THE STATUES
Delmore Schwartz
for Meyer Schapiro
T HE
SNOW
began to fall late in the afternoon on the 8th of
December. Faber Gottschalk, a dentist of thirty, was walking to his
office to meet one of his patients and he was scarcely aware of the
first few feathers of snow, having had a whiskey and soda but a
moment before. The pleasant bonfire which liquor set up throughout
his being permitted him to think of the next hour without his usual
disgust. What he resented most about his profession, as I learned later,
was the intimacy which it obviously involved. To put his fingers in
the mouths of hundreds of people in order to find decay, food par–
ticles, pus; to do this day after day, so that it occupied the forefront
of his consciousness; to be faced by the naked and cracked claws or
stalactites of human appetite; to regard at any rate, his means of
making a living 'from this standpoint could clearly have no effect
other than to make his existence a constant evasion of what imme–
diately presented itself before him, whether the dinner which he ate,
or the traffic and the faces on the street, or, as on this afternoon,
.he first signs of that delicate and perfect fulfillment of winter, the
snow.
It was night before the sidewalks were covered and midnight
before the remarkable character of the snow was observable, so that
only the nightfolk, the police, the watchmen, the habitues of night
clubs, knew before morning that an extraordinary and inexplicable
and even terrifying event had occurred. By morning, however, that
portion of the populace which was on its way to work was busy
examining the strange shapes into which the snow had solidified. Not
only had the snowfall formed curious and unmistakeable designs,
some of which were very human, but also the snow had the hardness
of rocks and could not be removed. The morning newspapers devoted
three columns on the first page to the event, commenting especially
upon the difficulty of removing the snow and including photographs
of the statues, as the snow objects were soon called. The photographs
11
