Paul Gallico, Disability and Love: How and why he changed the ending to “The Snow Goose”

During recent “Me Before You” discussions, some of us wondered if most fictional romances between disabled and nondisabled characters were always cut short. I started thinking about a story I read a long time ago.

I don’t  remember how old I was when I first read The Snow Goose by Paul Gallico. I’m pretty sure that it was between the ages of 10 and 13, because I was already familiar with the story when a made-for-tv version of it aired in 1971.  Here’s a good synopsis of the story from Wikipedia:

The Snow Goose is a simple, short written parable on the regenerative power of friendship and love, set against a backdrop of the horror of war. It documents the growth of a friendship between Philip Rhayader, an artist living a solitary life in an abandoned lighthouse in the marshlands of Essex because of his disabilities, and a young local girl, Fritha. The snow goose, symbolic of both Rhayader (Gallico) and the world itself, wounded by gunshot and many miles from home, is found by Fritha and, as the human friendship blossoms, the bird is nursed back to flight, and revisits the lighthouse in its migration for several years. As Fritha grows up, Rhayader and his small sailboat eventually are lost in the British retreat from Dunkirk, having saved several hundred men. The bird, which was with Rhayader, returns briefly to the grown Fritha on the marshes. She interprets this as Rhayader’s soul taking farewell of her (and realizes she had come to love him). Afterwards, a German pilot destroys Rhayader’s lighthouse and all of his work, except for one portrait Fritha saves after his death: a painting of her as Rhayader first saw her—a child, with the wounded snow goose in her arms.

This is the story that all of us read. It’s the story that’s told in the movie version.

But it’s not the version that Paul Gallico originally wrote.

Many years ago, measured in decades, I read an introduction written by Gallico in the book Three Legends, a collection of 3 of his stories – and The Snow Goose was one of them. In a long introduction, Gallico wrote that the story published in 1941 was not the same story he submitted to the publisher:

“The complaint against the original version of The Snow Goose was that my hero, the deformed painter and the girl Fritha, now grown into woman, had fallen in love and she had come to live with him at his lighthouse before his departure to France, from which he was never to return. At the time I was writing the story it seemed to me a natural thing to happen to these two people and to add poignancy and drama to the final tragedy. The viewpoint of the editors was that their readers would not like to see a man with a deformity united to a healthy girl. The Saturday Evening Post, it must be remembered, was then a family magazine published for Americans and hence subject to all kinds of odd taboos. What was interesting about this particular one was that it was not the living together to which they objected, but the fact that the man was a hunchback.” — From Introduction to Three Legends by Paul Gallico. 1968 paperback edition”(Emphasis added.)

Now, in both versions, Philip Rhayader is lost in the real-life Dunkirk Evacuation – from which many never returned.  But in the first version, Fritha and Philip enjoy a time of loving and living together – and the tragedy is the loss of a great love. The Post editors felt that an unrealized love between the two would be more comfortable for their readers than the idea could actually share love and life.

“Me Before You” and its popularity shows we haven’t moved very far in terms of disability acceptance in the past 70+ years.