DEATH OF CONTRIBUTOR BART ALBERTI, A SUICIDE, LAST SATURDAY IN SAN FRANCISCO
Saturday, June 3, 2006 [The Santiago Times]
(Ed. Note. Readers of our Sunday issues over the last month will have noticed four quirky poems we’ve run by one Bart Alberti. Last Saturday, Bart took his life. Bart was a high school classmate of our weekend editor, Bill Stott. In the following collection of emails, Bill informed his and Bart’s Scarsdale High School class of 1958 classmates about Bart’s death and his odd life. Bill publishes two of Bart’s poems at the end of this article and says more poems will continue to appear in the weekend ST.)
Dear Classmates,
This Monday John Austin was called by the San Francisco coroner’s office. After the call, John emailed Dan Neary and me.
Dear Bill and Dan, I am sorry to have to report that Barto Alberti is dead. He apparently committed suicide. It occurred at about 2:30 p.m. Saturday in San Francisco when Barto stepped on to the tracks in front of an on-coming train arriving from San Jose, turned his back and was struck. He apparently was killed instantly. As far as I know, he left no note. That is all the information I have. I got it from the San Francisco coroner's office, which called me seeking information on Barto. I was of no help to them because all I could tell them was that Barto lived in Scarsdale, at least until 1958, and graduated from SHS. I am sorry to say that I don't know if Barto had any living relatives, and if so, where they might be. Of course, the city is trying to locate any living relatives. The person who called me said that from all indications Barto was "a loner." If you have any information that might help in locating any relatives, I'd be glad to try to pass it on to the city officials. Again, I am sorry to be the bearer of this very sad news. John
I replied in an email to [classmates] John, Dan, Jennifer Carden Rogers, and [non-classmate] Beverly Spicer, whom I will introduce a bit later.
dear john, dan, jen, and beverly,
what SAD news. what a sad life.
bart--i've trained myself to call him that, knowing that he wanted to outgrow barto--once wrote me, before he joined our email junta, that he had struggled with depression, but i thought that, since he'd made it so far, and all alone, that he'd make it further, particularly if we could cook up a little community for him (the mark vonnegut notion of helping each other through whatever it is we're going through).*
so far as i know, bart had no relatives and no close friends. he worked as an actuary in NYC for a national life insurance company in the 1960s but never mentioned having another job, though i'm sure he did.
john, remembering how sensitively you handled the fact that x----- y------ didn't get a valentine card in mrs. reed’s sixth grade, i'm going to work with you on an announcement to send our classmates.
i tried to get some big-name historians, then some little-name ones, to look at a remarkable philosophy of history thesis bart had written, but no one bit and i was too ill-informed to evaluate it. (its thesis, so far as i understood, was that every generation is condemned to repeat its great grandparents' mistakes because human memory only keeps pain that we or our parents or their parents have experienced vividly enough before us for us to avoid it.) if it had its facts--about the middle ages through the 19th century--correct, which i couldn't judge, i told myself i might be christian enough to translate it into readable prose; i'm sure i would have wiggled out of that commitment. but, hey, i was publishing his unfathomable poems in the ST.
i did enough, i tell myself, not entirely feeling sure.
but that's my problem. the real sorrow here is bart's.
love you, john. love all you guys. let's virtually hug each other and really hug those around us.
bill
Now a long background note. Bart had emailed me out of the blue after I’d sent out a classmate email like the one you're reading. He knew I'd published some books and told me he was living in San Francisco and had written a manuscript he wanted to get published. I read the manuscript, was bowled over by it, and wanted to get someone competent to read it. I drafted an email that Bart sent to a number of prominent historians I suggested. I can’t remember all the names—Garry Wills was one, and Bart suggested someone—but no one responded except for my historian-friend Gaines Post, Jr., (about whom more later) and David Hackett Fischer, who had received the following emailing from Bart explaining what he was up to:
I am an independent scholar (as they say), 64, and living near to the bone in San Francisco. I have discovered a pattern of economic activity similar to Kondratieff's long-term cycle but based on something other than lucky innovation. It is my theory, which I demonstrate in a manuscript of 87 pages (with, I hasten to add, pages of endnotes), that the economic cycles of the past 1000 years are based on the adult human life span (50-60 years), because people apparently only "learn" from the history they have themselves experienced. True, humanity's short-term memory is prolonged by institutions that collect cultural memory, yet I bring forth evidence that even the collective memory breaks down after 120 years or so. Great paradigm shifts -- the Renaissance, Modernism -- appear after two shifts of cultural memory: that is, every 250 years. I have table showing all that I've said to this point, and also showing the interlocking of economic innovation with social, cultural, political, and artistic change. None of these interconnections have been so clearly set forth by anybody else.
