[In the following essay, Parrinder investigates Wells's revisions of the ending of “The Country of the Blind.”]

First published in the April 1904 number of the Strand Magazine, “The Country of the Blind” is among Wells's most admired short stories.¹ Together with D. H. Lawrence's “The Woman Who Rode Away” it is one of the finest “lost race” tales in 20th-century English literature. Nevertheless, “The Country of the Blind” has attracted rather cursory critical attention and none of the available accounts is based on a study of Wells's manuscript.

Virtually everyone who has written about the story draws attention to the beauty and thematic significance of its ending. Bernard Bergonzi, in perhaps the most influential and outspoken reading of “The Country of the Blind,” sees it as a “magnificent example of Wells's mythopoeic genius” (p. 84). Bergonzi quotes the final paragraphs, in which Núñez the protagonist is shown escaping from the valley of the blind people into which he has stumbled after a climbing accident in the Ecuadorian Andes. Marooned in the valley (a “Happy Valley” or ironic utopia), Núñez at first tries to establish the sighted man's superiority over the blind. Subdued and chastened by the blind people's ability to co-operate against him, he becomes a humble domestic slave and falls in love with Medina-saroté, his master's daughter. The elders agree to permit him to marry her if only he will consent to having his eyes removed in a simple surgical operation. On the day before his operation, however, he steals away from the sleeping village (the blind people naturally sleep during the heat of the day and work at night) and climbs up the side of the valley, searching for a passage through the impenetrable mountain wall. He is last seen with a smile on his face, lying motionless on his back under the stars.

Núñez at the end has suffered a fall and is bruised, blood-stained and insensible—in fact, he is almost certainly dead.² Critics are unanimous in applauding his escape from the valley, even though it makes for an ending in which (in Michael Draper's words) “self-fulfillment and self-destruction combine” (p. 41). According to Bergonzi, “[t]he end of the story expresses Wells's personal conviction that the individual can and should remove himself from any situation which he finds insupportable; at the same time, it shows how the human spirit can assert its true freedom, even at the cost of physical extinction” (p. 84). A similar act of destructive self-assertion occurs at the end of “The Door in the Wall” (1906), though, as Bergonzi points out, the two endings are to some extent antithetical since “Wallace dies in a pit; Núñez is at least able to escape from one” (p. 87). (Núñez has come to see the valley of the blind as a “pit of sin.”)

Frank McConnell also sets “The Country of the Blind” in antithetical relationship to another Wellsian text: this time to The Invisible Man (1897). Núñez, like Griffin, is a social outsider; so that in the later story, “The same basic tale is repeated, except that our sympathies and our identification are with the individual figure, the isolated hero rather than with the group, the society, that destroys him” (McConnell:119). Unlike Bergonzi's, McConnell's account would apply equally to a version of the story with a hypothetical alternative ending in which, far from escaping and dying in the mountains, Núñez finally felt forced to submit to the blind surgeons' scalpels. Such an alternative ending is no mere hypothesis, however. It can be found in a subsequently cancelled passage in Wells's first surviving draft of the story.

The manuscript of “The Country of the Blind” in the Wells Collection at the University of Illinois consists of three different versions of the story, two of which are bundled together, apparently in the order in which Wells or his secretary left them. At least one version is missing, since there is no MS authority for the story's published ending. Instead, there is the earliest version, in which Núñez turns back to face the surgeons, and two intermediate versions. The MS evidence suggests Wells's radical uncertainty both as to the appropriate fate for Núñez and as to the significance of that fate and the explicitness with which it should be presented.

