Following the decline of her mental health in 1929, Zelda wrote the novel while a voluntary patient at Johns Hopkins Hospital's Phipps Clinic in Baltimore.[2] She sent the manuscript to her husband's editor, Maxwell Perkins. Unimpressed by her manuscript,[3] Perkins nevertheless published the novel at the urging of her husband Scott Fitzgerald in order for him to repay his financial debt to his publisher Scribner's,[4][5] much of which resulted from Zelda's medical bills for her voluntary stays in psychiatric institutions.[6]
Although F. Scott Fitzgerald touted the novel's quality,[4] the novel garnered negative reviews upon its publication.[7] The book sold approximately 1,300 copies for which Zelda earned a grand total of $120.73.[8] Its critical and commercial failure dispirited Zelda and led her to pursue other interests as a playwright and a painter.[9] After Broadway investors declined to produce her plays,[9] her husband Scott arranged an exhibition of her paintings, but the critical response proved equally disappointing.[10][11]
In 1959, a decade after her death, Zelda's friend and literary critic Edmund Wilson wrote in The New Yorker magazine that readers should not infer too much about the Fitzgeralds' personal lives based on Save Me the Waltz as the semi-fictional novel merely reflects the glamorous fantasy that Zelda and Scott shared together.[12] Wilson later stated that acquaintance Morley Callaghan's 1963 memoir That Summer in Paris provided a more accurate depiction of the Fitzgeralds' marriage while in Europe.[13]
In 1970, forty years after its publication, biographer Nancy Milford speculated that Zelda's husband Scott Fitzgerald rewrote the novel prior to publication.[14][15] However, later scholarly examinations of Zelda's drafts and the published version debunked this speculation.[16] Contrary to Milford's claims, Scott did not rewrite the manuscript, and Zelda herself made only minor editorial revisions.[16][17]
In Winter of 1929, Zelda Fitzgerald's mental health abruptly deteriorated.[18] Soon after, during an automobile trip to Paris along the mountainous roads of the Grande Corniche, Zelda seized the car's steering wheel and tried to kill herself, her husband F. Scott Fitzgerald, and their 9-year-old daughter Scottie by driving over a cliff.[19]
After this homicidal and suicidal incident, Zelda sought psychiatric treatment, and doctors diagnosed her with schizophrenia in June 1930.[20] 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."[21] Zelda and her husband Scott traveled to Switzerland where she underwent further treatment at a clinic.[22]
The Phipps Clinic in Baltimore, Maryland. Zelda wrote the novel while staying at this institution.
After Dr. Forel's initial hypothesis of psychopathic tendencies,[21] Zelda remained in and out of psychiatric institutions. After yet another mental health episode, Zelda insisted that she be admitted to the Phipps Clinic at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, despite her husband's objections.[2] The Phipps Clinic in Baltimore admitted Zelda on February 12, 1932.[2] Dr. Adolf Meyer, an expert on schizophrenia, oversaw her daily treatment.[23] As part of her recovery routine, she spent two hours a day writing a novel.[24]
At Phipps Clinic, Zelda developed a bond with Mildred Squires, a female resident.[2] Toward the end of February, she shared fragments of her inchoate novel with Squires, who wrote to Scott that her writing had a certain charm.[25] Zelda wrote to Scott: "I am proud of my [unfinished] novel, but I can hardly restrain myself enough to get it written. You will like it—It is distinctly École Fitzgerald, though more ecstatic than yours—perhaps too much so."[26] Zelda wrote each day and finished the novel on March 9. She sent the unaltered manuscript to Scott's editor, Maxwell Perkins, at Scribner's.[27]
Surprised to receive an unannounced novel in the mail from Zelda, Max Perkins carefully perused her original and unaltered manuscript.[27] Perkins thought the work had "a slightly deranged quality which gave him the impression that the author had difficulty in separating fiction from reality."[27] Although the famous editor believed the manuscript contained a few promising sections, he deemed its overall tone to be hopelessly "dated" and hearkened back to the glamorous Jazz Age hedonism recounted in Fitzgerald's 1922 work, The Beautiful and Damned.[28] Perkins hoped that her husband Scott might be able to improve its overall quality with his criticism.[28]
French identity cards for the Fitzgeralds circa 1929, the year in which Zelda's mental health deteriorated and triggered homicidal tendencies.
