Save Me the Waltz

Save Me the Waltz

The cover of the first edition
Author	Zelda Fitzgerald
Cover artist	Cleonike Damianakes
Language	English
Genre	Tragedy
Published	October 7, 1932
Publisher	Charles Scribner's Sons
Publication place	United States
Media type	Print (hardcover & paperback)

Save Me the Waltz is a 1932 novel by American writer Zelda Fitzgerald. It is a semi-autobiographical account of her life in the Deep South during the Jim Crow era and her marriage to F. Scott Fitzgerald.^[1] The novel recounts the lives of Jazz Age hedonists Alabama Beggs and her husband David Knight, thinly-disguised alter-egos of their real-life counterparts. An aging Alabama aspires to become a prima ballerina, but an infected blister from her pointe shoe leads to blood poisoning, forever ending her dreams of fame.

Following the decline of her mental health in 1929, Zelda wrote the novel while a voluntary patient at Johns Hopkins Hospital's Phipps Clinic in Baltimore.^[2] She sent the manuscript to her husband's editor, Maxwell Perkins. Unimpressed by her manuscript,^[3] Perkins nevertheless published the novel at the urging of her husband Scott Fitzgerald in order for him to repay his financial debt to his publisher Scribner's,^[4][5] much of which resulted from Zelda's medical bills for her voluntary stays in psychiatric institutions.^[6][7]

Although F. Scott Fitzgerald touted the novel's quality,^[4] the novel garnered negative reviews upon its publication.^[8] The book sold approximately 1,300 copies for which 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 Broadway investors declined to produce her plays,^[10] her husband Scott 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' personal lives based on Save Me the Waltz as the semi-fictional novel merely reflects the glamorous fantasy that Zelda and Scott shared together.^[13] Wilson later stated that acquaintance Morley Callaghan's 1963 memoir That Summer in Paris provided 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 Scott Fitzgerald rewrote the novel prior to publication.^[15][16] However, later scholarly examinations of Zelda's drafts and the published version debunked this speculation.^[17] Contrary to Milford's claims, Scott did not rewrite the manuscript, and Zelda herself made only minor editorial revisions.^[17][18]

Author Zelda Fitzgerald (left) and her husband F. Scott Fitzgerald (right) circa 1920–1923.

In Winter of 1929, Zelda Fitzgerald's mental health abruptly deteriorated.^[19] Soon after, 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 F. Scott Fitzgerald, and their 9-year-old daughter Scottie by driving over a cliff.^[20]

After this homicidal and suicidal incident, Zelda sought psychiatric treatment, and doctors diagnosed her with schizophrenia in June 1930.^[21] Zelda's biographer, Nancy Milford, quotes Dr. Oscar Forel's contemporary 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."^[22] Zelda and her husband Scott traveled to Switzerland where she underwent further treatment at a clinic.^[23]

After Dr. Forel's initial hypothesis of psychopathic tendencies,^[22] Zelda remained in and out of psychiatric institutions. After yet another mental health episode, Zelda insisted that she be admitted to the Phipps Clinic at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, despite her husband's objections.^[2] The Phipps Clinic in Baltimore admitted Zelda on February 12, 1932.^[2] Dr. Adolf Meyer, an expert on schizophrenia, oversaw her daily treatment.^[24] As part of her recovery routine, she spent two hours a day writing a novel.^[25]

At Phipps Clinic, Zelda developed a bond with Mildred Squires, a female resident.^[2] Toward the end of February, she shared fragments of her inchoate novel with Squires, who wrote to Scott that her writing had a certain charm.^[26] Zelda 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."^[27] Zelda wrote each day and finished the novel on March 9. She sent the unaltered manuscript to Scott's editor, Maxwell Perkins, at Scribner's.^[28]

Surprised to receive an unannounced novel in the mail from Zelda, Max Perkins carefully perused her original and unaltered manuscript.^[28] Perkins thought the work had "a slightly deranged quality which gave him the impression that the author had difficulty in separating fiction from reality."^[28] Although the famous editor believed the manuscript contained a few promising sections, he deemed its overall tone to be hopelessly "dated" and hearkened back to the glamorous Jazz Age hedonism recounted in Fitzgerald's 1922 work, The Beautiful and Damned.^[29] Perkins hoped that her husband Scott might be able to improve its overall quality with his criticism.^[29]

French identity cards for the Fitzgeralds circa 1929, the year in which Zelda's mental health deteriorated and triggered homicidal tendencies.

