A. J. Lees | Brazil That Never Was / 2020

 

without a trace

by Douglas Messerli

 

A.J. Lees Brazil That Never Was (Kendal, Cumbria, U. K.: Notting Hill Editions, 2020)

 

Published in a small 7 1/2 x 4 3/4 format, A. J. Lees’ Brazil That Never Was itself was a kind of illusional publication for me. Although the cloth-bound book was only 139 pages in length—and that with photographs, chapter breaks, and heavy leading between lines—it took me weeks to read, despite the fact that I was almost mesmerized by the little book from its first chapter. Now I admit I am a slow reader and that I had numerous other projects upon which I was working while I perused its pages. But I’ve never quite taken so long to devour a work which totally interested me.

     Moreover, I kept having to remind myself throughout that Lees’ work was not a fiction, but a book apparently based on facts, the successful British neurologist becoming so incredibly involved in a childhood fantasy about a country far away from British shores that he finally had to himself take a short voyage into the Amazon landscape. Certainly, he would not be the first “mad” Englishman to be enticed into the vast Amazonian wilderness. Evelyn Waugh’s desperate attempt to reach Manaus in the Brazilian interior became the basis of his fiction Handful of Dust; and you might fill a entire wall of your library with books and films about European males’ failed journeys or their dreams of travel into the seemingly enchanted forests—which most Brazilians know to be also a fallen paradise due to the terrible effects of the rubber barons and others who raped the land and destroyed numerous tribes living within the South American equivalent of Conrad’s “heart of darkness.”

     Lees’ fascination began innocently enough when his school-teacher father presented him with a dog-eared copy of Exploration Fawcett which told of Colonel Percy Fawcett’s several voyages into the Amazonian forests throughout the 1910s and 20s, ending in his 1925 search with his son and his son’s best friend for a lost city of the Amazon from which they never returned.

     Fanned by the steaming smokestacks of the vast cargo ships in the Liverpool harbor, the young Lees created an imaginative alternative to the drab landscape in which he lived.

              Each Saturday we left the smoking works and foundries

              and escaped into the dank shadows of Liverpool. ...The SS

              Hilary was not the only steamer destined for Brazil. The

              SS Raphael was leaving that evening on the evening tide

              with a cargo of pianos for Santos, and the SS Herdsman was

              bound for the chocolate port of Salvador Bahia. Cotton bales

              arrived on red duster ships from São Paulo, and sacks of

              Pernambuco molasses were unloaded at Huskinsson Dock.

              As we waited, separated from the shops by the towering dock

              wall, unfamiliar scents of Brazil drifted in on the side streams

              of the North Atlantic.  [p. 6]

 

     Gradually over the years he perceives that the book not only has continued to fascinate him, but had drawn numerous others to the Amazon jungles in search of Fawcett and two companions. Twenty years after having left Liverpool, he had read in London about a wildlife documentary filmmaker, Ridout who, visiting a store in Cuiabá was given a ring by a woman whose husband had been awarded it “for services rendered,” [p. 23], which when he showed it to the Fawcett family back in England was immediately recognized, from the military inscription Nec asperra terrent (“hardships hold no fear”), as being an authentic remnant of Colonel Percy.*

    Returning to his studies of his childhood book, Lees’ begins to perceive that the book was actually written by Fawcett’s other son Brian, and slowly through amazing coincidences and contacts with others who have followed the Fawcett legend over the years, the author gradually starts to piece together a fantastic tale that is far more fabulous than the actual events surrounding Fawcett’s search of his “lost city.” Indeed, the third illusion of this book is that it truly concerns a journey to the Brazilian heartland, while in truth the story Lees has to tell comes straight out of dusty British libraries, crumbling letters loaned to him by Fawcett’s daughter and Fawcett’s now 80 year-old supporter, Sir John Scott Keltie, as well as stories and gossip by family members, students of the occult, and science-fiction writers. This book’s primary journey into the jungle of Amazonia is reconsidered more through libraries and Lees’ laptop computer than through  steamers or airplanes heading down to Rio. Lees takes the reader into Fawcett’s lost city of the Amazon through the mental acuity of his research abilities rather than any glide of canoe down the amazon or tromp of foot through the dark undergrowth of poisonous snakes or arrows.

     But what he finds there sin that in the character of Fawcett lies a darkness of mind every bit as mad as Conrad’s Kurz’s ramblings in the Congo. Long fascinated by the occult, the writings of Madame Helena Blavatsky, the tales of buried treasures, and his own science fiction fantasies, Fawcett’s search for his “Lost City” likely ended his own life and killed his supposedly “magically gifted” son Jack and his friend, who sounds to me to have been possibly Jack’s gay lover.

