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Save Me the Waltz

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Save Me the Waltz
The book cover with white title against a beige sky. A dancing couple twirl amid a white field of red flowers.
The cover of the first edition
AuthorZelda Fitzgerald
Cover artistCleonike Damianakes
LanguageEnglish
GenreTragedy
PublishedOctober 7, 1932
PublisherCharles Scribner's Sons
Publication placeUnited States
Media typePrint (hardcover & paperback)

Save Me the Waltz is a 1932 novel by American writer Zelda Fitzgerald. The novel's plot follows the privileged life of Alabama Beggs, a Southern belle who grows up the Deep South during the Jim Crow era and marries David Knight, an aspiring painter. After engaging in a carefree life of hedonistic excess during the riotous Jazz Age, an aging Alabama aspires to be a prima ballerina, but an infected blister from her pointe shoe leads to blood poisoning and ends her dream of fame. Much of the semi-autobiographical plot reflects Zelda Fitzgerald's own life and her marriage to writer F. Scott Fitzgerald.[1]

Following the decline of her mental health in Europe, Zelda wrote the novel in January–February 1932 while in Montgomery, Alabama, and then as a voluntary patient at Johns Hopkins Hospital's Phipps Clinic in Baltimore.[2][3] She sent the manuscript to Maxwell Perkins, an editor at Scribner's. Unimpressed by her manuscript,[4] Perkins published the revised novel at the urging of her husband Scott Fitzgerald in order for the couple to repay the financial debts incurred by Zelda's stays at expensive institutions.[5][6]

Although Scott Fitzgerald praised the novel's quality,[7] literary critics panned the novel for its lush prose and weak characterization.[8] The book sold approximately 1,300 copies, and Zelda earned a grand total of $120.73.[9] Its critical and commercial failure dispirited Zelda and led her to pursue other interests as a playwright and a painter.[10] After investors declined to produce her play,[10] her husband arranged an exhibition of her paintings, but the critical response proved equally disappointing.[11][12]

In 1959, a decade after her death, Zelda's friend and literary critic Edmund Wilson wrote in The New Yorker magazine that readers should not infer too much about the Fitzgeralds' marriage based on Save Me the Waltz as the semi-fictional novel merely presents the glamorous fantasy that Zelda and Scott created about their lives.[13] Wilson stated that acquaintance Morley Callaghan's 1963 memoir That Summer in Paris provides a more accurate depiction of the Fitzgeralds' marriage while in Europe.[14]

In 1970, forty years after its publication, biographer Nancy Milford speculated that Zelda's husband rewrote the novel prior to publication.[15][16] Scholarly examinations of Zelda's drafts and revised galleys debunked this speculation.[17][18] Archival evidence shows that Scott Fitzgerald did not rewrite the novel, and the revised galleys show nearly all marks to be in Zelda's hand.[19][18] Despite such scholarly refutations, popular myths persist that Scott rewrote Zelda's novel or tried to suppress its publication.

Plot summary

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A shooting star, an ectoplasmic arrow, sped through the nebulous hypothesis like a wanton hummingbird. From Venus to Mars to Neptune it trailed the ghost of comprehension, illuminating far horizons over the pale battlefields of reality.

—Zelda Fitzgerald, Save Me the Waltz (1932)[1]

Alabama Beggs, a coddled Southern belle "incubated in the mystic pungence of Negro mammies",[20] comes of age in the Deep South during the Jim Crow era.[a] She marries David Knight, a 22-year-old Irish Catholic artist and a United States Army officer stationed near her town during World War I.

David becomes a nationally famous painter, and the newly-wed couple moves to New York, where they enjoy constant revelries of hedonistic excess and dissipation amid the riotous Jazz Age. Alabama and David relocate the French Riviera where a handsome French aviator, Jacques Chevre-Feuille, romances Alabama.[b] In retaliation for this romance, David abandons Alabama at a dinner party and spends the night with a famous dancer.[c]

A dissatisfied and restless Alabama becomes estranged from her alcoholic husband and their young daughter, Bonnie. Obsessed with fame, an aging Alabama aspires to be a renowned prima ballerina and devotes herself to this ambition. She is offered a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to dance a featured part with a prestigious ballet company in Naples. Alabama journeys to the city alone, and she dances her solo debut in the opera Faust. A blister, infected from the glue in the box of her pointe shoe, leads to blood poisoning, and Alabama can never dance again.