Upon learning that Zelda had submitted her manuscript to his editor, Scott became perturbed that she had not shown a draft to him beforehand.^[30] After reading the manuscript, he objected to her plagiarism of his character Amory Blaine, the protagonist of This Side of Paradise.^[31] He expressed surprise that her novel featured the same plot as his upcoming work, Tender Is the Night.^[32]

After receiving a letter from Scott delineating these objections, Zelda wrote to Scott that she feared "we might have touched the same material."^[33] Despite Scott's initial annoyance, a debt-ridden Fitzgerald concluded that Zelda's book might earn a profit.^[34] Consequently, his requested revisions were "relatively few," and "the disagreement was quickly resolved, with Scott recommending the novel to Perkins."^[17][18] 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 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."^[4]

Although still unimpressed by Zelda's revised manuscript,^[3] Perkins nevertheless agreed to publish the work regardless as a way for Fitzgerald to repay his considerable financial debt to Scribner's.^[5] At the time, much of Fitzgerald's financial debt to Scribner's resulted from Zelda's medical bills for her extended voluntary stays at the Phipps Clinic and other psychiatric institutions.^[6][7] Perkins arranged for half of Zelda's book royalties to be applied against Scott's debt to Scribner's until at least $5,000 had been repaid.^[5]

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.^[35] According to Zelda, the book derived its title from a Victor record catalog,^[36] and the title evokes the romantic glitter of the lifestyle which F. Scott Fitzgerald and herself experienced during the riotous and insouciant Jazz Age of American history.

Alabama Beggs, a vivacious Southern belle who wants "her own way about things",^[37] comes of age in the Deep South during the Jim Crow era.^[a] She marries David Knight, a 22-year-old Yankee artist of Irish Catholic stock and a United States 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 romances a handsome French aviator named Jacques Chevre-Feuille.^[b] In retaliation, David abandons her at a dinner party and spends the night with a famous dancer.^[c]

Alabama grows further apart from her alcoholic husband and their young daughter. Obsessed with becoming famous, an aging Alabama aspires to become 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. 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.

At the novel's end, though outwardly successful to the general public, Alabama and David are both miserable. 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 she says otherwise, her childhood friends assume she must be happy, and they envy her privileged lifestyle. The last 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."

Editor Maxwell Perkins and writer Ernest Hemingway both disliked the novel.

Upon its publication, the novel received overwhelmingly negative reviews.^[8] Critics savaged Zelda's prose as overwritten, attacked her characters as weak and uninteresting, and declared her tragic scenes to be grotesquely "harlequinade".^[44] A particularly harsh review in The New York Times lambasted 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."^[44]

The overwhelmingly negative reviews bewildered and distressed Zelda.^[45] However, she acknowledged to Maxwell Perkins that a review by William McFee, writing in The New York Sun, contained several accurate criticisms.^[45] 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."^[44]

Malcolm Cowley, a friend of the Fitzgeralds, read the book and wrote consolingly to her husband Scott, "It moves me a lot: she has something there that nobody got into words before."^[44] 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."^[46] Perkins remained privately dismissive of the novel's quality.^[3] The book sold approximately 1,300 copies for which Zelda earned a final sum of $120.73.^[9]

The critical and commercial failure of Save Me the Waltz temporarily crushed Zelda's spirits. Nevertheless, she attempted to write a farcical stage play titled Scandalabra in the fall of 1932.^[10] She submitted the play manuscript to agent Harold Ober, but Broadway investors unanimously declined to produce the play.^[10] In an attempt 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.^[48] This independent production ultimately proved to be a failure.

One year later, during a tense group therapy session with her husband and a psychiatrist, Fitzgerald remarked that she was "a third-rate writer and a third-rate ballet dancer."^[49] Zelda next attempted to paint watercolors while in and out of sanatoriums but, when her husband Scott arranged their exhibition in 1934, the critical response proved equally disappointing.^[10][12][50] 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."^[51] No actual description of her paintings appeared in any reviews.^[51]

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' supposedly glamorous existence based on Save Me the Waltz as the semi-fictional novel merely offered "a reflection of the fantasy that he and she lived together".^[13] Wilson later stated that Morley Callaghan's 1963 memoir That Summer in Paris, which recounted Callaghan's friendship with the Fitzgeralds during their sojourn abroad, provided a more accurate representation of the actual lives of Zelda and her husband Scott while in Europe.^[14]

In later decades, critics reevaluated the novel in light of the time constraints placed upon the writer and offered more charitable opinions. In 1991, The New York Times literary critic Michiko Kakutani reviewed the work and opined "that the novel was written in two months is amazing. 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".^[52]

In 1970, forty years after the novel's original publication, Zelda's first biographer Nancy Milford posited that novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald had extensively rewritten his spouse's manuscript prior to its publication.^[15] Contrary to this unfounded speculation, later scholarly examinations of Zelda's earlier drafts of Save Me the Waltz and the revised version of her novel discerned fewer alterations than previously assumed.^[17]

According to Fitzgerald scholar Matthew J. Bruccoli, Milford's assumption that Scott "actually rewrote Save me the Waltz is false", and "the available documents indicate that his work was advisory."^[54] 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."^[53] Furthermore, the revisions requested by Fitzgerald were determined to be relatively minor.^[17][18]