Zelda

by Nancy Milford

He had spent years in a quandary about this novel; he had not published a novel since Gatsby in 1925, seven years before. He clearly resented the time he put into short-story writing, although that resentment now seems completely out of proportion. His income in 1931 was at its apex: he had earned $37,599 in the middle of the Depression. But writing short stories was more than just economically profitable for Fitzgerald. His stories were usually not the hack work he seemed to feel compelled to call them. The best of them, written for the top magazines in the country, have withstood whatever scrutiny was directed toward them, and many of the others were exploratory exercises in his craft. He stripped and mined the latter mercilessly for scenes and characters and moods to be incorporated into his novels. As such, these stories, about 160 in his relatively brief career, were not a compromising of his talent, as he liked to think, but a disciplining of it. They made him money and they kept him writing while he floundered with his fourth novel.

  Although furious with Zelda, Scott had not written directly to her about her novel. Learning of his reaction through her doctor, she tried to soothe his irritation with a letter of careful explanation.

  Dr. Squires tells me you are hurt that I did not send [my] book to you before I mailed it to Max. Purposely I didn’t—knowing that you were working on your own and honestly feeling that I had no right to interrupt you to ask for a serious opinion. Also, I know Max will not want it and I prefer to do the corrections after having his opinion. Naturally, I was in my usual rush to get it off my hands—You know how I hate brooding over things once they are finished: so I mailed it poste haste, hoping to have yours and Scribner’s criticisms to use for revising.

  Scott, I love you more than anything on earth and if you were offended I am miserable. We have always shared everything but it seems to me I no longer have the right to inflict every desire and necessity of mine on you. I was also afraid we might have touched the same material. Also, feeling it to be a dubious production due to my own instability I did not want a scathing criticism such as you have mercilessly—if for my own good given my last stories, poor things. I have had enough discouragement, generally, and could scream with that sense of inertia that hovers over my life and everything I do. So, Dear, My Own, please realize that it was not from any sense of not turning first to you—but just time and other ill-regulated elements that made me so bombastic about Max…. Goofo, please love me—life is very confusing—but I love you. Try, dear—and then I’ll remember when you need me too sometime, and help.

  Scott was having none of it. He scored sections of the first paragraph in red pencil and made a note to himself in the margin: “This is an evasion. All this reasoning is specious or else there is no evidence of a tornado in the sta…” and the rest was made illegible by a smudge of ink. His resentment, however, was clearly enough expressed: he was not just suspicious, he was sure she was purposely trying to harm him. In the latter part of her letter when she wrote, “I was also afraid we might have touched the same material,” she had, in Scott’s opinion, given herself away.

  Zelda knew perfectly well that if any portion of her book imitated or even echoed Scott’s novel he would insist that she change it. If she had sent it first to Perkins as a ploy to avoid Scott’s criticism or his demand that certain changes be made before he would allow its publication, she failed utterly. Certainly she must have known that sending it to Scott’s editor was hardly a way of keeping it from Scott. Her action could not have been as underhanded as Scott felt it was, but neither was it as innocent as Zelda maintained: she had heard portions of his novel and throughout the past four months she had consciously tried to learn from his style. Her motives were mixed. But Scott’s reaction, especially since he was the more balanced of the two, was completely out of proportion.

  Scott must have written Zelda in the same accusing and defensive vein as he had Dr. Squires—she had been able to complete a novel in, at the most, three months, while he had been forced to discontinue his. At this point he was totally insensitive to Zelda’s precarious state. She answered:

  Dear—You know that if I could sell any of my stories I would not have written this book. Ober is swamped with my things, and it seems worthless to plague him with more. The fact that I have had time to write it while you have had to put aside your own is due to circumstances over which I had no control and cannot bring myself to feel a sense of guilt. You, of all people, certainly would not have preferred my folding my hands during my long unoccupied hours…. Believe me, dear, I quite appreciate the strain and depression under which you are existing…. I realize that there is little that your life has to offer as a substitute, but I wish you could drink less—do not fly into a rage, I know you stay sober—but you need some rest and I can’t think how you can get it except by using those miserable moments that gin helps to dispel and turn into activity by resting.

  I love you D.O.— I would have collapsed years ago if I’d had me on my hands….

  Evidently he again wrote to her, this time insisting on specific changes in the novel. We have only Zelda’s reply.

