177. Zelda Fitzgerald — Save Me the Waltz with Stephanie Peebles Tavera

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KIM ASKEW: Welcome to an all new episode of Lost Ladies of Lit. I'm Kim Askew here with my co host, Amy Helmes. 

AMY HELMES: We're back, everyone! Yay, finally! And we're excited to start exploring some more lost ladies of literature and talking all things bookish. Let's kick off our return with a lost lady who, it's fair to say, is a true original. 

KIM: Yeah, she's one of a kind for sure. We know her instantly by her first name, but it's her last name, and, well, that of her famous literary husband which framed everything she did.

AMY: Zelda Fitzgerald, the first flapper, was an icon of the Jazz Age, but there was real substance under her bubbly effervescence. And I need to wrap my own knuckles here, Kim. I never took her seriously as a writer because I'd never really had her presented to me that way, I guess? We talked about her in a bonus episode from last year, which put her more on my radar. 

 KIM: Same for me. That's episode number 135 on Zelda's paper dolls for the curious among you. We mentioned then that she'd written a single novel, Save Me the Waltz. It was published in 1932. 

AMY: Yeah. So after that episode, our guests today happened to chime in on our Facebook forum to say that Save Me the Waltz was quite good. And I only had to read a few pages of this book to realize that this woman had a serious mind and she could write! 

KIM: Amy, while I was reading this largely biographical novel, I think I texted you two words, “Just. Wow.” Despite being once told by her famous literary husband that she had essentially nothing to say, I think she actually had a lot to say in this work.

AMY: Me too, and I cannot wait to discuss it, so let's raid the stacks and get started. 

 [intro music plays]

KIM: Our guest today, Stephanie Peebles Tavera, is an assistant professor of English at Texas A&M University, Kingsville. She's also the author of the 2022 work Prescription Narratives: Feminist Medical Fiction and the Failure of American Censorship, out from Edinburgh University Press.

AMY: In 2021, Stephanie helped to recover an 1892 novel by Annie Nathan Meyer called Helen Brent, M.D. That work earned her an honorable mention by the Society for the Study of American Women Writers Book Edition Award. Stephanie is currently working on recovering the plays of Angelina Weld Grimke, as well as a monograph on women writers and mental health with an emphasis on the role travel therapy and self exile play in improving one's mental health.

 AMY: Ooh, I love that. That's giving me a reason to go on a vacation. Um, Anyway, as we mentioned in our introduction, Stephanie also has a particular affinity for Zelda Fitzgerald. In fact, an essay she wrote about Zelda and Save Me the Waltz will be included in an upcoming collection called American Writers in Paris: Then and Now. Stephanie, welcome to the show.

STEPHANIE: Thank you guys so much for having me and for hosting me today. I've been a long time listener of your podcast and not least because a number of my friends and colleagues have been guests on your show. Laurie Harrison Kahan, Mary Chapman, Coritha Mitchell, and Etta Madden. You guys have excellent taste in guests. 

AMY: Oh, We love our guests! 

KIM: We love our guests, yeah, and we love hearing that. So as Amy just mentioned, you have a special affinity for Zelda Fitzgerald. Do you want to tell us a little bit about that? What attracts you to her life and work, Stephanie?

STEPHANIE: Sure. My first memory of being captivated by Zelda Fitzgerald as a historical figure and as a celebrity is from watching Midnight in Paris, the 2011 film directed by Woody Allen and starring Owen Wilson. Alison Pill, who plays Zelda Fitzgerald in the movie, really brought the character of Zelda to life for me. Her rapid-fire speech, her grandiloquent vocabulary, her decadence and vivaciousness, and then, of course, her infamous disdain for Ernest Hemingway.  Like you, I initially knew Zelda as a historical figure, not as a writer. She was the quote, "the wife of F. Scott Fitzgerald." And I'm putting air quotes around "wife of" because she hated that phrase "wife of." She wanted to be publicly recognized as an artist on her own terms. I didn't read Save Me the Waltz until COVID quarantine about four years ago, and then I went on a binge, reading everything she wrote: her girl stories, her play, her essays. And I believe one of the reasons I was initially pulled into Save Me the Waltz, specifically, is because I learned that it was a thinly-veiled account of Zelda's own attempt to become a professional ballerina with the Paris Opera Ballet at the ripe old age of 30. And I was a professional ballerina once upon a time. 