I am writing in hope that I can prevail upon you to look at my MS.-- which I'd send you in ''Acrobat'' pdf format -- and suggest what I should do with it. I have corresponded with a high school friend, Bill Stott, now professor emeritus in American Studies at the U of Texas Austin, and though he believes my MS., which I call "History and Paradigm," "an incredible achievement of learning, synthesis, and speculation," he finds it "difficult to follow because (1) I don't have the knowledge of European, particularly medieval, history required and (2) it is organized in a scattershot way." He then recommends that because [W.W.] Rostow and [Charles] Kindleberger are dead and my work is an expansion and demonstration of what you argue in THE GREAT WAVE, I get in touch with you, saying, "[Fischer] is obviously a scholar of EXTRAORDINARY energy and cleverness. His ALBION'S SEED revises everyone's thinking on the U.S. colonies. I quote from his HISTORIANS' FALLACIES in my WRITE TO THE POINT, and you may certainly use my name, which will ring no bells with him. Now, what he'll tell you to do with your MS. I don't know. He may find it so charming (it is charming) that it should be published as it stands; on the other hand, he may want a revision."
Professor Fischer, I seek whatever your interest in what I've written and your human generosity will give me: a brief appraisal of my argument; a suggestion of how it can be better made; the recommendation of a publisher who would be interested in the MS., as-is or heavily revised; an offer to collaborate with me in making my argument, however refined and expanded, into a book that would startle the history profession. At this critical moment, with a so-called ''war of the civilizations'' in the offing, perhaps, my essay is right to the point. My ''Table of Great Powers'' resembles Paul Kennedy's discussion THE RISE AND FALL OF THE GREAT POWERS, but summarizes hundreds of pages on one page. This is an achievement of compression no one else, in my opinion, has gotten to.
Fischer kindly responded, saying he didn’t have time to read the manuscript.
Bart had also written hundreds of poems, which he sent me in pdf format. I couldn’t understand them—-they are in the mode of John Ashbery, a poet of transcendent incoherence—-but Bart’s language was often amazing. When I became the volunteer feature editor of The Santiago Times, “Chile’s only daily English-language newspaper,” two months ago, I began publishing Bart’s poems, two per Sunday. (The Santiago Times’ website is http://www.santiagotimes.cl/.)
Bart and I emailed back and forth half a dozen times a day, sometimes more. He was full of alarming and, to me, plausible visions of the dollar’s collapse, the bursting of the housing bubble, and the end of American hegemony. He exulted when, as he predicted, the price of gold doubled. He was as amazed by the Bush administration’s incompetence but had the historian’s sense that life has always been messy and people have managed to wade through it to occasional moments of calm. He saw the human golden age as having been the British reign in the 19th century.
We weren’t personal friends—I foolishly doubted Bart had any—but I told him, as I do everyone, about my unrecognized-till-age-51 depression and its cure, 18 months later, when my mail-in drug company, saving money, sent me Paxil, then coming to the market, saying it would work as well as Prozac, which hadn’t worked very well for me, and the Paxil brought me a happiness I’d never thought possible. (I sent Bart, as I do everyone I think might read it, a 20-page essay I’ve written about my depression; if you’d like to read it, just say so.) Bart told me once in passing that he suffered from depression. Another time, he mentioned he had had a nervous breakdown in his 20s. Yet another time he spoke of how a long-ago rejection had meant that he had never had a romance with a woman. He had a fantastic memory of 1940s Scarsdale, of having ridden a milk-wagon over toward Eastchester, of having lived around the corner from where the FBI traitor Robert Hanssen later lived. He told me his father had enlisted in the Spanish-American war at age 19, which would have made him 60 when Bart was born. He mentioned his father several other times; his mother, never.
