Save Me the Waltz

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Save Me the Waltz
Save Me the Waltz (Zelda Fitzgerald novel - book cover).gif
First edition cover of Save Me the Waltz
AuthorZelda Fitzgerald
Cover artistCleonikes Damianakes
CountryUnited States
LanguageEnglish
GenreTragedy
PublishedOctober 7, 1932
PublisherCharles Scribner's Sons
Media typePrint (hardcover & paperback)

Save Me the Waltz is a 1932 novel by American writer Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald. It is a semi-autobiographical account of her early life in the American South during the Jim Crow era and her tempestuous marriage to F. Scott Fitzgerald.[1] Upon its publication, the novel received generally negative reviews,[2] and the work sold only 1,392 copies.[1] Its critical and commercial failure led Zelda to pursue her interests as a playwright and painter instead.[3][4]

Background[]

By the early 1930s, Zelda Fitzgerald had been a recurrent patient of several psychiatric institutions. After an episode of hysteria, Zelda insisted that she be readmitted to a mental hospital.[5] Over her husband's objections,[5] Zelda was admitted to the Phipps Clinic at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore on February 12, 1932.[5] Her treatment was overseen by Dr. Adolf Meyer, an expert on schizophrenia.[6] As part of her recovery routine, she spent at least two hours a day writing a novel.[7]

At Phipps Clinic, Zelda developed a bond with a female resident, Dr. Mildred Squires.[5] Toward the end of February, she shared fragments of her novel with Squires, who wrote to Scott that the novel was vivid and had charm.[8][9] Meanwhile, Scott feared that Zelda's treatment would consume all his finances, so he set aside his novel to work on short stories to fund her treatment. Zelda wrote to Scott from the hospital, "I am proud of my 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."[10][11] Zelda wrote diligently each day and finished the novel on March 9. She sent the unaltered manuscript to Scott's publisher, their friend Maxwell Perkins at Scribner's. Unimpressed by the manuscript, Perkins agreed to publish the work regardless.[12]

Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Zelda Sayre and F. Scott Fitzgerald

Upon learning that Zelda had submitted her manuscript to Perkins, Scott became irate that she had not shown her manuscript to him beforehand.[13] In particular, Scott objected that she had named her heroine's husband Amory Blaine, the name of the young protagonist of Scott's first novel This Side of Paradise.[14] He was further surprised to learn that Zelda's novel covered the same events which he had been working on for four years in his unfinished novel.[15] Scott would use much of the same autobiographical material in his 1934 novel Tender Is the Night. Zelda wrote to Scott apologetically that she was "afraid we might have touched the same material."[16] However, despite Scott's annoyance, "the revisions [which] Scott finally demanded were actually relatively few,[a] and that the disagreement was quickly resolved, with Scott recommending the novel to Perkins."[20][21] Several weeks later, Scott wrote enthusiastically 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 about something and absolutely new, and should sell."[22][23]

On June 14, 1932, Zelda signed the contract with Scribner's to publish the book. It was published on October 7 with a printing of 3,010 copies—not unusually low for a first novel in the middle of the Great Depression—on cheap paper, with a cover of green linen.[24][25] According to Zelda, the book derived its title from a Victor record catalog,[26] and the title evokes the romantic glitter of the lifestyle which F. Scott Fitzgerald and herself experienced during the riotous Jazz Age of American history.

Divided into four chapters, each of which is further divided into three parts, the novel is a chronological narrative of four periods in the lives of Alabama and David Knight, names that are but thin disguises for their real-life counterparts.

Plot[]

"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[27]

Alabama Beggs, a vivacious Southern belle who "wanted her own way about things",[28] comes of age in the Deep South during the Jim Crow era and marries David Knight, a 22-year-old Yankee artist of Irish Catholic stock. Alabama met David when he was an Army officer stationed near her Southern town during World War I. Knight becomes a successful painter, and the family moves to the French Riviera where Alabama has a romance with a handsome French aviator named Jacques Chevre-Feuille. Later David abandons her at an unpleasant dinner party to spend the night with a fashionable dancer.

Determined to be famous in her own right, an aging Alabama aspires to become a renowned prima ballerina and devotes herself relentlessly to this ambition. She grows further and further apart from her husband and daughter. She is offered an opportunity to dance featured parts with a prestigious company in Naples—and she takes it, and goes to live in the city alone. Alabama dances her solo debut in the opera Faust. However, a blister soon becomes infected from the glue in the box of her pointe shoe, leading to blood poisoning, and Alabama can never dance again. Though outwardly successful, Alabama and David are miserable.

At the novel's end, the unhappy couple returns to the Deep South where Alabama's father is dying. Though she says otherwise, her childhood friends assume she must be very happy, and they envy her privileged existence. She searches for meaning in her father's death, but finds none. While cleaning up after their final party before returning to their unhappy lives, Alabama remarks that emptying the ashtrays is "very expressive of myself. I just lump everything in a great heap which I have labeled 'the past,' and having thus emptied this deep reservoir that was once myself, I am ready to continue."

The last paragraph shows the 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."