AMY: What?!!

KIM: Oh that’s so cool!!

STEPHANIE: In another life. In another life. 

AMY: Alright, so sorry I interrupted you. I got so excited. Tell us more.

STEPHANIE: Okay, so I was invited to join Metropolitan Classical Ballet when I was 17 years old. So even before I finished high school, yeah.

It's a young person's career. So the emotional tenor of Save Me the Waltz, the pain that Zelda describes of molding your body to fit someone else's ideal form of beauty, as well as the anorexia, the perfectionism, the physical torture to your feet, all of that resonated with my own life experience, just as I had hoped when I got into the novel.

AMY: That's amazing. I love that connection.

KIM: I know. Absolutely. That is so cool. 

AMY: Even though, as I mentioned, I had never previously read any Zelda Fitzgerald, I had read the Nancy Milford biography of her that came out in 2011. So I was familiar with the basics of her life. And so I feel like we can have a parallel discussion going forward about Zelda's life as we also discuss the heroine of this book. Her name is Alabama Beggs. 

STEPHANIE: I think you're right. It is really hard to separate Zelda from Alabama, and I think that's purposeful. I think Zelda wants us to read her into Alabama Beggs. Zelda Sayre was born on July 24th, 1900 in Montgomery, Alabama. So there we have our first parallel, Alabama. Zelda was the youngest child of six born to Anthony Dixon Sayre and Minerva “Minnie” Machen. Her father was a prominent, respected judge from an old Southern family who had owned slaves and were proud supporters of the Confederacy. This is the same context in which Alabama Beggs was born and raised. Zelda suggests in her letters and in her novel, Save Me the Waltz, that her father was concerned with reputation and legacy. In other words, keeping his good name. Zelda was a threat to that legacy because she was such a wild child, and later as a teenager, a flirt who snuck out at night…

AMY: Uh oh! Daddy don't like it!

STEPHANIE: Oh no. Yep. A flirt who snuck out of the house to attend parties and date half a dozen boys all at the same time. Alabama is described similarly by the townsfolk, similar to Zelda. The first section, or act of Save Me the Waltz follows Alabama Beggs as she meets and falls in love with David Knight, who, just like F. Scott Fitzgerald, is temporarily stationed in Alabama's hometown during World War I. David wants to be an artist, a famous painter. And while Alabama's parents are resistant to their marriage, Alabama watches as her older sister, Joan, marries the right kind of husband, who can provide for her. David is neither southern nor wealthy, just like Scott, yet Section One ends with Alabama's marriage to David in New York City as he receives an advance for a piece that he recently sold.

AMY: So yeah, I want to get back to what you said earlier about Zelda not liking to be known as the “wife of” Scott, because we definitely see that here between Alabama and David. Alabama doesn't like the idea of being eclipsed by him. He carves their name on the doorpost of the country club in order to commemorate where they first met, but these are the words he carves: David, David Knight, Knight, Knight, and Miss Alabama Nobody. And then later in his letters to her from New York he writes, “You are my princess, and I'd like to keep you shut forever in an ivory tower for my private delectation.” And Zelda writes, “The third time he wrote about the princess, Alabama asked him not to mention the tower again.”

I found that really telling, because this idea of having to take on the supporting role to Scott's shining star, it really must have vexed her.

STEPHANIE: Yes. Alabama is struggling against the patriarchal expectations that were imposed on her by her father and then later her husband. Zelda tells us about this cultural struggle when she says things in the novel like, quote, "The girl had no interpretation of herself. She wants to be told what she is like." And the men in her life tell her that her identity is dependent upon the roles that she fills in correlation or subordination to them. I think it's telling that the book is bookended by Alabama's relationship to her father, because her father has basically taught his daughters that their value is in relationship to men. And in a kind of Freudian turn, the husband must replace the father in keeping that wife or daughter in line. 

AMY: That also leads to something else I wanted to mention, which was, especially in this first section of the book, I felt there was tension between the old world, the sort of turn of the century , and then this new world with the flapper and modernity. When Alabama is on her porch swing waiting for David, Zelda writes, "Alabama waited for her date outside, pendulously tilting the old swing from the past to the future, from dreams to surmises and back again." So we really get that sense of past versus future.

