Today’s guest is someone whom David saw posting regularly on an online C.S. Lewis forum. He enjoyed her posts discovered that she had met Lewis, so he invited her onto the show for a chat, both about her life and her book, O Love How Deep…
S5E58: “O Love How Deep” – After Hours with Diana Maryon (Download)
If you enjoy this episode, please subscribe on your preferred podcast platform, such as iTunes, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Audible, and many others…
For information about our schedule for Season 5, please see the our season roadmap, containing a list of all the episodes we plan to record together, as well as “After Hours” interviews with special guests.
Finally, if you’d like to support us and get fantastic gifts such as access to our Pints With Jack Slack channel and branded pint glasses, please join us on Patreon for as little as $2 a month.
Show Notes
Introduction
Quote-of-the-week
O love, how deep, how broad, how high,
Thomas à Kempis, O amor quam ecstaticus!
beyond all thought and fantasy,
that God, the Son of God, should take
our mortal form for mortals’ sake!
Chit-Chat
Beverage and Toast
- David was drinking Typhoo tea
- Diana had grapefruit juice with her breakfast
Discussion
1. “Background”
Q. Now, so far on this episode, I’ve been calling you Diana, but that’s actually a pseudonym you use in your book, O Love How Deep. We’ll discuss your book shortly, but what would you like to share with our listeners a little bit about yourself personally
Yes, I am Priscilla Diana Maryon Turner née Maryon Watson. It sometimes comes in very handy to have TWO middle names. I am, quite legally, two-faced on Facebook, and I read and contribute in the C.S. Lewis Group not as the real me, but as author of a deeply personal autobiography which is permeated with Lewis, quotation, allusion, accounts of my exchange of letters with him in the run-up to my whole evening spent with him as a Cambridge Classics student, his speaking voice, and how awkward he was as a guest. There’s a subtle allusion in Act III to A Grief Observed as I observe my own grief.
I belong of course to the dying breed of those who actually heard or met Lewis. We’re all pretty old by now!
2. “Love for Lewis”
Q. Please tell us about your love for Lewis.
Actually, my love of Lewis has all along been quite circumscribed: I was very young when I heard the first BBC broadcasts of what became Mere Christianity. As a very literary as well as theological person, growing up I liked the Ransom Trilogy; but as someone who never tried living outside the Christian system, otherwise he really left me cold. He specialised in most of his popular Christian writing in clearing away the undergrowth for modern people. I was theologically fluent, believed the whole Faith, was intellectually precocious and able to defend it verbally, was confirmed and an every Sunday Anglican communicant too young. I was not then nor am I now a modern person. I was lonely and frightened, going away from home for schooling at nine, spiritually empty. I still remember vividly going off alone early on Sunday mornings, and bringing back my routine sad little package of forgiveness. I did not come to know God personally in my first undergraduate year because of anything by Lewis. Even when Christopher my husband-to-be took me as a young graduate to hear him lecture on his own subject, I was not his disciple…
I do have the same type of intellect as he, including the weak arithmetic, but my intellectual training beyond the undergraduate level has been more theological and biblical than his. When I describe myself as basically a simple soul with a complicated mind, who’s lived in more interesting times than she’d have chosen for herself, I think that Lewis would feel with me.
3. “Lewis as lecturer”
Q. What do you recall from Lewis’ lecture? What was he like as a lecturer?
I honestly remember nothing of the content of the lecture that C took me to. His delivery was very loud. This was of course in a really large lecture hall. He needed that space, because he always lectured to a packed hall. It’s been said that he started lecturing well before he arrived at the podium: you could hear him coming many paces off. His voice was also dull, everyone has said the same; he relied on the content for drama. So I say in my book:
“One of our unsuccessful candidates for the Incumbency, he of the complicated love-life, has kept his promise and sent me the original Lewis tapes which were expanded into The Four Loves in 1960. I remember hearing that they were first commissioned, and then rejected, by an American radio station. They found them when they got them to be “too frank on the subject of sexual love”. I wonder what is in them that was missed out of the book? Probably nothing. I have time only to dip into the precious tapes: the familiar bass-baritone voice is oddly monotonous for today.
Diana Maryon, O Love How Deep (Pages 425-426)
That brings me to his paper that he gave in my College some months earlier. This was in a comfortable, medium-sized room, as opposed to a lecture hall, and there were perhaps no more than thirty of us there. I do not remember that he was loud; but I do recall my shock at his physical appearance. Having simply corresponded with him to invite him, (I still have his letters), somehow I had expected him to be pale, slim and spiritual, whereas he was actually broad, ruddy and coarse. He looked as though he spent all day on the back of a horse, coming home to a dinner washed down with too much port. No wonder they called him “The Squire”. I DON’T of course mean that he was bad-mannered, or untidy, or malodorous, even if it has been said of him by people who loved him that he made all he wore look as though it had come from an old-clothes shop, and that his was a “graceless figure seen to peculiar disadvantage from the top of a bus.” He was for quite other reasons the most awkward guest the College Classical Society had in my time.