The unhappy couple returns to Alabama's beloved Deep South during the Great Depression where her father is dying. She searches for meaning in her father's death but finds none.[d] Though outwardly successful to the general public, Alabama and David are both miserable. The final paragraph depicts the unhappy Knights immobile and dissipated as a couple:

"They sat in the pleasant gloom of late afternoon, staring at each other through the remains of the party; the silver glasses, the silver tray, the traces of many perfumes; they sat together watching the twilight flow through the calm living-room that they were leaving like the clear cold current of a trout stream."

Background and composition

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Further information: Zelda Fitzgerald and Scott Fitzgerald
Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald
F. Scott Fitzgerald
French identity cards for Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald circa 1929, the year in which Zelda's mental health deteriorated, and she experienced homicidal and suicidal tendencies necessitating psychiatric care.

In the Winter of 1929, while a 29-year-old Zelda Fitzgerald and her 33-year-old husband Scott sojourned in France, Zelda's mental health deteriorated.[27] Sara Mayfield, one of Zelda's confidants, stated that Zelda underwent three abortions in preceding years, and Zelda's sister Rosalind speculated that these procedures exacerbated her mental deterioration.[28] During this period, Zelda became obsessed with dreams of fame as a prima ballerina.[29] According to her daughter Scottie, Scott Fitzgerald supported Zelda's ambitions and paid for her ballet lessons.[30]

In September 1929, after receiving an invitation to dance with the San Carlo Opera Ballet Company in Naples,[31] Zelda undertook a grueling daily practice of up to eight hours a day.[32][33] This intense regimen destroyed her physical health and precipitated a nervous breakdown.[32][29] One evening, her husband returned home to find Zelda, unable to speak, collapsed on the floor and entranced with a pile of dust.[29] After summoning a French physician, the doctor examined an incommunicable Zelda and posited that she suffered a collapse of her mental health.[29]

A month later, in October 1929, during an automobile trip to Paris along the mountainous roads of the Grande Corniche, Zelda seized the car's steering wheel and tried to kill herself, her husband, and their 9-year-old daughter Scottie by driving over a cliff.[34] After this homicidal and suicidal incident, doctors diagnosed Zelda with schizophrenia.[35] (Posthumous diagnoses posit bipolar disorder.[36]) Dr. Oscar Forel wrote in his psychiatric diagnosis: "The more I saw Zelda, the more I thought at the time [that] she is neither [suffering from] a pure neurosis nor a real psychosis—I considered her a constitutional, emotionally unbalanced psychopath—she may improve, [but] never completely recover."[37]

The Phipps Clinic in Baltimore, Maryland. Zelda wrote the novel while staying at this institution, one of the most expensive facilities in the United States.

After these initial observations of psychopathic tendencies,[37] Zelda received further care at expensive psychiatric institutions.[38] Following the Fitzgeralds return from Europe and after another mental health episode, Zelda insisted—over her husband's financial objections—that she be admitted to the Phipps Clinic at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore.[39] The Phipps Clinic admitted Zelda on February 12, 1932.[39] Dr. Adolf Meyer, a schizophrenia expert, oversaw her care and psychiatric evaluations.[40] As part of her recovery routine, she spent several hours writing each day.[41]

Having begun writing a novel in January 1932 while in Montgomery, Alabama, Zelda finished the work in February during her voluntary stay at Phipps Clinic.[2][3] She wrote to Scott: "I am proud of my [unfinished] novel, but I can hardly restrain myself enough to get it written. You will like it—It is distinctly École Fitzgerald, though more ecstatic than yours—perhaps too much so."[42] Zelda finished the novel on March 9 and sent the unaltered manuscript to editor Maxwell Perkins at Scribner's.[43]

Surprised to receive an unannounced novel in the mail from Zelda, Perkins perused her original and unaltered manuscript.[43] Perkins discerned "a slightly deranged quality" in the prose that gave the impression that Zelda could not separate "fiction from reality."[43] He deemed the novel's overall tone to be hopelessly "dated" and evocative of the bygone Jazz Age hedonism in Scott Fitzgerald's 1922 work, The Beautiful and Damned.[44] Perkins hoped that her husband Scott, as a veteran novelist, might be able to improve the novel's overall quality with his guidance.[44]

Upon receiving Zelda's original and unaltered manuscript, editor Maxwell Perkins deemed its tone to be "dated" and a relic of the bygone Jazz Age.

