“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(All during this time, October–November, we’ve also been involved in a series of hassles with the foreign publishers Ankh-Hermes and Ariston. We’ve learned to our sorrow and rage that both entities have cut their versions of Seth Speaks, without our permission or knowledge, and have struggled to exert what force we could in order to rectify the situation. I thought it much more likely that these sorts of challenges were much more likely to be behind my problems. We do feel let down on the issue of foreign rights by Prentice-Hall, and the overseas publishers as well. As I’ve said to Jane more than once, “I wonder what we ought to know that Tam hasn’t told us”—meaning of course that every time a hassle develops with Prentice-Hall we find out a new batch of information that Tam has known all along but never relayed to us. This makes for a series of ugly surprises along the way of our travels with Prentice-Hall, since they always seem to involve money in a negative way, or royalties being withheld, etc.

(All of this material is on file in detail. Yesterday Jane confirmed with Tam by phone that we will take full control of foreign rights; not to try to make a lot of money, because we don’t think it can be done, but simply to prevent our being taken advantage of by any more foreign publishers. In all probability taking control of foreign rights merely means that there won’t be any. I’ve already written Ariston that we will sell them no more work after their dishonesty with Seth Speaks, and plan to do the same thing soon with Ankh-Hermes. At the moment we’re waiting to learn their reaction to correspondence from Prentice-Hall, demanding that the cut portions of the book be restored—a move I cannot see them complying with for economic reasons alone.

(Yesterday we learned that P. Grenquist and others from Prentice-Hall met representatives, including the owners, of Ariston at the book fair in Frankfurt—another bit of information Jane and I wouldn’t have been told without asking; my present suspicion is that eventually Jane and I will learn that those in charge at Prentice-Hall knew all along that both Ariston and Ankh-Hermes had made changes in Seth Speaks, with their casual okay. and that we simply weren’t informed for whatever reasons. I don’t mean to be paranoid about this observation, merely that business is done that way and that the author, once he or she has produced the property to be played with, is relegated to a place much lower on the totem pole of importance.

It would be nice if you learned to appreciate your own abilities both as an artist and as a writer (louder). It would be nice if you learned to appreciate your comparative financial freedom, instead of arguing with yourself as to whether or not you deserve it, or whether or not you are a good male if you accept it.

(Long pause at 9:55.) I do not want to define for you an ideal picture to which you can never live up. That is, I do not want your practical experience of life to seem inferior as you are in the process of learning how to live in a new fashion. The patterns of give-and-take between you and others are actually very simple to describe and delicate at a certain level of activity. There is some material of course that I have not given, though I will, because it would seem to you initially that in the light of what is possible, you were doing poorly—where instead in the light of your reality at this time, you are doing well. You must realize that you are judging your behavior by standards that are very high indeed, and that you are in a situation in which, say, all of the facts are not yet in. You have been geared to disapprove of yourselves, you have been taught to judge your performance in a very shallow fashion, according to social mores and sexual affiliation, and when you are breaking out of those patterns, you may indeed feel betwixt and between.