Preparing for the End: Hemingway's Revisions of "A Canary for One"

NOTES PREPARING FOR THE END: HEMINGWAY'S REVISIONS OF "A CANARY FOR ONE" Scott Donaldson CoUege of William and Mary Old lady: And is that aU of the story? Is there not to be what we called in my youth a wow at the end? Ah, Madame, it is years since I added the wow to the end of the story. Ernest Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon (1932) The trouble with "A Canary for One," for many readers,1 is that it has a surprise ending, and while surprise endings may be all right for O. Henry, they seem all wrong for Ernest Hemingway. Indeed, if Hemingway ever wrote a story with a "wow" at the end, it is this poignant tale of a broken marriage whose final one-sentence paragraph, "We were returning to Paris to set up separate residences," strikes with the force of a revelation. Yet if one rereads the story immediately , as Julian Smith has suggested,2 he will begin to see the groundwork the author has laid for this revelation. Furthermore, now that Hemingway's working manuscripts are available for inspection, it is possible to demonstrate in some detail what he did during textual revisions to cushion the shock of his finish. 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 204Notes 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 for 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...