Rewind the VHS tape to 1993, and you will find me seated three rows over, two desks back in my Ninth Grade English classroom. The camera hones in on my face, my heart. This is the scene that plays on repeat. This is the day the neighboring girl asks me to pass a note, but I can’t understand her. My neurons misfire, and the white noise of all the surrounding stimuli thrums in my ears, blocking sense out of sound. I shake my head over and over; she can’t get her meaning across to my muted, slow-processing mind. She turns back to her friends and says, “Kind of weird.” I hear that message loud and clear, and not for the first time.
*
The first biography written about the life of Dorothy Sayers was titled Such a Strange Lady. The advertising copywriter-turned mystery novelist-turned playwright-turned cultural critic-turned Dante scholar is a puzzle I return to again and again in my adult life.
Every year or so, I reread her mystery books, and I pay close attention as her main characters develop. I marvel at conversations, even fictionalized ones, that say what they mean to say, that get the meaning across. Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane’s clear and direct dialogue provides a helpful model for my often-confused speech. It’s possible to say something that organized? I am flabbergasted, and keep reading.
Of course, I want more. I go from the characters in Sayers’s novels to her own letters home to family and friends, and I find to the distress of my tidy-box mind that the real person is an enigma, this woman who wrote for women’s rights and dignity but never told anyone about the son she bore out of wedlock; this woman who claimed a Christian faith, but also had an affair with a married man and never seemed apologetic about it. I can’t fit the puzzle pieces together to match the narrative I’m looking for in the creator of Wimsey and Vane.
*
It isn’t always that one classroom. The VHS rewinds to one semester back, and I’m in Psychology class several doors down the same hallway. Back row, and a girl named Sharon sits several seats away. Sharon wears the wrong clothes (acid-washed jeans are out) and carries the wrong, tattered, off-brand backpack (Jansport is in). She has scraggly hair that doesn’t tease into a waterfall of Alicia-Silverstone-in-Clueless perfection. The boys in the class laugh at her every day. She keeps her head down on the desk.
Every day in that class, my heart cracks in some small echo of what must be fault lines running through Sharon’s own. I don’t know how to say, “I think you’re okay.” I am sixteen years old and sitting on the back row and wanting to step in, wanting to tell Sharon and also myself, “Weird is okay,” but I can’t find the words. I don’t yet believe they’re true.
*
Sayers was strange for a number of reasons, including her dramatic, bizarre clothes, her secrecy, her broad-ranging mind. For years, I have wanted to make her make sense, but she is more like her book Gaudy Night, which I didn’t understand at first but now consider my favorite, which is a novel that is other than what it claims to be: a murder mystery without a murder, a book that asks big questions without completely answering them, loose ends fluttering in the wind.
*
Exchange the VHS for a DVD and fast-forward to a family Thanksgiving meal scene, circa 2001. I have recently finished working for my church, a gap year between the successful classroom student I’d known how to be and the adult world I can’t quite figure out how to navigate. I make a comment about the quirky pastor who had cared for me most comfortingly during that neither-here-nor-there time, by whom I’d felt seen and accepted, and the words fly out of a family member’s mouth like a reflex: “But he was kind of strange.”
I won’t read Czeslaw Milosz’s poem “Late Ripeness” for two more decades, but still, a door opens inside me. I hear the words that should be an insult and taste instead a sharp salt wind and the rise of hope that I might meet myself somehow across the threshold. I cannot yet explain these things.
*
It’s 2024. I am still reading Dorothy Sayers. I think I will be reading her until the end of my days, because I enjoy her, because I enjoy her creations. I no longer poke and prod, knowing that, amoeba-like, her defining boundaries will shift away from my direct gaze and confound my desire for her, for anyone, to make sense. While her characters shed a helpful light–This is the way to be human in the world. This is the way to communicate well–Sayers herself remains in the gray, as well all do, neither here nor there. She is a mystery through which, as Seamus Heaney says, “known and strange things pass.”
The notion aggravates my need for tidy answers. But Milosz’s door opens wider within me as I age, and I find myself stepping through into a relief I never thought I’d feel. I stop worrying the bead of Sayers’s inexplicable life and let her complexity companion me, instead, as I walk through my own strange days.
Rebecca, I haven’t read Dorothy Sayers, but she’s on my shelf! A friend gave me “Whose Body?” It’s a thin little book. Is that a good place to start?
I know this is about a lot more than "Gaudy Night," but I love "Gaudy Night." Even more I love how you are telling your story alongside Dorothy Sayers, even though the two stories are not 1-to-1. It's a good reminder for me that not all things need to be.