4. “The Awkward Guest”
Q. What are your memories of that evening?
Faced with a maiden don and a bunch of virgin girls, he did not know where to put himself. For the Sherry Before Dinner in our Director of Studies’ rooms he stood first on one leg and then on the other, a big clumsy man …
I had the inviting of him as Secretary, and because of delay the eventual entertaining of him as President. That was in the Michaelmas term of 1959. Sherry was sticky in the extreme: he had no small-talk at all. Dinner in Hall was not much easier. But the instant he opened his mouth to give his paper on ‘Time in Boethius’, he became golden-tongued, for those who understood it. It was quite abstruse, only accessible to those who were doing some philosophy as we Classicists were in our third year.
None of us knew what sorrow he was going through when he visited us. Lewis looked hard and appraisingly at us all over sherry, I remember. It added to the embarrassment of his long silences. He was probably never at ease with females in general even after his marriage. I do believe, and have since that time, that he will have prayed for us all conscientiously until he died. And of course ever since. Thanks to this Cambridge undergraduate experience, I can say with truth that I once spent a whole evening with CSL.
5. “Book Genesis”
Q. Let’s turn to your book, O Love How Deep. Why did you write it?
I wrote it because I had to. It just poured out of me. As a pregnant woman must go into labour and deliver. That’s actually an ancient metaphor for authorship, first conception, then gestation, production, so that somewhere Lewis describes himself as “big with book”. Some have called it a tract for the times, even polemical, but I wrote with no didactic aim in view, not even as deeply personal testimony, though I certainly hope that it is that. The theme, in accordance with the title, is the goodness of God, experienced not just in spite of suffering, but truly as an effect of suffering. As Joseph says to his brothers, “You meant it for evil, but the Lord meant it for good.” I was not aiming to preach that or anything else, it simply emerged from my story. That is what most discerning readers have got out of it. I hope that that may be true of you too. The endorsations of both James Packer and James Houston, known here in Vancouver as Systematic and Mystic James respectively, are very precious to me.
6. “Book Synopsis”
Q. The back cover of your book describes the story as follows:
After twenty-six-year-old Australian David Carpenter – a psychiatrist and neurological researcher himself – had a breakdown in his first year at Cambridge, his therapist told him, “Go into the Anglican Chaplaincy, investigate Christianity, and have a love-affair with a nice Christian girl.” He did precisely that.
Diana was only twenty. They grew so close that when, after four years, she married someone else, he returned home devastated. They did not meet again for eight years. He realised then that he still loved her, and she him. He asked her to break her marriage for him. Instead, she sent him away indefinitely.
In her last letter she begged him to give her up. She said that Oxford had rejected her dissertation. She was thirty-three, with her academic career now shattered.
This is a poignant story of three hyper-intelligent, cosmopolitan and highly-educated people fighting their way through to genuine faith, hope, and love in the modern world.
Back cover of “O Love How Deep”
That’s basically why I subtitled it A Tale of Three Souls. It is the story of a real marriage, including many assaults on it, and at the same time the story of a marriage which did not take place. The assaults included my personal tragedy, the breaking of my academic career. Yes, David was a very brilliant man in his way, like my husband. I loved him extremely. Early in 1971 I came within an inch, nay a millimetre, of deserting my blameless Christian husband and our beautiful first little girl for an adulterous union with that old suitor, on the basis that we were passionately in love; the classic sinful situational ethical situation.
7. “A spiritual autobiography”
Q. What would you like to tell us about your book?
It is spiritual autobiography, full of stream-of-consciousness, an intertwined love & marriage and academic vindication story. The form is a double helix like Middlemarch with which some have kindly compared it. That greatest of novels started life as two disparate books. One difference is that George Eliot was a creator, I’m just the narrator of a true story. The thin layer of fictionalisation is for the protection of a number of people living and dead. I have altered academic subjects of almost all those close to me, thus ‘David’ becomes a medic, ‘Simon’ a scholastics and Mandarin man. I make myself a New Testament textual critic rather than an Old Testament one, an Armenian specialist not a Septuagint scholar, the big and ancient Regius Hebrew posts into invented chairs of Biblical Greek, the Oxford Faculty of Theology into an invented Faculty of Biblical Studies. Jim Packer called it a novel, rather to my surprise.
The narrative being quite sombre a lot of the time, the process of fictionalisation was more fun than some of the composition. E.g. Charlie (‘the holy’) Moule’s becoming Stephen ‘the blessed’ Badger … Lewis’s close friend Nan Dunbar was something of a ‘professional Scot’, so I made her Jane Scott in my book. Our Director of Studies, Tutor in Oxford terms, Alison (‘The Duchess’) Duke, becomes Melissa (‘The Queen Bee’) Baron.
