Save Me The Waltz

Save Me The Waltz

Also published by Handheld Press

Handheld CLASSICS

1 What Might Have Been: The Story of a Social War by Ernest Bramah

2 The Runagates Club by John Buchan

3 Desire by Una L Silberrad

4 Vocations by Gerald O’Donovan

5 Kingdoms of Elfin, by Sylvia Townsend Warner

Handheld MODERN

1 After the Death of Ellen Keldberg, by Eddie Thomas Petersen, translated by Toby Bainton

2 So Lucky, by Nicola Griffith

Handheld RESEARCH

1 The Akeing Heart: Letters between Sylvia Townsend Warner, Valentine Ackland and Elizabeth Wade White by Peter Haring Judd

2 The Conscientious Objector’s Wife: Letters between Frank and Lucy Sunderland, 1916–1919, edited by Kate Macdonald

Save Me The Waltz

by Zelda Fitzgerald

with an introduction by Erin E Templeton



First published in the USA in 1932 by Scribners.

This edition published in 2019 by Handheld Press Ltd.

72 Warminster Road, Bath BA2 6RU, United Kingdom.

www.handheldpress.co.uk

Copyright of the Introduction © Erin E Templeton 2019

Copyright of the Notes © Kate Macdonald and H L Marsh 2019

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publisher.

The moral rights of the authors have been asserted.

ISBN 978-1-9998813-0-6 ePub

ISBN 978-1-9999448-0-3 MOBI

Series design by Nadja Guggi.

Cover image: ‘Aesthetic dancer’ / Mary Evans Picture Library.

Contents

Introduction

by Erin E Templeton

Save Me The Waltz

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Notes on the Text

by Kate Macdonald and H L Marsh

Erin E Templeton is the Anne Morrison Chapman Distinguished Professor of International Study and an Associate Professor of English at Converse College, South Carolina, where she teaches and researches early twentieth-century American fiction and poetry.

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 earlier. She was nineteen years old.

Soon there were stories of fountain diving, taxi-roof rides through the city, and endless spins in revolving doors. The champagne flowed and the parties lasted into the early hours. This Side of Paradise was all the rage as its author and his new bride were hailed as ambassadors for the new generation. The 1920s had started to roar; the Jazz Age had begun, and the Fitzgeralds were at the centre of it all. Between the late-night revelries and resultant hangovers, Scott was trying both to write short stories, which paid the bills, and to write his next novel which he hoped would bring him critical acclaim; both were a struggle. Meanwhile Zelda grew increasingly restless and homesick for her beloved South.

Perhaps her restlessness was infectious: the couple began to travel both domestically and abroad, and by February, Zelda was pregnant. Their daughter Frances Scott Fitzgerald arrived on 26 October 1921, but parenthood did little to change the Fitzgeralds’ lives or the frenetic pace at which they lived. The family travelled to Paris in 1924, and they were to stay abroad for several years, but travel did little to ease Zelda’s unhappiness. She missed her family and her friends back in the States, and since they had a nurse to care for Scottie, there were long periods of time when she had nothing to do. Meanwhile, her husband struggled to balance the demands of his writing with the family’s steadily mounting expenses and the high life that he and Zelda enjoyed. He longed to write the Great American Novel, but the couple’s extravagant lifestyle demanded that he sell short stories. Bored and lonely, Zelda had an affair with a French pilot; her husband reciprocated with an affair of his own with a young American actress. Despite their infidelities, the Fitzgeralds stayed together, but the marriage grew ever more strained as the couple continued to live a life of excess, often spending beyond their means. While in Paris, Scott met the young Ernest Hemingway. The two expatriates rapidly became friends and bonded over their mutual literary ambitions. Zelda and Hemingway, however, disliked each other intensely from the beginning, and their mutual animosity added tension to an already overwrought marriage.