I send out a daily listserving of articles I like to family and friends, including, gee, maybe a dozen members of our class (if any of you reading this want to be added to the listserv, which is of course free, please email me and say so; you can always ask later to be dropped—people drop all the time), and Bart enthusiastically joined the few and the brave who respond to what I offer by emailing to tell me how benighted my opinions are. Specialists in this are darling Dan [Neary]and sublime Steve Buck (who has dropped the listserve at least twice). But they are as dabblers alongside bountiful Beverly Spicer, an Austin, Texas, artist, writer, cartoonist, photographer, medical and architectural historian, humanist friend of mine, who writes the monthly "E-bits" column for The Digital Journalist . Beverly and Bart took to each other, virtually, in a big way. And when she learned of Bart’s death, she emailed me:
Beverly
Why would anyone think he killed himself? He was animated and excited about his poetry. I just sent him a note in the mail yesterday. He had started sending poetry to me by snail mail. I think it must have been accidental. I cannot believe he did himself in. Very sad and very bad news.
Then, still later on that same day, Monday, she wrote again—this time to John and Dan as well as me:
Dear Bill, Dan, and John,
I just had a call from Bart's very good friend in San Francisco. I talked to Charlie and Sally Wehrenberg, who had given Bart an office that he used every day for years now. He was working on computer voice-sync projects with them and they loved the rare human being that was Bart. They saw him every single day, and ate with him 3 or 4 times a week, every week. He was a very close friend. Charlie said it was definitely a suicide, of great theatrical production, that people saw him jump down on the tracks and purposefully place himself in the train's path. They are profoundly sad about his death, and said they cannot fathom how much they are going to miss him. The coroner contacted Charlie.
Charlie and SallyWe talked for about 45 minutes, maybe an hour. They told me Bart had had rather notable mental problems since the 70's, some of which included earlier on episodes of yelling in the streets, etc, and other dramatic displays, but that he had been pretty well for a long time. He told them that he never wanted to take antidepressants even though he was depressed because he thought "they would make him feel good enough to kill himself." Charlie said he thought it was possible, and not an exaggeration, that Bart thought about suicide virtually every single day of his life.
I had received lots of his poetry by usps mail recently, and had written a few notes by hand to thank him. Charlie and Sally are of Solo Zone too [a company], where Bart had his email, and said he had pinned my letter up on his bulletin board - - that is how they found my number. I just mailed another note to Bart yesterday because he sent me several signed pages of poetry that he'd written this month. My note hasn't even had time to arrive yet.
Charlie and Sally said Bart had many, many friends, many of whom did not know each other. He said Bart was a totally unique soul and a very dear one, and lots of people loved him. He always took care of their place when they were gone. Bart received disability funds and had for many years, was apparently unable to keep a regular job, but he really loved and was good at his computer work that was stimulated by his relationship with Charlie. Sally is an artist. They are 62 and 52, respectively.
They said they published a book with Bart a while ago, and would love to send it out to some of Bart's friends. I would like to ask your permission to give them your names and addresses so that if they do in fact do that, you will receive some of Bart's work.
I loved Bart, found him delightful, and loved his eccentricity. I'm going to miss him terribly, am very sad that I did not know he was so troubled, and wish I could have helped somehow. I don't like it that he is gone, and it felt very odd to type out the addressees to this email and not include his name. I love all of you too, and John that includes you - - don't be mad at me anymore - - and know that you all will grieve in your own ways for our dear friend Bart. I do not even know what he looked like, but there was no one like Bart. Bill, thank you for introducing me to him. I know he was a childhood friend, so my own attachment to Bart must pale in comparison to your lifelong friend. However, I feel honored to have known him during this last part of his life.
GainesI got another striking email, from Gaines Post, Jr., a historian (of Germany and England) and, more recently, autobiographical writer (you would all find much to embrace in his Memoirs of a Cold War Son [Iowa, 2000]), who kindly read Bart’s history manuscript and was as baffled and impressed as I.
Dear Bill,
I am so sorry. I can feel your sadness even in this e-medium.
This is a more tormenting era than usual for the loner, the eccentric, the reading-thinking outsider who knows he is onto something that the academy will not take seriously from anyone but an insider. Like you, I wonder whether I could, should have done more to help Bart find a publisher for his theory of history. In my case, ignorance and limited imagination were a big part of the problem: he had gone so far beyond my grasp of events, causation, and the like, that I felt like a student who just didn't get it. At the same time, I sensed a tangle of emotions in the author's prose, as if he were trying to work through his own idiosyncrasies through or with the history. I sensed desperation.
How very sad indeed.
Then, yesterday, there was another email from Beverly:
Dear Bill, Dan and John,
I returned home for a few minutes today before going to class which will last into the evening. In my mail I have a card from Bart, written Saturday morning. A couple of words are eluding me, so I will make copies and send one to each of you.