STEPHANIE: Yes. And I just had this conversation with my students yesterday, that just because a century ends and a new one begins doesn't mean the culture stops or the politics stop. They just continue. They pull from the previous century into the new one, right? So it's poignant that both Zelda and her doppelganger, Alabama, are born in 1900. There is this tension that's pulling her between the two centuries, and I also think it's worth pointing out that tension also exists in Scott's short stories and novels, which indicates that he felt that tension too, culturally. You have these young folk who are trying to push for new progressive values in the early modernist period and they're at odds with one another.

KIM: All right. Let's dig in a little bit into her depiction of the Deep South. It's very sensual. You can feel the humidity. You can smell the perfumed air. You can hear the crickets chirping on a sweltering summer night. 

STEPHANIE: It's a really good novel to read right now when it's cold.

KIM: Yeah. 

AMY: Mix yourself up a mint julep, everyone! 

KIM: There's the tension, but there's also that deep, ingrained love of the environment of the South. 

STEPHANIE: She's romanticizing it. Which writers from the South often do. Nostalgia for a past perfect. 

AMY: All right. So let's move on to the next section of the novel then, which is quite a departure. It's set in New York and also the Connecticut country house where our newlyweds, Alabama and David, are living. But it soon becomes clear that the excesses of the Jazz Age have caught up to them, so they end up moving to France, where they hope their money will last longer, and where David can focus more on his art career. At this point, they have a young child, a little girl, Bonnie, and in real life, the Fitzgeralds’ only child, Frances, whose nickname was Scotty, was born in 1921. Stephanie, I'd love to hear some of your thoughts on this section of the novel and how it would have correlated with what was happening in the Fitzgeralds' real life.

STEPHANIE: Yeah. It's patterned directly after their real-life experiences and their adventure moving from New York City to abroad. Zelda and Scott had become celebrities in New York City. She became known as a fashion icon as the first flapper. And Scott, of course, he's gaining celebrity for his first novel, This Side of Paradise and for his short stories that he's published in a number of various literary magazines, like The Atlantic. And so they find themselves financially struggling, living the high life, and they take themselves abroad to Paris, where a community of writers had already established themselves. A community of high modernist writers: Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, Djuna Barnes. And then of course, prior to that journey, Zelda gives birth to Scotty, their only child. I think it was not an entirely planned pregnancy, so that kind of throws her for a loop. Interestingly enough, the part about section two that most attracted me was the comic relief. The ocean liner…

KIM: Oh my God. Yes. That description of that whole experience is fantastic.

AMY: But then there's also hijinks even back in Connecticut when they are having a dinner party and some drunken fools stumble in, and Alabama is trying to entertain her parents…

STEPHANIE: …who are horrified. This is how you live?

KIM: Totally.

AMY: The wild child continues, basically. 

KIM: Yeah. 

AMY: And it continues even on into France, because then she gets involved with some other gentleman. There's that whole plane crash situation. We won't reveal what all that is, but yeah.

KIM: Okay. So then moving on to chapter three in the novel, this is where we're going to cue Abba's “Dancing Queen,” right? 

AMY: Oh yeah. But “Young and sweet, only 17," therein lies the problem, because Alabama is around 30 years old, and as Stephanie already told us, that is a wee bit too old to be starting your ballet career. And this is a part of Zelda's life that always felt a little bit pathetic. Oh, what's she doing? But reading about it here, I developed a whole new respect for her drive and what she was trying to do.

KIM: Totally. Oh my God, yeah. It's intense, Stephanie, right?

STEPHANIE: Yes. We get the sense in the novel that Alabama joins the ballet because she's bored in her lifestyle in Paris, right? She's bored as a wife and as a mother, and she's also bored living this decade-long party. And so I think she's joining the ballet in part because she needs structure to her life. She doesn't have that anymore. And she wants her own thing, something that she can dedicate herself to that is entirely hers. She wants to produce an art that is entirely her own, not something that would compete with her husband. And the same might be true of Zelda as a writer. She creates a different kind of writing than her husband does. They're not really modernists together. He's a modernist, she's more surrealist. We'll get into that later. So as sad as this part of the novel might seem, yes, 30 is considered old for the life of a dancer, and then of course it's even more difficult when you've had children, which Zelda had just given birth to Scotty a few years before she joins the ballet. I have two kids. After giving birth your center of balance shifts…

KIM: Among other things… 

STEPHANIE: Among other things, yeah, and your body doesn't feel the same again. You have to kind of get used to living in a different body. So the ballerina in me is kind of reacting to this section going, "What are you doing? You're 12 to 13 years behind everybody else. Why would you put your body through this at this point in your life?" Zelda's trying to find or build some kind of community, a safe place among other women where she can create her art without criticism in the same way that the patriarchal world creates that criticism. 