Upon learning that Zelda had submitted her manuscript to his editor, Scott became perturbed that she had not shown a draft to him beforehand.[29] After reading the manuscript, he objected to her plagiarism of his character Amory Blaine, the protagonist of This Side of Paradise.[30] He expressed surprise that her novel featured the same plot as his upcoming work, Tender Is the Night.[31]
After receiving a letter from Scott delineating these objections, Zelda wrote to Scott that she feared "we might have touched the same material."[32] Despite Scott's initial annoyance, a debt-ridden Fitzgerald concluded that Zelda's book might earn a profit.[33] Consequently, his requested revisions were "relatively few," and "the disagreement was quickly resolved, with Scott recommending the novel to Perkins."[16][17] Several weeks later, Scott wrote enthusiastically to Perkins:
"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."[4]
Although still unimpressed by Zelda's revised manuscript,[3] Perkins nevertheless agreed to publish the work regardless as a way for Fitzgerald to repay his considerable financial debt to Scribner's.[5] At the time, much of Fitzgerald's financial debt to Scribner's resulted from Zelda's medical bills for her extended voluntary stays at the Phipps Clinic and other psychiatric institutions.[6] Perkins arranged for half of Zelda's book royalties to be applied against Scott's debt to Scribner's until at least $5,000 had been repaid.[5]
On June 14, 1932, Zelda signed the contract with Scribner's to publish the book. It was published on October 7 with a printing of 3,010 copies—not unusually low for a first novel in the middle of the Great Depression—on cheap paper, with a cover of green linen.[34] According to Zelda, the book derived its title from a Victor record catalog,[35] and the title evokes the romantic glitter of the lifestyle which F. Scott Fitzgerald and herself experienced during the riotous and insouciant Jazz Age of American history.
Plot summary
"A shooting star, an ectoplasmic arrow, sped through the nebulous hypothesis like a wanton hummingbird. From Venus to Mars to Neptune it trailed the ghost of comprehension, illuminating far horizons over the pale battlefields of reality."
Alabama grows further apart from her alcoholic husband and their young daughter. Obsessed with becoming famous, an aging Alabama aspires to become a renowned prima ballerina and devotes herself to this ambition. She is offered a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to dance a featured part with a prestigious ballet company in Naples. Alabama journeys to the city alone, and she dances her solo debut in the opera Faust. However, a blister soon becomes infected from the glue in the box of her pointe shoe, leading to blood poisoning, and Alabama can never dance again.
At the novel's end, though outwardly successful to the general public, Alabama and David are both miserable. The unhappy couple returns to Alabama's beloved Deep South during the Great Depression where her father is dying. She searches for meaning in her father's death but finds none.[lower-alpha 4] Though she says otherwise, her childhood friends assume she must be happy, and they envy her privileged lifestyle. The last paragraph depicts the unhappy Knights immobile and dissipated as a couple:
"They sat in the pleasant gloom of late afternoon, staring at each other through the remains of the party; the silver glasses, the silver tray, the traces of many perfumes; they sat together watching the twilight flow through the calm living-room that they were leaving like the clear cold current of a trout stream."
Upon its publication, the novel received overwhelmingly negative reviews.[7] Critics savaged Zelda's prose as overwritten, attacked her characters as weak and uninteresting, and declared her tragic scenes to be grotesquely "harlequinade".[43] A particularly harsh review in The New York Times lambasted her editor Max Perkins:
"It is not only that her publishers have not seen fit to curb an almost ludicrous lushness of writing but they have not given the book the elementary services of a literate proofreader."[43]
The overwhelmingly negative reviews bewildered and distressed Zelda.[44] However, she acknowledged to Maxwell Perkins that a review by William McFee, writing in The New York Sun, contained several accurate criticisms.[44] McFee wrote:
"In this book, with all its crudity of conception, its ruthless purloinings of technical tricks and its pathetic striving after philosophic profundity, there is the promise of a new and vigorous personality in fiction."[43]
Malcolm Cowley, a friend of the Fitzgeralds, read the book and wrote consolingly to her husband Scott, "It moves me a lot: she has something there that nobody got into words before."[43] Yet another friend, Ernest Hemingway, believed the work lacked artistic merit and warned editor Maxwell Perkins that if he ever published a novel by any of his wives, "I'll bloody well shoot you."[45] Perkins remained privately dismissive of the novel's quality.[3] The book sold approximately 1,300 copies for which Zelda earned a final sum of $120.73.[8]
Post-publication
"The [novel's poor sales] won't be encouraging to you, and I have not liked to ask whether you were writing any more because of the fact, but I do think the last part of that book, in particular, was very fine; and if we [both Perkins and Zelda] had not been in the depths of depression, the result would have been quite different."