Versions A and C, which are bundled together, consist of 46 pages of MS and corrected typescript, not all of which are in sequence. The first page is dated “December 25, 1903” in pencil. (Most probably this was the date of completion of one of the drafts, and being Christmas Day it illuminates Wells's somewhat frenetic methods of work.) In general, the MS pages are written straight out with many additions but very few deletions; the first version of the ending, as we shall see, is uncharacteristic in this respect. Portions of the MS appear to have been typed up as soon as they were completed, so that Wells could both revise them and continue writing the story on the last typed sheet. In version A (where the characters' names are given as Nuñez and Medinasaroti), Núñez finally flees to the mountains, sits down on a ledge, and imagines Medina-saroté waking up in the evening to find him gone. Not understanding how great a sacrifice she was demanding of him, she would necessarily think him a coward for refusing to face the eye surgeons. The last paragraphs in version A read as follows (Wells's insertions are underlined; his substitutions for deleted passages are preceded by a slash):³

But his decision was made now Down there in the valley was life & love, tender hands & a dear heart, down there was a sort of honour, a sort of consolation & a soul that stood in need of him, & above—solitude, & a fading dream, & a guideless struggle & death.

He put the back of his hands to his eyes, all wet with tears, & so stood for a space.

“Why was I given this gift?” he whispered (?)…—Why was I given this gift?

Sobs shook him

The warm light of the sinking sun was all about him, & suddenly the shadows came reaching (?) silently upon him & day fled away from him up the steep.

He shivered & stood still, stood up /very still.

Abruptly as one who will delay no more, he drew his cloak about him & bowed his head /set his face towards the valley /& set his feet /with a stern /set & sorrowful face turned (?) back towards the valley where the surgeons (?) awaited his coming.

Crammed into the bottom of the page, the deletions here make this one of the most difficult of Wells's manuscripts to decipher. The author's dissatisfaction with this first ending, in which the lovelorn Núñez goes weakly back down to the valley, is all too evident from the confused and hesitant state of the final sentence.

Versions B and C are closely similar to one another, C apparently being the corrected typescript version of B. Here Wells has reversed his original ending, anticipating instead that Núñez will die in the mountains. The words “die” and “death” are used here, though they are suppressed in the published text of the story (along with other details, such as the ledge and “trackless snowfield”). To facilitate comparison I shall reproduce the final paragraphs of versions B (holograph) and C (typescript with holograph additions) … :

He had clambered along a ledge of rock, taking terrible risks, & quite near now to him was the trackless snowfield upon which under the clear cold stars, he must presently struggle & sink & die. He stood, resting against an elbow of rock & panting.

And for all that death was /stood near& waiting for him, it seemed to him he was a man who had been in a terrible danger & had made a great /achieved escape

Medina saroti was very small & remote (?) now, a speck amidst those houses,

[Version B]

He had clambered along a ledge of rock, taking terrible risks, and quite near to him now was the trackless snowfield upon which under the clear cold stars, he must presently struggle and sink and die. He stood, resting against an elbow of rock and panting and looking at these things & ever (?) & again down into narrow valley where the blind men had their world. (?)

And for all that death stood near and waiting for him, it seemed to him he was a man who had been in a terrible danger and had achieved escape.

[Version C]

Both the deleted half-sentence in B and the inserted half-sentence in C suggest Núñez's inability to finally break his emotional ties with the valley of the blind: like Lot's wife, he keeps looking back. In the published ending (which is much richer than versions B and C), Núñez's final actions have lost any air of indecision:

He glanced back at the village, then turned right round and regarded it steadfastly.

He thought of Medina-saroté, and she had become small and remote.

He turned again towards the mountain wall, down which the day had come to him.

Then very circumspectly he began to climb.

There follows a kind of coda, in which the narrative is no longer focalized through Núñez's consciousness. He is instead visualized lying where he has apparently fallen, though the word “fall” is avoided in favor of the euphemistic statement, “He had been higher, but he was still very high.” Around him the sun sets over the mountains and the stars appear, but “he heeded these things no longer”—he is, as it were, blind to them. But he lies “smiling as if he were satisfied merely to have escaped from the Valley of the Blind in which he had thought to be King.”