KIM: When you talk about the trauma and ballet and the community, it makes me think of A Little Bit Culty, that podcast. It's like a little bit culty. It's like you're doing something that, you know, you're completely invested in to try to get something out of it, but it's causing a lot of harm at the same time.

AMY: And also just the masochism of putting yourself through that much pain. She describes the pain of being a ballerina. It's almost like when people cut themselves or something to relieve their inner pain. 

KIM: Yeah. She was not a dilettante in any way about it. Like she was spending hours, doing this.

AMY: Yeah.

STEPHANIE: In fact, there's this line that I really love that kind of encapsulates or crystallizes this idea. Zelda writes, "It seemed to Alabama that reaching her goal, she would drive the devils that had driven her, that in proving herself, she would achieve the peace, which she imagined went only in the surety of oneself."

KIM: That's perfect.

STEPHANIE: Yeah, I thought so too. 

AMY: And when we're talking about ballet and reading this book, the word “arabesque” kept coming up in my mind because we know an arabesque is a ballet move, but also I think arabesque is also a design description, right? A very intricate, curly design. That intricacy, ornateness, reminded me of the writing style of this book, I think. So why don't we get into that a little bit? While she was writing the novel, she was in the hospital and she wrote Scott saying that this was what she was working on and she said "I'm proud of my novel, but I can hardly restrain myself enough to get it written. You will like it. It is distinctly Ecole Fitzgerald, though more ecstatic than yours, perhaps too much so." And that line stood out to me "too much so," because at first when I was reading it, I almost thought she was trying too hard with her writing style, or she was trying to show off. She's got tons and tons of simile and personification, but then once I got into the rhythm, it worked for me. And so I kind of want to know your guys' thoughts and how you reacted to it.

KIM: Oh, exactly the same. At first I'm like, "Okay, I want to try to figure out every line. What is she trying to say here?" And then I stopped. I remembered our other experiences with some of our other books that we'd read that were like this. And I just let myself get swept into the story and the writing and then I absolutely loved it and I could not get enough.

STEPHANIE: Yes. Yeah, 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 gonna 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. 

AMY: She was living that excess, right? I mean, her lifestyle was excessive. Also, they're in the Jazz Age. So that sort of improvisational rhythm, the offbeats, the unpredictable nature, that is so evident in her prose.

STEPHANIE: And not just in the descriptions of the environment in which they're living, right? It's literally her writing is practicing or performing this excess. The word choice that she makes, right? 

AMY: Yeah, yeah, Okay, so let's go ahead and read a little bit that will um, showcase this. We have each picked a few of our favorite passages from the book. I'll go ahead and start with one of my favorites, just a description of New York City. You'll very much get that comparison to jazz when I read this.

The New York river's dangled lights along the banks like lanterns on a wire. The Long Island marshes stretched the twilight to a blue campagna. Glimmering buildings hazed the sky in a luminous patchwork quilt. Bits of philosophy, odds and ends of acumen, the ragged ends of vision suicided in the sentimental dusk.

The marshes lay black and flat and red, and full of crime about their borders. Yes, Vincent Yeomans wrote the music. Through the labyrinthine sentimentalities of jazz, they shook their heads from side to side and nodded across town at each other, streamlined bodies riding the prowl of the country, like metal figures on a fast moving radiator cap.

 That sounds like something Scott would have written, almost.

STEPHANIE: A little bit more decadent though. Like "labyrinthine sentimentality." That's so Zelda. Or "the ragged ends of vision suicided and the sentimental dusk." Suicided. 

AMY: She uses human verbs to describe these non-human things. it's just saturated with that.

KIM: It's so luscious and so visceral. I hope the listeners are getting how gorgeous this novel is and why people need to be reading it. I wish we had read it a long time ago. It's stunning. 

AMY: Yeah. 

STEPHANIE: Yeah. My favorite passage has that same kind of absurd or strange metaphor. This is on the train to Connecticut from New York City. The Green Hills of Connecticut preached a sedative sermon after the rocking of the gritty train. The gaunt, undisciplined smells of New England lawn, the scent of invisible truck gardens bound the air in tight bouquets.

