Save Me the Waltz by Zelda Fitzgerald

First published: 1932

Type of plot: Autobiographical romance

Time of work: The 1920’s

Locale: Alabama, New York, France, and Italy

Principal Characters:

• Alabama Beggs, the youngest and wildest of the Beggs daughters, but a thoroughbred
• David Knight, Alabama’s artist husband
• Bonnie Knight, the daughter of Alabama and David
• Judge Austin Beggs, Alabama’s father, a living fortress of security
• “Miss Millie” Beggs, Alabama’s mother, whose “fixation of loyalty . . . achieved in her life a saintlike harmony”
• Dixie Beggs, the oldest daughter of Judge and Mrs. Beggs, who moved to New York and married an Alabama man “up there”
• Joan Beggs, the middle daughter, who “was so orderly she made little difference”
• Jacques Chevre-Feuille, a French aviator
• Madame, a Russian ballet mistress

The Novel

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.

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.

These four phases conclude with a party given by the Knights in Alabama, at which once more David is the idol of the evening and once more Alabama and David are envied for their exciting and glamorous lives. The talk at the party, for Alabama, “pelted her consciousness like the sound of hoofs on a pavement,” an effect evocative of the remoteness and boredom in lines from T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”: “In the room women come and go/ Talking of Michelangelo.”

The tragic events of Zelda’s reverse fairy tale remained to be played out in real life in the devastating effects that she and her husband had on each other: his alcoholism, her many bouts with insanity, and finally, in 1948, her death in a fire at a mental institution. To the end, neither seemed to understand the other. Nicole Diver in Tender Is the Night (1934) and David Knight in Save Me the Waltz are graphic demonstrations of the masculine and feminine defenses, respectively, that each built against the other.

The Characters

The novel begins with a description of Judge Austin Beggs as a living fortress who provides his family with security. Equally strong is his “detached tenderness,” his bulwark against the disappointments of life, the most important of which is the loss of an only son in infancy. His anger and outraged sense of decency take over from time to time when additional disappointments invade his concentration on the “origins of the Napoleonic code” and on his attempts to provide financially for his family of three socially frivolous daughters. His handling of situations is direct, as when he “brusquely grabbed the receiver” of the telephone “with the cruel concision of a taxidermist’s hands at work” to ask a beau never to attempt to see Dixie, his eldest daughter, again.

“Miss Millie” Beggs, Alabama’s mother, on the other hand, possesses a “wide and lawless generosity,” “nourished from many years of living faced with the irrefutable logic of the Judge’s fine mind.” Because her sense of reality was never very strong, she could not “reconcile that cruelty of the man with what she knew was a just and noble character. She was never again able to form a judgment of people, shifting her actualities to conform to their inconsistencies till by a fixation of loyalty she achieved in her life a saintlike harmony.” Her strategy in life consists of avoiding or preventing difficult situations, so that when Alabama tells her that she does not want to go to school any longer and her mother can react only with a faintly hostile surprise, Alabama merely switches the subject to save her mother the difficulty of listening to an explanation that she cannot comprehend. Millie’s major battles are fought over dresses remade for one daughter from an older sister’s clothes.

Alabama’s older sisters, Joan and Dixie, the belles of Montgomery society and the envy of their younger sister during her childhood, eventually settle into conventional patterns of life in New York and Connecticut. Alabama finds the social whirl exciting at first and then suffocating; her pattern for life is established early, when her first escape arrives one day in the person of a handsome military officer from the north, David Knight. He is, indeed, the knight come to release his princess, as he refers to her in his letters. He even expresses a wish to keep her in his ivory tower for his “private delectation.” What Alabama realizes much later is that despite all the initial excitement of the escape, the disillusioning sense of entrapment eventually sets in. She leaves her father’s fortress for the ivory tower of her husband’s success and popularity as a painter. The need to create her own destiny and identity always lurks beneath the fairy-tale surface of her life. Her affair with a handsome French flyer and the constant adoration of her husband by women and by their daughter, Bonnie, only serve to intensify the emptiness of her glamorous, Bohemian existence.

In desperation, Alabama, at an age at which most ballet dancers have matured, begins achingly long days of lessons with a Russian ballet mistress. She spends less and less time with husband and daughter as her obsession with the ballet consumes her totally. This latest escape is aborted when she undergoes foot surgery in Naples, where she has been dancing in her first professional role. Shortly thereafter, she returns to the emptiness of a life without a purpose.

When she, David, and Bonnie return to Alabama on the occasion of her father’s death, she is aware of the pattern that their lives have taken. David continues to be a successful artist; she finds her old feelings of uselessness returning. He is still the idol of guests at a party they give, and their glamorous lives still draw the envy of local society. At that party it is the forms and shapes of things that hold Alabama captive as “the talk pelted her consciousness.” Scolded by David for not being the proper hostess, Alabama responds that her premature dumping of the ashtrays is expressive of herself, that she simply lumps “everything in a great heap which I have labelled the past,’ and having thus emptied this deep reservoir that was once myself, I am ready to continue.”

In real life, Alabama (Zelda) went on to compete with David (Fitzgerald) in his own chosen art form (writing). In Save Me the Waltz, the next escape has not yet taken shape.

