SOURCE: An introduction to White Chrysanthemums: Literary Fragments and Pronouncements, by Sadakichi Hartmann, edited by George Knox and Harry Lawton, Herder and Herder, 1971, pp. xii-xxv.

[In the following essay, Lawton and Knox discuss Hartmann 's last years of alcoholism and destitution, as well as his overall importance as a writer, critic, and cultural personality.]

A grotesque etched in flesh by the drunken Goya of Heaven. A grinning, obscene gargoyle on the Temple of American letters. Superman-bum. Half God, half Hooligan, all artist. Anarch, sadist, satyr. A fusion of Jap 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. Result: fantastic realism. A colossal ironist, a suave pessimist, a Dionysiac wobbly.

—Benjamin de Casserei

Every small town has an eccentric and it is characteristic of small towns everywhere that if they cannot come to terms with such a personality they finally transform him into a threat, an object for endless suspicions. For the town of Banning, California, during the Second World War, such a man was Sadakichi Hartmann. An almost forgotten figure in American art and letters, Hartmann lived in a clapboard shack he called "Catclaw Siding" amid the chaparral of the Morongo Indian Reservation east of town.

Still retaining a matchless arrogance and an unquenchable belief in his own genius, Hartmann, then in his seventies, destitute, broken in health from asthmatic attacks and bouts of alcoholism, was a familiar, austere figure on the streets of Banning from his arrival in 1938 until his death in 1944. To the local citizenry, he appeared as grotesquely exotic as an illustration for a Poe short story. Angular, spidery-limbed, with a lean cadaverous face that hinted at his German-Japanese ancestry, he made a daily pilgrimage from his shack on the edge of the desert to the post office in a seedy brown overcoat, long rumpled locks of hair poking from beneath a battered felt hat.

His major works long out of print, Hartmann had for many years eked out a penurious living on the strength of his reputation as ex-King of Bohemia, giving lectures in avant-garde circles, and accepting contributions from the numerous patrons around the world who admired or pitied him. In the eyes of one of his patrons, George Santayana, he had become an "importunate beggar." Guido Bruno in contrast saw him as a "wayfarer of yore, out in the world, appearing here and there demanding tribute from contemporaries who look upon him as a curiosity." Both would have agreed that he had the capacity to laugh at the world and himself—and that he usually gave something in return for patronage, a pastel sketch, a hand-written poem, or a copy of his latest privately printed work. He had fallen a long way down from the aristocratic literateur of the Mauve Decade who carried an elegant cane and wore a white chrysanthemum in the lapel of his Prince Albert jacket. A young poet of the 1930's who visited Maxwell Bodenheim in his Greenwich Village pad reported finding Sadakichi sleeping on a mattress on the floor—a vagabond mendicant thrown upon the charity of the period's most famous panhandler and artistic failure.

For a while in the twenties, Hartmann had sought his fortune in Hollywood, writing scenarios and film criticism, but he had wound up eventually playing court jester to the John Barrymore circle. Before this roistering band, he displayed the mordant wit and conversational brilliance that had made him a reputation as a maverick of the seven arts during his heyday in the era of James Gibbons Huneker and Ambrose Bierce. His tales of having known Walt Whitman and Stephane Mallarmé, of dancing with Isadora Duncan and slumming with Richard Le Gallienne, of Greenwich Village characters and a free-and-easy Bohemia that had vanished—tales related with a wry grin and often fantastic embellishments—were regarded as sheer invention by the motion-picture crowd that kept the old man in drinks to be entertained by his talk, recitations, and bizarre yet graceful dancing. They liked this shabby, self-proclaimed genius with termagantish tongue and they brought him to their parties to shock the easily outraged. But they were convinced, nonetheless, that he was essentially a hoax and a charlatan. How else explain the sly mockery of a man who could outrage all credibility by beginning an anecdote: "On a day like this there were Rodin, Whitman, myself, and three beers in a café in Vienna …"

