New Critical Approaches to the Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway

by Jackson J Benson

  There are three drafts of the story in the Kennedy library.3 Each ends with the sentence about “separate residences,” but Hemingway made substantial alterations elsewhere as he moved from pencil manuscript through typed manuscript to the final typescript which corresponds almost exactly with “A Canary for One” (rejected alternate title: “Give Her a Canary”) as it was published in Scribner’s Magazine for April 1927 and Men Without Women later that year. To omit that last sentence entirely,4 the author apparently decided, would strip the story of significance, but at least he could prepare his readers for the surprise that lay in wait.

  Like “Cat in the Rain,” “Hills Like White Elephants,” and other Hemingway stories of love and marriage in disrepair, not much happens on the surface of “A Canary for One.” Three passengers share a lit salon compartment during an overnight train journey on a rapide from the Riviera to Paris. One, referred to throughout as the American lady, is an unaware, insensitive, overly cautious person who has succeeded in breaking off her daughter’s engagement to a Swiss engineer of good family. She talks a great deal, especially as contrasted to her fellow travelers, the husband and wife, also American, who are about to separate. The American lady thinks in absolutes. One of her settled convictions (twice insisted upon) is that “American men make the best husbands”; another is that “no foreigner can make an American girl a good husband.” Acting on these axioms, she has destroyed her daughter’s chance of happiness. The girl reacted badly; she would not eat or sleep after her mother took her away from her fiance. By way of consolation the American lady has bought her a canary, not because the girl likes canaries but because her mother has “always loved birds.”

  Through most of its five printed pages, the story focuses on the American lady and her daughter’s frustrated romance. But eventually the impersonal narrative voice of the husband switches to the first person, intruding himself and his wife on the reader’s consciousness, and in retrospect almost everything the American lady has said or done stands in ironic counterpoint to the other domestic tragedy that is taking place before her imperceptive eyes and ears. The American lady is rather deaf, a clue to her general lack of awareness. When the train stops at Marseilles, she gets off to buy a Daily Mail and a half bottle of Evian water and then stays near the steps of the car because she is afraid “signals of departure” are given that she does not hear. The journey abounds in such signals, none more deafening than the sound of silence: at no time in the story do the husband and wife address each other, a foreshadowing of their impending departure the one from the other that the American lady seems to notice not at all. Other signals are provided by the desolateness of the urban wasteland, the burning farmhouse, and the train wreck the rapide passes in the course of its journey to Paris. The American lady misses much of this. The careful reader, trying to be one of those on whom nothing is lost and mindful of Hemingway’s injunction that in his fiction “there is much more there than will be read at any first reading,”5 catches most of it, on second reading, at least.

  The single most important change Hemingway made in revision was to remove a large red herring from the roadbed. Both in the first (Ms-1) and second (Ms-2) drafts, the narrator observes, following the American lady’s chitchat about the canary’s morning song, that “My wife and I are not characters in this story. It was just that the American lady was talking to my wife.” That piece of deliberate misinformation he wisely deleted from the final typescript (Ms-3). Hemingway’s task was not to mislead his audience but to guide it toward understanding without erecting obvious signposts. This he aimed to achieve in other ways: through the flatness of the narrator’s voice; through manipulation of the color palette; through ironic emphasis on the gap between reality and the American lady’s perception of the real; through suggestions about the unreliability and impermanence of human relationships; and finally through the story’s penultimate paragraph.

