Zelda (39 page)

The original manuscript, as well as Zelda’s revisions of that first draft, have been lost. What exist are a typed manuscript used probably as printer’s copy, two consecutive sets of heavily revised galley proofs (each with a duplicate also reworked in Zelda’s handwriting) and one set of clean page proofs. There must also have been a duplicate set of pages which were reworked, for there are changes in the published version of the novel that were not made on any of the existing galleys or pages.

From evidence in Zelda’s letters to Scott, and in Scott’s correspondence with Maxwell Perkins prior to even the signing of the contract, we know that there were earlier, extensive revisions, but we do not know specifically what they were. An indication of Zelda’s rewriting is given in a letter Scott wrote to Perkins at the end of April or the beginning of May: “Zelda’s novel is now good, improved in every way. It is new. She has largely eliminated the speakeasy-nights-and-our-trip-to-Paris
atmosphere. You’ll like it. It should reach you in ten days. I am too close to it to judge it but it may be even better than I think.” Then he asked Perkins to keep whatever praise he wished to give Zelda
“on the staid side,”
for Scott said it was important to the doctors at Phipps that Zelda not be made to feel too jubilant about the fame and money that might come to her through publication. “… I’m not certain enough of Zelda’s present stability of character to expose her to any superlatives. If she has a success coming she must associate it with work done in a workmanlike manner for its own sake, and part of it done fatigued and uninspired, and part of it done when even to remember the original inspiration and impetus is a psychological trick. She is not twenty-one and she is not strong, and she must not try to follow the pattern of my trail which is of course blazed distinctly on her mind.” This was all as much an indication of Scott’s feelings about his own work on his novel as it was about Zelda’s possible reactions toward hers.

In a second letter to Perkins, written about two weeks later, Scott sent him
Save Me the Waltz.
He wrote: “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 interested in dancing. It is
about something
and absolutely new, and should sell.”

Somewhat cavalierly Fitzgerald added that he would withdraw his restraint on praise if Scribner’s decided to take the book; Perkins might even write to Zelda directly about it. His advice was given, he said, in order to protect Zelda’s mental stability for fear of her “incipient egomania…but she has taken such a sane common-sense view lately—(At first she refused to revise—then she revised completely, added on her own suggestion and has changed what was a rather flashy and self-justifying ‘true confessions’ that wasn’t worthy of her into an honest piece of work. She can do more with the galleys but I can’t ask her to do more now).” Finally, he suggested that Perkins not mention Zelda’s novel to Hemingway, who would also have a book published that season by Scribner’s. It was not that there was a “conflict between the books”; it was rather because of the conflict between Zelda and Hemingway—which was in part a struggle for prominence. Fitzgerald hinted that if Perkins praised or even mentioned the book to Hemingway there might be “curiously
grave consequences—curious, that is, to un-jealous men like you and me.” He also asked Perkins not to discuss the terms of her contract with Zelda should Scribner’s take the novel; he would handle that himself.

Scribner’s did decide to publish the book and the contract for
Save Me the Waltz
was signed on June 14, 1932. A clause added to the agreement stipulated that one-half the royalties earned would be retained by Scribner’s to be credited against “the indebtedness of F. Scott Fitzgerald,” until a total of $5,000 had been repaid. Publication was planned for the following October.

In the first chapter of
Save Me the Waltz
we are introduced to the heroine, Alabama Beggs; her parents, Millie and Judge Beggs; as well as her two older sisters, Dixie and Joan. By the close of the chapter Alabama has gone to New York and married a twenty-two-year-old artist, David Knight, whom she met when he was a lieutenant stationed in the South during World War I.

