In V. S. Naipaul’s novel Half a Life, a boy is waging a battle, mostly silent, with his father, through stories he writes and leaves lying around strategically at home. One day the boy, Willie, is home from school for lunch and sees his exercise book still untouched.
Willie thought in his head, in English, “He is not only a fraud, but a coward.” The sentence didn’t sound right; there was a break in the logic somewhere. So he did it over. “Not only is he a fraud, but he is also a coward.” The inversion in the beginning of the sentence worried him, and the “but” seemed odd, and the “also.” And then, on the way back to the Canadian mission school, the grammatical fussiness of his composition class took over. He tried out other versions of the sentence in his head, and he found when he got to the school that he had forgotten his father and the occasion.
This passage, even apart from cultural, familial, and psychological complications, is interesting from the point of view of grammar and style. I’m curious about what ‘didn’t sound right’ to Willie in the first formulation of the line. What ‘break in the logic’ does he feel?
Is it the lack of ‘also’, which is often, though not always, included in the formula? (See my post on not only . . . but (also) for discussion.) Does the unnecessary comma detract from the emotional force of the thought? Or is it something deeper, a dissatisfaction with the idiom’s sly redirection of a negative?
And why, recasting the expression, does the inversion worry Willie? How does the ‘but’ seem odd, and the ‘also’? Are they odd in combination, or would either alone sound odd too? Do the particular nouns fraud and coward contribute to the problem? Or does it arise because English is not his first language?
These questions are pretty much moot, since we don’t know exactly what Willie, or Naipaul, thinks about not only . . . but (also) beyond those few lines. But with an author’s magnifying glass suddenly held above the idiom, it’s fun to speculate. It’s also amusing that Willie delves so deeply into the mechanics of syntax, he completely forgets his domestic angst.
Sentence first 
Yes, do you also feel that people feel the need to change, perhaps to “hype up” traditional expressions, so that “both this and that” is not strong enough and it has to be added to with “both this but also that”?
Yes, as a subtle form of linguistic inflation. Or in some cases it may result from confusion of two idioms.
What a striking passage. If I were teaching a writing class, I’d bring it in and ask students to respond.
I think the absence of “also” is the likely issue in the first sentence. And the “but” seems unnecessary. Simpler: He’s a fraud — and a coward too. But that’d be far too informal in a land of “grammatical fussiness.”
The ‘also’ could be the issue there, and yet the same word seems odd to Willie in the inverted version. As to necessity, the entire not only . . . but (also) structure is never absolutely required, so the necessity is of degree rather than kind, a matter of expressive intuition.
It would be interesting to learn what a whole class feels about it!
It’s an example of a writer, Naipaul, fretting about how his budding writer in the story would likewise fret; it’s “a writer’s line” as Dustin Hoffman once complained when he came across one in the scripted lines required of him, except that Naipaul’s writer’s fretting is justified
on the grounds of realism.
About half of all of Naipaul’s books are non-fiction.
Fiction alone didn’t satisfy. It seems to me he fretted lots.
Yes, it’s definitely a ‘writer’s line’, and I agree that it’s justified here. The book traces, among other things, Willie’s development as an author and his critical reflection on that development; the not only passage is a rare example of self-conscious mechanics within that arc.
I don’t know much about Naipaul’s life or personality beyond the few threads I’ve read in reviews and essays (like James Wood’s) and in Diana Athill’s publishing memoir Stet.
I spent a little time “fretting” over this one, and the least worrisome for me is, “He isn’t just a fraud; he’s a coward, too.” However, that may be too simple for most professional writers, many of whom seem to want our reading of their material to be as difficult as it was for them to write it.
Of Willie’s two options, I prefer the second, with the “but” removed. “Not only is he a fraud, he is also a coward”, perhaps with the comma replaced by a semi-colon.
I think the two elements of the construction are too closely correlated to warrant a semicolon. The version you favour also changes several other of the constituent parts – ‘is not’ to ‘isn’t’, ‘only’ to ‘just’, [0] to ‘too’ – so it’s hard to compare them directly. But of course it’s all very subjective.
For me, I’d write: “He is not only a fraud but also a coward.” as I feel the added ‘also’ and removing the comma makes it flow better.
I agree about the comma: better to omit it here. I could go either way with the ‘also’.
Thanks Stan
Though I feel that adding the ‘also’ gives a better euphony/rhythm’* to the sentence.
(*not quite sure if these ARE the right words to describe this?).
Which is the more important attribute?
“He is a fraud; a cowardly fraud.”
“He is a fraud. Worse than that, he is a coward.”
Perhaps the hesitation comes from giving them equal weight.
And the semantics aren’t strong enough to express what Niapaul is feeling. The insults would perhaps satisfy more if they were more colloquial:
“Not only is Papa a phony, but a chicken.” (or equivalent)
Hmm. I think fraud and coward are at least as strong as phony and chicken, in this context anyway.
I remember from my schooldays many decades ago, a construction that cropped up quite often in Latin class was “non solum… sed etiam…”, the close English translation being “not only… but also…”
Perhaps Naipaul learned Latin as a schoolboy too?
Perhaps so.
[…] Examples I’ve written about include Ali Smith (‘Compulsive pedantry’), V. S. Naipaul (‘Not only but also…’), Ivy Compton-Burnett (‘An odd word…’), and Michael Connelly (‘Harry Bosch, trainee […]