Writer's Voice

Recently I've been getting into E.B. White's (yes, he of Charlotte's Web; also, the White of Strunk & White) book of essays, One Man's Meat. It is rather good, so far. The writing, at least, is well-crafted. Surely you know the feeling, when beginning a book, of making the acquaintance of a particular voice, a personality. It is even better when that voice is not only unique but also agreeable. (There are enough voices that are distinctive but towards which I feel little natural affinity: Hemingway, or Wilde. That's not to say I dislike The Sun Also Rises — and indeed, I would place The Picture of Dorian Gray among my top thirty favorite books — but I can't imagine having a particularly satisfying conversation with either of those authors. Perhaps it is a matter of temperament, or childhood inculcation. I will always enjoy that chummy, donnish tone of C.S. Lewis, but then, the Narnia books were my constant companions when I was young.) E.B. White's voice is honest and simple: earnest without being humorless, occasionally wise without being pompous. If you weren't assigned to read "Once More to the Lake" in school, you simply must go and read it. (I was assigned it, and although being given as homework is generally sufficient to ruin any good thing, I still remember that essay fondly.)

In any case, the man knew what writing is like:

[T]here is nothing harder to estimate than a writer's time, nothing harder to keep track of. There are moments — moments of sustained creation — when his time is fairly valuable; and there are hours and hours when a writer's time isn't worth the paper he is not writing anything on.