Apologetic trees swept the porch. Insects creaked in the baking meadows, widowed of the crops. There didn't seem room in the cultivated landscape for the unexpected.

AMY: And she was the unexpected, traveling on that train to Connecticut, right? 

KIM: Yep. 

AMY: Here comes Alabama, Connecticut! Watch out! 

STEPHANIE: But it's so perfect. The next time I go to Connecticut, that's exactly how I'm going to think of it.

KIM: Oh, yeah, absolutely.

STEPHANIE: The conservative nature of the state right? Apologetic trees. I mean, I will never see trees the same way again. Yeah.

AMY: Connecticut, she's got your number.

KIM: So this is a description of David and Alabama, courting. The spring rain soaked the heavens till the clouds slid open and autumn flooded the south with sweat and heat waves. Alabama dressed in pink and pale linen, and she and David sat together under the paddles of ceiling fans, whipping the summer to consequence.

Outside the wide doors of the country club, they pressed their bodies against the cosmos, the gibberish of jazz, the black heat from the greens in the hollow, like people making an imprint, for the cast of humanity. They swam in the moonlight that vanished the land like a honey coating.

And David swore and cursed the colors of his uniforms and rode all night to the rifle range rather than give up his hours after supper with Alabama. the beat of the universe to measures of their own conception its precious thumping. Mm hmm. how visceral that is.

Isn't that amazing? Gorgeous.

So let's move into Chapter Four now, the final section of the novel. In it, we see Alabama hospitalized for a dance-career-ending foot injury. In real life, though, Zelda was also hospitalized, but not for a foot injury. Let's talk about the mental struggle she was having at this time.

STEPHANIE: Sure. Zelda wrote Save Me the Waltz while she was a patient at the Phipps Clinic of John Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland in 1932. Get this, she wrote the whole novel in six weeks. 

AMY: That's mind blowing. 

KIM: In every way, she's like a bright shining comet that's like streaking across the sky, burning brightly, right? 

AMY: Yeah. The feverish pace of that. 

STEPHANIE: So interestingly, Phipps Clinic was the fourth clinic or asylum that Zelda visited during her life. It also wouldn't be the last. She actually tragically died in an asylum during a fire in 1948, when she was about 47 years old. Zelda had been institutionalized by her husband after her previous mental health episodes of breakdowns, including her post-ballet breakdown in the fall of 1929. Like Alabama Beggs, Zelda Fitzgerald was invited to dance a solo part in a professional production of Aida with the San Carlo Opera Ballet in Naples, Italy. Unlike Alabama, Zelda did not take the position. We don't really know why she declined the offer, but shortly after declining the invitation, Zelda experienced mental and physical exhaustion, during which she began hallucinating and seeing voices. She was hospitalized twice as a result of these symptoms. First at Malmaison in France in April, 1930, and then Valmont Clinic in Glion, Switzerland in June, 1930. Because she wasn't getting better, Scott invited a famous psychiatrist named Dr. Oscar Forel to come assess Zelda.

And of course, Dr. Forel diagnosed Zelda with schizophrenia, which actually in those days was a term they used for bipolar disorder, not just schizophrenia as we know it today. And then Dr. Forel recommended treatment at his clinic, the Prangins Clinic in Switzerland on the shores of Lake Geneva. While she was there, she experienced traumatic forms of treatment. She was given tons of injections of chloral hydrate to tranquilize her, of morphine to induce sleep, of bromides for pain. And she also participated in talk therapy sessions with a psychiatrist and her husband, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and these sessions are important because not only were they verbally abusive, 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.

AMY: That feels like such a betrayal. Am I wrong? 

KIM: Yeah.

STEPHANIE: Absolutely. Yeah.

AMY: And there's another little section I saw in the introduction to the edition that I read. When Zelda and Scott are fighting over who has the rights to their story, I guess you could say. And he basically said to Zelda that what she wrote were “nice little sketches, but you have essentially nothing to say. You are a third rate writer and a third rate ballet dancer. I am a professional writer with a huge following. I am the highest paid short story writer in the world.” You know what? If you're the highest paid and you're the best, maybe get your own stuff. Don't steal from what I was telling my doctor.

KIM: Yeah, under tragic, really difficult circumstances. Sorry, go ahead, Stephanie. 

