Save Me the Waltz is the story of Alabama Beggs, a young Southern girl who meets and falls in love with David Knight during World War I. The two inevitably get married and David goes on to become a successful painter, before moving their family to the French Riviera. However Alabama is determined to find her own success and takes up ballet. When she lands her first solo debut in the opera Faust the cracks in their marriage become evident.After an episode of hysteria in 1932, Zelda Fitzgerald was admitted to the Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore for treatment. Dr Adolf Meyer, an expert on schizophrenia was her doctor and as part of her recovery routine he got her to write at least two hours a day. Save Me the Waltz was written over the course of six weeks and was the first and only novel to be published by Zelda Fitzgerald. Her husband was outraged that she took so much of their personal life and added it into this novel. Despite the fact that the majority of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novels are also autobiographical and he used the same material for his novel Tender is the Night.I wanted to read Save Me the Waltz after reading Tender is the Night to compare the similarities. The problem I soon discovered is that Save Me the Waltz has possibly been whitewashed by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Apparently he helped Zelda revise her book and the amount that has been changed is unknown because her original manuscript has been lost. However Scott went from being irate to writing to Maxwell Perkins at Scribner (their publisher) “Here is Zelda’s novel. It is a good novel now, perhaps a very good novel—I am too close to tell.” I am inclined to believe that he has made sure he comes across better than originally written but without the original that is purely speculation.The major theme within Save Me the Waltz is around the intense desire for Alabama/Zelda to succeed for themselves. It was not enough for either person to be the wife behind a successful man, and it explores the problems faced in doing this in a male dominated society. When Alabama gets her dream job in Naples with the San Carlo Opera Ballet Company, David does not want to move. Considering that he is a painter and could really work from anywhere, it says a lot about their marriage. This does not hinder Alabama from perusing her dreams and she goes to Naples anyway, leaving her husband to look after their child alone. Now this move may make people uneasy but it really plays with the power dynamic of marriage. Zelda Fitzgerald wants to challenge the conceptions people had of the role of a wife in a marriage and ask why it was alright for a man to go away for work but not the woman.This can be a very difficult novel to read, knowing the historical context and history behind the story. Comparing this book with Tender is the Night does not leave F. Scott Fitzgerald in pleasant light but then again his novel did not do that either. One of the most powerful lines in this novel can be found right near the end and it beautifully wraps up the whole book into a few lines. “Emptying the ashtrays was very expressive of myself. I just lump 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.”While I cannot say that Save Me the Waltz is a strong novel, it was a fascinating exploration into the lives of the Fitzgeralds. I am glad to have read and compared this book to Tender is the Night but I think it has only fuelled my interest into this couple. I still need to read a biography or two on the Fitzgeralds but I am beginning to get a better idea of their lives. I think if you are going to read Tender is the Night, you need to read Save Me the Waltz so you can have perspective on the autobiographical elements; even if they were tainted by F. Scott Fitzgerald’s edits.This review originally appeared on my blog; http://literary-exploration.com/2015/...
"I am so outrageously clever that I believe I could be a whole world to myself if I didn't like living in Daddy's better." - Alabama Beggs As the glamorous wife of a famous author, Zelda Fitzgerald was already a celebrity when her first (and only published) novel, Save Me the Waltz, appeared in 1932. Was her public notoriety responsible for the book’s lukewarm reception with readers and critics alike? The public continues to be fascinated by the tragic personal stories of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, and their tempestuous marriage. Zelda’s highly-autobiographical Save Me the Waltz continues to exist in baffling obscurity, yet the book’s literary merits are significant. Readers will be very aware that the book is a first novel, so it certainly has its faults. I personally found its structure uneven, with the occasional awkward gap in the story's progress. Alabama Beggs, youngest of a Southern judge’s three daughters, is a young girl coming of age in an American South on the verge of the First World War. By the war’s end, she has matured into a hardened flirt, one who keeps her suitors, mostly officers from the local military base, on tenterhooks. She receives their attentions, including offers of marriage, with cool indifference. Yet almost implausibly she accepts the proposal of David Knight, who seemingly has very little to offer the sought-after beauty. David Knight, if he is meant to represent F. Scott Fitzgerald, the author’s husband, is not portrayed very sympathetically. His sarcasm, his jealousy, his constant worrying about money, gives the impression of a rather pinched, overly-critical man. Their marriage begins to struggle when the couple travel to Europe, following David’s success as a painter. It is in France where they begin to rub elbows with wealthy expatriates, a circle which nonetheless leave Alabama feeling excluded and patronized. In Paris, she becomes a student of classical ballet, in spite of its excruciating demands on her body. The formerly idle gadabout blossoms through a regime of backbreaking discipline. In spite of its grueling work, the petty jealousies of other dancers, and its general shabbiness, ballet finally allows Alabama the freedom to be her own person. The dance sections of the book are, in my opinion, the best written and most memorable. Zelda Fitzgerald can write unforgettably, with skill and brilliance, about the people and places she truly loved. It might be an overstatement to view Save Me the Waltz as a cri de coeur. But the book is certainly not about her public image, nor her rich and famous friends, nor her notoriously extravagant globe-trotting lifestyle. What inspired her writing was her childhood in Alabama, her long-suffering parents, her complicated husband, her adored yet neglected child, and her own struggles to find inspiration and expression through art. My copy is the Vintage paperback, which includes Harry T. Moore's preface to the 1968 edition, and textual notes by Matthew J. Bruccoli. Moore's preface (no doubt meant to argue for the novel's significance) is oddly backhanded about book and its author. Bruccoli's notes reconstruct how the book was edited, revised, and ultimately, published. These notes seem to refute the widely-held belief that the author's husband tried to suppress and sabotage the book's publication.
