“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

By the age of three I was already drawing—scribbling, experimenting—and began writing stories in grade school. Many of them were fantasies involving cowboys and Indians and detectives and world adventurers that I crudely illustrated on my yellow school pads. I still have a collection of those: strangely innocent but moving. (I was especially fascinated by horses, but have yet to ride one!) While a sophomore I wrote a novel that I typed on the same kind of yellow paper and bound into a book, I even tried—unsuccessfully—to sell it. I still have that book, also.

I had kept my very strong feelings for Jane to myself, or so I’d thought, and despaired at the idea of never seeing her again. I was the complete amateur at dealing with the personal interactions of others. I visited Walt and Jane at their apartment in Saratoga Springs and told them I’d be leaving the area. Jane discussed the decision she and Walt had made. Then, directly to me: “I’m leaving town, with or without you. So which is it going to be?” I was quite unprepared, yet knew at once what my answer would be. Even though I’d had no thought of interfering with, or taking advantage of, any complications between them. I can see Walt now, sitting by the window of their second-story apartment’s small living room, nodding at Jane’s words, his eyes wet. There was never a harsh word between us. Jane’s dog, Mischa, slept at her feet. It was only after Jane had begun the Seth material a number of years later that we realized that she and Walt, both coming from dysfunctional families, had chosen to come together at just the right time for their own mutually creative learning purposes—and that with those purposes fulfilled, each of them was ready to move on by the time I met them. At the time, however, I wasn’t ready to consciously understand such interlocking emotional relationships even though I was playing a part in one of them.

Jane made her first sales of short stories—science-fiction fantasies. And riding her old-fashioned secondhand bicycle she also sold cutlery and household supplies door-to-door for two out-of-town manufacturers, and did well at those efforts, too! She turned down an offer to be a district manager for one of the companies. In 1960 we moved 15 miles across the Pennsylvania border to Elmira, NY, to live in Jimmy Spaziani’s apartment house on West Water Street. I designed greeting cards for a nationally known company, and was to work there off and on for several years. Jane worked part-time as a secretary for Elmira’s Arnot Art Museum, and wrote two unpublished novels—and one that did sell. The Rebellers was published in a two-novel paperback edition that she disliked intensely. Without judging the other author’s work, she just didn’t want to share her first book with anyone else.

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.

The last stop in our group’s little tour was to visit the hill house. 1730 Pinnacle Road sits on a corner lot up a modest hill on the western outskirts of Elmira. Jane and I fell for it the first time we saw it. It’s a one-story dark-green-painted dwelling with a big stone fireplace, and has a screened-in side porch and a one-car garage in back. The woods continuing on up the hill begin only 50 feet from the garage. The setting had—and has—privacy without being isolated from other homes not far away and it had plenty of room for our few possessions and work projects. That was a real treat to us.