A tremendous free gift

From Alan Jacobs:

One of the most extraordinary figures of the British theater in the last century was Kenneth Tynan, a flamboyant, irrepressibly gifted man who electrified almost everything he touched. He was perhaps too gifted: he excelled as a dramatist, a screenwriter, a critic, an essayist, a director, and a theatrical impresario, and he flitted all his life among these varying roles. . . .

He was devoted to the pushing of boundaries, from pointedly saying words that were not supposed to be said on BBC television to directing the first all-nude musical, Oh Calcutta! (At age sixteen he had announced his plan to write, not a morality play, but an amorality play: "The whole point of it, I feel, is that the Devil is horrified by the goodness of God and considers him immoral.")

His college at Oxford, to which he came up in 1945, was Magdalen; his tutor was C.S. Lewis. Though it might seem highly unlikely that so plainly traditional a figure as Lewis and so peacockish an undergraduate as Tynan would get along, they did. . . .

Writing in his diary on the first of October, 1974, Tynan recalled a crucial moment in his life:

Yesterday a bald, deaf, elderly Canadian came to interview me on C.S. Lewis, about whom he is writing a book. Into his hearing aid I bellowed reminiscences of the great man, whose mind was Johnsonian without the bullying and Chestertonian without the facetiousness. If I were ever to stray into the Christian camp, it would be because of Lewis's arguments as expressed in books like Miracles. (He never intruded them into tutorials.) Because I stammered, he kindly undertook to read my weekly essays aloud for me, and the prospect of hearing my words pronounced in that wonderfully juicy and judicious voice had a permanently discipling effect on my prose style.

He was a deeply kind and charitable man, too. Once in the summer of 1948 I came to him in despair: Jill Rowe-Dutton had jilted me on the eve of what was to have been our marriage, and I had spent most of the term in and out of bed with bronchial diseases that I was sure would soon culminate in TB. I brought my troubles to Lewis, asking him whether I could postpone my final examinations until Christmas. To this he at once agreed: after which he got on with the Christian business of consolation. [In an interview Tynan added that he had told Lewis that he saw no reason to go on living.] He reminded me how I had once told him about the parachuted landmine which, dropping from a German bomber during an air-raid in 1940, so narrowly missed our house in Birmingham that next morning we recovered some of the parachute silk from our chimney. (The mine destroyed six houses across the road and blew out all our windows.) But for that hair's-breadth - a matter of inches only - I would already (Lewis gently pointed out) have been dead for eight years. Every moment of life since then had been a bonus, a tremendous free gift, a present that only the blackest ingratitude could refuse. As I listened to him, my problems began to dwindle to their proper proportions; I had entered the room suicidal, and I left it exhilarated.