Zelda

by Nancy Milford

  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….

  In her introduction of Alabama, Zelda takes special care to stress her heroine’s primary concern: Alabama’s quest for her own identity. And, although the novel begins with a description of the Judge in relation to his family, Alabama’s sense of herself is first described within her mother’s orbit. Alabama’s quest for her own identity will grow throughout the novel, but it is here marked by a peculiar distinction.

  “Tell me about myself when I was little,” the youngest girl insists. She presses against her mother in an effort to realize some proper relationship.

  “You were a good baby.”


  The girl had been filled with no interpretation of herself, having been born so late in the life of her parents that…childhood [had] become more of a concept than the child. She wants to be told what she is like, being too young to know that she is like nothing at all…. She does not know that what effort she makes will become herself. It was much later that the child, Alabama, came to realize that the bones of her father could indicate only her limitations.

  Uncertain about who she is, the author steps in and states that Alabama “is like nothing at all….” Zelda describes “The girl” in terms of a vessel, an object which has not been “filled,” but it is a strangely impersonal figure of speech: Alabama as container.

  In an interchange with her mother which immediately follows the preceding one, Alabama tries another tactic to rouse a more meaningful response from Millie. But her mother characteristically veers from a pertinent answer. Alabama asks,

  “And did I cry at night and raise Hell so you and Daddy wished I was dead?”

  “What an idea! All my children were sweet children.”

  But Alabama does not want to know about “all” of her mother’s children, she wants something specific about herself; the very intensity of the language of her question is a push for a genuine emotional response from her mother.

  Just before Alabama’s bedtime that evening she overhears the Judge asking Millie the whereabouts of Dixie (who is out with Randolph McIntosh, whom the Judge considers a wastrel). Millie tells him, “‘She’s out with some friends.’ Sensing the mother’s evasiveness, the little girl draws watchfully close, with an important sense of participation in family affairs.” (We would expect Alabama to say “her mother,” but instead Zelda uses “the,” an impersonal article, which reinforces Alabama’s sense of estrangement from her mother.) The Judge suspects that Dixie is out with Randolph and tells Millie that if she is, “‘she can leave my house for good.’ “Millie takes Alabama to bed “and the little girl lies in the dark, swelling virtuously submissive to the way of the clan.” As she falls asleep the aroma of pears from an orchard fills her room; she hears a band practicing “waltzes in the distance.”

  White things gleam in the dark—white flowers and paving-stones. The moon on the window panes careens to the garden…. The world is younger than it is, and she to herself appears so old and wise, grasping her problems and wrestling with them as affairs peculiar to herself and not as racial heritages. There is a brightness and bloom over things; she inspects life proudly, as if she walked in a garden forced by herself to grow in the least hospitable of soils. She is already contemptuous of ordered planting, believing in the possibility of a wizard cultivator to bring forth sweet-smelling blossoms from the hardest of rocks, and night-blooming vines from barren wastes, to plant the breath of twilight and to shop with marigolds. She wants life to be easy and full of pleasant reminiscences.

  In this passage Zelda weaves back and forth between two strains that she will use consistently throughout the novel. Images of flowers and gardens reinforce the development of her central characters and establish not only mood but the interior direction of these characters’ lives. Sometimes, however, that imagery extends beyond what the reader could be prepared to accept about a character within the time sequence of the novel. For example the following passage is infused with images drawn from Zelda’s memories and hallucinations at Prangins—within the context of the novel at this point the passage does not make much sense. But within the context of Zelda’s life it is explosive with autobiographical meaning.

  She grows older sleeping. Some day she will awake to observe the plants of Alpine gardens to be largely fungus things, needing little sustenance, and the white discs that perfume midnight hardly flowers at all but embryonic growths; and, older, walk in bitterness the geometrical paths of philosophical Le Nôtres rather than those nebulous byways of the pears and marigolds of her childhood.

  (Much later in the novel when Alabama is ill in Naples, she too will have fantasies, but not of “Alpine gardens” in southern Italy.)

  When the war comes Alabama plans “to escape on the world’s reversals from the sense of suffocation that seemed to her to be eclipsing her family…. Relentlessly she convinced herself that the only thing of any significance was to take what she wanted when she could. She did her best.” She falls in love with the romantic figure of Lieutenant David Knight, who carves a “legend” in the doorpost of the country club, “David…David, David, Knight, Knight, Knight, and Miss Alabama Nobody.” Insistently he tells her how famous he will become. He asks her to tell him she loves him.

  “Say, ‘dear,’ “he said.

  “No.”

  “You love me. Why won’t you?”

  “I never say anything to anybody. Don’t talk.”

  “Why won’t you talk to me?”

  “It spoils things. Tell me you love me.”

  He does. But Alabama withholds from him her own pledge of love. When Zelda describes Alabama’s love for David she says it is like pressing her nose against a mirror and looking into herse’f: “So much she loved the man, so close and closer she felt herse’f that he became distorted in her vision….” She feels “the essence of herse f pulled finer and smaller like those streams of spun glass that pull and stretch till there remains but a glimmering illusion.”* She does not break, but remains in a sort of suspension of self within David; she fee’s “very small and ecstatic. Alabama was in love.”