Learning that Zelda submitted a manuscript to his editor, Scott—consumed with writing his forthcoming work, Tender Is the Night—became angry that she had not shown a draft to him beforehand.[45] Perusing the manuscript, he objected to her plagiarism of his character Amory Blaine, the protagonist of This Side of Paradise, and her use of the same autobiographical plot elements as his forthcoming novel.[2][46]

Receiving Scott's letter delineating these objections, Zelda replied that "we might have touched the same material."[47] Despite Scott's initial reaction, a debt-ridden Fitzgerald believed that Zelda's book might improve their financial situation, and the couple speedily resolved their disagreements.[48][18][49] After a few suggestions for revisions, Scott praised the novel.[18][49] He wrote to Perkins:

"Here is Zelda's novel. It is a good novel now, perhaps a very good novel—I am too close to tell. It has the faults and virtues of a first novel. It is more the expression of a powerful personality, like Look Homeward Angel, than the work of a finished artist like Ernest Hemingway. It should interest the many thousands in dancing. It is about something and absolutely new, and should sell."[7]

Perkins did not share Scott's enthusiasm for Zelda's novel and, although still unimpressed by her revised manuscript,[4] he consented to publish the work regardless as a way for the couple to repay their financial debt to Scribner's.[50] At the time, much of this financial debt resulted from Zelda's medical bills for her extended voluntary stays at the Phipps Clinic and other expensive psychiatric institutions.[51][6] Perkins arranged for half of the couple's book royalties to be applied against their debt to Scribner's until they repaid at least $5,000 (equivalent to $111,659 in 2023).[50]

On June 14, 1932, Zelda signed a contract with Charles Scribner's Sons to publish the book, and Scribner's published the work on October 7 with a printing of 3,010 copies—typical for a first novel in the midst of the Great Depression—on cheap paper, with a green linen cover.[52] According to Zelda, the novel's title derives from a Victor record catalog, evoking the glamorous lifestyle which the couple enjoyed during the riotous Jazz Age.[53]

Contemporary reception

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Photo of Malcolm Cowley
Photo of Ernest Hemingway
Amid the critical backlash, Malcolm Cowley wrote a letter of consolation to the Fitzgeralds, while Ernest Hemingway criticized the novel's quality.

Following its publication on October 7, 1932, Save Me the Waltz received overwhelmingly negative reviews.[54] The critics savaged Zelda's prose as overwritten, attacked her characterization as weak, and declared her tragic scenes to be unintentionally comedic.[55] A particularly harsh review in The New York Times lambasted not only Zelda but her editor Max Perkins:

"It is not only that her publishers have not seen fit to curb an almost ludicrous lushness of writing but they have not given the book the elementary services of a literate proofreader."[55]

The harsh reviews puzzled Zelda,[56] although she acknowledged to Max Perkins that a review by William McFee, writing in The New York Sun, contained several accurate criticisms.[56] McFee wrote:

"In this book, with all its crudity of conception, its ruthless purloinings of technical tricks and its pathetic striving after philosophic profundity, there is the promise of a new and vigorous personality in fiction."[55]

Malcolm Cowley, a friend of the Fitzgeralds, read Zelda's book and wrote consolingly to her husband Scott, "It moves me a lot: she has something there that nobody got into words before."[55] Another friend, Ernest Hemingway, believed the work lacked artistic merit and warned editor Max Perkins that if he ever published a novel by any of his wives, "I'll bloody well shoot you."[57] Perkins remained privately dismissive of the novel's quality.[4] The book sold approximately 1,300 copies, and Zelda earned a final sum of $120.73 (equivalent to $2,696 in 2023).[9]

Post-publication

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The [novel's poor sales] won't be encouraging to you, and I have not liked to ask whether you were writing any more because of the fact, but I do think the last part of that book, in particular, was very fine; and if we [both Perkins and Zelda] had not been in the depths of depression, the result would have been quite different.

—Max Perkins, 1932 letter to Zelda[58]

The critical and commercial failure of Save Me the Waltz dispirited Zelda. Believing that she might have more success as a playwright than a novelist, she wrote a farcical stage play titled Scandalabra in the fall of 1932.[10] She submitted the play manuscript to agent Harold Ober, but Broadway investors declined to produce the play.[10] To bolster her spirits, Scott arranged for her play Scandalabra to be staged by a Little Theater group in Baltimore, Maryland, and he sat through long hours of rehearsals of the play.[30] This independent production arranged by Scott Fitzgerald proved to be a failure.

