Save Me the Waltz
In February 1932, after an episode of hysteria, Zelda insisted that she be readmitted to a mental hospital. On February 12, 1932, over her husband's objections, Fitzgerald was admitted by The Henry Phipps Psychiatric Clinic at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, where her treatment was overseen by Dr. Adolf Meyer, an expert on schizophrenia. As part of her recovery routine, she spent at least two hours a day writing a manuscript. At the Phipps Clinic, Zelda developed a bond with Dr. Mildred Squires, a female resident. When Dr. Squires asked Scott to speculate why Zelda's mental health had deteriorated, Fitzgerald replied:
Perhaps fifty percent of our friends and relatives would tell you in all honest conviction that my drinking drove Zelda insane—the other half would assure you that her insanity drove me to drink. Neither judgement would mean anything.
Toward the end of February 1932, Zelda shared fragments of her manuscript with Dr. Squires, who wrote to Scott that the unfinished novel was vivid and had charm. Zelda wrote to Scott from the hospital, "I am proud of my 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." Zelda finished the novel on March 9. She sent the unaltered manuscript to Scott's editor, Maxwell Perkins, at Scribner's.
Surprised to receive an unannounced novel in the mail from Zelda, Perkins carefully perused the manuscript. He concluded the work had "a slightly deranged quality which gave him the impression that the author had difficulty in separating fiction from reality." He felt the manuscript contained several good sections, but its overall tone seemed hopelessly "dated" and tonally resembled Fitzgerald's 1922 work The Beautiful and Damned. Perkins hoped that her husband might be able to improve its overall quality with his criticism.
Upon learning that Zelda had submitted her manuscript to Perkins, Scott became angry that she had not shown her manuscript to him beforehand. After reading the manuscript, he objected to her novel's plagiarism of his protagonist in This Side of Paradise. He was further upset to learn that Zelda's novel used the very same plot elements as his upcoming novel, Tender Is the Night. After receiving letters from Scott delineating these objections, Zelda wrote to Scott apologetically that she was "afraid we might have touched the same material."
Despite Scott's initial annoyance, a debt-ridden Fitzgerald realized that Zelda's book might earn a tidy profit. Consequently, his requested revisions were "relatively few", and "the disagreement was quickly resolved, with Scott recommending the novel to Perkins." Several weeks later, Scott wrote 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 should interest the many thousands in dancing. It is about something and absolutely new, and should sell." Although unimpressed, Perkins agreed to publish the work as a way for Fitzgerald to repay his financial debt to Scribner's. Perkins arranged for half of Zelda's royalties to be applied against Scott's debt to Scribner's until at least $5,000 had been repaid.
In March 1932, the Phipps Clinic discharged Zelda, and she joined her husband Scott and her daughter at the La Paix estate in Baltimore, Maryland. Although discharged, she remained mentally unwell. A month later, Fitzgerald took her to lunch with critic H. L. Mencken, the literary editor of The American Mercury. In his diary, Mencken noted Zelda "went insane in Paris a year or so ago, and is still plainly more or less off her base." Throughout the luncheon, she manifested signs of mental distress. A year later, when Mencken met Zelda for the last time, he described her mental illness as immediately evident to any onlooker and her mind as "only half sane." He regretted that F. Scott Fitzgerald could not write novels, as he had to write magazine stories to pay for Zelda's psychiatric treatment.
On October 7, 1932, Scribner's published Save Me the Waltz 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. According to Zelda, the book derived its title from a Victor record catalog, and the title evoked the romantic glitter of the lifestyle which F. Scott Fitzgerald and herself experienced during the riotous Jazz Age. The parallels to the Fitzgeralds were obvious: The protagonist of the novel is Alabama Beggs—like Zelda, the daughter of a Southern judge—who marries David Knight, an aspiring painter who abruptly becomes famous for his work. They live the fast life in Connecticut before departing to live in France. Dissatisfied with her marriage, Alabama throws herself into ballet. Though told she has no chance, she perseveres and after three years becomes the lead dancer in an opera company. Alabama becomes ill from exhaustion, however, and the novel ends when they return to her family in the South, as her father is dying.
Echoing Zelda's frustrations, the novel portrays Alabama's struggle to establish herself independently of her husband and to earn respect for her own accomplishments. In contrast to Scott's unadorned prose, Zelda's writing style in Save Me the Waltz is replete with verbal flourishes and complex metaphors. The novel is also deeply sensual; as literary scholar Jacqueline Tavernier-Courbin observed in 1979, "the sensuality arises from Alabama's awareness of the life surge within her, the consciousness of the body, the natural imagery through which not only emotions but simple facts are expressed, the overwhelming presence of the senses, in particular touch and smell, in every description."
Save Me the Waltz received overwhelmingly negative reviews from literary critics. The critics savaged Zelda's prose as overwritten, attacked her characterization as weak, and declared her tragic scenes to be unintentionally comedic. Although some praised her writing as "always vibrant and always sensitive", other critics faulted the "exaggerated" and "atrocious" prose as "words gone wild" to the point of unintelligibility. Geoffrey T. Hellman wrote in The Saturday Review of Literature that "her book rivals the cross-word puzzle page in point of obscurity" and lamented "the author's general inability to create full-bodied figures." Similarly, a Forum and Century reviewer wrote that, although "gifted with a talent for crisp dialogue and with a pleasant sense of the humorous, Mrs. Fitzgerald has some reason seen fit to subordinate this element in her first novel to an extremely involved prose style which fails to do anything but clog both the action of the plot and the reader's understanding of the characters."
