Last week, I posted the first half of my conversation with New Yorker staff writer David Grann, whose new book The Lost City of Z, about the explorer Percy Fawcett and his mysterious disappearance in the Amazon in 1925, is currently sitting comfortably at number thirteen on the New York Times non-fiction bestseller list. Some brief thoughts on the book were offered before the transcript began; many others have offered more in-depth praise. Part two of our long conversation follows below, with topics including Sherlock Holmes, Theosophy, and some of Fawcett’s more extreme beliefs.

* * * * *

It’s also a book, of course, about your own obsession. I wonder what you think you have in common with someone else you’ve written about, another historian who was particularly interested in a cache of secret papers, the Sherlock Holmes expert Richard Lancelyn Green?

Oh, probably a lot. I mean, a lot. The thing I remember most about the Lancelyn Green piece, who was this great Conan Doyle and Sherlock Holmes scholar, was his room towards the end of his life, which was so filled with pictures of Conan Doyle and papers and artifacts that everywhere you kind of turned he was haunted by this subject matter he was investigating. And in the course of writing this book, which took me several years of research—I have a little room, a little office, it’s extremely small, and I had, you know, maps up on the wall where Fawcett went and pictures and pop culture imagery and thousands and thousands of pages of copies of Victorian letters and diaries. I mean, you could barely get into my office. And I often felt extremely overwhelmed in the pursuit of this subject. It’s interesting—I wrote the Lancelyn Green piece before the book, and it actually led to the book when I discovered while researching that Fawcett had helped inspire Conan Doyle’s novel The Lost World. Green was driven…mad may be too strong a word, but nearly insane by his obsession with Conan Doyle and his desire to write the definitive biography, he’d spent his whole life on it. And I wanted very much to write the definitive biography on Fawcett—there’d never really been one—but it was utterly elusive. Even if you try to fill in every little bit, there will always be other little bits you don’t know. So of all the people you asked me, in terms of my own life and quest, I feel the most similarity with him.

This is mostly for me, as a Conan Doyle nerd, but can you elaborate on the friendship between Conan Doyle and Fawcett? You note a letter or two, and a shared later-life interest in spiritualism, but was there more than that?

It’s hard to know in detail much about the relationship. There’s not a lot of documentation on it, so it’s kind of piecemeal to figure it out. Fawcett has referred to Conan Doyle coming to the Royal Geographic society and hearing his lecture, and there is very little correspondence that exists. I did find one of the actual pieces of correspondence, which I quote from in the book—it had never been found before, at least that I know of—and it kind of cemented this relationship, talks about Conan Doyle writing to Fawcett when he was working on his book. And scholars had always supposed or believed that Fawcett had always been one of the inspirations for John Roxton in The Lost World, so they are clearly linked, and they are linked because Doyle wrote this book on the Amazon, a quest novel, and Fawcett’s whole life is kind of like a quest novel.

They come out of the same imaginative space…

They come out of the same imaginative space. They were both interested in spiritualism, even though they were men trained in the scientific method and were in many ways the embodiments of rationalism, they saw it as an extension of rationalism, but it clearly wasn’t. One of the things I suspect but I could never know for sure is that Conan Doyle knew Fawcett’s older brother, who was a very popular quest novelist. Given the small literary circles and that they wrote similar subjects, I suspect that they knew each other as well, and that that may be the way Conan Doyle and Fawcett made a connection. In fact, one of the things I have just as a footnote in the book is that Fawcett’s older brother, who is now forgotten as a novelist, had written a book called Swallowed by an Earthquake, in which dinosaurs appear, and they’re in a different realm. It was a very popular book in its day, and it came out before The Lost World—there’s no question that Conan Doyle was influenced by it, that Conan Doyle was influenced by both arms of the Fawcett family.

At one point, you discuss the tension in Fawcett between evidence of an advanced Indian society and his Victorian beliefs and attitudes. Was this just an internal struggle within him, or did he elaborate on it in his papers—to what extent, I mean, was this an disagreement he was aware of and openly struggled with?