Here is what it says:
Sat morning, May 27
Bev
I am glad you like my poetry. I have been depressed for months and I wanted to polish off my oe[u]vre. I kept going with poetry. Now I am off for good. You can mail my patron Charles Wehrenberg at charlie@solozone.com.
Goodbye forever,
Bart Alberti
Tell Stott he wont through it too.
I just don't understand the last line, and my brain is not working well enough to correctly interpret what he was saying there.
As these details are shaping up, my sadness is mounting as well. Poor, dear soul. On the other hand, if he was theatrical and dramatic, and if he felt his poetry polished, and if he was feeling good enough for a grande finale, well then, so be it, and perhaps we must celebrate with him rather than grieve for our loss. It may have been his finest moment, in his scheme of things . . . I just don't know. But, he was a dear soul and again I can only feel happy that we were connected somehow.
John, thank you so much for your kind and beautiful note in today's email. Dan, I remember how when Bart hadn't heard from any of us for a couple of days about a week and a half ago, he wrote, "Are you there? I hadn't heard from any of you. Dan, send me something." So, I figured that he was corresponding with you as well, and that's wonderful to know.
Dan
Bill, and all - - you can see Charles Wehrenberg's address and contact information above, and I'm sure he will be most happy to hear from you directly, rather than me gathering names and addresses to give to him. Bill, especially you, might be helpful even to the coroner's office since you knew him as a child and obviously have more on his history and potential surviving relatives than the rest of us.
My heart is really beating for Bart and for all of us now, and along with my sadness, my feeling of love for you all is growing as well. It's big.
This was followed by a final email from Beverly:
Oh, I see. He wrote: "Tell Stott he went through it too."
I, Stott, am very touched by Bart’s p.s. I read it, or I’d like to, as a sort of older brother’s reaching out to me in truculent approval.
I will be in touch with the Wehrenbergs and report anything further I feel needs reporting. Because Bart published his collected poems and his philosophy of history essay in PDF formats, I will be able to send either or both to anyone who wants them; just ask.
It’s hard to think of his writing “Goodbye forever” and mailing the card. It’s yet one more thing about him I won’t forget.
Classmates, thank you for reading this, and my love to you and yours,
Bill
*P.S. The Mark Vonnegut reference:
Kurt Vonnegut, In These Times, March 2006: “When you get to my age, if you get to my age, which is 81, and if you have reproduced, you will find yourself asking your own children, who are themselves middle-aged, what life is all about. I have seven kids, four of them adopted.
“Many of you reading this are probably the same age as my grandchildren. They, like you, are being royally shafted and lied to by our Baby Boomer corporations and government.
“I put my big question about life to my biological son Mark. Mark is a pediatrician, and author of a memoir, The Eden Express. It is about his crackup, straightjacket and padded cell stuff, from which he recovered sufficiently to graduate from Harvard Medical School.
“Dr. Vonnegut said this to his doddering old dad: ‘Father, we are here to help each other get through this thing, whatever it is.’ So I pass that on to you. Write it down, and put it in your computer, so you can forget it."
P.P.S. As I prepare to email this out, this from Jennifer Carden Rogers:
Jennifer jesus h christ...I am just catching up with this.......the poor, poor man.....more than anything in life (literally) he wanted to express it........................love to all, j
P.P.P.S. Then, less than an hour later, this also from her:
EXPRESS
More than life itself
He wanted to express it.
Bart at the BART is a poem --
Or, as he wrote, pome.
Po' me.
Among other things.
TWO POEMS
By Bart Alberti
[UNTITLED]
You, my friend, are wise and simple, you stir
my laziness, as I reach out to grasp impure
imagery; us, fertile in the accord of natures:
acts, superfluous; words, a glance: banter,
truth. Truth? Truth is the substance of sweet
risk. Happy are the possessors of firm knowledge;
unhappy, those who rely on them. Myth, gentles,
it is the melee of the gods where we couple
with enigmas and beget strange children. Behold,
friends, my eyes perceive a clearly lit object:
baroque shapes, hideous fish, tousled octopuses.
Behold, I create myth with a jagged pen stroke!
A tourbillion of coruscations forming... demons!
Killing time, I fall asleep: awake, sleep-
walker, to find that aquarium that mariners
had left behind before their voyage in delight
of children drawing figures in the sands...
of time..., tentacles, feet, feelers, appendages.
So, join the lie to the truth: Let us call it TIME.
But time and the lie are hearing of the bell:
the artifice of speech.... Lady, I said,
to her, Myth! Rivalries gave birth....