Reception[]

Maxwell Perkins
Ernest Hemingway
Editor Maxwell Perkins and writer Ernest Hemingway

The reviews by literary critics were mostly negative.[29] The critics savaged Zelda's prose as overwritten, attacked her characters as weak and uninteresting, and declared her tragic scenes to be grotesquely "harlequinade". The New York Times review was particularly harsh:

"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."[30]

Zelda was distressed and bewildered by the overwhelmingly negative reviews. However, she acknowledged to Maxwell Perkins that a review from William McFee, writing in The New York Sun, was at least accurate in its criticisms. 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."[30]

Malcolm Cowley, a friend of the Fitzgeralds, read the book and wrote consolingly to Scott, "It moves me a lot: she has something there that nobody got into words before."[30] Yet another friend, Ernest Hemingway, believed the work lacked artistic merit and warned editor Maxwell Perkins that if he ever published a novel by any of his wives, "I'll bloody well shoot you."[31] Perkins himself was dismissive of the novel's quality.[32] The book sold only 1,392 copies for which Zelda earned a grand total of only $120.73.[25][1]

After the failure of Save Me the Waltz, Zelda's spirits were crushed, and she never published another novel. She nonetheless attempted to write a farcical stage play entitled Scandalabra in Fall 1932.[3] However, after submitting the manuscript to agent Harold Ober, Zelda was further dispirited when Broadway producers were unimpressed by her play.[3] During a subsequent group therapy session with her husband and a psychiatrist, an irate Fitzgerald told her that she was "a third-rate writer."[33][34] Distraught, Zelda next attempted to paint watercolors but, when her paintings were exhibited in 1934, the critical response was equally disappointing.[35]

References[]

Notes[]

  1. ^ Contrary to earlier claims by Nancy Milford in her 1970 biography of Zelda Fitzgerald,[17] later scholarly examinations of Zelda's earlier drafts of Save Me the Waltz and Fitzgerald's revised version of her novel discerned fewer alterations than previously assumed.[18] Furthermore, according to Fitzgerald scholar Matthew J. Bruccoli, the revised galleys were "worked over, but 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."[19]

Citations[]

  1. ^ Jump up to: a b c Bruccoli 2002, p. 328
  2. ^ Bruccoli 2002, p. 327
  3. ^ Jump up to: a b c Bruccoli 2002, p. 343
  4. ^ Bruccoli 2002, p. 362
  5. ^ Jump up to: a b c d Bruccoli 2002, p. 320
  6. ^ Cline 2003, p. 304
  7. ^ Milford 1970, pp. 209–12
  8. ^ Fitzgerald & Fitzgerald 2009, p. 145
  9. ^ Milford 1970, p. 213
  10. ^ Fitzgerald & Fitzgerald 2009, p. 156
  11. ^ Milford 1970, p. 215
  12. ^ Berg 2013, p. xi
  13. ^ Fitzgerald & Fitzgerald 2009, p. 163
  14. ^ Berg 2013, p. xi
  15. ^ Milford 1970, p. 220
  16. ^ Fitzgerald & Fitzgerald 2009, p. 163
  17. ^ Milford 1970, p. 225
  18. ^ Fitzgerald & Fitzgerald 2009, p. 164
  19. ^ Fitzgerald 1991, p. 9
  20. ^ Fitzgerald & Fitzgerald 2009, p. 164
  21. ^ Fitzgerald 1991, p. 9
  22. ^ Cline 2003, pp. 306–307
  23. ^ Milford 1970, p. 225
  24. ^ Cline 2003, p. 320
  25. ^ Jump up to: a b Milford 1970, p. 264
  26. ^ Fitzgerald & Fitzgerald 2009, p. 207
  27. ^ Bruccoli 2002, p. 328
  28. ^ Fitzgerald 2013, p. 220
  29. ^ Bruccoli 2002, p. 327
  30. ^ Jump up to: a b c Milford 1970, p. 263
  31. ^ Berg 2013, p. xi
  32. ^ Berg 2013, p. xi
  33. ^ Cline 2003, p. 325
  34. ^ Bruccoli 2002, p. 345
  35. ^ Bruccoli 2002, p. 362

Bibliography[]

  • Berg, A. Scott (2013). Max Perkins: Editor of Genius. New York: Simon and Schuster. ISBN 978-1-4711-3010-6.
  • Bruccoli, Matthew J. (2002). Some Sort of Epic Grandeur: The Life of F. Scott Fitzgerald (2nd rev. ed.). Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. ISBN 978-1-57003-455-8. Retrieved February 24, 2021.
  • Fitzgerald, F. Scott; Fitzgerald, Zelda (2009) [1985]. Bryer, Jackson R.; Barks, Cathy W. (eds.). Dear Scott, Dearest Zelda: The Love Letters of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald. Scribner. ISBN 978-1-9821-1713-9.
  • Cline, Sally (2003). Zelda Fitzgerald: Her Voice in Paradise. New York: Arcade Publishing. ISBN 1-55970-688-0.
  • Fitzgerald, Zelda (1991). Bruccoli, Matthew J. (ed.). The Collected Writings of Zelda Fitzgerald. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. ISBN 0-684-19297-7 – via Internet Archive.
  • Fitzgerald, Zelda (2013). Save Me the Waltz. New York: Simon and Schuster. ISBN 978-1-4767-5893-0.
  • Milford, Nancy (1970). Zelda: A Biography. New York: Harper & Row. ISBN 978-0-0601-2991-0.
  • "Book Notes". The New York Times. New York. p. 23. May 26, 1932.
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