Save Me the Waltz was written by Zelda Fitzgerald in the six hectic weeks while recovering from a breakdown. It is intensely autobiographical: Southern belle Alabama Beggs meets promising artist David Knight during war-time service, and marries him; prolonged honeymoon in Prohibition New York ‘when it was always tea-time or late at night’; then expatriate years in Paris and on the Riviera lived ‘at a broken, strident tempo’; next, Alabama’s belated efforts to succeed as a ballet-dancer … a jealous attempt to rival her husband’s fame. Save me the Waltz was a similar real-life attempt. But Zelda Fitzgerald’s book emerges as much more than a document of spite. It is a forceful, truthful picture of legendary marriage in a fabulous age: one of the most shattering self-portraits of a woman ever committed to paper.

There is a great difficult in looking at this book objectively, especially as so much of it mirrors Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s lives together. It raises all sorts of questions in regards to the – in this case – very fine line between autobiography and fiction. I have to wonder how much of writing this book was intended as therapeutic catharsis – remembering that she wrote this in a short period after a nervous breakdown, and also that F. Scott Fitzgerald had co-opted much of their life into his fictional work. As I read this book I had to wonder how much I was imagining Zelda and Francis Scott as Alabama and David rather than letting the prose create the idea these characters for me. The truth is I was letting the mythology of Zelda and Francis shape my reading of the book. Despite the lovely luscious writing, there is very little characterization – so it becomes almost necessary to draw upon the rich biographical reserves of the famous author and her husband in order to create a full image. The characters just seem to drift along on the heady, poetic writing.

Fitzgerald uses a lot of unusual and obscure language in this book, and it is helpful to keep a thorough dictionary on hand while working your way through it; I imagine that a lot of words have simply fallen out of daily or fashionable usage in the seventy seven years that have passed since it was first published. However, the eccentric use of language does not make the book entirely impenetrable. The fact that the narrative, plot and character are too often buried beneath her wonderful use of language makes this an uneven, but not unaffecting book.

Alabama could not read the letter. It was in French. She tore it in a hundred little pieces and scattered it over the black water of the harbour beneath the masts of many fishing boats from Shanghai and Madrid, Colombia and Portugal. Though it broke her heart, she tore the picture too. It was the most beautiful thing she’d ever owned in her life, that photograph. What was the use of keeping it? Jacques Chevre-Feuille had gone to China. There wasn’t a way to hold on to the summer, no French phrase to preserve its rising broken harmonies, no hopes to be salvaged from a cheap French photograph. Whatever it was that she wanted from Jacques, Jacques took it with him to squander on the Chinese. You took what you wanted from life, if you could get it, and you did without the rest.

Ballet Rehearsal by Edgar Degas (1873)

The first section of the book, following Alabama Beggs’ coming of age and the stories about her overbearing father and her compliant mother and her varied sisters is interesting, full of Southern charm and lilting nostalgia. This section is disappointingly short and moves quickly on to Alabama’s marriage to David Knight. Here everything gets lost in a nebulous blur as the couple embark on a continental adventure, engaging in parties with socialites and indulging in various affairs. It loses some charm here, which doesn’t pick up again until the rather beige character of David all but disappears in the third section, in which Alabama devotes herself to ballet. Again, here is a scenario close to Zelda’s own life – she too started to practice ballet late in her twenties, driving herself to mental and physical exhaustion.

At night she sat in the window too tired to move, consumed by a longing to succeed as a dancer. It seemed to Alabama that, reaching her goal, she would drive the devils that had driven her – that, in proving herself, she would achieve that peace which she imagined went only in surety of one’s self – that she would be able, through the medium of the dance, to command her emotions, to summon love or pity or happiness at will, having provided a channel through which they might flow. She drove herself mercilessly, and the summer dragged on.

The language here creates a vivid sense of atmosphere, and the characters she meets in the ballet studio are interesting – even funny – in their singular obsession of dancing success, but it is a bit aimless. Intriguingly poetic and dream-like, but without any narrative force. Her prose is engaging and evocative enough to ignore the lack for the most part.

Zelda Fitzgerald

Further Reading:

• Zelda: A Biography by Nancy Milford. The biography which critically examined Zelda Fitzgerald’s work and positioned her as an artist in her own right.
• Dear Scott, Dearest Zelda: The Love Letters of F. Scott & Zelda Fitzgerald by F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald.
• Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Written at the same time as Save Me the Waltz and published after, many see it as Fitzgerald’s take on their tumultuous marriage.