Following the consecutive failures of her novel Save Me the Waltz and her play Scandalabra, Scott Fitzgerald remarked during a mutual criticism session with his wife and a psychiatrist that Zelda, as "a third-rate writer and a third-rate ballet dancer", should instead pursue other creative outlets.[59] Zelda next attempted to paint watercolors but, when her husband arranged their exhibition in 1934, the critical response proved equally disappointing.[10][12][60] As with the negative reception of her book, New York critics disliked her paintings.[11] The New Yorker described them merely as "paintings by the almost mythical Zelda Fitzgerald; with whatever emotional overtones or associations may remain from the so-called Jazz Age."[61]

In January 1959, over a decade after Zelda's death, her friend and literary critic Edmund Wilson wrote in The New Yorker magazine that readers should not infer too much about the Fitzgeralds' marriage based on Save Me the Waltz as the semi-fictional novel merely presents the glamorous fantasy that Zelda and Scott created about their lives.[13] Wilson stated that Morley Callaghan's 1963 memoir That Summer in Paris, recounting Callaghan's friendship with the Fitzgeralds during their sojourn abroad, provides a more accurate representation of the couple's lives while in Europe.[14]

In later decades, several critics reappraised Save Me the Waltz in light of the time constraints placed on the writer and offered more charitable opinions. In 1991, The New York Times literary critic Michiko Kakutani reviewed the work and opined "that for all its flaws it still manages to charm, amuse and move the reader is even more remarkable. Zelda Fitzgerald succeeded, in this novel, in conveying her own heroic desperation to succeed at something of her own, and she also managed to distinguish herself as a writer".[62]

Myths

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The assumption that [Scott Fitzgerald] actually rewrote Save Me the Waltz is false. The available documents indicate that his work was advisory.... Almost all the marks are in Zelda Fitzgerald's hand. F. Scott Fitzgerald did not systematically work on the surviving proofs: only eight of the words written on them are clearly in his hand.

—Matthew J. Bruccoli, The Collected Writings of Zelda Fitzgerald, Introduction, 1991[19]

In 1970, nearly forty years after the publication of Save Me the Waltz, biographer Nancy Milford inaccurately speculated that F. Scott Fitzgerald extensively rewrote Zelda Fitzgerald's manuscript prior to its publication by Scribner's.[15] Contrary to this unfounded speculation, later scholarly examinations of Zelda's drafts of Save Me the Waltz deposited in the Fitzgerald Papers at Princeton University Library proved Milford's assumptions to be false.[17][18]

According to scholarly examinations, archival evidence shows any input by Scott Fitzgerald to be advisory.[17][18] The revised galleys show nearly all marks to be in Zelda's hand, and there is no evidence that Scott rewrote the work.[19][18] Despite such scholarly debunking, popular myths persist that her husband rewrote Zelda's novel or attempted to suppress its publication.

References

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Notes

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  1. ^ Zelda's grandfather, Willis B. Machen, served in the Confederate Congress.[21] Her father's uncle John Tyler Morgan, a Confederate general in the American Civil War, became the second Grand Dragon of Alabama's Ku Klux Klan.[22] According to biographer Nancy Milford, Zelda Sayre came from "the heart" of the "Confederate establishment in the Deep South".[21]
  2. ^ In France, while Scott labored on his novel The Great Gatsby, French aviator Edouard Jozan romanced Zelda, and she requested a divorce.[23]
  3. ^ At a dinner party, Zelda threw herself down a flight of marble stairs because Fitzgerald ignored her while talking to dancer Isadora Duncan.[24]
  4. ^ There is scholarly speculation about whether her father Anthony D. Sayre sexually abused Zelda,[25] but there is no evidence confirming incest.[26]