  Only in the first of these categories did Hemingway find his original draft satisfactory. In all three versions of the story the narrator relates his tale in a flat monotone. The opening paragraphs overuse the inert verb “to be” to an extent unusual even for Hemingway. “A Canary for One” begins: “The train passed very quickly a long, red stone house with a garden and four thick palm-trees with tables under them in the shade. On the other side was the sea. Then there was a cutting through red stone and clay, and the sea was only occasionally and far below against rocks.” The view from the compartment window is quite pleasant, but it recedes rapidly and the virtually ungrammatical “the sea was” suggests that the Mediterranean will cease to exist for the narrator once it passes from view. Contrasted with the blue Mediterranean is the stifling atmosphere of the train, again communicated through a series of “it was” and “there was” clauses:

  It was very hot in the train and it was very hot in the lit salon compartment. There was no breeze came through the open window. The American lady pulled the window-blind down and there was no more sea, even occasionally. On the other side there was glass, then the corridor, then an open window, and outside the window were dusty trees and an oiled road and flat fields of grapes, with gray-stone hills behind them.

  This beginning underscores what the narrator-husband will be doing throughout the trip. He listens, or fails to listen, to the chatter of the American lady. He speaks only three times: to make a feeble joke that the lady does not hear, to change a painful subject, and to say goodbye. Though the train is a rapide, the journey goes slowly for him in the overheated compartment. He consults his watch or a timetable to discover how long the train will stop at Cannes (twelve minutes) and Marseilles (twenty-five minutes). He does not even read to pass the time. He merely sits, gazing first at the dusty roads and flat fields, later at the industrial detritus alongside the railroad tracks. The dullness of the narrator’s prose and his selective perception of dreary land and cityscapes indicate that something is troubling him, a point further emphasized by two oddly unidiomatic phrases he uses. When the train stops in Avignon, he sees Negro soldiers on the platform. ‘Their faces were very black,” he reports, “and they were too tall to stare.” Too tall to stare? Why should they stare, unless possibly to stare back at the stranger on the train staring at them? He is the starer, seeking to shut off internal feelings through concentration on the world without. The other curious passage has to do with breakfast. Though the American lady sleeps badly, she rises and goes to the restaurant-car for breakfast the next morning. But to the narrator, “all that the train passed through looked as though it were before breakfast.” The point is reinforced as the rapide reaches Paris: “Nothing had eaten any breakfast.” Nothing? Néant? Nada? Since it would be awkward for them to go separately and there is no question of their going together, the narrator-husband and his wife have not had breakfast. Neither, it seems to him in his mood of negation, has anything or anyone other than the wholesome, middle-aged, and quite intolerable American lady.

  Hemingway also uses chiaroscuro to communicate mood, with the cheerfulness of the sunlight outdoors opposed to the darker psychological mood of the narrator, a man who, like Robert Frost’s persona in “Tree at My Window,” is more concerned with “inner weather.” This contrast is established early in the story. It is hot and sunny outside (the tables of the first paragraph are placed in the shade), but the narrator notes principally the coming of nightfall. As the train leaves Marseilles, he catches a glimpse of “the last of the sun on the water.” “As it was getting dark,” he sees the farmhouse burning in the field, with the bedding spread in the field and people watching the house burn. Then: “After it was dark the train was in Avignon.” It is there that he sees the black troops, dressed in brown uniforms, under command (as Hemingway wrote, for the first time, in Ms-3) of “a short white sergeant.”

  This contrast between lights and darks, external brightness and internal darkness, is picked up and developed the next morning when the sun shines cheerfully, and incongruously, into the compartment. (The narrator o
r his wife have presumably raised the blind and opened the window while the American lady had her breakfast.) The sunshine prompts the canary to chirp briefly, but does not brighten the day for the narrator. Instead, as Hemingway made clear through several additions to the final draft of his story, his vision is concentrated on a sterile world of muted colors. Here, italicized, are those additions:

  The train was now coming into Paris. The fortifications were levelled but grass had not grown. There were many cars standing on tracks—brown wooden restaurant-cars and brown wooden sleeping cars . . . and passing were the white walls and many windows of houses.

  Then the train was in the dark of the Gare de Lyons . . . and we were on the dim longness of the platform.

