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A large white yacht was coming into the harbor and seven miles out on thehorizon you couldsee a tanker, small and neat in profile against the blue sea, hugging the reef asshe made tothe westward to keep from wasting fuel against the stream.

the additive, non-subordinating style is obviously versatile; itcan be the vehicle of comedy, social satire, philosophical reflection, realism, andsomethingapproaching photography.

In any of its guises it displays the advantages of being able to stop on adime, arrest action, freeze the frame, stay still at the same time the reader moveslinearlyall effectsachieved in spectacular fashion in a sentence from Virginia Woolfs To the

Lighthouse(1927).

She was now formidable to behold, and it was only in silence, looking up fromtheir plates,after she had spoken so severely about Charles Tansley, that her daughters,Prue, Nancy,Rosecould sport with infidel ideas which they had brewed for themselves of alife differentfrom hers: in Paris, perhaps; a wilder life; not always taking care of some man orother; forthere was in all their minds a mute questioning of deference and chivalry, of the

Bank ofEngland and the Indian Empire, of ringed fingers and lace, though to them allthere wassomething in this of the essence of beauty, which called out the manliness intheir girlishhearts, and made them, as they sat at table beneath their mothers eyes, honourher strangeseverity, her extreme courtesy, like a queens raising from the mud a beggarsdirty foot andwashing it, when she thus admonished them so severely about that wretched

atheist who hadchased them toor, speaking accurately, been invited to stay with them inthe

Isles of Skye.

Although it might

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seem as if writing in the additive style is just a matter of putting one thing afteranother in no particularorder (how can that be hard?), it is in fact the more difficult style to master; for therelative absence offormal constraints means that there are no rules or recipes for what to do

because there are no rule orrecipes for what not to do. (

But that itself is a rule of a (negative) kind;dont forge bolted-down connections, dont put everything in its one and properplace, dont maintain aconsistent time frame, dont sustain the integrity of the speakers voice, dontmake things clear. Beforeyou can follow these rules, which amount to the flouting of the decorums ofhypotactic prose, you

must first master those decorums; you cant depart from something withconfidence unless you arefully practiced in the something you are departing from.

You have to know how towrite do not lean out of the window before you can riff on it. The answer to thequestion raised awhile back

Are sentences written at the furthest reaches of the additive style reallysentences?is

yes; they are sentences in which the logical structure of components firmly tied toone another is selfconsciouslyrelaxed. (Whew! Formalism saved again.)

How do you learn to write sentences like that? Not by trying to imitate Stein andWoolf. You needtraining wheels. There are writers less experimental and more conventional (in agood sense) whomight serve as beginning models, not because they are un-artful or simple, butbecause their

artfulness is (relatively) accessible and therefore available for imitation.

Anyhow, there you have the picture, the immensely tall trees, elms most of them,towering andfeathering away up into the black mistiness that trees seem to gather about themat night, the

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silhouettes of those two upon the seat, the beams of light coming from thecasino, the womanall in black peeping with fear behind the tree trunk.