No, I don’t think he was always fully conscious of it. His writings are just filled with contradictions, and I don’t think he could step out of his time entirely, so what you see are these two contradictory impulses in his writing. He always has great reverence the tribes and the communities he stayed with and lived with. And in that sense he was conscious enough that he was going against the grain—he was aware of it on some level, and he thought too many people had racist attitudes towards these tribes. And yet you also see these racist impulses within him as well. You kind of have two strands of this moral absolutism and moral relativism at battle, and he’s aware of it to some extent, because he’s writing about it, and describes at times ‘going native,’ at times defends even cannibalism. He knows he’s breaking with society, but his writings also show—the thing about Fawcett is that you can read two letters, separated by a few days, and in one of them he’ll be offering kind of racist descriptions of what he thinks the Indians will be like, based on what he’s been taught, and then the next day he’ll actually go meet the Indians, or a tribe in the similar area, and be stuck by how sophisticated their culture is. And he’s not always self aware enough to realize that these two things are doing battle within his writings. I don’t think he was ever a fully modern figure in the way we would think of today.

It seems almost like, when he’s breaking with the norms, he can dismiss it in himself because it’s based completely on his personal observation.

Right, it’s experiential. I think he came close—he pushes up to the edge. The thing about Fawcett is, among everything, he’s a man of extremes, almost maniacal. In the jungles he was a man of extremes, and in his intellectual theories he was a man of extremes, for his time period, right at the edge, in particular in his belief that the jungle could sustain a complex society and that the Indians were capable of it. But he never fully crosses the threshold—he still thinks that, you know, maybe they were descendents of one of the lost tribes of Israel. Things he would conceive of to justify, because he knew based on observation that they were capable. But he knew theoretically, as he’d been taught, that no, they were not capable. And he could never find his way fully out of the paradox. And his writing showed more a man conflicted than a man who had total self-awareness of it.

The original article from which this book grew shared the same broad arc as the story presented here. How did you go about expanding it? What were you hoping to do with the longer form that you’d been unable to before?

The thing about the magazine article, which was extremely long, probably 18,000 words, is that it was the first story I’d ever done where I had literally boxes and boxes of material I couldn’t use and there were so many things I still didn’t know. The magazine article was really about seventy per cent my story, going in search of Fawcett, and about thirty per cent who Fawcett was. That was just the nature of the constraints, and also there were no books on Fawcett, so what I could learn in that small amount of time came from what letters I could track down. But for me, Fawcett, as I did more research, was this incredibly compelling, larger than life character who’d never had a serious biography written about him, and most of his papers have been considered lost. So the thing I really wanted to accomplish was to excavate his life, and to tell his story. So that became, even after I finished the piece, a kind of quest unto itself—it took me years. And in fact, Raleigh Rimmel’s last letter took me three years to find, and I was finishing the book. Raleigh, who was the third companion on the expedition, who disappeared with Fawcett, and was [Fawcett’s son] Jack’s best friend, he had siblings, but none of the siblings had descendants. And I had checked wills and genealogies, and I’d written blind letters to ever Rimmel in England I could find. Nobody could find any papers, but eventually I found a cousin once removed in England, and that took me three years. So it was all these other characters and excavating. I was able to track down a lot of diaries, not just Fawcett’s, but people who went with him over the years, and for me that was the biggest compulsion.

What became of the Haggard idol [an old carved statue that Fawcett believed to be a relic from a lost Amazonian civilization]? Is there any reason to believe that it was what Fawcett thought it to be?

