This is by Zelda Fitzgerald. It's the only novel she completed; and it was published in 1932.

It focuses on Alabama Beggs, a young woman from the south of the United States (her family have deep roots in the Confederate tradition). She's wild and headstrong, determined to suck the last drop out of life, whatever the cost. She marries a young painter, David Knight, who very soon achieves fame and some measure of fortune. The pair, with their young daughter, Bonnie, move to France. There are affairs and parties. Then Alabama decides she wants to train as a ballet dancer. She's not untalented, but she begins too late in life. She studies with a former ballerina, a Russian emigree. She slogs courageously, even obsessively -- "She worked till she felt like a gored horse in the bull ring, dragging its entrails" -- and she does achieve a certain measure of success, and even an offer of professional employment. But then illness and a severe foot injury put paid to her hopes. She will never dance again.


Alabama goes to see the last performance of Anna Pavlova (who died in January 1931)

The novel closes with the little family back in the southern states, gathering for the last days and death of Judge Beggs, Alabama's father. Then they're due to move on again, but we don't know to what. The closing paragraphs are very moving:

"'Alabama,' said David, 'if you would stop dumping ash trays before the company has got well out of the house we would be happier.'

"'It's very expressive of myself. I just lump everything in a great heap which I have labelled 'the past', and, having thus emptied this deep reservoir that was once myself, I am ready to continue.'

"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."

Having recently read The Beautiful and Damned by Zelda's husband, F. Scott Fitzgerald, which draws more than a little on their relationship, and even on her actual words (Zelda said he cribbed from her diaries), I was keen to read another perspective. Save Me the Waltz is a fictional account, but it hews very closely to Fitzgerald's own life and marriage.

Which is one of the problems in writing about it... Try as you might, you can't dissociate Alabama and David Knight, the protagonists of the novel, from Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald, the real-life -- and larger-than-life -- celebrity couple.

So let's get that over with first. Here you can find the transcript of a really interesting interview with academic Stephanie Peebles Tavera. According to her, Fitzgerald wrote her novel in just six weeks in 1932, while she was a patient at the Phipps Clinic of John Hopkins Hospital, Baltimore. Troubled by mental illness, this was the fourth clinic she had turned to. And there would be more. She was said to be suffering from schizophrenia (a diagnosis that many would now question), and she underwent a number of types of treatment. One was talk therapy, and the bizarre thing here is that present along with the psychiatrist was her husband: "These sessions are important because not only were they verbally abusive [F. Scott Fitzgerald describes his wife as a third-rate writer and a third-rate ballet dancer, and emphasizes that he is the professional novelist, and he is supporting her], but also Scott poached dialogue word for word from the transcripts of those recorded sessions for his novel, Tender is the Night, published in 1934."

Where do you even start with all that...?

So when Scott took umbrage at the intimately personal nature of Save Me the Waltz, and tried to prevent its publication, and then insisted on changes, and accused her of poaching from his novel, and took charge of the proofreading so that he could do a really bad job of it, and actively discouraged his agent from marketing it, you start to get an insight into the profoundly messed-up emotional and artistic relationship these two staggered along under...



Not that it's an easy book. The style drives you crazy at times. It's too ornate; it tries too hard. It's overwrought, overegged, overeverythinged... Whether you're talking about similes, metaphors, or adverbs -- on all counts, there are just too many.

But you can see that there's a gifted writer in there. In many places, the novel is very resonant, very evocative. With a better editor, or a more sympathetic mentor, this could have been really good.

Interesting, too, was Peebles Tavera's attempt at "establishing Zelda as part of a surrealist community, the community of women writers in expat Paris, like Gertrude Stein and Natalie Barney and Djuna Barnes".

She continues: "I think that that influence affected her writing style in positive ways, but also then made it really difficult for her to fit in any kind of box as a writer, and makes it difficult for us to make sense of her, to make sense of what she was doing in her writing style and the meaning of the text outside of these clear autobiographical parallels."