With his health collapsing, Hartmann finally fled Hollywood and accepted an invitation to build an old-age retreat on land owned by a son-in-law, Walter Linton, a Morongo Reservation cattleman of part Indian descent. Here, overlooking the Colorado Desert, he planned to finish in leisure the autobiography that he had begun almost forty years before. He faced the door of his shack towards Mount San Jacinto, which he often said exceeded his native Mount Fuji in beauty. He built a make-shift gate to his cottage from an old bedpost and planted African daisies around his yard. Here with grandchildren romping around his cabin, he continued writing, sketched the desert landscapes in soft pastel chalks, and studied the stars at night as they wheeled across the sky. From his numerous patrons came letters congratulating him on an appropriately philosophic and peaceful end to a stormy life. "Hail and farewell, Old Goat of the Night," Benjamin de Casseres saluted him.

Banning residents quickly became curious about this unusual personage in their midst. Postal employees gossiped about the peculiar assortment of mail he received from all over the world, letters from patrons as diverse as Santayana, Ezra Pound, H. L. Mencken, Douglas Fairbanks, and David Selznick. On occasion Barrymore's black limousine was seen spiriting the old man off from his shack. Once a service station attendant glimpsed W. C. Fields in a car that stopped to ask directions to the cottage. Again it was said that Ruth St. Denis had passed through town on her way to pay homage to the man that Edward Weston had considered a greater improvisational dancer than any woman of this century.

Such incidents led initially to an effort to incorporate Hartmann into the intellectual life of Banning. The effort was about as successful as inviting François Villon to a tea party. Hartmann's erudition was intimidating, his knavish wit and dry sarcastic laugh infuriating, and his enormous ego disquieting. Although women were enchanted by his courtly manners, their husbands eyed him as an ancient roué. He wasn't above asking for a loan on the heels of an introduction, and for one so clearly living in poverty he appeared oblivious to the social cleavages that divided the town and his own probationary status. He might spend an evening in the company of the community's leading social figures and the next afternoon be observed carousing with a group of Cahuilla Indians in a San Gorgonio Avenue bar. Thus, although he gave a few talks at clubs, he was soon tagged as an eccentric, except by a few townspeople who enjoyed having him in their homes for an evening of stimulating conversation.

Then came Pearl Harbor. Hartmann immediately fell under a cloud of suspicion because of his ancestry, although he had been a naturalized citizen since 1894. Those who had made friends with him turned their backs on his approach, not because they believed the widespread gossip that he was a spy, but because in those years of fierce patriotism it was safer not to be seen talking to the old man. The Riverside County Sheriff's Department staked out Hartmann's shack. When his daughter, Wistaria, or his son-in-law drove into town, they often found themselves followed by a patrol car. Indian families at Morongo also banded with the townspeople in the common cause of hatred towards Hartmann. When Sadakichi walked the desert at night, drawing up charts of the constellations, it was rumored that he was making one of his periodic climbs to the top of Mount San Jacinto to signal Japanese bombers off the coast with a lantern.

Hartmann's last years were spent under the continual pressures of harassment and insults from townspeople. He lived with a brooding terror that at any moment he would be taken off and interned. FBI agents regularly questioned him, sifting through the papers in his battered old trunk for evidence of disloyalty. Every radical view he had ever expressed was brought forth to confront him. He could only plead in his defense that he had devoted most of his life to championing American art and artists and that H. L. Mencken had called him a "thoroughly American personality."

In November of 1944, the seventy-five-year-old Hartmann set out on his last journey for St. Petersburg, Florida, to gather more biographical material from a daughter there, Mrs. Dorothea Gilliland. He died soon after arrival at her home and was buried in a pauper's grave surrounded by ancient magnolias heavy with Spanish moss.