Zelda, moreover, was increasingly frustrated by the lack of a creative outlet. She had written a few short celebrity pieces in the early years of her marriage, but she lived in a world where married women were expected to be content in their roles of wife and mother. Satisfaction eluded Zelda until she decided to start taking ballet lessons again. She studied with notable teachers in both the United States and France, most famously with well-known Russian ballerina Lubov Egorova. ‘Madame’, as her students referred to her, had danced with the Imperial Russian Ballet in St Petersburg before she attracted the attention of Sergei Diaghilev, who then hired her to dance with the famous Ballets Russes in Paris.⁸ Madame accepted Zelda into her studio and taught her alongside a variety of aspiring and professional dancers, including Lucienne Lamballe, who danced professionally with the Paris Opera, and a few years later would also include Lucia Joyce, daughter of James Joyce. Zelda was twenty-five when she resumed her ballet studies, and within two years, at the age of twenty-seven, she had decided to become a ballerina, in her own words ‘a Pavlova, nothing less.’⁹ Physically demanding, the ballet became Zelda’s primary focus. She purchased a large mirror with a gilt frame for their house and installed a barre in front of it where she spent hours each day practicing. For three years, she devoted all of her time to the dance, often at the expense of her marriage and her relationship with her daughter.

Zelda disliked having to rely on her husband’s money to pay for her ballet lessons, so when she wasn’t practicing, she turned to writing to support herself. She wrote several articles and short stories, some of which would be published in Harper’s Weekly, College Humor, The Smart Set, and The Saturday Evening Post. All of these pieces were either solely or jointly attributed to her husband; his name brought a higher price. As Matthew J Bruccoli has explained, because her husband was a commercially successful author, it was ‘easier [for Zelda] to have her work published; but it impeded her development as a professional writer — one who successfully competes in the marketplace.’¹⁰ Put another way, since she was the wife of a successful author, her work was seen as a curiosity. No one expected talent.

Writing was not the only area where Zelda struggled to be taken seriously. She also faced obstacles in the dance studio because of her age and because she was married. Though Zelda was now too old, beginning her training in her mid-twenties, to achieve her dream of becoming a prima ballerina, her hours of rehearsal and dedication to the dance still might have paid off had her health not failed. In the autumn of 1929, she received an invitation to dance professionally with the San Carlo Opera Ballet Company in Naples, Italy. She was offered a solo role in Aida as her debut and promised additional solos during the season. She was offered a monthly salary to dance the full season, but inexplicably, she declined the offer.¹¹

Friends noted that Zelda’s behaviour was becoming increasingly erratic; within months, she collapsed in Paris after experiencing visual and auditory hallucinations, anxiety attacks, severe depression, suicidal tendencies and exhaustion. She was first hospitalised just outside Paris, but desperate to return to the ballet studio, she left the hospital against the advice of her doctors. Within weeks, she had relapsed, and the anxiety attacks and hallucinations returned. This time she went to a hospital in Switzerland, but the facility was intended for physical illnesses, and her doctors suspected that Zelda would require psychological treatment. They requested a consultation with a noted psychiatrist, Dr Oscar Forel, whose prognosis was grim: schizophrenia. Schizophrenia was a relatively new diagnosis in 1930. The term, which meant ‘split mind’ had only been coined in 1908 by Swiss psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler. At the time of Zelda’s treatment schizophrenia was a common diagnosis for women, whose symptoms might include disordered thinking, blunted affect, ambivalence and the preoccupation with one’s own thoughts. By 1930, psychiatrists also had begun to suspect a genetic component to the disease though there was no such history reported in Zelda’s family. The Fitzgeralds’ marital difficulties, Zelda’s frustrations with a lack of creative outlet, her dedication to her dance, and her reluctance towards traditional female domesticity were all considered part of her pathology.

