Save Me The Waltz (Vintage Classics)

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Zelda wanted desperately to be taken seriously as a writer, and for the first time wanted her work to be evaluated on its own merits, without her husband’s intervention, opinion, or the use of his name. Published in October of 1932, Save Me the Waltz is part memoir and part bildungsroman, a semi-autobiographical account of Zelda Fitzgerald’s marriage to novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald. Her only published novel, Save Me the Waltz follows the life of Southern belle Alabama Beggs and her marriage to artist David Knight.

Fitzgerald, Zelda (2013), Save Me the Waltz, New York: Simon and Schuster, ISBN 978-1-4767-5893-0– via Google Books As a child and teenager, Zelda had been an accomplished dancer. She had also written a few short “guest celebrity” pieces early in her marriage, including a review of Scott’s novel The Beautiful and the Damned, but as a woman and wife of a famous author, she was not expected to have the talent of her own. However, Zelda found that she had no desire to be simply a wife and mother and muse to her husband. Zelda and Scott had lived glory days as the most famous couple of the Jazz Age in New York, following the success of his first novel This Side of Paradise. Save Me the Waltz is based on their time together in the France, which represented the beginning of the decline of their marriage. The novel reflects Zelda’s anxieties to do something for herself and move out of the shadow of her husband’s accomplishments.

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It was my mother’s misfortune to have been born with the ability to write, to dance, and to paint, and then never to have acquired the discipline to make her talent work for, rather than against, her.” Most of the stories appeared under her husband’s name. The F. Scott Fitzgerald byline fetched a far higher price and made it easier to get pieces accepted, but it also meant that Zelda struggled to establish any kind of writing the identity of her own. In part, then, it’s Zelda’s story the way that her husband wanted it to be told, but there are still elements that are very different from Scott’s and that can therefore be assumed are Zelda’s unique style — lush description, vivid colors, a southern summer brought to life in dripping heat and suffocating magnolias, the anguish and pain of obsession and alcoholism, and the frantic search for an identity outside of marriage. One of the great literary curios of the twentieth century Save Me the Waltz is the first and only novel by the wife of F. Scott Fitzgerald. During the years when Fitzgerald was working on Tender is the Night, Zelda Fitzgerald was preparing her own story, which strangely parallels the narrative of her husband, throwing a fascinating light on Scott Fitzgerald's life and work. In its own right, it is a vivid and moving story: the confessional of a famous glamour girl of the affluent 1920s and an aspiring ballerina which captures the spirit of an era. Here we have a woman whose talents and energy and intellect should have made her a brilliant success, who was determined to be an accomplished artist, writer, and ballet dancer in an era where married women were supposed to be wives and mothers, period.”

However she is defined, perhaps her greatest achievement was summed up by Therese Anne Fowler, who wrote: An Italian critic comes to see Alabama’s classes and offers her a solo role at the Opera in Naples, on a modest salary. At first, Alabama dismisses the idea, knowing she could not move Bonnie to a new school and that David would not follow her. After some thought however, she decides to take the offer and go to Naples, leaving her family behind. This is the main difference between Alabama’s story and Zelda’s: Zelda Fitzgerald had also learned ballet as an adult, and received this same offer. The author, however, refused. Milford, Nancy (1970), Zelda: A Biography, New York: Harper & Row, LCCN 66-20742– via Internet Archive They get engaged, David telling her father that he has some money from his family. As the war carries on, David is sent away and they both have affairs with other people. Neither seems to mind too much, and they get married when the war ends. Alabama leaves her parents’ house behind, thinking that she will miss them both. She does not know how poor David truly is, but they are both happy to have each other.She talked with so spontaneous a color and wit — almost exactly in the way that she wrote — that I very soon ceased to be troubled by the fact that the conversation was in the nature of the free association of ideas and one could never follow up anything. I have rarely known a woman who expressed herself so delightfully and freshly; she had no ready-made phrases on the one hand and made no straining for effect on the other.”

He was also angry that she had named one of her main characters Amory Blaine, a name that her husband had also used in This Side of Paradise. Scott fumed, “This mixture of fact and fiction is calculated to ruin us both … my God, my books made her a legend and her single intention in this somewhat thin portrait is to make me a nonentity.” She arrived at the clinic in Switzerland in June 1930 and stayed for over a year. The rest of her life would be spent in and out of hospitals and sanatoriums in both Europe and the U.S. 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." Alabama grows further apart from her husband and their daughter. Determined to be famous, an aging Alabama aspires to become a renowned prima ballerina and devotes herself relentlessly to this ambition. 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.

Publication of Save Me the Waltz and subsequent writings 

This time she was sent to a hospital in Switzerland, where the doctors recommended psychological treatment. After seeing a highly sought-after psychiatrist, Dr. Oscar Forel, she was diagnosed with schizophrenia. Indeed, Scott used lines from Zelda’s letters and diaries throughout his writing career, most notably in This Side of Paradise, The Beautiful and Damned, The Great Gatsby, and Tender Is the Night.