For more than a decade after Hartmann's death, his shack at Catclaw Siding remained padlocked because his daughter and literary executrix, Wistaria Linton, had deep reservations about permitting anyone to examine the piles of unpublished manuscripts, bundles of private correspondence, and other documentary materials that lay in her father's trunk. Her attitude partly stemmed from feelings about Gene Fowler's best-selling book Minutes of the Last Meeting with its serio-comic treatment of the aged Hartmann and his roistering companions of the Barrymore circle. Although Fowler handles Hartmann with a fond nostalgia, he also views him as a "magnificent charlatan" and repeats much that is apocryphal. His rapscallion portrait of Sadakichi scarcely comes to grips with the earlier Hartmann of achievement who prior to World War I reached his peak as a major critic and significant force in the modern American art movement.

Now at last Hartmann's heirs have made it possible to lift the lid from.the trunk at Catclaw Siding. Not only did Sadakichi leave more than half a million words in unpublished manuscripts, notes, and literary fragments, but he kept meticulous lists and records making it possible to track down many of his best essays and other writings that have languished in obscure journals. It is clear now that Ezra Pound was right in his Cantos when he placed Hartmann as a member of the "lost legion," attributing his neglect to the disappearance of his writings in the "fly-by-night" periodicals. Many of Hartmann's most significant critical pieces were written under pseudonyms or appeared unsigned as is the case with several essays in Camera Work that have generally been attributed to Alfred Stieglitz or others.

Much of the material that Hartmann left behind is auto-biographical, making it possible for the first time to trace his many-sided career with reasonable accuracy, although considerable research still remains to be done, particularly to fill in gaps in his life in the 1890's.

He was born Carl Sadakichi Hartmann in about 1867 on the island of Desima in Nagasaki Harbor, the son of a German trader and member of the consulate staff to Japan and a Japanese mother, Osada, who died in childbirth. Soon afterwards, the father, Oskar Hartmann, placed Sadakichi and an elder brother, Tara, in the care of a wealthy uncle and his grandmother in Hamburg, Germany. The boys were given excellent schooling under private tutors, and Sadakichi for a time wore a uniform at a preparatory school in Steinwerder, Hamburg. Upon his father's remarriage, Hartmann was sent to a naval academy in Kiel. He rebelled against the strict discipline and ran away to Paris. Enraged, his father disinherited the thirteen-year-old boy and shipped him off to relatives in Philadelphia.

Arriving in America in June of 1882, Hartmann was dismayed by the bleak contrast to his former life in his uncle's prosperous German household. He worked at a succession of menial jobs, among which was cleaning spitoons, and spent his nights studying in the Philadelphia Mercantile Library. Discovering Walt Whitman's poems through a Philadelphia bookseller in 1884, he paid his first of many visits to the aging and ailing poet in Camden. He occasionally translated letters for Whitman from German correspondents, and the record of his visits is described by Hartmann in a rare pamphlet titled Conversations with Walt Whitman, published in 1895.

Between 1886 and 1892, Hartmann made four trips to Europe to further his study of literature, the theater, the dance, and the visual arts. He studied stage machinery under Lautenschläger at the Royal Theater, Munich, and art and literature in Berlin, Brussels, and Paris. He visited the Moulin Rouge in Paris and tried to learn the cancan from Grille d'Egout and Rayon d'Or. He became acquainted with the French Symbolists and their movement, and in 1893 published the first American sketch of Stephane Mallaré ("A Tuesday Evening with Stephane Mallarmé") in which he described his visit to the poet's literary salon. He met Liszt, Björnson, Carducci, and Gabriel Max, and spent long afternoons discussing literature with Paul Heyse.

As an art critic, Hartmann started writing essays for the Philadelphia newspapers in the late 1880's. Between 1887 and 1889, he assayed the role of a Society Lion in Boston, giving receptions, readings, and hosting concerts. There he also wrote for the Boston Evening Transcript, the Advertiser, and the Globe as well as for such magazines as Poet-Lore, Shakespeareana, The Theatre, and John Swinton's Paper. He attempted to produce Ibsen's plays in Boston, but the effort fell through for lack of sufficient financial backing. Discouraged, the young Hartmann spent several restless years in New York, engaged in hack writing. He attended Edgar Fawcett's Tuesday soirees, frequented the Café Manhattan where artists hung out, exchanged ideas on Symbolism with Stuart Merrill, and tried to write melodramas for the stage. Finally in despair at his lack of success in surmounting Parnassus, he attempted suicide.

