Forger Mark Hofmann and His Joseph Smiths

Review of Simon Worrall, The Poet and the Murderer. New York: E.P. Dutton, 2002. 320 pages, ISBN 0525945962, $23.95.

Journalist Simon Worrall has written a book that begins with the Sotheby’s Auction House sale of a “re-discovered” poem by Emily Dickinson for $21,000 to a small library in her hometown, Amherst, Massachusetts, in 1997. It proved to be a forgery. This incident is used as a springboard to inquire into the writings and life history of Dickinson, examine the evidence of corruption and deceit by the auction houses in New York City, discuss the history and techniques of forgery (ancient and modern), modern methods of detection, and delve into the mind of a psychopath who may be the most successful forger of the 20th century (and also a murderer). Mark Hofmann may have created as many as 1000 forgeries, some of which, like the Dickinson poem, are still out there. This forger, in seemingly stupid, unconsciously self-destructive acts to deflect attention from himself, pipe-bombed a young dynamic Mormon Bishop who was on the verge of exposing him, and an innocent Mormon grandmother.

This fact identifies the culture and background of this forger into which Worrall delves more completely than anything to do with Emily Dickinson, for almost half of Mark Hofmann’s forgeries had to do with the Mormon Church and its history. Here the book stumbles over some errors of fact and slides into a sensationalist review of an odd religion with some bizarre beginnings of magic and superstition. If a reader tolerates these limitations, recalls that this Mormon part of the story was told in greater detail in the late 1980s, (for example, Linda Sillitoe et al, Salamander, 1988), and appreciates that The Poet and the Murderer covers a great deal in too little space (and lacks references), and so is not a scholarly study but meant for the general public, then one can enjoy a pleasant fluid read.

Worrall does not really attempt a depth inquiry into Mark Hofmann. One might argue that it would be difficult or impossible to do, given the problems in trying to understand a severe psychopath and very successful deceiver. Everything Hofmann said must be considered self-serving and manipulative. One is left with the need to understand his behaviors, which are usually more vague and abstract, rather than understand the printed or spoken words of a cooperative, or at least neutral, subject.

The author does make some suggestions with which it is hard to disagree. Hofmann was a genius who developed “deep-seated anger at his parents” (Worrall, Poet, p. 79) yet showed unbelievable control and superficial smoothness. His secret fury was at his father who allowed no questioning, challenges, or even discussion of the family Mormon religion, and his behavior contained disguised contempt for his father, family, and religion that he considered a gross deceitful cultural delusion (Worrall, Poet, p. 90). His behaviors included a wish to harm this church and its hierarchy, and stick “a knife between their ribs” (Worrall, Poet, p. 115). The evidence for this builds with repetition and includes Hofmann’s secret mocking of these “Apostles of God” who are assumed to be inspired with “the spirit of discernment” in sensing the intention of people and validity of facts, but could not discern his motivation or forgeries.

One might suspect that Hofmann unconsciously identified with the geniuses he mimicked in his forgery. That would be difficult to demonstrate except for one fairly clear example. On a few occasions, Worrall makes the brief comment, without elaboration, of Hofmann’s fascination and commonality with Joseph Smith. The believer’s view of Joseph Smith has been of a heroic martyred colossus, who (in an official and canonized statement) has done more for the salvation of the world, Jesus excepted, than any other man. He strode across the American frontier, and has continued as a modern combination of Moses, Peter, and Paul. While the church of the Mormon people has always been “The Church of Jesus Christ,” in

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day-to-day experience and investment in thought the carefully documented and nearby Joseph Smith was larger than the more distant and abstract picture of the Son of God. (That has modified in the last 30 years, and instead of his statue greeting one at the gate of Temple Square in Salt Lake City, it has been moved to a corner, and the focus is on the statue of Jesus.)

Mark Hofmann grew up with the pre-eminence of Joseph Smith deeply imposed into his psyche — as deeply imbedded as the attachment to Israel as Zion among ultra-orthodox Jews, or of the reverence of Irish Catholics to the Vicar of Christ on earth. One modifies such imbedded beliefs; one does not remove them completely. I would emphasize that Mark Hofmann’s life contained an identification with Joseph Smith — an ideal model as taught in Sunday school and revered in the family home, but modified by switching to the view of a disgruntled non-believer. It is difficult — very difficult — to have a moderate view of this man. He either was a prophet of God who miraculously translated ancient scripture and re-founded the only true church of God, or he was a very successful fraud. The naturalistic evidences for his translations of ancient scripture have not supported his claims. (The multiple means of denial, avoidance, and rationalization by the majority of Mormons is a worthy topic for a large detailed volume.)

So I suggest the parallels between the lives of Mark Hofmann (M.H.) and Joseph Smith (J.S.) — as Mark Hofmann came to view him. Central to everything is the creation of fraudulent ancient documents: The Book of Mormon and the Egyptian Book of Abraham (J.S.) and hundreds of pieces of non-Mormon and Mormon forged signatures, letters, and documents representing at least 129 people (M.H.). Add the following incomplete list: the “successful” search for gold buried plates by magical divination (J.S.) and the “successful” forgery of early Mormon paper money and coins by electroplating (M.H.); the experience of a severe life-threatening leg surgery (J.S.) and painful plastic repair of a burned neck (M.H.); the irrelevance of women in The Book of Mormon and their manipulation by polygamy (J.S.) and the misuse of an unsuspecting wife as “witness” to the “accidental” discovery of a document (M.H.); the use of hypnosis/ecstatic religious trance (J.S.) and the use of hypnosis with friends and self (M.H.); and cheating others by broken promises and bankruptcy (J.S.) and broken promises of document sales and bounced checks (M.H.). Both men challenged assumed “received” beliefs and produced new revelations for Christianity (J.S.) and new “revelations” for the history of Joseph Smith and Mormonism (M.H.).