Within what I have called the coda in the published text, Wells systematically repeats a number of motifs from earlier in the story. The valley now “seemed as if it were a pit,” echoing Núñez's earlier impression of a “pit of sin.” Moreover, Núñez, who initially tumbled into the valley of the blind from the snow-slopes, has now suffered a second fall. The proverb about the One-Eyed Man is also recalled. Perhaps the most memorable feature of the coda, however, is the sublimity of the sunset landscape in the high mountains. The passage is marred slightly by over-insistent repetition. (It would be fascinating to study the MS drafts of the coda, which apparently we do not have.) Some of the phrases describing the glints of “light and fire” appeared in the earlier versions, where they occupied a different position, coming before Núñez finally made his decision regarding the alternative of continuing on up the slope, or returning to the valley.

The sublime mountain landscape is doubly hidden from the people of the valley: it cannot be seen by the blind, and it cannot be seen from the valley. In the coda to the published text, Núñez is at last blind to it as well. Only the narrator can evoke it, for the reader to visualize; so that the reader has inherited from Núñez the superior awareness, and perhaps the delusions, of the sighted. This may lead us to emphasize another crucial detail in the coda, Núñez's contented smile. The Núñez of version A was last shown with a “set and sorrowful face,” while in B and C there was a certain grim exhilaration (such as is felt by the reader of the published text) but no smiling.

Núñez, being insensible, is finally blind, and his contentedness is something that he shares with the blind people of the valley. In keeping with the Happy Valley topos, the most evident characteristic of the inhabitants of the Country of the Blind is their complacency. In mythopoeic terms, Núñez is finally reunited with the blind people, at one level, almost fully as if he had gone back to face the surgeons. The coda, read in this light, unmistakably completes the “organic” pattern of the story, yet it also conveys a rather disturbing element of ambiguity and ambivalence. This ambivalence is forcibly and inescapably present when we consider the earlier versions of Wells's ending, which offer the spectacle of an irresolute, vacillating protagonist set forth by an uncharacteristically hesitant and fumbling author. Though a full study of the textual genesis of “The Country of the Blind” is beyond my purpose here, a comparison of the alternative endings reveals some of the artistic uncertainties surrounding the creation of a classic short story, as well as hinting at the buried life of the author which serves to generate his fantasies. For who, reading Wells's life and many of his other best-known novels and stories, could fail to observe that he himself was torn between social responsibility and manic individualism, between acceptance of the Happy Valley of contented (but limited) fulfillment, and a desperate, self-destructive need to strike out along imaginary paths for the mountain summits?

Notes

1. The story was reprinted in The Country of the Blind, and Other Stories (London: Nelson, 1911), pp. 536-68, and later in The Works of H. G. Wells: Atlantic Edition, vol. X (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1925), pp. 601-36, and in The Complete Short Stories of H. G. Wells (London: Benn, 1927), pp. 167-92. For the present purpose these texts are identical. At the time of the 1927 reprint, Wells told the London Sunday Express that “The Country of the Blind” and “The Pearl of Love” were his two favorites among his short stories. See David C. Smith, p. 416.

2. For most critics Núñez is unequivocally dead, though Michael Draper (p. 14) and John Huntington (p. 126) express some uncertainty.

3. The speech beginning “Why was I given this gift?” and the words “Sobs shook him” in this extract represent a second insertion within the inserted passage. Other conventions I have used are as follows: a question mark in brackets indicates a dubious reading of the preceding word; words struck through represent Wells's deletions.

   This and other quotations from the unpublished MSS of “The Country of the Blind” appear by permission of A. P. Watt Ltd. on behalf of the Literary Executors of the Estate of H. G. Wells.

Works Cited

Bergonzi, Bernard. The Early H. G. Wells: A Study of the Scientific Romances. Manchester, UK: 1961

Draper, Michael. H. G. Wells. Basingstoke, UK: 1987.

Huntington, John. The Logic of Fantasy: H. G. Wells and Science Fiction. NY, 1982.

McConnell, Frank. The Science Fiction of H. G. Wells. NY, 1981.

Smith, David C. H. G. Wells, Desperately Mortal. New Haven & London: 1986.