The nurse in the hospital where he was recovering was Elizabeth Blanche Walsh, the highly talented daughter of a British army officer. Hartmann married her and for several decades she brought stability to his life. She served as his agent and amanuensis, helped edit much that he wrote, encouraged him to discover a literary pose for the public that would attract attention to his work, and tolerated his frequent amours because of her belief that he had genius.

In 1893, Hartmann launched his magazine The Art Critic in Boston, which contained essays on the French Symbolist movement and probably can be said to substantiate his claim that he was the first promoter of the movement in America. Although the American muralist F. D. Marsh wrote from Paris to report an enthusiastic reception for the magazine in Europe, the publication quickly folded. Hartmann had ranged too far ahead in his appreciations of European dramatists, painters, and literary movements, and Americans were incredibly indifferent and unreceptive to what had already been accepted on the continent.

In the same year, Hartmann published his symbolist drama Christ, a prose poem that Huneker termed "absolutely the most daring of all decadent productions." This work with its lyrical paean to man's sexual nature brought down the wrath of the New England Watch and Ward Society. Almost all copies of the drama were confiscated and burned. Hartmann was arrested and spent Christmas week in Charles Street Jail. A second symbolist drama, 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." Among other religious dramas written by Hartmann are his epigrammatic Confucius with its Samuel Beckett-like stage devices; his somewhat Shavian Moses; and two unpublished plays, Mohammed with its defense of polygamy, and the surrealistic Baker Eddy.

The failure of his magazine and other literary ventures forced Sadakichi once more to turn his hand to hack work and journalism. Between 1898 and 1902, he turned out more than 350 German-language sketches of New York life—ranging from studies of the poor to essays on high society—for the New Yorker Staats-Zeitung. He served with Huneker on the staff of The Criterion, wrote numerous articles on pictorial photography, and began lecturing widely on art.

In 1896, the same year Alfred Stieglitz launched his influential Camera Notes, Hartmann attempted to revive his art magazine under the name of Art News in New York City. The venture failed after four issues, but Stieglitz, who was to lead the modern revolt in American art, recognized Hartmann as a man whom he needed—an unruly inconoclast who could write up the photographer's disciples and criticize them in a way in which he as their patriarch could not. For the next two decades, first in the pages of Camera Notes, then as the most prolific single contributor to the more famous and innovative Camera Work, Hartmann performed his task with verve, evaluating artists and photographers with discrimination and tact, continually leaping into the midst of controversies between both revolutionaries and counter-revolutionaries. Challenging photographers and painters to turn away from the continent for ideas, he projected a new aesthetic for young American artists. He showed a prescient sense of the new directions the modern art movement might take. Even at the turn of the century, as the late Jerome Mellquist noted, Hartmann had already "forecast the fighting lines of a decade later." An encourager of the Photo-Seccession Movement, he refused to bow before it or its leaders in its ascendancy, nor did he ever commit himself to any one movement. Significantly, he was the only major colleague of Stieglitz who failed to respond with a eulogistic testimonial to the genius of the founder of "291" for a special issue of Camera Work in 1914.

Hartmann's first book on art, Shakespeare in Art, appeared in 1900. His classic two-volume History of American Art, used as a standard textbook for many years, was published in 1901 and revised in 1938. In addition to Japanese Art (1903) and The Whistler Book (1910), he published a number of books on photographic technique under the pseudonym of Sidney Allan. Some of these works were turned out rapidly for a popular market, and, in general, it may be said that his books on art fail to display either the acuity or brilliant incisiveness that permeated his shorter art essays.

