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3 The “Pointless” Story What Is “A Canary for One”? You know that fiction, prose rather, is possibly the roughest trade of all in writing. You do not have the reference, the old important reference. You have the sheet of blank paper, the pencil, and the obligation to invent truer than things can be true. You have to take what is not palpable and make it completely palpable and also have it seem normal and so that it can become a part of the experience of the person who reads it. —Hemingway to Bernard Berenson (1954), Selected Letters There is no critical debate about the merits of either “Indian Camp” or “Soldier’s Home.” Both stories have been frequently anthologized and highly praised, and each is rich in interpretive possibilities and open to a wide range of critical methodologies. But “A Canary for One” is a different sort of story, one intended to be purely mimetic, and has proven unfertile ground for all but biographical approaches. It is especially unrewarding to criticism requiring some sort of thematic assessment. To understand, appreciate , and properly gauge this type of Hemingway story (which is exemplary of a number of his stories), we must examine it from another perspective —in terms of craft. “A Canary for One” first appeared in the April 1927 issue of Scribner’s Magazine along with “In Another Country”; “The Killers” had come out the month before in that same publication.1 Sandwiched between these two indisputable masterpieces, it was overshadowed then and has been relatively neglected ever since. The few critics who have addressed the story have mostly focused on its biographical relevance, as a fairly straightforward representation of Ernest and Hadley’s return to Paris in May 1926 to begin their separation. With the exception of Hilary K. Justice’s superb biographical article, which views the story as a complex representation not only of the end of Ernest and Hadley’s marriage but also of his impending marriage to Pauline Pfeiffer, these critics all make essentially the same points.2 The only two substantial pieces of criticism that examine the text The “Pointless” Story: “A Canary for One” 113 qua story are Scott Donaldson’s extremely valuable genetic study of the manuscripts and Julian Smith’s analysis of the story’s theme, motifs, and symbols. The biographical aspects of the story have thus dominated the criticism of “A Canary for One,” and the thematic content of the text is, by now, all too manifest. Much more interesting than what the story is about, however, are the questions of what the story is and how it works. These are the questions I shall here address. “A Canary for One” opens within a compartment aboard a train speeding its way along the coast of southern France. For the first half of the story it appears to be a third-person narrative, and the only character seems to be a slightly deaf American lady who is afraid of a possible train wreck and who is returning to Paris with a canary she has purchased in Palermo , Sicily, for her daughter. Although the story will turn out to be a firstperson narrative—a fact deftly concealed by the use of inert constructions (“outside the window were dusty trees”) and by placing the actions of the American lady at the center of the narrative—the reader suspects nothing of the sort.3 Inside the compartment it is hot and oppressive. The train pulls into Marseilles, and the lady takes a brief walk along the platform, fearful of straying too far because she was almost left behind at Cannes. The train leaves Marseilles at dusk, passes a burning farmhouse, and pulls into Avignon at night, where people get on and off and black soldiers are standing on the platform. All night the American lady lies awake fearing a train wreck. In the morning, with the train approaching Paris, she washes, breakfasts in the restaurant car, and returns to the lit salon. She removes the cloth from the canary’s cage, and the bird begins to sing. At this point the narrator steps forth by using the first-person pronoun and reveals to the reader that he is traveling with his wife. In the first of two conversations between the American lady and the narrator’s wife, we discover that the American lady has mistaken the couple for English, that she recently terminated her daughter’s love affair with a non-American whom the girl...

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