Citations

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  1. ^ a b Bruccoli 2002, p. 328.
  2. ^ a b c Fitzgerald 1991, p. 3.
  3. ^ a b Bruccoli 2002, p. 320; Kakutani 1991, p. 15.
  4. ^ a b c Berg 1978, p. 250: "She has some mighty bad tricks of writing, but she is now getting over the worst of them."
  5. ^ Fitzgerald 1966, p. 262; Berg 1978, p. 251; Turnbull 1962, pp. 299–300; Mizener 1951, pp. 283–284.
  6. ^ a b Piper 1965, p. 164: "Her prolonged convalescence only increased Fitzgerald's expenses, and he was obliged to make up for the interruptions of 1930 by writing even more Post stories than usual during 1931."
  7. ^ a b Fitzgerald 1966, p. 262.
  8. ^ Bruccoli 2002, p. 327; Milford 1970, p. 263.
  9. ^ a b Milford 1970, p. 264; Bruccoli 2002, p. 328; Berg 1978, p. 252.
  10. ^ a b c d e Bruccoli 2002, pp. 343, 362.
  11. ^ a b Bruccoli 2002, p. 362.
  12. ^ a b Fitzgerald 1991, p. vi: According to her daughter, Scott Fitzgerald arranged "for the first showing of her paintings in New York in 1934".
  13. ^ a b Wilson 1959, pp. 115–23; Wilson 1965, p. 24.
  14. ^ a b Wilson 1965, p. 517.
  15. ^ a b Milford 1970, p. 225.
  16. ^ Berg 1978, p. 239.
  17. ^ a b c Fitzgerald 1991, p. 4: "The assumption that he actually rewrote Save Me the Waltz is false. The available documents indicate that his work was advisory."
  18. ^ a b c d e f g Fitzgerald & Fitzgerald 2009, p. 164.
  19. ^ a b c Fitzgerald 1991, pp. 4–5.
  20. ^ Fitzgerald 2013, p. 3.
  21. ^ a b Milford 1970, pp. 3–4.
  22. ^ Davis 1924, pp. 45, 56, 59; Milford 1970, p. 5; Svrluga 2016.
  23. ^ Tate 1998, p. 86; Bruccoli 2002, p. 195.
  24. ^ Milford 1970, p. 117.
  25. ^ Bate 2021, p. 251; Daniel 2021.
  26. ^ Tate 1998, p. 59.
  27. ^ Bruccoli 2002, pp. 288–289; Milford 1970, p. 156.
  28. ^ Bruccoli 2002, p. 159.
  29. ^ a b c d Graham & Frank 1958, p. 242.
  30. ^ a b Fitzgerald 1991, p. vi.
  31. ^ Tate 1998, pp. 86–87, 283.
  32. ^ a b Milford 1970, pp. 141, 157.
  33. ^ Tate 1998, p. 86.
  34. ^ Milford 1970, p. 156.
  35. ^ Bruccoli 2002, p. 291; Mizener 1951, p. 217; Turnbull 1962, p. 193; Tate 1998, p. 23.
  36. ^ Stamberg 2013.
  37. ^ a b Milford 1970, p. 179.
  38. ^ Bruccoli 2002, p. 291.
  39. ^ a b Bruccoli 2002, p. 320.
  40. ^ Cline 2003, p. 304.
  41. ^ Milford 1970, pp. 209–212.
  42. ^ Fitzgerald & Fitzgerald 2009, p. 156; Milford 1970, p. 215.
  43. ^ a b c Berg 1978, p. 235.
  44. ^ a b Berg 1978, p. 236.
  45. ^ Fitzgerald & Fitzgerald 2009, p. 163; Berg 1978, p. 236.
  46. ^ Berg 1978, pp. 235–236.
  47. ^ Fitzgerald & Fitzgerald 2009, p. 163.
  48. ^ Berg 1978, pp. 237, 251.
  49. ^ a b Fitzgerald 1991, p. 9; Fitzgerald 1966, p. 262.
  50. ^ a b Berg 1978, p. 251.
  51. ^ Turnbull 1962, pp. 299–300; Mizener 1951, pp. 283–284.
  52. ^ Cline 2003, p. 320; Milford 1970, p. 264.
  53. ^ Fitzgerald & Fitzgerald 2009, p. 207.
  54. ^ Bruccoli 2002, p. 327.
  55. ^ a b c d Milford 1970, p. 263.
  56. ^ a b Milford 1970, p. 262.
  57. ^ Berg 1978, p. 250.
  58. ^ Berg 1978, p. 252.
  59. ^ Bruccoli 2002, p. 345.
  60. ^ Tate 1998, p. 88.
  61. ^ Milford 1970, p. 290.
  62. ^ Kakutani 1991, p. 15.

Works cited

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