      Even Lees’ rendition of the backstory about Jack calls up a kind of exotic mix of Asian religious beliefs spiced-up with theosophist ramblings, hack psychology, and dreamy semi-scientific pipedreams. While living in what was then called Ceylon in 1903, Fawcett was approached in his hotel by a delegation of soothsayers and Buddhists who petitioned an audience with him wherein they revealed that his pregnant wife would bear a son on May 19, during the celebration of Buddha’s anniversary, who would have a mole on the instep of his right toe, and that his toes instead of running in the normal sliding scale would be grouped in equal-sized pairs.

The child born on May 19th, in fact, precisely had the mole and toe abnormalities. Fawcett also notes in his letters that the boy had a rather recognizable “obliquity of the eyes,” [p. 74] hinting that in his father’s mind his son had bodily connections to the Asian people themselves, with evident ties perhaps to the Buddhist monks who had foretold his birth. Fawcett, accordingly, treated Jack as special for the rest of his life, even though, as Lees gleans from his brother Brian’s comments, he was basically lazy, unlearned, and untalented. At least it explains why Jack and his friend were chosen to accompany him on his search. But what he was searching for is almost beyond explanation.

     Believing—from his readings of Blavatsky—that there was a “vast underground labyrinth that contained Inca tombs [which] stretched from Cuzco to Lima and on the south into Bolivia,” that could be entered through tunnels marked only by ciphers “visible when the sun hit the rocks and a certain angle,” Fawcett extended the concept of tombs and lost cities as being related to what he believed existed in the Amazon jungle as well. With his contemporaries such as Dion Fortune, Algernon Blackwood, and Aleister Crowley, Fawcett argued in the December 1922 issue of The Occult Review

 

               that the Great White Brotherhood was under the authority

               of fifteen spiritually developed trans-dimensional human

               beings from parallel versions of Venus, the moon and Mars.

               He believed that mankind’s hope and destiny lay in the

               hands of the Earth Guardians or “Adepts,” who inhabited

               six underground lodges located in continents that had once

               been home to great civilisations. The lodges extended

               into the astral plane and were surrounded by an impenetrable

               wall of mental matter. Under those lodges were the occult

               schools, located all over the world except for Europe, from

               where they had been forced to withdraw after the terrors of

               war. [p. 83]

 

In short, we have now entered a territory of faith that spurred on Fawcett’s falsely reported scientific expeditions into Brazil that has more links to a high racist fantasy akin to L. Ron Hubbard’s science-fiction fantasies behind his foundation of Scientology than with any rational search for unknown Brazilian prehistoric civilizations. What to most people of the day seemed like one of the last great adventures into the unknown wilds, was actually an extraordinary farcical voyage into insanity. Sorry to say, it seems almost condonable that the looney trio met up with a primitive cannibal tribe who, as rumor has it, shrunk their skulls as evidence of their consummation.

      To give him credit, Lees does not judge these crackpot concepts as much as he thoroughly explores the various absurd avenues through which the Fawcett writings, correspondence, and histories lead him. And even after he recognizes that Fawcett’s explorations and what his childhood imagination imbued those adventures were little more than nonsense, he still must prove to himself by actually traveling to Manaus, the starting point for all travels into the jungle, to see for himself. What he discovers is even more mundane than the fantasies of the mad mind of Fawcett:

 

             Manaus was just another place. It was not the exceptional

             enclave I thought I knew. I realised that what I had seen with

             my own eyes could never compete with the flashbacks of my

             dead past.  [p. 120]

 

The real Manaus as he describes it a page earlier smells of a “nauseous stench of diesel” and appears as an urban landscape consisting of “A Shell garage, rows of shops with roller shutters defending their windows, overhead bridges, corrugated iron shacks, sallow walls covered in graffiti, bracketed streetlights, telephone wires, parking lots filled with trucks, and a Coca Cola bottling plant....” [p. 117] Inside a tall perimeter fence patrolled by guards “were 600 global corporations including Honda, Gillette and Yamaha.” [p. 117]

     If I felt several layers of illusion as I read Lees’ book, perhaps he reflected the Liverpoolian lad’s own sense of illusion in regarding his own childhood vision. Only when he travels on a silkwood dugout for a ways down the Rio Negro does he briefly find himself in a world where “time had collapsed.” [p. 125] Clearly this, however, is not a world in which he can exist, and when he returns to society, almost smelling of nature, he realizes, as he puts it, that “trying to recapture those magic moments [of his childhood vision] was as impractical as trying to look for the path of the SS Hilary in the ocean.” A ship leaves no track, just as Fawcett’s mad march into the interior left no evidence of his even having entered it. The past is nothing but the past.

 

*The fascination with Fawcett continues with the 2016 film, directed by James Gray, The Lost City of Z.