THOSE WHO WANDER ARE LOST

Titaÿna

(Éditions Marchialy, 240 pages, 2020)

I don’t like adventure novels.

I write this novel with no concern for how it is received, for I drowned my vanity . . . I have nothing left but pride.

—Opening to Those Who Wander Are Lost

Titaÿna, née Elisabeth Sauvy, was one of the rare women who made her mark as a travel journalist in the 1920s and 1930s, alongside the likes of Evelyn Waugh, Pierre Loti, and Michel Leiris. Pilot, sailor, sporting a short haircut and an androgynous figure, Titaÿna immersed herself completely in a world traditionally men-only. Her book, Those Who Wander Are Lost, originally published in 1938, is an account of the time she spent in Oceania and portrays the allure of errancy and her inevitable disillusionment with Europe’s colonial presence throughout the islands. The book resonated with ex-adventurers who had returned to Paris, members of the short-lived Les Ratés de l’Aventure club, which was founded in the book’s honor.

The novel begins on the white sands of Tahiti where Titaÿna’s days and nights are spent dancing, drinking, and swimming but are also marked by a disconcerting timelessness, where hours and days linger or pass mysteriously and the constant worry over money hounds her thoughts. Titaÿna then leaves Tahiti as a crew member aboard the Belle . . . and so begins her adventure at sea. She comes upon lepers, cannibals, witches, mariners, pearl divers, lone guitarists in the night, a despondent nymphomaniac, opium eaters, and other men-of-adventure like herself, whose experiences “amongst the natives” were far afield from what they had imagined.

In parts reminiscent of Jean Rhys’s Voyage in the Dark, in others of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince, Titaÿna’s singular voice is lucid and hypnotic, describing with equal ease the throes of fever, the mysteries of desire, or the endlessness of a sunset at sea. She neither philosophizes nor moralizes, as many of her male counterparts did, nor does she pretend to “belong to” or “be at one with” the native communities she lives with. Instead she observes with true self-abandon and curiosity, finding in her rootlessness the openness needed to consider others without an impulse to label or ethnographize them. Her writing is straightforwardly journalistic yet frequently caught up in the tragedy and beauty of the places she observes, while the otherworldly people whose paths she crosses lend the narrative an air of myth or dream.

This is a book to be read with childlike eagerness, all the more so during our collective confinement, and it speaks to what is youthful and fearless in us. Those Who Wander Are Lost, though undeniably of its time, also transcends it, and is well worth the rediscovery.

Titaÿna (née Elisabeth Sauvy, 1897) authored twelve books in addition to her translations from German and English and was a prolific travel reporter during the Roaring Twenties. Independent and intrepid, she often traveled alone, frequently piloting her own plane. Her work influenced a generation of writers before being lost in the archives in the years following World War II.