  Alabama, then, in a fantasy, enters David’s head, which is “gray and ghostly”; she looks into “the deep trenches of the cerebellum.” She runs to “‘the front lines’ “and becomes lost in “a mystic maze [of] folds and ridges [rising] in desolation; there was nothing to indicate one way from another.” She falls and reaches the “medulla oblongata.” “Vast tortuous indentations led her round and round. Hysterically, she began to run.” This entire scene takes place during a kiss. The mirror image at the opening is crucial, for what Alabama loves is something of herself in David. It is when she enters his head that she is terrified, and images of a bleak terrain of the mind, a deserted battlefield, are used to reinforce her terror. What she seems to be afraid of is not simply being there, but the emptiness, the oddly directionless mindscape she is within. It is immediately after this scene that David tells her he is going to see her father about marrying her.

  David Knight is Alabama’s rescuer from her father’s world. A knight is a young man whose job it is to rescue princesses from their imprisonments. David Knight promises to take Alabama away with him into a world without restraint, without fortresses; a world in which law plays little part. It is the artistic world of New York.

  When Knight is in New York for embarkation he describes it to Alabama in terms of a fairy tale, and his letters probably echo Scott Fitzgerald’s: “‘The tops of the buildings shine like crowns of gold-leaf kings in conference—and oh, my dear, you are my princess and I’d like to keep you shut forever in an ivory tower for my private delectation.’ “The third time David writes about his locked-in princess Alabama asks him (as Zelda had asked Scott) “not to mention the tower again.” In a sense she seems to believe she is a princess “We shall suggest that it was on the basis of this exquisite vulnerability that the unreal man became so adept at self-concealment.”

  in a tower, but a tower like the one described in the opening of the book, which has been built by her father. She is eager to escape from it through Knight, but certainly she will not accept a change of domains on similar terms of imprisonment. However, David differs decidedly from the Judge and Alabama is attracted to him because he does. He is open-handed, an artist, a man who is comfortable with people and playful; he is also as restless and filled with dreams as Alabama is. What he lacks is the Judge’s inexorable strength and single-mindedness. One day, long after David’s splendid first successes, Alabama will find herself repelled by him, and it will be largely because she misses that quality of authority she had resented in her father. A fortress, Zelda seems to be saying, ha
d protected as well as imprisoned. Alabama turns to memories of her father for sustenance: “She thought of the time when she was little and had been near her father—by his aloof distance he had presented himself as an infallible source of wisdom, a bed of sureness. She could trust her father. She half hated the unrest of David, hating that of herself that she found in him.” Frightened then by the disintegration of her marriage, she tries to make “a magic cloak” out of the “strength of her father and the young beauty of her first love with David….”

  With Chapter 2 begins the story of the Knights’ marriage. In time, six novels written by the Fitzgeralds would grow out of their love affair and marriage: This Side of Paradise, The Beautiful and Damned, The Great Gatsby, Save Me the Waltz, Tender Is the Night and Zelda’s unfinished manuscript, Caesar’s Things. What Zelda cut out of the chapter probably tells us something about the kind of material to which Scott objected. Still some of it was not cut entire, but recast, and in the recasting Zelda kept what she wanted.

  Alabama’s peculiar genius lay in possessing a rapacious engulfing ego that swallowed her world in the swift undertow of its ebb and flow…. Alabama was proud of David. Used to the plugging, slow, and costly successes of the life about her in the South, David’s triumphs filled her with an anticipatory sense of uneasiness, as if she had ordered some elaborate appurtenance and, penniless, awaited the bill.

  The first sentence was altered to read “Possessing a rapacious, engulfing ego their particular genius swallowed their world in its swift undertow and washed its cadavers out to sea” (my italics). The change was clearly intended to include David as well as Alabama.

  Mention of money, debt, and drinking were pared down; and the single reference to Alabama’s jealousy in the galley proof was drastically altered by the time it was published. But the primary difference between what was published and what appeared in the galleys before revision is in Alabama’s attitude toward her family. in both versions Alabama’s parents come to visit the Knights while they are living in Connecticut. Their visit is a disaster. In a comic scene, while the Knights are trying to present themselves as models of conventional young marrieds to the Beggses, two of David’s friends appear drunk on a hammock in the Knights’ back yard. Unable to think of a way to get rid of them, Alabama manages to maneuver her mother upstairs for a rest. “From the sense that she had nothing whatever to do with herself which radiated from the girl as she descended from her parents’ room David knew that something was wrong.” This reads pretty much the same in the galleys except that there are additional sentences which explain why she is the way she is: “Alabama had a way of abnegating under difficulties. It wasn’t that she shirked, but her mother had led her to believe that she could have no connection whatever with anything but perfection from babyhood.” These sentences did not appear in the published version.