Except for one major event in the novel, that of Alabama’s professional ballet engagement in Naples—Zelda never danced professionally—the real life of the Fitzgeralds is only thinly disguised. Like Alabama, Zelda was twenty-two years of age when she met the man who was to become her husband. The Southern childhood of Alabama is Zelda’s own. Millie Beggs, as Nancy Milford points out in her biography of Zelda, is given a name that combines the names of Zelda’s and Fitzgerald’s mothers, Minnie and Mollie, respectively. Like Millie Beggs, Zelda’s mother provided the quiet and harmony necessary to Judge Sayre and the attention to the practical needs of their daughters. Zelda’s older sister Rosalind wrote society columns for the local newspaper, as does Alabama’s older sister Dixie. Zelda and Fitzgerald’s daughter Scottie and their Japanese servant Tanaka are the Bonnie and Tanka of the novel. Events in the Knights’ odyssey from Montgomery to the New York area, the Riviera, Paris, and Switzerland—then back to Alabama—follow closely those of the Fitzgeralds. Especially significant are the portraits of Zelda’s father and of her husband. Judge Sayre symbolized both security and inaccessibility, and her husband, as surrogate father, became both. The contradictory impulses of authority on the one hand and freedom on the other are the poles between which the pendulum of her life swung and between which Zelda could find no stable point.

A major difference between Zelda’s self-portrait and that which her husband paints of her as Nicole Diver in Tender Is the Night is one of the most intriguing revelations of the novel. Nicole is an irrationally jealous wife whose unpredictable tantrums create marriage problems. Alabama Beggs, on the other hand, although jealous of the attention her idolized husband receives, is in her own words an empty, deep reservoir that she tries desperately to fill. It is from these irreconcilable views that the two companion novels draw their central characters.

Critical Context

Save Me the Waltz makes fascinating reading for a student of literary history in several ways. First, there is the matter of the novel’s being read by one of the most famous twentieth century editors, Maxwell Perkins, who liked it well enough to give it serious consideration. Fitzgerald, however, also read the novel and made many changes, against the wishes of Zelda, although she eventually agreed to them. He had been working on his own novel about their marriage, Tender Is the Night, at the time, and had his way regarding matters he wished deleted or changed in the original manuscript of Save Me the Waltz. Together, Harry Dan Piper states, “these two chronicles of the same marriage seen from the wife’s and the husband’s points of view, form one of the most unusual pairs of novels in recent literary history.”

In a later edition (1960), the novel includes a preface by Harry T. Moore, a note on the text by Matthew J. Bruccoli, a set of emendations, and “an exact type transcript of the typescript opening of Chapter 2 in the form originally set in galleys.”

Scholars and critics have shown interest in the novel primarily because of the prominent position occupied by F. Scott Fitzgerald in American literary history. Consequently, critical concern has focused on autobiographical insights rather than on the aesthetic merits of Save Me the Waltz. Most critics, however, have mentioned the turgid prose and overblown metaphors in parts of the novel, especially at the outset. One in particular has been noted: “Incubated in the mystic pungence of Negro mammies, the family hatched into girls. From the personification of an extra penny, a street-car ride to whitewashed picnic grounds . . . the Judge became, with their matured perceptions a retributory organ, an inexorable fate. . . . Youth and age: a hydraulic funicular, and age, having less of the waters of conviction in its carriage. . . .” Yet as the action of the novel develops, the self-consciousness of the writing settles down, as in the description of Alabama’s sick father: “The noble completeness of the life withering on the bed before her moved her to promise herself many promises.” In the final paragraph of the novel, the linguistic awkwardnesses disappear, as Alabama and David sit in the “pleasant gloom of the late afternoon,” and amid “the silver glasses, the silver tray, the traces of many perfumes,” they watch “the twilight flow through the calm living room that they were leaving like the clear cold current of a trout stream.”

Beyond the interest that important scholars have taken in the novel, beyond its autobiographical value, and in spite of its embarrassingly self-conscious language, Zelda’s fictive autobiography slowly catches even the discriminating reader in a rhythmic involvement in the feminist imagination and feminine psychology that have a fascination all their own.

Bibliography

Cline, Sally. Zelda Fitzgerald: Her Voice in Paradise. New York: Arcade, 2003. This latest biography of Fitzgerald includes analysis of the rigid and traditional attitudes of Fitzgerald’s male doctors who refused to acknowledge how vital and compelling her writing, dancing, and painting were to her sense of well-being. Illustrated, with an index.

Davis, Simone W. “ The Burden of Reflecting’: Effort and Desire in Zelda Fitzgerald’s Save Me the Waltz.” Modern Language Quarterly 56 (September, 1995): 327-351. Davis examines the novel’s exploration of dilemmas confronted by women in the 1920’s. Feminine identity is examined in a culture where it is the “work” of leisured women to add meaning to someone or something.

Lanahan, Eleanor A. Zelda, An Illustrated Life: The Private World of Zelda Fitzgerald. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1996. An illustrated book of Fitzgerald’s own drawings, paintings and private photographs. A fascinating glimpse into Fitzgerald’s creative expression.

Milford, Nancy. Zelda: A Biography. New York: Harper and Row, 1970. A well-written and thoroughly researched account of Fitzgerald’s life.

Nanney, Lisa. “Zelda Fitzgerald’s Save Me the Waltz as Southern Novel and Kuntslerroman.” In The Female Tradition in Southern Literature, edited by Carol S. Manning. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993. An interesting discussion.

Payne, Michelle. “5'4" x 2": Zelda Fitzgerald, Anorexia Nervosa, and Save Me the Waltz.” Bucknell Review 39 (1995): 39-56. A discussion of the work and its relation to eating disorder.

Wood, Mary E. “A Wizard Cultivator: Zelda Fitzgerald’s Save Me the Waltz as Asylum Autobiography.” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 11 (Fall, 1992): 247-264. Wood asserts that Save Me the Waltz should be considered asylum autobiography though there is no explicit mention by Fitzgerald of her mental illness.