The critical and commercial failure of Save Me the Waltz temporarily crushed Zelda's spirits. Nevertheless, she attempted to write a farcical stage play titled Scandalabra in the fall of 1932.[9] She submitted the play manuscript to agent Harold Ober, but Broadway investors unanimously declined to produce the play.[9] In an attempt to bolster her spirits, Scott arranged for her play Scandalabra to be staged by a Little Theater group in Baltimore, Maryland, and he sat through long hours of rehearsals of the play.[47] This independent production ultimately proved to be a failure.
One year later, during a tense group therapy session with her husband and a psychiatrist, Fitzgerald remarked that she was "a third-rate writer and a third-rate ballet dancer."[48] Zelda next attempted to paint watercolors while in and out of sanatoriums but, when her husband Scott arranged their exhibition in 1934, the critical response proved equally disappointing.[9][11][49] As with the negative reception of her book, New York critics disliked her paintings.[10]The New Yorker described them merely as "paintings by the almost mythical Zelda Fitzgerald; with whatever emotional overtones or associations may remain from the so-called Jazz Age."[50] No actual description of her paintings appeared in any reviews.[50]
In January 1959, over a decade after Zelda's death, her friend and literary critic Edmund Wilson wrote in The New Yorker magazine that readers should not infer too much about the Fitzgeralds' supposedly glamorous existence based on Save Me the Waltz as the semi-fictional novel merely offered "a reflection of the fantasy that he and she lived together".[12] Wilson later stated that Morley Callaghan's 1963 memoir That Summer in Paris, which recounted Callaghan's friendship with the Fitzgeralds during their sojourn abroad, provided a more accurate representation of the actual lives of Zelda and her husband Scott while in Europe.[13]
In later decades, critics reevaluated the novel in light of the time constraints placed upon the writer and offered more charitable opinions. In 1991, The New York Times literary critic Michiko Kakutani reviewed the work and opined "that the novel was written in two months is amazing. That for all its flaws it still manages to charm, amuse and move the reader is even more remarkable. Zelda Fitzgerald succeeded, in this novel, in conveying her own heroic desperation to succeed at something of her own, and she also managed to distinguish herself as a writer".[51]
Authorship
"Almost all the marks are in Zelda Fitzgerald's hand. F. Scott Fitzgerald did not systematically work on the surviving proofs: only eight of the words written on them are clearly in his hand."
In 1970, forty years after the novel's original publication, Zelda's first biographer Nancy Milford posited that novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald had extensively rewritten his spouse's manuscript prior to its publication.[14] Contrary to this unfounded speculation, later scholarly examinations of Zelda's earlier drafts of Save Me the Waltz and the revised version of her novel discerned fewer alterations than previously assumed.[16]
According to Fitzgerald scholar Matthew J. Bruccoli, Milford's assumption that Scott "actually rewrote Save me the Waltz is false", and "the available documents indicate that his work was advisory."[53] The revised galleys were "worked over, but almost all the marks are in Zelda Fitzgerald's hand. F. Scott Fitzgerald did not systematically work on the surviving proofs: only eight of the words written on them are clearly in his hand."[52] Furthermore, the revisions requested by Fitzgerald were determined to be relatively minor.[16][17]
Related Research Articles
The Great Gatsby is a 1925 novel by American writer F. Scott Fitzgerald. Set in the Jazz Age on Long Island, near New York City, the novel depicts first-person narrator Nick Carraway's interactions with mysterious millionaire Jay Gatsby and Gatsby's obsession to reunite with his former lover, Daisy Buchanan.
