"Whole New Worlds of Art": Zelda Fitzgerald's Save Me the Waltz, the Ballets Russes, and Paris between the World Wars

Abstract

"Whole New Worlds of Art":Zelda Fitzgerald's Save Me the Waltz, the Ballets Russes, and Paris between the World Wars Charlotte Rich Diaghilev . . . made choreographers work with real music and contemporary composers, pulling dance out of the ghetto of made-to- order ballet music and into Stravinsky's modern world. So too with decor and costumes: fashion and art merged with theater and design. Behind all of this lay a new twentieth-century urgency. It was no longer enough to create entertaining novelties: the point was to invent whole new "worlds of art." —Jennifer Homans, Apollo's Angels: A History of Ballet (2010, p. 339) The reassessment of Zelda Fitzgerald's only published novel has taken many turns. Save Me the Waltz received "circumspect, mixed, and brief " reviews upon its little-promoted publication in 1932. After Fitzgerald's death in 1948 the novel remained out of print, with the exception of one British edition in 1953, until reissue in 1967 as a Signet paperback, an effort spurred by F. Scott Fitzgerald scholar Matthew J. Bruccoli (Wagner 206). Three years later a biography by Nancy Milford sparked new interest in Zelda Fitzgerald, but scholarly attention to the novel remained slim. Offering a recuperative assessment in 1979, Jacqueline Tavernier-Courbin noted that those who read Save Me the Waltz tend to do so "for the wrong reason—that is, because Zelda was the wife of F. Scott Fitzgerald," asserting that it is "a moving and fascinating novel which should be read on its own terms equally as much as Tender Is the Night" (22, 23). In 1991, Bruccoli reissued Save Me the Waltz as part of the Collected Writings of Zelda Fitzgerald. Despite Bruccoli's faint praise for Fitzgerald's writing as "evidence of an individualized literary capacity" (xiii), the novel received high marks from Michiko Kakutani in the New York Times, who hailed it as a "strangely evocative novel, episodic in structure, painterly in [End Page 78] its description, almost hallucinatory in overall effect." After a Vintage Classics paperback reissue in 2001, the novel languished again before a new edition in 2019 by Handheld Press. Scholarly discussion of the novel tends to focus on its autobiographical connections, feminist considerations of its protagonist, or its treatment of material similar to Tender Is the Night. Sally Cline's 2002 biography, like Milford's, details links between Fitzgerald and her counterpart in Save Me the Waltz, Alabama Knight, as does Erin E. Templeton's introduction to the Handheld Press edition and Meryl Cates's recent essay in the F. Scott Fitzgerald Review. Critics including Michelle Payne apply feminist approaches, exploring issues such as body image and eating disorders, while Simone Weil Davis analyzes its portrayal of female identity in a commodified culture that demands constant self-fashioning. Kathryn Lee Seidel, Alexis Wang, and Alvin Y. Wang explore how the text reflects Fitzgerald's own growth as a visual artist. Rickie-Ann Legleitner argues that the novel shows the persistence of sentimentalism in modernist literature through its depiction of a struggling mother/artist figure. And Deborah Pike's The Subversive Art of Zelda Fitzgerald makes valuable claims for Fitzgerald's place in literary modernism and reassesses Save Me the Waltz alongside Tender Is the Night through a biocritical lens.1 Despite these insightful ways of reading Save Me the Waltz, the novel remains marginal in accounts of modern American fiction between the world wars, particularly that spurred by American expatriatism in Europe. Judging by its absence in several studies of Lost Generation literature, the novel appears a lesser contribution—or no contribution at all—to the body of fiction about Americans in interwar Europe, especially the environment of Paris.2 Neglect of Save Me the Waltz, particularly alongside its roman à clef counterparts The Sun Also Rises and Tender Is the Night, affirms Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald as the preeminent storytellers of American lives in post–World War I Europe, with the fiction of Djuna Barnes and Kay Boyle more recently recognized for this significance. While Hemingway's and F. Scott Fitzgerald's evocations of the erratic, anchorless culture of American expatriatism are timeless, they continue to dominate understandings of Lost Generation experience...