Chapter 2
, which is the longest in the novel (and the only one for which an earlier version exists; Zelda completely rewrote the opening thirty-three pages in galleys, reducing them to twenty-five pages, and revised ten pages of Section III), takes us from David’s extraordinary success as a painter in New York and the birth of their daughter, Bonnie, through the Knights’ journey to the Riviera, where Alabama falls in love with a French aviator, to a series of ludicrous parties in Paris, where David is lionized and Alabama is completely unhappy. By the end of this chapter a distraught Alabama has decided to become a ballet dancer, although she is aware that she is too old to be beginning. Her decision is made in retaliation against David’s attraction to a lovely movie actress, Gabrielle Gibbs. Alabama has overheard David telling Miss Gibbs that her breasts are like “a sort of blancmange,” and that he has heard she has “the most beautiful blue veins all over [her] body.” Alabama, who is at the dinner table with them, observes, “David opened and closed his personality over Miss Gibbs like the tentacles of a carnivorous maritime plant.” The following morning, when David comes home after having spent the night out, Alabama wonders why “Men…never seem to become the things they do, like women….” She tries to tell herself that she doesn’t care, but she does.

“‘I can’t stand this any longer,’ she screamed at the dozing David. ‘I don’t want to sleep with the men or imitate the women, and I can’t stand it!’”

When David tells her that he understands, “‘It must be awful just waiting around eternally,’ “Alabama tells him to “‘shut up!’ “and promises him, “‘I am going to be as famous a dancer as there are blue veins over the white marble of Miss Gibbs.’ “But she has also turned to the dance in an effort to bring order and meaning into a life “so uselessly extravagant.” This duality of motivation is important, for as Alabama becomes immersed in dancing it is far more because of her feelings of having wasted her life than out of jealousy. It is, however, the intermeshing of both strains that tightens the texture of the book.

The third chapter describes Alabama’s increasing dedication to the ballet; she becomes possessed by it. Her dancing is also seen as a defense against the collapse of her marriage, and she spends less and less time with her husband and child. She exhausts herself practicing, and she is infuriated when a member of the ballet studio asks her why she tries so hard when she already has a husband who will take care of her. Alabama says, “‘Can’t you understand that I am not trying to get anything—at least, I don’t think I am—but to get rid of some of myself?’ “At the end of the chapter, as the Knights plan to return to America, Alabama, in a sudden reversal of plans, accepts an invitation to dance her solo debut in the opera
Faust
with the San Carlos Opera in Naples.

The first and second sections of
Chapter 4
deal with her success in Naples, where she is living without David and Bonnie, who are in Switzerland. These sections are perhaps the only departures from Zelda’s own life, in the sense that Zelda did not go to Naples to dance and has probably transmuted her memories from Switzerland into the Italian setting. Bonnie visits her mother in Naples, and it goes badly; the child eagerly returns to her father in Switzerland. David gets a telegram from America notifying them that Alabama’s father is dying. At the same time Alabama has suddenly fallen seriously ill in Naples with blood poisoning caused by an infection in her foot. Her foot is operated on and the tendons are severed; she will be able to walk, but never to dance again. David comes to her side during her illness, and his devotion brings them together again. As soon as Alabama is well enough to travel they return to America and the Judge’s bedside. He dies in November, 1931.

At the end of the novel the Knights have decided to leave the South and they realize that they will return only to visit Alabama’s family.

Clearly Zelda patterned her novel closely upon her own life. Judge Beggs is much like her own father, Judge Sayre, and Millie, Alabama’s mother (whose name is an interesting combination of Scott’s mother’s first name, Mollie, and Minnie Sayre’s), shares many of Mrs. Sayre’s traits, as well as her place within the marriage and family. She is their harmonizer. There are also certain resemblances between Dixie, Alabama’s oldest sister, and Rosalind. The job as society editor she holds in the novel was one Rosalind held in Montgomery, and there is the same age difference between the two sisters as there was between Rosalind and Zelda. David is twenty-two when Alabama meets him, as was Scott; Alabama and David honeymoon at Room 2109 in the Biltmore, as did Zelda and Scott; and they take a house in the Connecticut countryside shortly after their marriage, with the same intentions the Fitzgeralds had when they moved to Westport. Their Japanese houseboy is Tanka; the Fitzgeralds’ was Tanaka. But a listing of these relatively minor details is not the main concern; rather, it is with how
Save Me the Waltz
works as a novel, as well as with what it tells us about Zelda, for it provides a key to those images of self that Zelda projected into her fiction.

