Save Me The Waltz

Zelda Fitzgerald

• Publisher: Handheld Classics
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781999881306
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Classics
• Index: Literature

Written in six weeks and drawing from the life she shared with F. Scott Fitzgerald, Save Me the Waltz is a classic novel of one woman's experience in a fast-moving Jazz Age society.

Alabama Beggs is a Southern belle who makes her début into adulthood with wild parties, dancing and drinking, and flirting with the young officers posted to her hometown during World War I. When Lieutenant David Knight arrives to join her line of suitors, Alabama marries him—and their life in New York, Paris, and the South of France closely mirrors the Fitzgeralds' own life and their prominent socializing in the 1920s and 1930s. In Paris, Alabama becomes fixated on becoming a prima ballerina and refuses to accept that she might not become the great dancer that she longs to be, threatening her mental health and her marriage.

Save Me the Waltz is a relic from The Lost Generation and the brilliant introduction from Erin Templeton shows how Alabama's struggles mirrored Zelda's own, particularly her need to have a life of her own rather than living in her husband's shadow.

Introduction

by Erin E Templeton

I want to go to fabulous places where there is absolutely no conception of the ultimate convergence of everything —Zelda Fitzgerald¹

Zelda Sayre was one of America’s original flappers. An iconic image of 1920s New Womanhood, the flapper bobbed her hair; she smoked cigarettes and drank alcohol; she wore dresses that had scandalously short hemlines revealing not just her ankles but also her knees. She danced the Charleston to the sounds of jazz bands, and she kissed boys in public. And yet, despite her iconic status as one of the ‘It Girls’ of the Roaring Twenties, Zelda Sayre is best known as the mentally-ill wife of American novelist F Scott Fitzgerald. The couple’s Jazz Age exploits are legendary, as are their debacles, disappointments, and breakdowns. Hers ultimately resulted in a diagnosis of schizophrenia; his were the result of struggles with alcohol.

Together, the Fitzgeralds liked to blur the line between fact and fiction. Scott famously proclaimed, ‘I married the heroine of my stories. I would not be interested in any other sort of woman,’ and he remarked later to Malcolm Cowley, ‘Sometimes I don’t know whether Zelda isn’t a character that I created myself.’² In an oft-quoted review of his novel The Beautiful and Damned, Zelda quipped:

It seems to me that on one page I recognized a portion of an old diary of mine which mysteriously disappeared shortly after my marriage, and also scraps of letters which, though considerably edited sound to me vaguely familiar. In fact, Mr Fitzgerald — I believe that is how he spells his name — seems to believe that plagiarism begins at home.³

Early on in their relationship, her husband borrowed lines from Zelda’s letters and diaries for This Side of Paradise and The Beautiful and Damned, materials which she willingly shared. The practice continued throughout their marriage, and Zelda contributed key lines to many of her husband’s most famous fictional scenes, notably Daisy Buchanan’s bitter remembrance to her cousin in The Great Gatsby: ‘And I hope she’ll be a fool – that’s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.’ Still under the effects of anaesthesia from giving birth, Zelda herself had uttered this wish when she learned the sex of her new infant.⁴ Her husband had recorded what she had said in his ledger at the time, repurposing it a few years later. Moreover, Fitzgerald incorporated several passages from Zelda’s correspondence in the 1930s into Tender Is the Night.

Is it any wonder that readers conflate life and art when art draws so directly upon lived experience? As novelist Mary Gordon explains, ‘the case of Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald, their symbiotic relationship as creator and object of creation, may be unique in the history of literature — at least in the history of literary married couples.’⁵ But to only view Zelda through her connection to her husband is to undervalue her not only as an individual but also as an artist. Zelda was a remarkable if controversial woman, but she was also a talented dancer, painter, and writer. Her daughter believed ‘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.’⁶ Fitzgerald scholar Matthew J Bruccoli agreed, noting that ‘[Zelda] wrote like no one else. It is regrettable that the conditions under which she worked prevented her from mastering her craft.’⁷ Bruccoli is correct in his observation that the conditions under which Zelda worked poses significant obstacles, but so too did the time in which she lived.

Zelda Sayre’s biography shows her to be the product of her generation and of her country more broadly. She was born with the new century in July 1900. A Southern belle through and through, she nevertheless grew up with a generation of young women who strove to be independent and audacious, reckless and rebellious. She fell in love with a soldier, a lieutenant in the Army, who was stationed just outside her home town of Montgomery, Alabama just as he was about to be sent overseas to fight in the Great War. When the Armistice was signed on the cusp of his deployment, there was both relief and disappointment. The young couple’s grand wartime romance fizzled out under the banality of a regular job as his dream of becoming the Next Great American Novelist was frustrated by multiple manuscript rejections. Meanwhile, Zelda continued to flirt and dance and date eligible men from across the South. In fact, there was rumoured to be a special society at Auburn University, Zeta Sigma, whose membership was distinguished by its devotion to Montgomery’s most popular belle.

Charles Scribner’s and Sons accepted This Side of Paradise for publication in October 1919. Only then did Zelda hear from her former beau: the soldier turned ad-man turned author-to-be. He asked if he might come south to visit her. She agreed to see him, and before their weekend together had ended, the couple had renewed their romance and were once again engaged to be married. Zelda’s family, however, would not formally announce the engagement of their youngest daughter until the following spring, in early March 1920. From that point forward, Zelda’s life changed quickly and completely. This Side of Paradise was published on 26 March and a week later, on 3 April, Zelda Sayre married F Scott Fitzgerald in the rectory of St Patrick’s Cathedral, New York, having left her beloved South for the first time just days ea...

Table of contents

• Title Page Content
• Introduction
• Footnotes