  In revising the story Hemingway made a number of changes designed to lay stress on the American lady’s unreliability. Missing in both the first and second draft, for example, is the husband’s joke about wearing “braces” instead of “suspenders,” inasmuch as the American lady has thought him and his wife, probably because of their reticence, to be English rather than American. She does not hear the joke, because in her deafness she relies on reading lips and the husband had not looked toward her. As usual, he “had looked out of the window.” Nor does the original draft include another piece of dialogue which calls attention to the American lady’s deafness. The wife has begun to tell her about her honeymoon in Vevey: “We had a very fine room and in the fall the country was lovely.” To which the American lady blankly responds, “Were you there in the fall?” Her tendency is to talk without listening, a point Hemingway called attention to by altering the beginning of the American lady’s discussion of her couturier in Paris. Ms-1 reads, “My wife admired the dress the American lady was wearing,” but this is out of character for the wife, and in later drafts it is the American lady who admires the wife’s apparel and then rambles on without encouragement.

  Actually, the wife initiates conversation but twice, once to ask pointedly, after hearing of the daughter’s broken engagement, “Did she get over it?” and again to bring up the subject of her own honeymoon. This reminiscence about happier times and marital solidarity (“We” spent our honeymoon in Vevey. “We” stayed at the Trois Couronnes. “We” liked our room and enjoyed the good weather.) apparently distresses the husband. At any rate he interrupts to call attention to a train wreck involving three cars, of which the American lady, another touch missing in first draft, sees only the last car.

  The wreck itself is the subject of an elaborate conceit in the original pencil manuscript: “Outside the window were three cars that had been in a wreck. They were splintered and opened up as boats are cross sectioned in a steamship advertisement showing the different decks or as houses are opened up by a bombardment.” In working toward final copy Hemingway must have concluded that neither the holiday suggestions of the boat cruise nor the military connotations of the bombardment properly belonged in his story of marital separation. So the final draft reads, simply, “We were passing three cars that had been in a wreck. They were splintered open and the roofs sagged in.”

  With typical wrong-headedness, the American lady remarks of that part of the wreck she has seen, that she had been afraid of just such a thing all night, and congratulates herself on having “terrific presentiments.” She will never travel on a rapide again, she says. “There must be other comfortable trains that don’t go so fast.” The adjectival qualification, “other comfortable,” was omitted in the first draft and added later to flesh out the American lady’s character. She is a woman who wants and expects life to be smooth and comfortable, as permanent as her own dress measurements or those of her daughter now that she is “grown up and there was not much chance of their changing” through pregnancy or other unsettling events.

  She fails to realize that in taking her daughter away from the Swiss she was “simply madly in love” with she has repudiated a singularly eligible suitor. Hemingway makes two changes to emphasize his reliability. The first is to have the lovers take long walks together, rather than the more adventurous alternative of going skiing (as they had in the first and second draft). The other is to provide the suitor, in Ms-3, with the presumably methodical and trustworthy occupation of engineer. But letting her daughter marry any foreigner would have meant taking a risk, according to the American lady’s prejudices, and she is afraid of all risks. It is with relief that she “put[s] herself in charge” of the emissaries from Thomas Cook at the Gare de Lyons in Paris (originally, Hemingway had written that she “was taken in charge of” by the men from Cook’s).

  But the world will not stand still for the American lady or anyone else, as Hemingway attempted to suggest through several additions to the first draft of his story. In telling the story of her daughter and the Swiss, for example, the American lady acquires a certain hesitancy in the third draft that was not in evidence earlier. These are the italicized additions: “‘My daughter fell in love with a man in Vevey.’ She stopped. They were simply madly in love.’ She stopped again. ‘I took her away, of course.’” Then she goes on to explain her “of course”: “‘I couldn’t have her marrying a foreigner.’ She paused. ‘Some one, a very good friend, told me once, “No foreigner can make an American girl a good husband.”’” American men make the best husbands, she soon reiterates, just as the husband is playing the useful soon-to-be-abandoned husbandly role of “getting down the bags.”