STEPHANIE: No, no, I remember the response to that. That was part of the transcript from the therapy sessions, and Zelda interrupts him at one point and says, “It seems to me you are making a rather violent attack on a third rate talent then.”

KIM: Yeah. It's like, if she's so third rate, why are you so threatened by it?

STEPHANIE: It felt like a mic-drop moment. 

KIM: Yeah, totally. 

AMY: And for him to say that after you read this novel and you see how good it is, it's like, "Shut up, dude.”

KIM: Oh, totally. Yeah. So going back to the novel, by the end of it, Alabama and David, they make their way back to her parents’ home in the Deep South. And it's really a full-circle moment. It's actually very emotional, right?

AMY: Yeah. Personally, I don't cry often reading books, but I teared up a little at the end of this book, I will admit. The book affected me. I know that sounds corny… 

KIM: No, it doesn't. 

AMY: And that last line in particular… we all know the final line of the Great Gatsby: And so we beat on, boats against the current, born back ceaselessly into the past. Let me read the final line of Save Me the Waltz: 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. 

KIM: Team Zelda. I'm getting us Team Zelda t shirts, Amy. 

AMY: They're both good. I mean, I'm not denigrating Scott. 

KIM: They're both good, but I'm sorry, Team Zelda for me.

AMY: And you do, you see similarities.

STEPHANIE: Yeah!

AMY: So if you're a fan of F. Scott Fitzgerald and you're reading his version of their life, why not go ahead and see. her take on it is?

KIM: Yes. I love that, Amy.

STEPHANIE: They both end with a sort of meditation on water. I'm not sure what to make of that yet, I just realized it for the first time. Mm 

AMY: It definitely echoes one another. 

KIM: Time, water. Yeah, totally. The tension of past, present, future that Amy was talking about earlier. Yeah. 

AMY: I was gonna ask how did Scott feel about Zelda writing her version of their life together, but I think we know the answer. He wasn't happy about it.

STEPHANIE: Of course. Yeah. No, he felt that he had the copyright to their lives basically, right? He owned it. He gets to tell the story. So it's interesting. I think that Zelda was rather amused at the prospect of being Scott's muse. She enjoyed the attention from him. But then she came to resent it over time as he becomes increasingly more controlling. And so, as we know, Zelda wasn't just Scott's muse. He stole passages from her letters and diaries, the transcripts of their therapy sessions. Zelda was livid about that, um, she felt that it was a breach of privacy, which of course it is. But it's ironic, too, because Scott complained that Save Me the Waltz was a breach of privacy. He felt that it aired their marital issues in a way that Tender is the Night didn't, according to him, um, and in a way that Gatsby didn't, in his view.

AMY: He kind of thwarted her a little in the publishing process of this book, right? I don't remember the story completely, but when the book was published it was riddled with errors and typos. Do you remember about this, Stephanie?

STEPHANIE: Oh, yeah, I can tell you the hot goss. 

AMY: Okay. 

STEPHANIE: So Scott infamously tried to prevent the publication of Save Me the Waltz. When Zelda sent the manuscript of Save Me the Waltz directly to Scott's editor at Scribner's, Maxwell Perkins, Scott had not read the draft at that point. The first draft of the novel was more transparently about the Fitzgeralds' marriage. In fact, David Knight was originally named Amory Blaine, the protagonist of This Side of Paradise, and the autobiographical character of F. Scott Fitzgerald. So of course, his first response to this was "Veto! Veto!"

AMY: I can see that. I can kind of side with him on that. Yeah.

