“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

In 1931 in Saratoga Springs, New York, Jane’s father, Delmer Roberts (or Del) chose to exercise the probability that he would leave his wife Marie and their daughter Jane, who was not yet three years old. Marie’s mother, Mary Finn, called Minnie, lived with the family and often served as Jane’s nanny. Jane was a second child following her mother’s earlier miscarriage. Already Marie was showing signs of arthritis. Jane and I came to believe that it was hardly accidental that her mother quickly became bedridden—for life—following the departure of her husband. Minnie Finn was killed by a hit-and-run speeding motorist one icy winter day on her way to the corner store to buy the young girl some shredded wheat for supper—a tragedy that Marie never stopped blaming her daughter for. The two went on welfare. A series of housekeepers, of varying abilities and temperaments and staying powers, were provided for them over the early years. The young Jane spent almost two years in a Catholic orphanage for women while her mother was hospitalized. Some of the housekeepers had been—and some still were—prostitutes, Jane told me. They took care of Marie’s physical needs—tasks that in her later teens Jane would often take care of herself. With welfare’s help Marie set up a telephone answering service for local doctors that she ran from her bed. The two women’s Catholicism became even stricter: it was often bolstered by the head of the local church coming to Sunday dinner at the old two-family house at 92 Middle Avenue, in one of the lower-income sections of Saratoga Springs.

It wasn’t too long however before Jane, already writing rudimentary poetry, began to have creative conflicts with the doctrinaire priests. She told me how eventually one of the older priests burned certain “forbidden” books of hers in the backyard incinerator, including one she particularly admired: Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. There were other conflicts also, that Jane didn’t reveal to her mother: certain persistent hints and requests as she began to mature, Jane told me more than once, for favors from a young priest that she intuitively rejected. She left the church when she was 19, despite Marie’s bitter objections.

Ed told me that his car was in a garage for repairs. Tomorrow he was to take the bus from Schuylerville to mail his weekly set of strips to the syndicate via the faster service provided by the post office in Saratoga Springs. If I drove upstate, he suggested, I could meet him late in the day at the post office, and then we could go out to his place. Evening was approaching at the end of my 200-mile trip when we met. Now Ed had a new idea after we’d become reacquainted. I paraphrase all of his dialogue even though my memory is good: “Bob, there’s a couple you’ve got to meet—her name’s Jane Zeh and her husband is Walt. She writes poetry, did a column for The Saratogian. I think she’s got real ability. They have an apartment here in town, and her mother lives on Middle Avenue. I’d like to see the place where she grew up—it’s not far out of our way out of town...” Ed added that a few days later, on Saturday night, the Zehs were to join a gathering of friends at his and Ella’s home in Schuylerville.

Ed wanted to find number 92, the old double house that Jane had described to him as being her childhood home. We had crawled halfway along the avenue, between its dim corner streetlights, when my car’s headlights brushed over a shadowy feminine figure walking in our direction. Indeed, I was driving past the lady when Ed, looking back, exclaimed: “Hey, wait, Bob—that’s her! That’s Jane right there now. Pull over—” He was lowering his side window even as he spoke. Yes, it was Jane Zeh, expressing surprise in a clear musical voice at such a “chance” meeting as she came even with the car. I could see only part of her silhouette as Ed introduced us and told her I’d be working for him. Jane didn’t have a license to drive. She said that if she happened to be in Schuylerville during the day she’d stop in at Ed’s studio in town and say hello. (She did, but several weeks later.) Right then, she told us she was on her way to see her bedridden mother, Marie, as she often did at that time of night. She pointed out number 92, a few doors ahead of us. I said something innocuous to the effect that I looked forward to meeting her and her husband next Saturday night.

Nor did I brush aside my deep concerns about her symptoms because of the excitement stemming from the appearance, then the steady growth and complexity, of the sessions. Instead we became involved in a long process of trying to understand my wife’s impairments as they fluctuated over the years, and then finally did not leave her completely at all. Seth told us a number of times that Jane did not have arthritis, like her mother Marie did, but had instead started to develop deep self-protective defense mechanisms at an early age as a result of her chaotic and fatherless upbringing.

Even her early intuitive connections with her grandfather, “Little Daddy,” helped only so much. Add to those early fears her later fears of rejection not only by the mainstream publishing world because of the “psychic” nature of her work, no matter how good it was—but also by most of the world in general because of her chosen and unique way of expressing her great creativity: the Seth material. Seth also told Jane that her mother was “an old enemy,” thus implying a reincarnational relationship, but we didn’t demand details at that early stage. Nor did Jane want to. Once again, I felt there were more such hidden conflicts.

Pardon me for using the phrase every so often, but as the years passed and after her two very brief stays in Elmira’s St. Joseph’s hospital, Jane finally came to be deeply skeptical of the value of conventional medical help. It hadn’t helped when it was offered. The connections involving her mother’s bedridden condition and her tempestuous temper, including her suicide attempts, both faked and real, troubles with a succession of housekeepers, the lack of a father, the almost two years she spent in a Catholic orphanage while Marie was hospitalized, the death of her beloved grandfather, the whole strained atmosphere within which the gifted and impressionable child was growing, as well as her conflicts with church dogma and personalities, had, all together, powerful effects indeed. Neighbors tried to help. One gifted Jane with a male dog—a Sheltie—from the city pound. Jane named that loving young creature Mischa, and he was to offer her great comfort for years, just as he did to me when later we met. And I learned that the symptoms were not only a possibility that was native within my wife, but were to become corrosively alive within her all of those years later. Jane took me to meet her mother in the old double house on Middle Avenue three times. The first time, Marie cursed me from her bed; the next two times she ignored me.

My father died in a rest home in 1971, my mother in 1973. Both were buried in the family plot in Tunkhannock. Without judgment or rancor I note that my parents never seemed to have the slightest interest in Jane’s work (although they loved her dearly), while taking my own abilities for granted as they had done all of my life. It was easy to look at signs and commercial art and paintings; they only knew that Jane wrote poetry and fiction, but never asked to read any of her work any more than we offered it to them.

During this time also Jane’s mother, Marie, lost her home in Saratoga Springs, NY, and was placed in a state-run nursing home in nearby Middle Grove. Through the mail mother and daughter patched up their volatile relationship enough to begin exchanging letters fairly regularly. Jane never told Marie about the Seth material, or her symptoms. Marie even accepted me as her daughter’s husband. The two gave each other Christmas gifts. Jane sent her mother nightwear and stationery and other small useful presents. Marie always sent her daughter sweaters that she had knitted with great difficulty because of her misshapen fingers; invariably the garments were too large. Seth suggested that Jane not wear them in any case because of the roiled emotions that had existed between the two almost from Jane’s birth; gifts from the mother could still carry those feelings. Mother and daughter were to never meet again: Marie died shortly before 1975. By then it wasn’t easy for Jane to travel, and we didn’t make the approximately 400-mile roundtrip to attend the funeral. Later the nursing home was closed by the state. A mutual friend sent us photographs of the big old red-brick building, three stories high, shuttered and dark and deserted among the trees and in the snow.

John “settled down” eventually; he lives with his wife and children in Seattle, Washington. I saw him once several years later when he visited his mother. He was immensely proud to show me his very young first son. His mother Margaret retired to Florida after the death of her husband Joe. We still keep in touch. I’ll always treasure her exceptional kindnesses to me during Jane’s long and final hospital stay.