Zelda agreed to in-patient treatment at Praguin’s clinic in Switzerland. In an autobiographical sketch, she recalled the journey:

Our ride to Switzerland was very sad. It seemed to me that we did not have each other or anything else and it half killed me to give up all the work that I had done. I was completely insane and had made a decision: to abandon the ballet and live quietly with my husband … If I couldn’t be great, it wasn’t worth going on though I loved my work to the point of obsession. It was all I had in the world at the time.¹²

She arrived at the exclusive facility located on the banks of Lake Geneva in early June 1930 and would stay for over a year. Her illness took an enormous toll on her and on her family. Not only was treatment expensive, but it also required her to be in residence at a care facility where she would be given structure and a daily routine of activities that her doctors thought appropriate for her condition. In addition to her psychological symptoms, she suffered from eczema, a painful skin condition, and endured morphine and calcium injections. Later in life, she would also receive insulin injections. She would spend the rest of her life in and out of sanitoriums and hospitals in Europe and the United States including Craig House in upstate New York, Phipps Clinic outside Baltimore, Maryland, and Highland Hospital in Asheville, North Carolina.

Zelda wrote the first draft of Save Me the Waltz in early 1932 while undergoing treatment at Phipps psychiatric clinic. It took her two months. This manuscript was not her first attempt at writing a novel or even her first attempt at fiction, but it was the first work that she sent off to a publisher without showing it to her husband first. In a note attached to the manuscript, she explained to Max Perkins, ‘Scott completely being absorbed in his own [novel], has not seen it, so I am completely in the dark as to its possible merits but naturally terribly anxious that you should like it.’¹³ Zelda wanted her work to be evaluated on its own terms, without her husband’s guidance or intervention.

She sent a copy to her husband a few days later. When he did see the draft, he was furious. Interpreting Zelda’s direct submission as a deliberate betrayal, he wrote an irate letter to her doctor in which he accused his wife of stealing several ideas from his current project, Tender Is the Night: ‘literally one whole section of her novel is an imitation of it, of its rhythm, materials … there are only two episodes, both of which she has reduced to anecdotes but upon which whole sections of my book turn.’¹⁴ Zelda had even named her protagonist’s love interest Amory Blaine, a name she recycled from her husband’s famed debut, This Side of Paradise. Finally, he felt that her novel, which was autobiographical in nature, exposed too much of his private life and was aimed at ridiculing him. He protested:

The mixture of fact + fiction is calculated to ruin us both, or what is left of us, and I can’t let it stand. Using the name of a character I invented to put intimate facts in the hands of the friends and enemies we have accumulated en route — my God, my books made her a legend and her single intention in this somewhat thin portrait is to make me a nonentity.¹⁵

To him, Zelda’s manuscript reads as a deliberate attack, an intentional humiliation meant to ridicule him and diminish his reputation.

Zelda learned of her husband’s fury from her doctor and wrote him an explanation:

Dr Squires tells me you are hurt that I did not send [my] book to you before I mailed it to Max. Purposely I didn’t — knowing that you were working on your own and honestly feeling that I had no right to interrupt you to ask for a serious opinion. Also, I know Max will not want it and I prefer to do the corrections after having his opinion. Naturally, I was in my usual rush to get it off my hands — You know how I hate brooding over things once they are finished: so I mailed it post haste, hoping to have yours and Scribner’s criticisms to use for revising.

Scott, I love you more than anything on earth [sic] and if you were offended I am miserable. We have always shared everything but it seems to me I no longer have the right to inflict every desire and necessity of mine on you. I was also afraid we might have touched the same material. Also, feeling it to be a dubious production due to my own instability I did not want a scathing criticism such as you have mercilessly — if for my own good given my last stories, poor things. I have had enough discouragement, generally, and could scream with that sense of inertia that hovers over my life and everything I do.¹⁶

Zelda explained that she didn’t want to interrupt her husband’s work on his own novel and waste his time with her mediocre writing. She reasoned that sending him the manuscript first would have been too much of an imposition, particularly given how much she had already imposed on him because of her illness and the expenses it had caused them to incur. Moreover, she explained that due to her illness, she felt unable to withstand what would be deservedly harsh critiques of the work. But immersed in this explanation is an almost passing confession: ‘I was afraid we might have touched on the same material.’ Zelda knew that her husband considered their shared life together to be the fodder for his work and had long been accustomed to seeing her words in his manuscripts.