8. “The publishing process”
Q. What was the publishing process like?
Publishing anywhere took some time. My husband was diagnosed with Parkinson’s, I with kidney cancer, in the late summer of 2002. Back in 1971 friends suggested that the then-fresh dramatic love & marriage events were material for a striking book. They were motivated partly I think by my obvious transformation into a happy woman, and how I had taken the thesis rejection. This was before the second pregnancy got a grip on me on top of the viral pneumonia of the previous summer. I’d never recommend any young woman to combine all that with moving 2,400 miles. I thought those events too slight for a book. In the event the love&marriage drama grew much longer, and became something out of which some especially men have drawn doctrine for their Christian lives, married or single. One of my prospective publishers insisted on my inserting Act II, which wasn’t there at all at first. The narrative had jumped about 20 years. He desiderated a blow-by-blow account of my Oxford Appeal and re-examination. My feeling had been that nothing much happened between the original thesis rejection in 1971 and its eventual acceptance in 1996. In fact, there were some big, and necessary, changes in me. And I did piles of work that nobody else could have done.
9. “Learning about love”
Q. Obviously, much of your book surrounds the subject of love, and you have a quotation from The Four Loves at the start of the book. How did that book shape your thinking about love?
I’m not at all sure that it did. It is of course a very deep book, the fruit of his maturity, and written after he had joined the majority of our race and been married. But I’ve been thinking about love ever since I was converted. My very substantial but more scripturally-based paper on love for neighbour was published in the late 1960s. That may be read with other stuff on LinkedIn. Of course, I’ve been reading the same Scripture, and trying to obey the same Lord; but Lewis has, to be precise, confirmed what I’ve come to know, from my own meditation and experience. Our first copy of The Four Loves was not the original hardback of 1960, nor did we buy it, but it was given to us by a particular person whom we came to distrust. I gave away that copy with no regrets. I came around to it as I was dealing with swarms of irreligious modern people in the largest and most fashionable Anglican parish in my city. It seemed to me then as it still does to be most useful as a pre-evangelistic tool, for people who are not yet thinking about God, but do think about love, what it is and what it is not. Insofar as we all need to be thinking as hard about love as Lewis did, the book is a fine annual cleansing bath for the Christian mind.
10. “The Four Loves”
Q. “Do you have any other thoughts about ‘The Four Loves’?”
I do believe The Four Loves to be the very best book on marriage, even though it doesn’t aim at that. We made a point from the 1970s on of giving a hardback copy as part of our wedding gift. I still try to do that.
11. “Permeated with Lewis”
Q. You said earlier that your book is “permeated with Lewis”. What do you think are the chief Lewisian influences?
By permeated I mean that it’s full of quotations short and long from several of his books, stories about him, and subtle allusions, e.g. to A Grief Observed, and the title of A Severe Mercy, not that I copied his style. I honed my own style through my very extensive reading. I was reading English untaught at three-and-a-half. Yes, I am a bit under 40 years junior to him, but, far more deeply than by Lewis himself, I have been formed by the same influences as he was. We stand in the same tradition, so time and again I find that he expresses precisely, and with his typical precision, what I believe.
More Information
Q. Where can people go to find out more about you and pick up a copy of your book, “O Love How Deep”?
To start with, the second 2017 edition, available on Amazon.com in seven formats, three paper sizes each hardback and paperback, plus eBook, is the genuine article. The 2011 Westbow ‘vanity’ volume was overpriced and sold to nobody except me. That is substantially the same, but has a duller cover, more typos, more fictionalisation, and no illustrations. I apologise that there are a couple of tiny formatting slips in even the new edition. Look for the C&P Books imprint. My dear husband was a Christopher, so no prizes for guessing how I arrived at the C&P label.
Letters from Lewis
Transcription of Lewis letters to Miss Priscilla Watson, who had written as Secretary of the Girton College Classical Society to Lewis in February of 1959 asking whether he would come and give us a paper next term…
March 2nd 1959
Dear Miss WatsonI would love to if I had anything classical to say or had the least chance of producing anything by next term. But neither is the case. Sorry – but you’d only hear the creak of the pump handle Perhaps April 1969…?
Yours sincerely
C. S. Lewis
She wrote back saying that any paper at all would be a privilege for us to hear, whereat he replied:
8/3/59
Dear Miss Watson
I could read a long, dull paper on Metre (English) if you liked. That is the table d’hôte: there isn’t any à la carte!
Yours sincerely
C. S. Lewis
She wrote as politely as she could that she wasn’t sure how many, their ranks decimated by examination fever, would come for that in the Tripos term (We have examinations every summer at Cambridge). How about something else a term later?
And then from his Oxford home, typed rather messily by his brother Major Lewis:
24th March I(sic!)959.
Dear Miss Watson,
By all means. A paper is often too near,and never too far. ahead.
Yours sincerely,
C. S. Lewis
One of my favorite After Hours! Lovely lady… already bought the book.
Thank you Diana and David ,Cheers!
Thankyou, Mo. Let me know in this space what if anything you especially like about the book.