STEPHANIE: Perkins helped guide the revisions of Zelda's novel into the final published form that we're reading today. And this is the version that Scott read, actually, before the novel went to press. Even so, he was still angered about the novel for a couple of reasons. He felt that it was too similar to his own novel, Tender is the Night, which he was writing at the same time that she was writing Save Me the Waltz. And he accused Zelda of poaching from Tender is the Night. Again, ironic, because he's the one who's actually poaching. The second reason he was upset about it was he felt it breached their privacy, and that it presented him in particular in a bad light. In fact, in a letter to his editor, Scott complains, quote, "The mixture of fact and fiction is calculated to ruin us both, or what is left of us, and I can't let it stand." End quote. That's when he actively intervened in the publication process. He discouraged his editor, Perkins, from proofreading, and in fact insisted on doing the proofreading himself. And it was so poorly proofread that the reviews of the book in The New York Times and in the Bookman, among others, complained about the mechanical errors and the type print. So after the book had been on the market for a few years, Fitzgerald pleaded in a letter to his agent, Harold Ober, “Please don't have anybody read Zelda's book because it's a bad book!” In other words, he's trying to tell his agent, Don't market it. Don't sell it. Don't help her out. So it didn't sell well. But I don't think It's entirely the fault of the copy editing process. Zelda's book came out in the Great Depression. People just weren't buying books. Another reason could be that they just didn't know what to do with the language. Even if it was well-copyedited, Zelda has a unique voice, and I think people don't know what to do with that. They didn't know what to do with it then, and they still don't know what to do with it now. They don't quite understand the principles of surrealism, or they just find it too difficult to read. It requires too much work on their part to parse through the language and learn the rhythm, as you said.

KIM: Okay.

AMY: Yeah. So back to Zelda and F. Scott's life, they eventually separated. He suffered a heart attack and died at the age of 44. Zelda died four years later at the age of 48 under really tragic circumstances. Can you tell the listeners what happened, Stephanie?

STEPHANIE: Sure. In 1936, Scott once again checks Zelda into a mental hospital, against her will. This was the Highland Hospital in Asheville, North Carolina. While she was there, Scott ran off to Hollywood to become a screenwriter, thinking that it would make him more money than writing novels and short stories. Zelda was in and out of the Highland Hospital for the next nine years, and when she wasn't in hospital, she was often at her parents' home in Montgomery, Alabama. But then Scott dies in 1940, and Zelda falls into this deep depression. She checked herself into Highland Hospital voluntarily in 1948, and even though the doctors told her that she was well enough to go home, she kept insisting on staying until she felt stable. And that was her fateful decision. A fire broke out at the hospital three weeks later, on March 10th, and Zelda died in the fire alongside eight other women. And the autopsy revealed that she had sedatives in her system at time of death, which I think is really interesting. She might have been sedated as part of the treatment plan at the clinic.

AMY: Also an interesting internet dive if anybody wants to look into it more, it's possible that fire was arson. One of the employees at the hospital is suspected of being the person that set that fire intentionally. She was never charged, but it's an interesting thing to dig around on the internet about. 

STEPHANIE: Oh my goodness. 

AMY: Even more awful of a story, right? 

KIM: Yeah. 

STEPHANIE: I didn't know that part about the arson. 

AMY: Yeah. It was a nurse working at the time. And yeah, I'll send you a couple links to it.

STEPHANIE: Okay. All right, so there's a mystery here. 

AMY: Yeah, for sure. But really just a tragic… so much about her life is tragic, right? 

KIM: Yeah.

AMY: And yet so much about it is brilliant and beautiful. She's such a paradox. Let's talk a little bit about her literary legacy, because I know that's something that you focus on in your forthcoming essay. You sort of have some ideas about why she has been excluded.

STEPHANIE: I think that it's easier for us as humans to accept the simpler story of a person's life. It's easier to remember Zelda as the flapper, the “wife of,” the drunk, the party girl, and, potentially, the madwoman. We cannot reconcile this simplistic image of her with the literary and artistic genius that she was. And I don't think that it's just the case with Zelda. I think it's also the case with a number of women writers that I've been working with over my career who I've been recovering. So what I'm working on with this article in particular is 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. 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.

KIM: Stephanie, I love that you're doing this work to bring Zelda out of this box and sort of change this legacy into something she deserves. 

STEPHANIE: Thank you.

KIM: Your time with us today has been so invaluable, and the more we talk about this book, I feel like there's just even more to say. There's so many layers, really, we only scratched the surface, listeners. But Stephanie, thank you so much for joining us. I've loved this discussion.

STEPHANIE: Thank you so much for having me. This was delightful. 

AMY: So that's all for today's episode. Join us back in two weeks when we'll be discussing a forgotten mystery writer. And speaking of mysteries, next week we'll be discussing the Winchester Mystery House of San Jose, California, and its connection to author Shirley Jackson. That episode is exclusively available to our Patreon members, so if you want in on that, head over to lost ladies of lit.com and click Become a Patron.

Our theme song was written and performed by Jennie Malone, and our logo was designed by Harriet Grant. Lost Ladies of Lit is produced by Kim Askew and Amy Helmes and supported by listeners like you.