  Other important additions (again italicized) involve the narrator-husband’s awareness that previous arrangements may have been altered in his absence. The rapide comes into the Gare de Lyons, and he duly observes the train “that would go to Italy at five o’clock, if that train still left at five,” and the cars that would go to the suburbs that evening with “people in all the seats and on the roofs, if that were the way it were still done.” The American lady, a great explainer, betrays at least a slight uncertainty. The husband can no longer be certain of anything.

  Obviously aware of the hazard he ran with his ending, Hemingway tried five different versions of the passage that led up to it:

  We found a porter with a truck and he piled on the baggage and we said goodbye to the American lady whose name had been found by the man from Cook’s on a typewritten page in a sheaf of typewritten sheets he carried which he replaced in his pocket. We were returning to Paris to set up separate residences (Ms-1).

  The porter brought a truck and piled on the baggage and my wife said goodbye and I said goodbye to the American lady [the passage about the man from Cook’s repeated]. We followed the baggage truck along beside the train. It was a long train. At the end was a fence and a man at the gate took the tickets of people coming to Paris. We ourselves were returning to Paris to set up separate residences (Ms-2).

  The most significant revision is the change from “we said goodbye to the American lady” to “my wife said goodbye and I said goodbye to the American lady.” The husband and wife do not speak in unison; their status as a collective body of one is about to end. In addition Ms-2 adds several sentences to make the climax seem less abrupt.

  Still not satisfied, in Ms-3 Hemingway tried again, twice. First, he eliminated the intermediate sentences about following the baggage truck, the length of the train, and the man taking the tickets: “The porter brought a truck and piled on the baggage and my wife said goodbye and I said goodbye to the American lady [passage about man from Cook’s]. We were returning to Paris to set up separate residences.” Then he restored and rewrote the intermediate sentences, this time in handwriting, though the rest of the draft is typed:

  The porter brought a truck and piled on the baggage and my wife said goodbye and I said goodbye to the American lady [passage about man from Cook’s].

  We followed the porter with the truck down the long platform beside the train. At the gate a man took the tickets. We were returning to Paris to set up separate residences.

  The husband and wife make the long walk together behind their luggage and pass through the gate toward separation.
The extraneous comment about other people coming to Paris is crossed out in pencil, along with the repetitive “length” of the platform. Missing from the Ms-2 draft is the “fence” in front of which the ticket-taker mans his gate. As Julian Smith has shown, “A Canary for One” is a story full of traps and cages: that of the canary itself, that of the daughter shut off from her life by her dominating mother, that of the husband and wife in the hot compartment at the mercy of the mindless but painful talk of the American lady.6 The fence would surely reinforce this motif, but Hemingway apparently decided that it was one thing he could do without.

  Yet he was not quite through tinkering with his conclusion. Somewhere, perhaps in galleys, the concluding sentence was given greater emphasis by being set apart, as a paragraph of its own. Finally, Hemingway added one word to connote the hard, cold reality of the impending separation. The “long platform” of Ms-3 becomes the “long cement platform” of the printed story.

  Considering its provenance, it is remarkable that Hemingway was able to tell that story at all as soon as he did. “A Canary for One” almost exactly recreates the journey that he and his first wife, Hadley, took from Antibes in August 1926, on their way to find separate residences in Paris.7 Ernest had broken off with Hadley, by all accounts a wonderful person and a loving wife and mother, in order to marry Pauline Pfeiffer. It was a decision that troubled him for the rest of his life. Much later, he took to blaming others as well as himself for permitting his first marriage to fail.8 But at the time he indulged in an orgy of self-disparagement. The separation was entirely his fault, he kept insisting in letters; he was a son of a bitch, and he felt miserable about the whole thing. Yet he put this story in the mail to Scribner’s Magazine on October 25, 1926: it must have been written, and rewritten, within the two months following the actual separation. Hemingway may have sensed that he was too close to his material. In any case he imposed a kind of distance both by keeping the major characters anonymous (only the dressmakers have names) and by delaying until the last sentence the extent of the narrator’s involvement in the proceedings.