The ongoing exchange between the Fitzgeralds over the first draft of Save Me the Waltz deepened an already significant rift between them. Her husband’s side of their correspondence is lost, but Zelda’s letter must have inspired a sharp response from Scott because in her next letter, she concedes:

Of cource [sic], I glad[ly] submit to anything you want about the book or anything else. I felt myself the thing was too crammed with material upon which I had not the time to dwell and consequently lost any story continuity … However, I would like you to thoroughly understand that my revision will be made on an aesthetic basis: that the other material which I will select is nevertheless legitimate stuff which has cost me a pretty emotional penny to amass and which I intend to use when I can get the tranquility of spirit necessary to write the story of myself versus myself. That is the book I really want to write.¹⁷

Zelda’s willingness to surrender specific elements of her novel was an attempt at conciliation with her husband, and it’s worth noting that all of her published correspondence to him from this time contains numerous declarations of love and affection. Also notable in the letter is her insistence on the aesthetic basis for revisions. Zelda wants to be taken seriously as a writer. She argues for her right to use her life, her experiences, in her work, whether this novel or something else when she is able to regain a sense of equilibrium.

Over the next few months, Zelda would revise her book, and her husband must have helped her, though the extent of his influence is unclear because the original drafts of the book are lost. In the months that would follow, his opinion of the manuscript fluctuated dramatically. In one letter dated 25 March 1932, he wrote to Perkins that the novel would require, in Bruccoli’s words ‘only minor revisions’ but then just days later said that it would need more extensive adjustments. By mid-May, he would write to Perkins that ‘It is a good novel now, perhaps a very good novel — I am too close to really tell’ all the while cautioning Perkins against encouraging Zelda too much: ‘praise will do her good within reason.’¹⁸ But by 1936, he would change his mind again, writing to his agent that ‘it is a bad book!’¹⁹

The novel was published in 1932. Scholars speculate that its initial print run would have been no more than 3000 copies, which was common for a first-novel in the Depression Era. Of these 3000, only 1392 sold, and Zelda received $120.73 in royalties (approximately £1563 in 2018 currency).²⁰ Contained in the book’s contract was a clause which stated that 50% of the book’s royalties — up to $5000 — would be used to pay off her husband’s debts to Scribner’s, but because the book sold so poorly, this provision was disregarded. Pointing to ‘hundreds of errors’, Matthew J Bruccoli has proclaimed that Save Me the Waltz ‘was one of the most sloppily edited novels produced by a distinguished American publisher.’²¹ The novel went out of print after its first run and remained inaccessible for more than thirty years until it was republished by Southern Illinois Press in 1967 and then again as part of The Collected Writings of Zelda Fitzgerald published by the University of Alabama in 1991. When the book was republished in 1967, it required ‘some 550 emendations for correctness.’²²

According to Nancy Milford, Zelda told Scott she found the title for her novel Save Me the Waltz in a Victor record catalogue. As Milford remarks, ‘it is an evocative request, with a bitter edge, and like an old song, it stirs memories.’²³ Moreover, the title is particularly well-suited for a book that centres on dance. The waltz, like the ballet, is a formal style of dance which requires instruction and specific steps. By 1932, it was also old-fashioned in a world that preferred the syncopated rhythms of jazz. For a book whose main character is poised between the old and new in many different ways, the title captures both the nostalgia for tradition and the desire for change. The main character, Alabama Beggs, is a child of the American South with all of its traditions and history, and yet she is drawn to both New York and Paris, both epicentres of modernity. She wants to be a wife and becomes a mother, and yet she also craves personal autonomy and independence, which causes her to walk away from her family in order to pursue her dreams of becoming a ballerina. Even the ballet itself is an art form associated with centuries of tradition, and yet Alabama studies with one of the former dancers of the notorious Ballets Russes, one of the most controversial and provocative modern ballet companies of its time, best known for inciting riots at its performance of Igor Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du Printemps in 1913.

Save Me the Waltz is a roman a clef, a novel with a key, which means that its fictional characters have real world counterparts. It’s a composite of autobiographical detail and fictional imaginings which tells the story of a Southern debutante who marries an up-and-coming painter. The couple find themselves living amid a