Earlier in the interview she expands on these ideas: "Zelda is definitely a surrealist writer, not a high modernist like her husband. I think that's interesting because, for all of the claims to experimentalism that high modernist writers and scholars of high modernism have made, I find high modernism actually quite predictable. Surrealism is not. It surprises you, very much the same way that Zelda's writing surprises you. You think it's going to unfold in one direction, and then it takes a sharp left turn and jumps off a cliff. That excess and decadence that you were describing earlier of Zelda's writing, there's an excess in language, an excess in imagery, it's very over the top. It's almost too much... It's literally her writing is practicing or performing this excess."

Surrealist... That does make sense. On my way through, I noted down a couple of passages that illustrated that overblown quality, and they actually both have surrealist notes:

-- "Alabama's expectations for her sister envisaged everything except that love might roll on using the bodies of its dead to fill up the craters in the path to its line of action."
-- "As a compliment to the [Russian] Princess the party chose a Russian boite. The voice of a fallen aristocracy tethered its wails to the flexible notes of Tzigane guitars; the low clang of bottles against champagne buckets jangled the tone of the dungeon of pleasure like the lashing of spectral chains. Cold-storage necks and throats like vipers' fangs pierced the ectoplasmic light; eddying hair whirled about the shallows of the night."

Yes, definitely surrealist elements here... Gothic almost...

Michelle Bailat-Jones comments on the kinship she detects with Carson McCullers and Flannery O'Connor: "That dark southern gothic feel and something about the way the mysterious and brooding interior life of the female character is written. How she reacts -- emotionally -- to the world around her. And then I had to check dates because, contrary to what I was expecting, Zelda Fitzgerald wrote this novel ten years before Carson McCullers would publish her first novel and twenty years before Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood... So I think we need to be very careful about ever using the word 'derivative' when talking about Zelda Fitzgerald."


Fitzgerald had considerable talent as an artist. Again there are suggestions of surrealism

There's also lots in the books that's just really beautiful. A couple of examples:

-- "From the orchard across the way the smell of ripe pears floats over the child's bed. A band rehearses waltzes in the distance. White things gleam in the dark -- white flowers and paving stones."
-- "... one summer night when it poured with rain and the vines swished and dripped like ladies folding silken skirts around them, and the drains growled and choked like mournful doves..."
-- "... daisy fields like nursery rhymes where dreamy cows saddled with shade nibbled the summer off the white slopes..."
-- "The party poured out into the Paris night like dice shaken from a cylinder."
-- "A southern moon is a sodden moon, and sultry. When it swamps the fields and the rustling sandy roads and the sticky honeysuckle hedges in its sweet stagnation, your fight to hold on to reality is like a protestation against a first waft of ether."


Composer and producer Vincent Youmans is mentioned four times. Here's one of the contexts, again highly evocative: "Vincent Youmans wrote the music for those twilights just after the war. They were wonderful. They hung above the city like an indigo wash, forming themselves from asphalt dust and sooty shadows under the cornices and limp gusts of air exhaled from closing windows"

And Fitzgerald can be very amusing. We meet Mr Hastings, for example. He's just out of "an asylum". He has ulcers, and can eat only spinach, and the flamboyant Dickie has to stop him annoying his neighbours by playing his phonograph. None of that is funny, but the subsequent exchange is great:

"'It must be very inconvenient,' muttered David.
"'Frightfully so -- travelling all the way to Switzerland with all those discs, and ordering spinach in thirty-seven different languages.'"

*_*_*

The most interesting element of the novel is its psychology, its searing portrayal of two people who love each other, and yet do not help each other. They're both at fault. Yet the power imbalance means that you particularly resent David's cloth-eared inability to support Alabama.

Alabama is ruthlessly honest about her own faults. She admits she is conceited, demanding, and spoilt. But she is also unsparing of David.

He's self-absorbed. One of their early dates, for example, takes them to an abandoned clubhouse:

"Taking out his knife he carved in the door-post:
"'David,' the legend read, 'David, David, Knight, Knight, Knight, and Miss Alabama Nobody.'
"'Egotist,' she protested...
"She was a little angry about the names. David had told her about how famous he was going to be many times before..."

