Index of Articles

Recently, while reading a friend's account of life with a late, famous writer, I was reminded of a telling detail that I'd neglected to mention in my memoir, Speaking of Jane Roberts—something so obvious in memory that I'd overlooked it, and yet it illustrates a fundamental quirk of Jane's creative focus. The novelist John Gardner, so my friend recalls, lived in a house that was "dedicated to, and streamlined for, work," without TV, newspapers, magazines, or other familiar diversions. Similarly, Jane and Rob's home environment reflected this same stripped-down, work-oriented quality, as well as a sense of function that was ever mindful of distractions.

Sure, Jane and Rob had TV, but they would watch a favorite program only when they were satisfied with their day's work output. I never saw Jane sitting in front of daytime soaps, or flipping through channels looking for whatever might be on (she did love Dallas and Star Trek). She and Rob read the Elmira paper and enjoyed solving the daily crossword, but these would often pile up on their kitchen table for lack of time. They didn't have hobbies as such, didn't collect things, didn't fill the nooks of their apartment with any other avenues of endeavor outside their art. And, of course, there was no home computer lurking on the desk with its internet temptations ready to whisk the hours away on a click and a whim.

But most striking to me now, as I compare these recollections with others from my past and present, is that Jane, at least, didn't have a particularly voracious reading habit. In the sixteen years of our friendship, I never knew her to read popular fiction of any kind. Her apartment's bookcases held her own published works and a modest collection of older paperbacks; unlike my house, hers didn't have floor to ceiling bookcases crammed jackstraw-like with volumes on so many subjects that a person could easily curl up on my sofa and do nothing else but spend years reading other peoples' words, and this didn't even include the constant flow of library books, something else I never saw in Jane's house.

Which was, I daresay, the point. And, of course, it was also illustrative of her immense will, and resulting physical hassles, as eventually, all she could do, literally, was sit and write. When she did read, Jane chose serious subjects that frankly bored me into a coma within minutes: philosophy, for example, by writers like Huxley or Phillip Wylie, or treatises on psychology, or metaphysical writers such as Gurdjieff, Ouspensky, Oliver Fox. As for me, I couldn't figure why she bothered with those dried-up old guys when her own fantastic not to mention original stuff was right there in front of her. For entertainment, give me a good potboiler any day, and lots of them.

So while I spent my evenings devouring serial killer novels, Jane and Rob, devoted to their work, were producing the Seth material. Of course each person's creativity grows from unique life experience; only lately have I begun to fully appreciate my choices in that regard. Still, when I finally did get around to reading some of those heavy tomes of which Jane was so fond, I was amused to discover that my disenchantment had been entirely justified. They were dry as dust, pompous and one-dimensional, Jane's books and ideas soaring with vitality and evocative possibility beyond all of them combined. For that, she focused her time and energy in a way that few of us do, or even should do. And so I look around my cluttered, bookish house with its various electronic amusements and its gardens full of weeds and lawn that needs mowing, and I think about the simple limits of time and the ironies of choice that combine so smoothly to reflect our true intentions.