Zelda Fitzgerald was an American novelist, painter, and socialite. Born in Montgomery, Alabama, to a wealthy Southern family, she became locally famous for her beauty and high spirits. In 1920, she married writer F. Scott Fitzgerald after the popular success of his debut novel, This Side of Paradise. The novel catapulted the young couple into the public eye, and she became known in the national press as the first American flapper. Due to their wild antics and incessant partying, she and her husband became regarded in the newspapers as the enfants terribles of the Jazz Age. Alleged infidelity and bitter recriminations soon undermined their marriage. After traveling abroad to Europe, Zelda's mental health deteriorated, and she had suicidal and homicidal tendencies which required psychiatric care. Her doctors diagnosed Zelda with schizophrenia, although later posthumous diagnoses posit bipolar disorder.
Frances Scott "Scottie" Fitzgerald was an American writer and journalist and the only child of novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald and Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald. She matriculated from Vassar College and worked for The Washington Post, The New Yorker, and other publications. She became a prominent member of the Democratic Party.
William Maxwell Evarts "Max" Perkins was an American book editor, best remembered for discovering authors Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, and Thomas Wolfe.
Matthew Joseph Bruccoli was an American professor of English at the University of South Carolina. He was the preeminent expert on F. Scott Fitzgerald. He also wrote about other writers, notably Ernest Hemingway, Thomas Wolfe and John O'Hara, and was editor of the Dictionary of Literary Biography.
This Side of Paradise is the debut novel by American writer F. Scott Fitzgerald, published in 1920. It examines the lives and morality of carefree American youth at the dawn of the Jazz Age. Its protagonist, Amory Blaine, is an attractive middle-class student at Princeton University who dabbles in literature and engages in a series of romances with flappers. The novel explores the theme of love warped by greed and status-seeking, and takes its title from a line of Rupert Brooke's poem Tiare Tahiti.
Tender Is the Night is the fourth and final novel completed by American writer F. Scott Fitzgerald. Set in French Riviera during the twilight of the Jazz Age, the 1934 novel chronicles the rise and fall of Dick Diver, a promising young psychiatrist, and his wife, Nicole, who is one of his patients. The story mirrors events in the lives of the author and his wife Zelda Fitzgerald as Dick starts his descent into alcoholism and Nicole struggles with mental illness.
The Beautiful and Damned is a 1922 novel by American writer F. Scott Fitzgerald. Set in New York City, the novel's plot follows a young artist Anthony Patch and his flapper wife Gloria Gilbert who become "wrecked on the shoals of dissipation" while excessively partying at the dawn of the hedonistic Jazz Age. As Fitzgerald's second novel, the work focuses upon the swinish behavior and glittering excesses of the American social elite in the heyday of New York's café society.
"The Cut-Glass Bowl" is a short story by American author F. Scott Fitzgerald, first published in the May 1920 issue of Scribner's Magazine, and included later that year in his first short story collection Flappers and Philosophers. The story follows the lives of a married couple, Evylyn and Harold Piper, through various difficult or tragic events that involve a cut glass bowl they received as a wedding gift. In a copy of Flappers and Philosophers which he gave to literary critic H. L. Mencken, Fitzgerald wrote that he deemed the story to be "worth reading" in contrast to others in the volume which he dismissed as either "amusing" or "trash."
"Head and Shoulders" is a short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald. It was his first story to be published in the Saturday Evening Post, with the help of Fitzgerald's agent, Harold Ober. The story appeared in the February 21, 1920 issue and was illustrated by Charles D. Mitchell. It later appeared in his short story collection Flappers and Philosophers.
Jay Gatsby is the titular fictional character of F. Scott Fitzgerald's 1925 novel The Great Gatsby. The character is an enigmatic nouveau riche millionaire who lives in a luxurious mansion on Long Island where he often hosts extravagant parties and who allegedly gained his fortune by illicit bootlegging during prohibition in the United States. Fitzgerald based many details about the fictional character on Max Gerlach, a mysterious neighbor and World War I veteran whom the author met in New York during the raucous Jazz Age. Like Gatsby, Gerlach threw lavish parties, never wore the same shirt twice, used the phrase "old sport", claimed to be educated at Oxford University, and fostered myths about himself, including that he was a relation of the German Kaiser.
"The Ice Palace" is a modernist short story written by F. Scott Fitzgerald and published in The Saturday Evening Post on May 22, 1920. It is one of eight short stories originally published in Fitzgerald's first collection, Flappers and Philosophers, and is also included in the collection Babylon Revisited and Other Stories.