Well, it disappeared with him, and I suspect that it probably had some authenticity, came from some old civilization. But by the end of Fawcett’s life, when he had latched onto this statue, he’d become increasingly mad, he’d been driven increasingly mad by his obsession with finding Z. And at that point he was latching onto things that had less credence. People always ask me to define Fawcett, and it’s a bit like defining the Amazon. There are many Fawcetts—like there are many Frédéric Bourdins—but you can divide him very much into kind of two essential characters, at least as an adult and during his career as an explorer, and you can almost divide them with a clear line at the Battle of the Somme. There’s Fawcett exploring the Amazon and piecing together a theory about Z and what this ancient civilization would be like. And then he has to go off and fight in the war, witnessing this collapse of Western civilization, watch all these young lads march up the trenches to their death, and you see almost a shattering in him. You see his notions of Z in his writings begin to change, and Z becomes much more fantastical and utopian—he longs for something that is almost a counterpoint to what he has witnessed. And so by the end what had once been a very meticulous scientific method, even though he was an amateur, becomes much more haphazard, where he’s relying on statues.

It’s only near the end of the book that you discuss at length Fawcett’s more unusual writings—that, for instance, he hoped at Z to discover a White Lodge that had been there since Atlantis and to attain transcendence. Brian Fawcett seems to downplay it, too. Why has it not been given a more prominent role in the histories, including this one?

Well, twofold. I think for the family, clearly they were trying to cover it up. They wanted to preserve his life and reputation. One of the reasons I think there hadn’t been a biography written, in part, is because I think the family didn’t want people to see a lot of thee papers and his writings, which would have done a lot to impugn his reputation. In my case, it’s the repetitive element to them. In other words, once you kind of see one they become very repetitive in their content. They don’t become a thing where reading one becomes more revelatory than the last. So what I wanted to do early on was discuss the origins of spiritualism and Theosophy, which happens earlier where he was a young man.

Yeah, because…did he meet Blavatsky [the influential spiritualist and founder of Theosophy]?

You know, that’s another one where I suspect he did meet Blavatsky, but I can never be 100 per cent sure. But his brother was always with Blavatsky and helped writer her opus. I have no doubt he must have met her, but can never prove it. So I wanted to describe it, its origins, and its impact, and, just like Z, his Theosophy has different points in his life. Early on, it was almost a scientific curiosity—you know, what else can be out there? He had a kind of openness and curiosity about the world and a kind of rebelliousness against his own society. And in the end, theosophy gets clouded up with madness. But once you start to quote those writings, it’s all the same.

The Great Web of Percy Harrison Fawcett [an internet hub for Fawcett conspiracy theorists] notes that Fawcett was hoping to find a “highly advanced civilization inhabited by a tribe of white long-hair natives.” Is there reason to believe that Fawcett thought that Z might still be inhabited?

I do think that he did think there might be descendants, remnants of the civilization, in the place. I think he did—I don’t think he just thought he’d find Machu Picchu. Again, he wasn’t always certain himself, but I think he did think he would.

Why does this web guy think they’d be white and long-haired?

Well, one of the things that’s emerged about Fawcett is that Fawcett becomes like the Amazon, he becomes almost a blank space unto himself—people can project on him many ideas and notions. And many people over the century have done that. Fawcett has become like Z in his disappearance and his mystery. And there are a whole bunch of people who, because of his interest in the occult and because he was never found, have latched onto him as this transcendent being who found a transcendent world. And a lot of people, and this website is an example…

…well, he’s still alive…

…exactly, he’s still alive, and they’re going to become immortal, and it’s an extension—it’s not totally unlike an extension you can trace back. We were talking about the notions of the Amazon and what people might find, maybe the Garden of Eden. Well, people believe Fawcett found the Garden of Eden, and they’re going to attain transcendence. There are people who now believe that about Z, that it’s actually a portal to another world.

[Note: Even though the interview went on for another ten minute or so, my tape recorder cut my record of it off at this precise moment, another quest unfulfilled. For my last question, I asked Grann whether he subscribed to the theory of Fawcett’s disappearance that, not to ruin the book’s close, one might shorthand as the campfire theory. He assured me that he’s certain that that’s how Facwett, Jack, and Raleigh met their ends.]