Save Me The Waltz (Vintage Classics)

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Alabama sees both her sisters experience heartbreak as their father disapproves of their suitors of choice. Alabama, still young but eager to grow older, paints her face, dances ballet, and hopes to marry a man from New York and move to the big city someday. By the time Alabama is almost eighteen, the war has been going on for a few years. She has a reputation in town for being a flirt and for inappropriate behavior, kissing officers and getting drunk. She falls in love with one of her many beaux, a lieutenant called David Knight. David wants to move to New York and be an artist, and believes he will be famous one day. Alabama loves him, but does not like it when he speaks of his success and how he will maintain her. Tate, Mary Jo (1998) [1997], F. Scott Fitzgerald A to Z: The Essential Reference to His Life and Work, New York: Facts On File, ISBN 0-8160-3150-9– via Internet Archive When Scott did see the novel soon after, he was furious. He wrote to Zelda’s doctor accusing her of plagiarizing several ideas from his current novel-in-progress, which would become Tender Is the Night — “literally one whole section of her novel is an imitation of it, of its rhythm, materials…” — and of exposing too much of his private life. 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. People are like almanacs, Bonnie—you can never find the information you’re looking for, but the casual reading is well worth the trouble.” – David Knight, Save Me the Waltz

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. Davis, Susan Lawrence (1924), Authentic History Ku Klux Klan, 1865–1877, New York: Davis Publishing, ISBN 978-1-258-01465-0– via Internet Archive French identity cards for the Fitzgeralds circa 1929, the year in which Zelda's mental health deteriorated. The rich prose style has also been connected to Surrealism, in its attempts to disrupt realism by creating unexpected connections. In the novel, Alabama’s first kiss with David becomes a deep, nightmarish dive into the frontal cortex of his brain: After this homicidal incident, Zelda sought psychiatric treatment, and doctors diagnosed her with schizophrenia in June 1930. [17] 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." [18] The couple traveled to Switzerland where Zelda underwent further treatment at a clinic. [19]It was far from her first foray into writing fiction, but it was the first time she had ever written anything and sent it to a publisher without showing it to her husband beforehand. Having been forbidden by Scott to use any autobiographical material that might coincide with what he wanted to use for Tender Is the Night, Zelda struggled even for a storyline. It was performed by a small Baltimore theatre company in 1933, but its rambling banter only confused the critics. Still mentally unstable, in and out of psychiatric clinics, and at odds with her husband much of the time, Zelda then turned to paint instead. 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.

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.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. The four chapters loosely follow four distinct phases of the author’s life up to the death of her father: her childhood filled with romantic dreams of escape from the increasingly stifling family; her exciting escape via marriage to a painter and their early life together in Connecticut, New York, France, and Switzerland; the increasing emptiness of that life; and a final escape into ballet training, concluding with the return to Alabama for her father’s final illness. 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. Alabama comes of age in the Deep South, in a house with an affectionate mother, Millie, and a distant father, Judge Austin Beggs, along with two older sisters Joan and Dixie. Amidst the tensions in her house, Alabama grows up a rebellious teenage daughter, albeit still the favorite. Despite disapproval, Alabama marries the charismatic David Knight, an aspiring artist based on F. Scott Fitzgerald. One of the most emotionally powerful moments in the novel is when they first meet and Knight carves into the door “David, David, David, Knight, Knight, Knight, and Miss Alabama Nobody.” They move to New York, and between their extravagant social gatherings and David’s painting, Alabama gives birth to their only daughter, Bonnie. In the autumn of 1929, she was offered a salaried position with the San Carlo Opera Ballet Company in Naples, dancing a solo role initially in Aida with more solos to follow during the season, but had to decline the offer as she was not mentally capable of fulfilling the demanding contract. Mizener, Arthur (1951), The Far Side of Paradise: A Biography of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Boston, Massachusetts: Houghton Mifflin– 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. Zelda also faced challenges in the ballet studio. In her mid-twenties, she was too old to achieve her dream of becoming a prima ballerina, but she could still have made a career out of it had her health not failed.

Save Me the Waltz, according to its author, derives its title from a Victor record catalog, and it suggests the romantic glitter of the life which F. Scott Fitzgerald and Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald lived and which Scott’s novels have so indelibly written into American literary and cultural history.

It wasn’t the first time that the lines between fact and fiction had become blurred. Scott, too, often conflated fantasy and reality in his novels: he once said to Malcolm Crowley, “Sometimes I don’t know whether Zelda isn’t a character that I created myself.”They move to Paris and join the never-ending party happening in the capital. David becomes interested in a beautiful woman and propositions her in front of Alabama, who feels inadequate in comparison. He disappears with the other woman as Alabama goes to the ballet with some friends, and she becomes interested in pursuing a career in it. She meets a famous former dancer, known as Madame, who says she would be willing to teach her, despite Alabama being too old. During the boat journey to Europe, a storm hits and Alabama is anxious throughout a lot of the journey. She spends much of her time cooped up in her cabin with Bonnie while David drinks with friends at the bar. They arrive in France, and find a house to settle into. David spends all his time working on his painting, and Alabama feels alone. One day, she meets Jacques, a handsome French aviation officer, and becomes fascinated by him. They begin an affair, and David becomes jealous as the couple’s relationship becomes strained. Eventually, Jacques leaves for China and Alabama is heartbroken. 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." [30] 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. She chose Max Perkins, her husband’s own editor, writing to him, “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.”