At the heart of the novel is the characterization of Judge Beggs. It is with him that the novel opens and closes. His standards of judgment serve Alabama as a model against which she measures her life, and his austere infallibility is the pivot about which the entire motion of the novel turns. It was not until the death of Judge Sayre that Zelda began to form her book and it would seem that his death provided a kind of psychological freeing for her that stimulated her into reviewing her life up to his death. She establishes the Judge’s importance at the beginning of the book: “‘Those girls,’ people said, ‘think they can do anything and get away with it.’ That was because of the sense of security they felt in their father. He was a living fortress.”

The Judge has only one flaw: he is completely inaccessible. In a fortress that is an ideal quality, but in a father it is nearly disastrous. Images of defense and imprisonment from a feudal society— castles, impregnable keeps, drawbridges, strongholds, and ramparts—are carefully used by Zelda to describe the Judge’s character. He is
“entrenched… in his integrity,” the “lord of the living cycle,” and his strength of character is formidable and unchallengeable, for he is always on the side of right and justice. But he stands for an ideal of conduct Alabama cannot hope to find in either herself or her own generation. When beaus come to pick her up for dates and whistle from their cars for her, she is ashamed of them. But more importantly she is ashamed also of herself for wanting to go out with them. Good manners, however, are the lightest of the burdens the Judge places on his children; they are permitted no deviation from his code of integrity, no vacillations of purpose or errors of judgment. As a result his children never learn to deal with the world on their own terms, but try to emulate his. By comparison their own efforts are inadequate. Zelda understood that failure clearly. “By the time the Beggs children had learned to meet the changing exigencies of their times, the devil was already upon their necks. Crippled, they clung long to the feudal donjons of their fathers….” Zelda also implies that as long as the Beggs children remain within the household they are safe; it is only when they move out into larger worlds where choices are less clear that they are uncertain. Their final crippling is due to their inability to exercise their own faculties of reason and judgment.

Pitted against the Judge is his wife. She is as vague and soft as the Judge is harsh and unremittingly correct. It is to her that the girls turn for relief from their father, for “the Judge became, with their matured perceptions, a retributory organ, an inexorable fate, the force of law, order, and established discipline.” This relationship between the Judge and his wife instills in their youngest daughter, Alabama, a mode of masculine-feminine role-playing that, much as she tries to rebel against it, has formed her. The male partner may be the stronger, may possess the keener intelligence, but his authority is undercut by the rather passive deviousness of the female, who by fooling him gets her own, or in Millie’s case, her children’s way.

Millie, who had never had a very strong sense of reality, was unable to reconcile that cruelty of the man with what she knew was a just and noble character. [The Judge and Millie have just lost their only son; the Judge’s reaction to his son’s death is to turn “savagely to worry fleeing from his disappointment” and to fling the bill for the boy’s funeral at Millie, asking how she expects him to pay for it.] She was never again able to form a judgment of people, shifting her actualities to conform to their inconsistencies till by a fixation of loyalty she achieved in her
life a saintlike harmony…. The sum of her excursions into the irreconcilabilities of the human temperament taught her also a trick of transference that tided her over the birth of the last child…. Confronted with the realism of poverty, she steeped her personality in a stoic and unalterable optimism and made herself impervious to the special sorrows pursuing her to the end.

When Dixie dates someone whom the Judge deeply disapproves of, Millie suggests that rather than “bother” her father she “could make [her] arrangements outside”; in other words she tries not only to be the peacemaker in the family, but attempts to have Dixie avoid confrontation with the Judge by subterfuge.

The wide and lawless generosity of their mother was nourished from many years of living faced with the irrefutable logic of the Judge’s fine mind…. Millie Beggs, by the time she was forty-five, had become an emotional anarchist. It was her way of proving to herself her individual necessity of survival. Her inconsistencies seemed
to assert her dominance
[my italics] over the scheme….