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. 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. Here we have a woman whose talents and energy and intellect should have made her a brilliant success, who was determined to be an accomplished artist, writer, and ballet dancer in an era where married women were supposed to be wives and mothers, period.” Bate, Jonathan (September 2021), Bright Star, Green Light: The Beautiful Works and Damned Lives of John Keats and F. Scott Fitzgerald, New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, ISBN 978-0-300-25657-4– via Google Books More recently, it has been reissued by Handheld Press. However, interest in Zelda’s writing and life has only really surged since the 2013 film adaptation of The Great Gatsby. Several novels have been based on her life.

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. Fitzgerald, Zelda (1991), Bruccoli, Matthew J. (ed.), The Collected Writings of Zelda Fitzgerald, New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, ISBN 0-684-19297-7– via Internet Archive 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 A portrayal of the marriage of Alabama Beggs and David Knight, Save Me the Waltz highlights the trials and tribulations both went through in their attempts to discover their own identities, separately and in the context of one another. Using place and setting, Fitzgerald manages to portray the nuanced, multifaceted lives of the Knights. Fitzgerald’s characters are compelling, interesting and multi-dimensional, and she makes them extremely likable, despite all their flaws. Save Me the Waltz is the only novel ever written by Zelda Fitzgerald, the wife of famous American writer F. Scott Fitzgerald. Published in 1932, it was written in six weeks while Zelda was hospitalized for schizophrenia. It is a semi-autobiographical account of her relationship with Scott, providing insight into their disturbed marriage.

Fitzgerald, F. Scott (July 1966) [January 1940], Turnbull, Andrew (ed.), The Letters of F. Scott Fitzgerald, New York: Charles Scribner's Sons– via Internet Archive Over the next few months, Zelda revised the novel, this time with some input from Scott — although how much he influenced the revisions is unclear, as the original drafts have been lost. His own opinion of the novel varied dramatically, sometimes feeling that it was “perhaps a very good novel” and other times claiming that it was “a bad book.” Save Me the Waltz was finally published in 1932 in a print run of likely no more than 3,000 copies. Only around 1,200 sold, and the novel went out of print after this first run. Following her high school graduation in 1918, Zelda met F. Scott Fitzgerald at a weekend country club dance. She was a regular at such social activities, and he was an officer stationed at nearby Camp Sheridan. Scott began a courtship, but Zelda was hesitant about his financial prospects and continued to court other suitors. When he published his first novel, This Side of Paradise, in March 1920, she finally agreed to marry him, and the two wed in New York on April 3. Zelda gave birth to their only child, Frances (“Scottie”) Fitzgerald, the following year.

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] 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] These lessons were reluctantly paid for by Scott, an arrangement which Zelda also disliked intensely. To support herself and to be able to pay for her own lessons, she began to write again. Articles and short stories including Our Movie Queen, Miss Ella, and A Couple of Nuts were published in Harper’s Weekly, The Smart Set, and The Saturday Evening Post. Daniel, Anne Margaret (August 25, 2021), "The Odd Couple: John Keats and F. Scott Fitzgerald", The Spectator, London, United Kingdom , retrieved December 27, 2021 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.

TWO

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. He was also angry that she had named one of her main characters Amory Blaine, a name that her husband had also used in This Side of Paradise. Scott fumed, “This mixture of fact and fiction is calculated to ruin us both … my God, my books made her a legend and her single intention in this somewhat thin portrait is to make me a nonentity.” She talked with so spontaneous a color and wit — almost exactly in the way that she wrote — that I very soon ceased to be troubled by the fact that the conversation was in the nature of the free association of ideas and one could never follow up anything. I have rarely known a woman who expressed herself so delightfully and freshly; she had no ready-made phrases on the one hand and made no straining for effect on the other.” 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

By Spring of 1932, Zelda Fitzgerald had been a recurrent patient of several psychiatric institutions. After an episode of hysteria, Zelda insisted that she be readmitted to a mental hospital. [2] Over her husband's objections, [2] Zelda was admitted to the Phipps Clinic at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore on February 12, 1932. [2] Her treatment was overseen by Dr. Adolf Meyer, an expert on schizophrenia. [20] As part of her recovery routine, she spent at least two hours a day writing a novel. [3] 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.

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: 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. In Winter of 1929, Zelda Fitzgerald's mental health abruptly deteriorated. [15] 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. [16]

verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{ Bruccoli, Matthew J. (July 2002) [1981], Some Sort of Epic Grandeur: The Life of F. Scott Fitzgerald (2nd rev.ed.), Columbia, South Carolina: University of South Carolina Press, ISBN 978-1-57003-455-8 , retrieved January 1, 2023– via Internet ArchiveHowever she is defined, perhaps her greatest achievement was summed up by Therese Anne Fowler, who wrote: