre Music for Jonathan. Signature: Truly yours/Oscar
Wilde. [Note: Charles Mathews, with one ‘t’, was the third member of
Wilde’s defence counsel.] The two minor errors are plausible failings of a
cavalier orthographer. The type of urgent, flying cursive handwriting of
Wilde’s letters at the time of his trials, beseeching loans from friends, is
absent in the Cadogan Hotel Letter, suggesting that at the time of his
arrest (April 6 1895), Wilde had composed himself in contemplation of his fate.

•

Catherine Eisner believes passionately in plot-driven suspense fiction, a devotion to literary craft that draws on studies in psychoanalytical criminology and psychoactive pharmacology to explore the dark side of motivation, and ignite plot twists with unexpected outcomes. Within these disciplines Eisner’s fictions seek to explore variant literary forms derived from psychotherapy and criminology to trace the traumas of characters in extremis. Compulsive recurring sub-themes in her narratives examine sibling rivalry, rivalrous cousinhood, pathological imposture, financial chicanery, and the effects of non-familial male pheromones on pubescence, 

see Eisner’s Sister Morphine (2008)
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/sister-morphine.html

and Listen Close to Me (2011)
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/published-this-autumn-listen-close-to.html 

and A Bad Case (2014)

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2015/07/a-bad-case-and-other-adventures-of.html

 
. . .