Daisy Fay Buchanan is a fictional character in F. Scott Fitzgerald's 1925 novel The Great Gatsby. The character is a wealthy socialite from Louisville, Kentucky who resides in the fashionable town of East Egg on Long Island during the Jazz Age. She is narrator Nick Carraway's second cousin, once removed, and the wife of polo player Tom Buchanan, with whom she has a daughter. Before marrying Tom, Daisy had a romantic relationship with Jay Gatsby. Her choice between Gatsby and Tom is one of the novel's central conflicts. She was described by Fitzgerald as a "golden girl".
Nick Carraway is a fictional character and narrator in F. Scott Fitzgerald's 1925 novel The Great Gatsby. The character is a Yale University alumnus from the American Midwest, a World War I veteran, and a newly arrived resident of West Egg on Long Island, near New York City. He is a bond salesman and the neighbor of enigmatic millionaire Jay Gatsby. He facilitates a sexual affair between Gatsby and Nick's second cousin, once removed, Daisy Buchanan which becomes one of the novel's central conflicts. Carraway is easy-going and optimistic, although this latter quality fades as the novel progresses. After witnessing the callous indifference and insouciant hedonism of the idle rich during the riotous Jazz Age, he ultimately chooses to leave the eastern United States forever and returns to the Midwest.
Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald, widely known simply as Scott Fitzgerald, was an American novelist, essayist, and short story writer. He is best known for his novels depicting the flamboyance and excess of the Jazz Age, a term he popularized in his short story collection Tales of the Jazz Age. During his lifetime, he published four novels, four story collections, and 164 short stories. Although he achieved temporary popular success and fortune in the 1920s, Fitzgerald received critical acclaim only after his death and is now widely regarded as one of the greatest American writers of the 20th century.
Ginevra King Pirie was an American socialite and heiress. As one of the self-proclaimed "Big Four" debutantes of Chicago during World War I, King inspired many characters in the novels and short stories of Jazz Age writer F. Scott Fitzgerald; in particular, the character of Daisy Buchanan in The Great Gatsby. A 16-year-old King met an 18-year-old Fitzgerald at a sledding party in Saint Paul, Minnesota, and they shared a passionate romance from 1915 to 1917.
All the Sad Young Men is a collection of short fiction by American writer F. Scott Fitzgerald. The stories originally appeared independently in popular literary journals and were first collected in February 1926 by Charles Scribner's Sons.
Anthony Dickinson Sayre was an Alabama lawyer and politician who notably served as a state legislator in the Alabama House of Representatives (1890–1893), as the President of the Alabama State Senate (1896–1897), and later as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of Alabama (1909–1931). Influential in Alabama politics for nearly half-a-century, Sayre is widely regarded by historians as the legal architect who laid the foundation for the state's discriminatory Jim Crow laws.
"Echoes of the Jazz Age" is a short essay by American writer F. Scott Fitzgerald that was first published in Scribner's Magazine in November 1931. The essay analyzes the societal conditions in the United States which gave rise to the raucous historical era known as the Jazz Age and the subsequent events which led to the era's abrupt conclusion. The frequently anthologized essay represents an extended critique by Fitzgerald of 1920s hedonism and is regarded as one of Fitzgerald's finest non-fiction works.
Andrew Winchester Turnbull was an American biographer, scholar, and essayist who wrote acclaimed biographies of novelists F. Scott Fitzgerald and Thomas Wolfe. Turnbull grew up in Baltimore, Maryland, and first met Fitzgerald when the author lived on his family's property in the 1930s. After graduating Princeton University and serving in the United States Navy during World War II, Turnbull obtained his doctorate from Harvard University. He taught literature at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Brown University. He committed suicide at age 48.
↑ In France, while Scott labored on his novel The Great Gatsby, Zelda romanced French aviator Edouard Jozan and requested a divorce.[39]
↑ At a dinner party, Zelda threw herself down a flight of marble stairs because Fitzgerald, talking to dancer Isadora Duncan, ignored her.[40]
↑ There is a scholarly debate regarding whether Zelda was sexually abused by her father, Anthony D. Sayre.[41] Mary Jo Tate states there is no concrete evidence that Zelda was the victim of incest.[42]
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