'The Fourth Forger': John Mair's Other Book

John Mair (1913-42) is known among crime and thriller enthusiasts for his one novel, Never Come Back (1941). It is a fast-paced, tense drama of international intrigue in the tradition of John Buchan, Graham Greene and Eric Ambler. It was one of the first in the field to be written from a cynical, amoral standpoint. Copies of the original edition are scarce, but a 1986 Oxford paperback reprint, with an introduction by Julian Symons, may still be found.

Mair, from Symons’ account, based on those who knew him, was a brilliant raconteur, a stylish aesthete and a temperamental figure. He also had sound literary taste, editing an edition of three Thomas Love Peacock novels, Headlong Hall; Nightmare Abbey; Crotchet Castle for Nelson (1940).  He joined the RAF at the outset of the Second World War, supposedly because it was the only service in which the ranks wore a collar and tie. He was killed in a collision during a training exercise off the Yorkshire coast.

Never Come Back was not, however, his only book. For he had earlier written The Fourth Forger, William Ireland and the Shakespeare Papers (1938), a study of the great Shakespeare forger William Henry Ireland (1775-1835). I like oblique Shakespeareana, so this looked just right for me. Symons describes the book as ‘scholarly, readable, altogether admirable . . . a remarkable accomplishment’, but it has received much less attention than Mair’s novel.

In its way, it is just as enthralling as his thriller, as we follow Ireland’s audacious career, his adroit handling of suspicions, and his eventual downfall. It is not hard to detect a certain sympathy with Ireland, who was only seventeen when he began his forgeries. Mair explains exactly why the cultured society of the time was so keen to accept them, partly because Ireland was alert enough to play to prevalent tastes and prejudices.

Ireland is mostly known now because of the derision heaped on his supposedly ‘new’ Shakespeare play, Vortigern, and the rowdy scenes that accompanied its sole performance, and for his ‘improved’ version of King Lear, which was at first better received because it removed some of the passages perceived as crude by 18^th century readers. His main weakness in his pastiches was for redundant consonants, which he evidently thought gave his drafts a more authentic air.

But he also created quite a number of occasional pieces in the guise of Shakespeare: here is the purported tribute to Sir Thomas More’s jester (I was surprised to learn, indeed, that More had a household jester). It is a neat piece of imitation Tudor word-play, which he quotes with evident pride in his autobiographical The Confessions of William Henry Ireland (1805):

LINES UPON HENRY PATENSON, SIR THOMAS MORE'S JESTER.

      More wit thou hadst than wits by rule:

     Thou didst fool More, who was no fool.

      More jibes thou told'st to judging More

      Than fool ere told to judge before.

      More wit More heard from Folly base;

      More forgot more the sage's face.

      Since more from Folly's cup More quaff'd,

      Still more sage More at folly laugh'd.

      Now which had most the sage's head—

      Wise More, or Hal, who more wit said?

Unlike the more tragic figure of Thomas Chatterton, Ireland lived to a ripe age, and went on to write work under his own name, including a Gothic novel. But he was often in penury, and hawked manuscripts of his forgeries around London taverns. In his later life these became quite collectable, and, not having a sufficient supply, he forged his own original forgeries, which it must be admitted shows a continuing ingenuity.

Mair’s book is thorough and shrewd, and gives a balanced view of the whole affair, and it left me persuaded that Ireland was, after his own fashion, something of a genius. Had he merely written a few avowed Tudor imitations, his Gothic novel, and the then fashionable long-winded narrative poems, he would now be at best a footnote. As a clever and sometimes inspired Shakespeare forger, he has had a larger literary life.

(Mark Valentine)

Image: Book Lovers of Bath