TOWSON AND MARYLAND TIES

Photo: Courtesy of BETTMANN/CORBIS

FITZGERALD LIKED TO PLAY UP HE WAS RELATED TO FRANCIS SCOTT KEY, AUTHOR OF THE BANNER, THOUGH A DISTANT 3RD COUSIN.  PERHAPS KEY, TODAY, WOULD WANT TO PLAY UP HIS RELATION TO THE GATSBY AUTHOR. FITZGERALD LIVED IN TOWSON WITH ZELDA AND LATER BURIED NEXT TO HER IN ROCKVILLE.

In February 1932 Fitzgerald's wife ZELDA underwent hospitalization at the Phipps Clinic at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.

In April 1932, when the clinic allowed Zelda to travel with her husband, Fitzgerald took her to lunch with critic H.L. Mencken. In his diary, Mencken noted that Zelda "went insane in Paris a year or so ago, and is still plainly more or less off her base". Throughout the lunch, she manifested signs of mental distress. A year later, when Mencken met Zelda for the final time, he described her mental illness as immediately evident to any onlooker and her mind as "only half sane". He regretted that Fitzgerald couldn't write novels as he had to write magazine stories to pay for Zelda's psychiatric treatment.

During this time, Fitzgerald rented the "La Paix" estate in the suburb of Towson, Maryland and worked on his forthcoming novel which drew heavily upon recent events in his life. The story concerned a promising young American named Dick Diver who marries a mentally-ill young woman and whose marriage deteriorates while abroad in Europe. While Fitzgerald labored on his novel, Zelda wrote—and sent to Scribner's—her own fictionalized version of these same autobiographical events in Save Me the Waltz (1932). Angered by what he saw as theft of his novel's material, Fitzgerald would later describe Zelda as "plagiaristic" and a "third-rate writer". Despite his annoyance, he demanded few revisions to the work, and he persuaded Perkins to publish Zelda's novel. Scribner's published Zelda's novel in October 1932, but the novel amounted to a commercial and critical failure.

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