Sadakichi Hartmann

Hartmann, born on the artificial island of Dejima, Nagasaki to a Japanese mother Osada Hartmann (who died soon after childbirth) and German businessman Carl Herman Oskar Hartmann and raised in Germany, arrived in Philadelphia in 1882 and became an American citizen in 1894.[1] An important early participant in modernism, Hartmann was a friend of such diverse figures as Walt Whitman, Stéphane Mallarmé and Ezra Pound.

Around 1905, Hartmann was an occasional performer at the New York City Miner's Theater. His act involved a device which dispensed perfumes in a manner intended to be analogous to notes in a symphony, which was poorly received by the crowd.[2]

His poetry, deeply influenced by the Symbolists as well as orientalist literature, includes 1904's Drifting Flowers of the Sea and Other Poems, 1913's My Rubaiyat and 1915's Japanese Rhythms. His works of criticism include Shakespeare in Art (1901) and Japanese Art (1904). During the 1910s, Hartmann let himself be crowned King of the Bohemians by Guido Bruno in New York's Greenwich Village.[3] Hartmann wrote some of the earliest English language haiku.

He was one of the first critics to write about photography, with regular essays in Alfred Stieglitz's Camera Notes. Hartmann published criticism and conducted lecture tours under the pseudonym "Sidney Allen."[4]

He made a brief appearance in the Douglas Fairbanks film The Thief of Bagdad as the court magician.[3]

Later years found him living in Hollywood and, by 1942, on his daughter's ranch outside Banning, California. Due to his age and health conditions, Hartmann was one of only a few Japanese Americans on the West Coast to avoid the mass incarceration during World War II, although the FBI and local officials visited the ranch often to conduct investigations.[1] In 1944, he died while visiting another daughter in St. Petersburg, Florida. A collection of his papers is held at the University of California, Riverside, including correspondence related to his obtaining permission to remain in Banning during the war.

The following biography of Sadakichi Hartmann is taken from Paul Avrich's The Modern School Movememnt from page 134-138

"Next to Havel, the most exotic personality at the Ferrer Center was Sadakichi Hartmann. Hartmann's father was a German merchant, his mother a Japanese woman who died soon after childbirth, and Sadakichi, according to Manuel Komroff, "inherited the worst traits of both races." Like Havel, he was an inverterate sponger and drinker ("a tremendous boozehound," to quote Maurice Hollod). Sadakichi in Japanese means "steady luck," or "fortunate if constant." "The moniker means 'Gimme some dough,'" quipped W. C. Fields, who knew him from his Hollywood years. According to John Barrymore, he was "presumably sired by Mephistopheles out of Madame Butterfly."

Born in Nagasaki in 1867, Sadakichi was sent to Germany to be raised in the household of a wealthy Hamburg uncle, "among whose books and art treasures," he would recall, "I spent my childhood, and whom I have to thank for my first appreciation of art." For his education he was sent to a naval academy at Kiel, but he rebelled against the strict military discipline and ran away to Paris, whereupon his father disinherited him and shipped him off to relations in Philadelphia. Arriving in 1882, he worked at a succession of menial jobs while reading in the library at night. When he learned that Walt Whitman lived across the river in Camden, New Jersey, he visited the aging poet and they fried eggs together, recited verses, and discussed literature and art.

Sadakichi emerged as a man of diverse artistic talents, "poet, writer, painter, and a marvelous reader of the poems and stories of Whitman and Poe," as Emma Goldman describes him. He wrote fiction, drama, poetry, essays, and sketches, half a dozen books and hundreds of articles in the fields of painting and photography, including important studies of Japanese and American art. In the 1880s and 1890s he was already informing the American public, in wide range of magazines and newspapers, both in German and English, about Ibsen and the French Symbolists, and introducing Japanese art and literature to women's clubs of Philadelphia, Boston, and New York. He was probably the first person, according to Kenneth Rexroth, to write English haiku ("White petals afloat / On a winding woodland stream / What else is life's dream?"). In 1897 he produced the first psychedelic light show, and in 1902 held his first "perfume concert." He also fave lessons in body language, mostly to "young women, fascinated by his rakish good looks, restless energy, and courtly manners."

Ezra Pound, with whom he corresponded, placed him at the head of the lost legion of American avant-garde writers of the fin-de-siecle era, and Alfred Stieglitz considered him one of the best critics of photography in the United States. (He was a regular contributor to Stieglitz's Camera Work, writing as "Sidney Allan" when he was not under his own name or initials.)

In physique Sadakachi was tall and thin - so thin, a friend remarked, that he "looked as if he only exhaled and never inhaled." Immensely photogenic in spite of his rotting teeth, he was incapable of being photographed badly. Thousands of pictures were taken of him, not one without interest. Attractive to women, he sired a dozen children, most of whom he gave the names of flowers or herbs. In 1891 he married Elizabeth Blanche Walsh, the daughter of an English colonel, who bore him five of his children and served as his secretary for many years. Long after he deserted her in 1910, she still spoke of him with loyalty and affection, once saying: "He was three parts genius and one part devil, and I was in love with all four parts."

"Sadakichi is singular, never plural," Gertrude Stein remarked. Vain, stubborn, eccentric, he was capable of the most outlandish behaviour. On one occasion, masquerading as a Japanese prince with an escort of costumed companions, he hoodwinked the City of New York into holding a parade down Broadway. "A grotesque etched in flesh by the drunken Goya of Heaven, wrote Benjamin De Casseres of Sadakichi. "A grinning, obscene gargoyle on the Temple of American Letters. Superman bum. Half Gof, half Hooligan; all artist. Anarch, sadist, satyr. A fusion of Japanese and German, the ghastly experiment of an Occidental on the person of an Oriental. Sublime, ridiculous, impossible. A genius of the ateliers, picture studios, ginmills, and East Side lobscouse restaurants. A dancing dervish, with graceful, Gargantuan feet and a mouth like the Cloaca Maxima. A painter out of Hakusai, Manet, Whistler. Result: fantastic realism. A colosal ironist, a suave pessimist, a Dionysiac Wobbly."

