It is not easy to write these three minute radio talks. My year and a half silence was forced upon me by the fact that I was in England, not here in Traverse City, but there were other reasons why I was silent.
I am a frank & open man. Eighty percent of my talks are based upon personal experience, the muck of my life, and when I was single, that was no problem: I could be brutally honest about everything in my life. But once I got married, there were limitations. Someone once said writers should never marry. There is much truth in that saying. You can't reveal your deepest feelings, your doubts, your apprehensions, when you have a wife who might strongly object.
I've never forgotten a scene in an Arthur Miller play when the wife of the main character in the play -- think Marilyn Monroe for wife, Arthur Miller for main character -- finds the writer's notebook. She reads a line he wrote: I have never been able to truly love anyone." She was shocked, shattered. The main character, Arthur Miller, explains that he doesn't fully believe what he wrote. He wrote it to see what he would think about the line he wrote. He was experimenting with an idea. No idea is fully true. All ideas contain a part of the truth. Writers experiment. Is this true? Have I not ever loved anyone?
The preceding is only one example. In our long life we question everything, or anyway, I do. In the two years I've been married I've wondered whether I should have gotten married. After all, I lived alone for 25 years and I liked living alone. Yes, I'm glad I married. Yes, I love my wife and lately I've had trouble remembering what it was like to live alone. I depend on her so much.
But if I had been writing these talks in the first two years of our marriage, if I delved deeply into my feelings in these talks, I would have written many words I would have regretted. Or, what I could write about was curtailed by the fact that I was married.
Obviously there is much that one can write about that is not involved in one's personal life. I have written countless talks about cars & traffic. I have written, and will write, countless talks about ideas & books I have encountered. But being married does affect what I can say not only because there are certain things I can't, or shouldn't say, but also because so many of my thoughts are transmitted to my wife rather than to my radio audience.
There is much truth in the belief that writers should not marry. They should be married to their audience. They should have no one to talk to but their audience. They should make love to their audience and to no one else.
If truth be told, I'm not a very verbal person. I do more listening than talking. Or, as I realized long ago, I'm better at talking to people when people are not there, and really that is what a writer is -- he is a writer, not a talker.
Copyright © 2004 Henry Morgenstein