Life & Wisdom Quote by Clifton Fadiman

“Masterly” is the dagger’s velvet sheath. Fadiman pretends to pay tribute while quietly indicting an entire modernist posture: the elevation of texture, voice, and procedure over incident. By saying Stein “made nothing happen very slowly,” he turns her signature repetitions and circular phrasing into a kind of artisanal stalling. It’s not that her work is empty, he implies; it’s that it converts emptiness into method, and method into prestige.

The line works because it mimics the reader’s experience of Stein while also caricaturing it. “Nothing happen” sounds like the complaint of the impatient consumer of plot, yet “very slowly” acknowledges craft, control, and intention. The joke is double-edged: it flatters Stein’s command of language even as it questions the payoff of that command. Fadiman, a mid-century critic with one foot in high culture and another in mass literacy, is speaking from a moment when modernism had become canonized enough to be mocked. Stein is no longer the scandal; she’s the institution ripe for puncturing.

Subtextually, it’s also a comment on gatekeeping. If a writer can make “nothing” feel like something, the critic has to decide whether that’s genius or a con. Fadiman’s phrasing leaves room for both readings, which is why it endures: it’s a one-sentence review of modernism’s central gamble, delivered as a compliment you can hear grinning.