In a philosophical sense at least, Sadakichi was also an anarchist. He called on Kropotkin when the Russian prince visited New York in 1897 on his first lecture tour of America. He attended anarchist meetings, mingled in anarchist circles, was friendly with Goldman and Berkman, and contributed to Mother Earth and other anarchist publications. Among his pieces was a poem to Ferrer, and Tobias Sigel of the Detroit Modern School was his old friend and physician. Regarding life and art as "the twin flames of revolt," he refused to be herded along by prevailing tastes and standards, and he rejected "stagnant crowd-thinking and mass-meeting morality." Unlike Havel, however, he remained on the periphery of the anarchist movement, a sympathizer rather than an activist, too cynical perhaps to believe in a successful libertarian revolution that would inaugurate the stateless millennium. "I personally do not believe in reform," he wrote to a friend. "Human nature in itself (in all of us) is so beastly and nasty that reform is impossible."

For several years the Ferrer Center was Sadakichi's chief point of contact with the anarchists. "He fell in love with the Ferrer gang," Maurice Hollod recalls, "for they were the very warp and woof of what he stood for." An admirer of Henri and Bellows, he drifted in and out of their art class, "loaded with fire-water and bacchanalic spirits." (On such occasions, of course, work from nude models had to be suspended.)

A gifted reciter and performer, Sadakichi became one of the Center's star attractions. When he opened his mouth to speak, says Manuel Komroff, he was toothless "except two tusks," but he had "a fine, sonorous voice, which today would be thought too dramatic." Apart from declaiming his own verse, he read from Whitman and Poe and Amy Lowell, from Tolstoy and Ambrose Bierce. He staged shadow pictures and perfume concerts, pantomimes and hand dances. "Nobody danced like Sadakichi," was the general verdict.

The high point, however, arrived when he read from his cycle of symbolist dramas, Confucius, Buddha, Christ, and Mohammed ("providing Sadakichi doesn't change his mind", the programs warned). When Christ, which James Gibbons Huneker pronounced "absolutely the most daring of all decadent productions," was published in Boston in 1893, the work was immediately confiscated and burned, and Sadakichi himself was arrested and spent Christmas week in the Charles Street jail. Buddha, published in 1897, was described by Vance Thompson as "strange, gaudy, fantastic - a thing all color and incense; something as gilded and monstrous and uncouth as the temple of Benares." When Sadakichi read from Christ at the Ferrer Center in 1915, Maurice Hollod was in the audience. "The first night," he remembers, "limousines pulled up with women in fur coats and lorgnettes, things never seen on 107th Street before! During the intermission he drank a pint of liquor to get primed for the second act. During one particularly obscene segment, the rich ladies all got up and walked out."

Very poor during these years, Sadakichi subsisted on handouts and small sums earned from his articles and sketches. Hutchins Hapgood remembers visiting his apartment one day and "admiring him tremendously because of the way he could quietly sit and work or talk while the children, like flies, dropped all over him. Certainly a man who could accommodate himself as beautifully to the life of the young had something." And yet he could not maintain a secure existence. Unable to discipline his unruly talents, he alternated, as his biographers have noted, between "the Bohemian stance and the role of a serious scholar." He was an important historian of art, observed a pupil of Henri and Bellows, but he was also an opportunist, "a con-man who sought patrons and felt the world owed him something." To Jacques Rudome, who taught French at the Center, he was a "half-baked genius with great promise that blew up in smoke," like one of his perfume concerts."[5]

"Sadakichi, trying hard to be a great man, went frying eggs with the great whitman

• Christ: A Dramatic Poem in Three Acts (play, 1893)
• Buddha: A Drama in Twelve Scenes (play, 1897)
• Mohammed (play, 1899)
• Schopenhauer in the Air: Seven Stories (1899)
• Shakespeare in Art (1900)
• A History of American Art (1901)
• Japanese Art (1903)
• Drifting Flowers of the Sea and Other Poems (1904)
• Landscape and Figure Composition (1910)
• My Theory of Soul Atoms (1910)
• The Whistler Book (1910)
• My Rubaiyat (1913)
• Permanent Peace: Is it a Dream? (1915)
• Tanka and Haikai: Japanese Rhythms (1916)
• The Last Thirty Days of Christ (1920)
• Confucius: A Drama in Two Acts (play, 1923)
• Moses: A Drama in Six Episodes (play, 1934)
• Buddha, Confucius, Christ: Three Prophetic Plays (reprint collection, 1971)

• Bell, Bill (Fall 2018). "In Search of Sadakichi Hartmann". The Riverside County Chronicles. Riverside County Heritage Association (19): 10–28. ISBN 978-1729660737.

• Minutes of the Last Meeting Gene Fowler, Viking Press, 1954 (Reminiscences of Hartmann from his final days in Hollywood)

• The Modern School Movement Paul Avrich, AK Press, 2006 (First published in 1980 by Princeton University Press)

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Sadakichi Hartmann.

• Detailed Biography, Bibliography and More at Modern American Poetry
• Guide to the Sadakichi Hartmann papers University of California, Riverside
• Works by or about Sadakichi Hartmann at Internet Archive
• Works by Sadakichi Hartmann at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)
• Sadakichi Hartmann Correspondence and Manuscripts Dartmouth College Library