Under the rigorous eye (of whom?),
under the repeated and convergent blows
of questions, the fauna of vague things sees
the earth as the combined presence of the body,
as the uncovered foot, free of the bedclothes,
reaches out for the foothold of its slippery
nightmares. Vainly we escape from what is not.
December 6, 1993
LOVE AND CHANCE
You look up at the sky where you see the stars
fastened to the vault of the heavens by thumbtacks.
As you hear the grinding of the crank-shafts that rotate
the world you clasp a wilted peony in your hand.
Reflections... thoughts....
At last the hope of music floats in the empyrean
the drummer, his sticks beating at the xylophone,
the concertmaster, outlined in scarlet letters,
you shudder at the violet violence of the violin
Emotions... feelings....
The classical separation of thought and feeling
is not abolie par l'hazard but remains an ever teasing
possibility of a suggested unity of apperception
(in, say, the poetry of Wallace Stevens
or in such offerings lawful in the several states,
classical-romantic of the which herein hereof)
or even in these lines, which I address to you,
who may not exist, or exist only in imagination.
Farewell my friend. There are many volumes
yet to write.
after C. S. S. Pierce
September 25, 2004
A celebration of Bart's life took place at his favorite bookstore. Beverly Spicer attended and reported to his email pals:
June 7, 2006
It was a sweet and somewhat surreal thing, so Bohemian and full of exaggerated characters that it felt like walking onto a movie set. The Adobe Bookstore was according to Charles the center of Bart's life, as was the Cafe Soma, where many initially met Bart. I kept hearing "the first time I met Bart he was screaming" about this or that at Cafe Soma. Not that he was actually screaming but that he was loudly discussing some issue and holding court. He went to the cafe every day and dropped in at the bookstore every afternoon around 4pm. "Everybody" knew Bart, and Charles said they're getting messages from all over the world, from lowly to lofty people who were so sad to hear of his death.
Over and over people commented that "he compartmentalized everything." Everyone marvelled how he knew so much about everything, and at one point Charles commented that since Bart never worked, he had so much more time than anyone to research things, and he figures that made Bart about 30 years ahead of everyone else. The range of his interests was phenomenal, according to all. Somebody later asked me why I thought he compartmentalized people, places, things, and I said I didn't think it was pathological but that he just categorized people into ways he could relate to them. It doesn't look like anyone knew the whole Bart, but Sally and Charles knew him most intimately. They said he laughed a lot, and said again for emphasis, A LOT. He loved good food, "he LOVED good food," and "he really loved the women." "Oh, he REALLY loved the women." He was a poet, a historian, an eccentric, genius, and flaneur, in the Baudelairian sense.
Charles also said Bart left massive amounts of data, that his computer contained a whopping 147,000 files. Charles' brother (?) Paul was there, and he handed me his card which states he's with Apple and is "manager of advanced mass storage and optical standards." Charles said Bart had very sophisticated computer equipment in his apartment, but he and Sally also gave him an office where he was working on the programming of the voice sync system with them - - he was really good at what he was doing. They saw Bart most every day, and ate with him 3-4 times a week, and are devastated by his death. It's clear now he was planning this for quite a while, and the week before Bart took the train down to San Jose and back, remarking upon his return how beautiful everything was. Charles said he now realizes that Bart was covering every detail, checking all the schedules, making his plan, sending out his poetry, tying up loose ends everywhere.
The morning of Bart's death, he mailed his cards and stopped by to see Sally and Charles, though they weren't there. I asked Charles how he knew Bart had come by, and he said Bart erased his entire email history that morning. Charles was really curious why the coroner contacted John. That puzzles me too, as hotmail is not necessarily a local address. With no email history, and Bart's own address at Solo Zone, that is even more curious. Maybe John can tell us more.
August 2008 addendum. Those interested in reading Bart’s poetry should go to www.solozone.com and click on “Authors.” (The “Bart Alberti” page has a photo of him that makes him look like—surprise—Jerry Orbach on Law and Order.) His complete, collected poems are available to be read at https://webspace.utexas.edu/xythoswfs/webui/_xy-40986379_docstore1-t_41nxKmIW. Those interested in reading his philosophy of history should email Beverly Spicer (bspicer@austin.rr.com), who will email you a pdf of the manuscript.
Gaines Post, Jr., has published an entertaining on-the-road book in which he travels back into the 19th century West while exploring his family's history in the 1940s to the present. You'll find yourself or your parents in it: Blue Bug, Red Road (iUniverse, 2008).
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