Carry this identification to the extreme. Hofmann would later state, “I don’t believe [that] Joseph Smith had the First Vision or received the plates from the Angel Moroni or whatever.” (Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith, The Mormon Murders, 1988, p. 438) So his view of Joseph Smith was of a man who accepted the deaths of dozens of his followers out of loyalty to his fraudulent image as a Prophet of God. Would this identification contribute to his act of murder in defending his own fraudulent image?

If one is a non-Mormon or Mormon non-believer, one might wonder what the real beliefs were of both these men. One neighbor of Joseph Smith, long after his murder, looked back to his late teenage years or early adulthood and quoted him as saying that the Bible was a fable. Any believer scoffs at such cheap gossip against a prophet of God, but Smith did apparently believe in aspects of cultural magic, and carried a metal astrological talisman until his death. Did he believe he was fulfilling his destiny under the stars? With Hofmann, his repeated statements of strict logical agnosticism are believable. What is certain is that both men broke basic rules of honesty — Judeo-Christian or not — in their dealings with others. Did both believe that veridical reality was unimportant? Hofmann later stated, “My feeling is, it’s not so much what is genuine and what isn’t, as what people believe is genuine,” and then brought this home to Mormonism: “To me it is unimportant if Joseph Smith had the vision or not as long as people believed it. The important thing is that people believe it.” (Naifeh, The Mormon Murders, p. 438)

Forgers are imposters and some of the descriptions in the Phyllis Greenacre “The Imposter” paper of 1958 do seem to apply to Hofmann. (Psychoanalytic Quarterly 27, pp. 359-382) On the deepest level, Greenacre believed that the imposter finds confirmation in his assumed role, overcoming a feeling of incompleteness of self, and may replace the father as the important man in the home. Both men, when successful, superseded their fathers in importance, but we do not have evidence that Hofmann temporarily was favored in his mother’s heart. Joseph Smith had overshadowed his father and, encouraged by both parents’ supporting his supernatural claims, had become the central dominant figure in his family by the age of

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17. On a more obvious level, Greenacre believed that the trickery of the imposter fuses with the longings of the audience, and Mormonism did seemed to grasp at Hofmann’s “faith-promoting” creations. He didn’t have to convince many; he stood by and watched them convince themselves. Greenacre believed that the roots of impostering might go back to the second and third year of life when “[t]here is a great interest in gesture and imitation which gives to the young child a convincing ‘as if’ behavior, and makes great appeal in charming cuteness to the adult.” The child experiences the “exhilaration of seeming independence with the great pleasure in and capacity to win admiration for the recently developed skills of walking and talking, but without real responsibility.” (p. 370)

Both Hofmann and Smith were rewarded for the appearance of success in finding rare and revealing documents. Hofmann’s confession confirms Greenacre’s equation that to imposters, appearance is the same as genuineness: “My view was, when I forged a document and sold it, I was not cheating that person that I was selling it to because the document would never be detected as being a fraud.” (Naifeh, The Mormon Murders, p. 438) With both Hofmann and Smith, their identity was established by their forging acts. Without these acts, Joseph Smith may have remained like his father — poor, probably alcoholic, and deluded in a silly outdated world of magic — and Mark Hofmann showed some promise in elevating his erratic grades toward pre-medicine until he dropped out (at the time of his first forgeries), but one doubts he would have been successful in an ordinary occupation. Unconsciously, both men were successful because their followers wished to believe their accomplishments. Thus, as Greenacre wrote, often “especially conscientious people are ‘taken in’ … because of the longing to return to that happy state of omnipotence which adults have had to relinquish.” (pp. 370-371) Desperate or “fundamentalistic” religious beliefs are a way of refusing to relinquish that “happy state.”

Hofmann devastated his family and friends. As one friend said, after Hofmann had murdered another of his friends, “In a very real sense, I lost two friends…. But the one was an illusion and the other listened to the siren song of that illusion…. …the [Hofmann] I thought I knew never existed.” (Worrall, Poet, p. 232) I would propose a third grief, for one does not remain who one is, when one realizes that even with careful appraisal, one has been “had” in a most profound way. One loses more than just trust in oneself, and one becomes different.

Hofmann did finally reveal his need for the important “other” responsive person so frequently seen with malignant narcissists. After his incarceration for life in 1987, and with little chance of parole even at the present time, and with continued evidence of deceit, his wife finally divorced him, and he made a serious suicide attempt that resulted in permanent damage and disability to his forging hand and arm.

And so to the forged poem. It is to his genius that he could not only forge accurately the lined paper, pencil work, and handwriting of Emily Dickinson, but catch her muse completely enough to fool the literary experts: “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.”

Hofmann claimed he wrote the poem in three days, and felt union with Dickinson because of her agnosticism. Perhaps. One can play in the winter’s sun without fear or the solace and adequate knowledge of God. But Dickinson’s playfulness did not include indifference or disregard for others.

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