He's possessive. Writing to her from New York, he enthuses:

"'The tops of the buildings shine like crowns of goldleaf kings in conference -- and oh, my dear, you are my princess and I'd like to keep you shut for ever in an ivory tower for my private delectation.'
"The third time he wrote that about the princess, Alabama asked him not to mention the tower again."


Another of Fitzgerald's illustrations

He's inconsiderate. As he works away happily on his art, she is left much alone, with no outlet for her energy and her considerable talents. But he doesn't understand. When she tells him of her frustration with the frivolous life she leads: "I don't want to sleep with the men or imitate the women, and I can't stand it," he responds: "Poor girl... I understand. It must be awful just waiting around eternally."

Correct... But what are you going to do about it?

He's unfaithful. But then so is she. They agreed to give each other freedom. But they're actually both jealous by nature.

Alabama's decision to take up dancing comes from the confluence of all these elements. It's an outlet for creativity, an area that can be hers alone, a cure for boredom, and a way of rebuilding the confidence that has been knocked by David's infidelity.


Serge Pavlovich Diaghilev (1872-1929)


Dancers from Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, 1928. Fitzgerald writes: "Diaghilev called his rehearsals at eight in the morning. His dancers left the theatre around one at night... Diaghilev insisted that they live at so much nervous tension that movement, which meant dancing to them, became a necessity, like a drug. They worked incessantly"

David is ostensibly supportive of Alabama's dance ambitions, but in a rather condescending way: "'You're so thin,' said David patronizingly. 'There's no use killing yourself. I hope that you realize that the biggest difference in the world is between the amateur and the professional in the arts.'... He exhibited her to his friends as if she were one of his pictures... David said he would help her to be a fine dancer, but he did not believe that she could become one." It's gaslighting, really. Sabotage.

Inevitably, you compare Alabama and Zelda, and the similarities and divergences are particularly instructive when it comes to the ballet training. Zelda wrote stories to help fund her ballet lessons; Alabama has everything paid for by David. Zelda, like her fictional twin, trained in Paris (her actual teacher was Russian ballerina Lubov Egorova, who is unlikely to have taken her on if she had no merit), and associated with the most talented dancers of the time. Zelda was offered the opportunity to dance with the Teatro di San Carlo in Naples. Unlike her double, she didn't go, probably because of her incipient mental illness. It's this -- not physical ill health and injury -- that stops Zelda's career achieving lift-off.


Portrait of Diaghilev by Leon Bakst. Fitzgerald: "The hope of entering Diaghilev's ballet loomed before her like a protecting cathedral... Diaghilev died. The stuff of the great movement of the Ballet Russe lay rotting in a French law court -- he had never been able to make money. Some of his dancers performed around the swimming pool at the Lido to please the drunk Americans in summer..."

_*_*_

Never emphasized, but interestingly present throughout, are references to the era. The modernity of New York is brilliantly evoked:

"People met people they knew in hotel lobbies smelling of orchids and plush and detective stories, and asked each other where they'd been since last time. Charlie Chaplin wore a yellow polo coat. People were tired of the proletariat -- everybody was famous. All the other people who weren't well known had been killed in the war; there wasn't much interest in private lives... There were a hundred thousand things to be blue about exposed in all the choruses... All over New York people telephoned. They telephoned from one hotel to another to people on other parties that they couldn't get there -- that they were engaged. It was always tea-time or late at night..."

The Knights move to Paris, where life is all revelry: "Nobody knew whose party it was. It had been going on for weeks. When you felt you couldn't survive another night, you went home and slept and when you got back, a new set of people had consecrated themselves to keeping it alive. It must have started with the first boatloads of unrest that emptied themselves into France in nineteen twenty-seven... The postwar extravagance which had sent David and Alabama and some sixty thousand other Americans wandering over the face of Europe in a game of hare without hounds achieved its apex."

Flitting through the pages are many other cultural figures, who were either contemporary, or still remained influential from an early era. Some are mentioned above, but we also come across Georgia O'Keeffe, Fernand Leger, Marie Laurencin, Arthur Rimbaud, Paul Verlaine...


"The French talked volubly and incomprehensively to David and Alabama about the works of Fernand Leger and Rene Crevel..." This is Crevel



All in all, this was a fascinating read... I'm so not finished with this woman...