  Of cource, I glad[ly] submit to anything you want about the book or anything else. I felt myself the thing was too crammed with material upon which I had not the time to dwell and consequently lost any story continuity. Shall I wire Max to send it back? The real story was the old prodigal son, of cource. I regret that it offended you. The Pershing incident which you accuse me of stealing occupies just one line and will not be missed. I willingly relinquish it. However, I would like you to thoroughly understand that my revision will be made on an aesthetic basis: that the other material which I will elect is nevertheless legitimate stuff which has cost me a pretty emotional penny to amass and which I intend to use when I can get the tranquility of spirit necessary to write the story of myself versus myself. That is the book I really want to write. As you know my contacts with my family have always been in the nature of the raids of a friendly brigand. I quite realize that the quality of this book does not warrant so many excursions into the bizarre—As for my friends: first, I have none; by that I mean that all our associates have always taken me for granted, sought your stimulus and fame, eaten my dinners and invited “The Fitzgeralds” place[s]. You have always been and always will be the only person with whom I have felt the necessity to communicate and our intimacies have, to me, been so satisfactory mentally that no other companion has ever seemed necessary. Despised by my supiors, which are few, held in suspicion by my equals, even fewer, I have got all external feeding for my insignifigant flames from people either so vastly different from myself that our relations were like living a play or I have cherished my inferiors with color…and the friends of my youth. However, I did not intend to write you a treatise on friendship in which I do not believe.

  She signed herself, “With dearest love, I am your irritated Zelda.”

  The novel reopened the rift between them and it was Scott who, on the surface, was the more deeply wounded. Zelda had used him, he insisted—his writing, his life, his material—to her own advantage. Yet at the end of March just before he left Alabama for Baltimore he wrote to Dr. Squires (who, astonished by the vehemence of his reactions, had apparently suggested to him that if he and Zelda could not survive together a separation might be in order):

  My whole stomach hurts when I contemplate such an eventuality— it would be throwing her [Zelda] broken upon a world which she despises; I would be a ruined man for years—

  On the other hand, he could not

  stand always between Zelda and the world and see her build this dubitable career of hers with morsels of living matter chipped out of my mind, my belly, my nervous system and my loins. Perhaps 50% 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 judgment would mean anything:…these two classes [of friends and relatives] would be equally unanimous in saying that each of us would be well rid of the other—in full face of the
irony that we have never been so desperately in love with each other in our lives. Liquor on my mouth is sweet to her; I cherish her most extravagant hallucinations.

  Her affair with Eduard Josanne in 1925 and mine with Lois Moran in 1927, which was a sort of revenge shook something out of us, but we can’t both go on paying and paying forever. And yet I feel that that’s the whole trouble back of all this.

  * Upon her entry to the clinic Scott told the doctors that she was practically blind in one eye. Years after her death, a member of her family mentioned that Zelda’s doctor in Montgomery, who had treated her from childhood, thought the retina of her right eye was “missing.” Zelda had a lorgnette, which she never wore, saying that it did no good. Scott assumed it was out of vanity that she refused to wear it. She did suffer from headaches caused by eyestrain, but there is no other evidence of a defective or detached retina.

  “But I warn you,” she said, “I am only

  really myself when I’m somebody else

  whom I have endowed with these wonderful

  qualities from my imagination.”

  ZELDA FITZGERALD, Save Me the Waltz

  14

  ZELDA TOLD SCOTT SHE FOUND THE title for her novel, Save Me the Waltz, in a Victor record catalog. It is an evocative request, with a bitter edge, and like an old song it stirs memories. In the novel Zelda probes her childhood in Montgomery as well as her life with Scott Fitzgerald. Inevitably her awareness of Scott’s process of creating fiction had deeply influenced her. And she too stripped portions from various of her short stories, like “A Couple of Nuts” and “A Millionaire’s Girl,” and added them to her novel. The surface structure of the novel is quite simple; there are four chapters, which are each divided into three sections. But she has trouble sustaining a longer narrative and Save Me the Waltz is not an easy book to read. Its force depends on the cumulative effect of its vignettes rather than on an orderly flow of events. Her style is turgid, and extended chunks of poetical description, an oddity of language, as well as incorrect grammar and misspellings seriously mar the novel. (It did not appear to have been copyedited by Scribner’s at all, as several of the reviewers pointed out.) Yet, as eccentric a novel as it is, as uneven and flawed, it is nonetheless charged with her own fictional energy and voice. It becomes a good deal more than the curio of a deranged sensibility working over the grievances of a life with Scott Fitzgerald, or of a life shattered by mental illness.

  Zelda recreates the life of an American girl in the Deep South before the First World War, who later, in the twenties, is exposed, through the extraordinary success of her artistic husband, to a gaudy and unstable life in New York, Paris, and the Riviera. Few women could have written about it with greater authenticity or poignancy. Again and again the autobiographical impulse seeks release in the novel, ensnaring the reader who has a prior knowledge of Zelda’s life. Perhaps that is the larger problem presented by this novel— that because it is so deeply autobiographical, the transmutation of reality into art is incomplete. We read it against the life, or as a gesture of release from the life. If Zelda is telling her side of the story, Scott’s turn will come within two years with the publication of Tender Is the Night. Both of the Fitzgeralds would corrupt and alter the story by seeing it through their private angles of vision. Save Me the Waltz is not a defense; it is Zelda’s view of that complex tangle of selves within wedlock in those postwar years when, as she wrote, “People were banking in gods….”

  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.