What do You think about Save Me The Waltz (2001)?
Southern belle, Alabama Beggs, is the youngest daughter of a prominent judge and unlike her two older sisters from her endearing wit to her attitude towards life. She meets David Knight during his visit to the South during World War I; they marry and ultimately move to live in the Riviera. David, an artist, carries on an affair with an actress, a relationship of which Alabama is aware. In her desperate attempts to salvage the marriage she throws herself into learning ballet, an exceptionally difficult feat of a 28-year-old like herself. They return to the States with their daughter, Bonnie, to visit the death bed of the Judge, ending the story essentially where it began.This mostly autobiographical book was written during Zelda's first psychiatric clinic stay as part of her recovery program. When her husband, the better known F. Scott Fitzgerald, read the intial draft he insisted Zelda change several details - he felt the story was not particularly kind to his image and "stole" from his own writing. After the changes were made the book was finally published, though modestly. It did not take off like her husband's writing which only exacerbated her hysteria. It now is considered more of a cult classic, worth a read to see how the other half of the Fitzgerald's saw the same events as Scott and how they affected her. It's heartbreaking in a way to know Zelda's story and to then read her book and realize she had great potential that was obviously stifled much more than it should have been.
—El
I very nearly regretted picking up this book when, four lines in, I ran into this humdinger of a sentence:“Most people hew the battlements of life from compromise, erecting their impregnable keeps from judicious submissions, fabricating their philosophical drawbridges from emotional retractions and scaulding marauders in the boiling oil of sour grapes.”“Oh snap,” I thought. “I’m never going to get through this.”Either I grew used to it, or she toned her writing down, but reading Save Me the Waltz was not that difficult. Her prose was perceptive and beautiful more often than it was weighted with its own enigma and/or pretension. Even when her prose was at its densest, I still found it immensely interesting to read and admire the interesting way Zelda viewed the world.I have to say, my decision to read Nancy Milford’s biography of Zelda first was a good one; Save Me the Waltz would have been a tad disorienting had I not. I did like the book on its own, but reading it as an extension of the Fitzgerald saga made it more enjoyable, and I’m sure less confusing than it would have been.
—Melee
'Under separate cover, as I believe is the professional phraseology, I have mailed you my first novel. Scott [Fitzgerald] being absorbed in his own has not seen it, so I am completely in the dark as to its possible merits. If the thing is too wild for your purposes, might I ask what you suggest?'Zelda Fitzgerald, in a letter to Maxwell Perkins, March 1932Written in six weeks while its author was a resident of John Hopkins University Hospital in Baltimore, Save Me the Waltz is one of those books that has all the right components, but stalls almost immediately.Despite the brief time it took to write and Scott's connections to Scribners, the novel led a less than charmed life. Scott wanted alterations. Some were points of copyright (Zelda used the name of 'Amory Blaine' for a character - Scott's hero in This Side of Paradise). Others were points of craft (the middle section sagged, and needed extensive revision). Others seem deeply hypocritical, considering how thoroughly Scott had looted their marriage for material in the past. Once published, the novel tanked: a mere 1,380 copies, earning Zelda $120.73, after deducting the costs for extensive proof corrections.Rightly, too. Switch off hindsight, and it's hard to imagine writing like this avoiding the slush pile: 'They ordered Veronese pastry on lawns like lace curtains at Versailles and chicken and hazelnuts at Fountainbleu where the woods wore powdered wigs. Discs of umbrella poured over suburban terraces with the smooth round ebullience of a Chopin waltz. They sat in the distance under the lugubrious dripping elms, elms like maps of Europe, elms frayed at the end like bits of chartreuse wool, elms heavy and bunchy as sour grapes. They ordered the weather with a continental appetite, and listened to the centaur complain about the price of hoofs.'There's barely a page in which something avoids having this amount of lush, undisciplined prose dumped on top of it. The images are charged, but don't connect to their subject; the similes amplify and call attention to themselves, rather than distill and focus attention on what's happening. It's the kind of material authors smile at as they write their first draft, frown at during their second, and cut from their third. Much as you sympathise with Zelda, this novel is a dud.
—Ryan Williams