As was the case with Charles Caffin and Roland Rood, two other outstanding art critics of his period, Hartmann's reputation as a critic reached its peak shortly before World War I. He was heavily in demand as a lecturer and judge at art shows and photographic exhibitions. He had finally achieved a measure of respectability on the strength of his critical talents, although he was viewed as somewhat of a flamboyant personality. Yet there was little acknowledgment of Hartmann as an artist in his own right. His plays, volumes of poetry, and other literary works were known only to the audiences of the little magazines.

More and more, he took to the open road, carrying art to the provinces, lecturing across America, almost as if he were in some relentless search after his own identity and it might be claimed tomorrow or the day after in Detroit or Pittsburgh or St. Louis. "God save all wanderers," Walt Whitman had said obliquely of the precocious boy who had visited him in the 1880's, and Hartmann was to fulfill that prophecy of wanderer for the remainder of his life.

With respectability and a quiet home in the Bronx, his personal life became more tangled. His drinking increased and his boisterous escapades alienated many who admired him; his Whistlerian sarcasms went down poorly in the various literary and social circles of Manhattan in which he had begun to move easily ("You're a big man in a small way," he is reputed to have told Henry Frick); and his numerous romantic conquests surrounded him with an aura of scandal. In 1908, he deserted his first wife and family for a sensitive young Quaker artist, Lillian Bonham. She gave him her loyalty and love, but she was unable to temper a personality steadily becoming more quixotic and irresponsible.

Sometime before World War I, Hartmann began to emerge as an unmistakable individuality—the personification of the American Bohemian. In Paris in his youth, he had heard the siren's call of Henri Murger's La Vie Bohéme, and he had wavered some twenty-five years in accepting it as a literal portrait of the artist. He had long alternated between the Bohemian stance and the role of a serious scholar, and around the turn of the century he was rumored incorrectly to have been the model for Frederick Locke's The Beloved Vagabond. Now, frequenting the gaudy ateliers of Greenwich Village in the second decade of the century, he made the Bohemian pose uniquely his own, refined it into the total image of Sadakichi, rowdy genius, rough-house opportunist, a touch of Aretino on the make and Villon laughing at the world. The publicist Guido Bruno hailed him as King of Bohemia and the tourists flocked to Romany Marie's and other village spots where he hung out to hear Hartmann declaim his verse, hold forth to young disciples, or perform rakish improvised dances as the spirit moved him. He became a source of endless legends and apocryphal stories. 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. Such roguish pranks and escapades contributed to his notoriety.

From 1912 to 1916, Hartmann served intermittently as a ghost-writer for Elbert Hubbard at his Roycroft Colony. In 1916, he moved to San Francisco and launched a little theater movement in the House of Mystery on Russian Hill, where he produced Ibsen's Ghosts and gave nightly readings. He lectured regularly at Paul Elder's Bookshop and hobnobbed with Jack London, George Sterling, and other literary and artistic figures of the Bay Area. His only novel, The Last Thirty Days of Christ, was published in 1920.

In 1923, Hartmann moved to Hollywood, where he attempted unsuccessfully to break into motion pictures in various capacities. He wrote the first script for Don Quixote, but could not find a producer. He became a member of John Barrymore's circle of friends, made friends with many local artists, and wrote a thousand-page book on aesthetics, Esthetic Verities, for which he was unable to find a publisher. He was now sick much of the time with crippling asthmatic attacks and periods of alcoholism. Increasingly, he became irrascible and embittered. The newer art magazines of the period only occasionally accepted his articles, and his former reputation had been forgotten. In art circles, he was increasingly viewed as the disreputable Gully Jimson of American art, a somewhat endearing figure, but not one to be taken seriously.

The sheer diversity of Hartmann's interests—and they have been only touched upon here—make it difficult to assess the full extent of his influence on American thought and letters. He was a participant, for example, in the anarchist movement, joining Emma Goldman, Edwin Bjorkman, and John R. Coryell in founding the magazine Mother Earth, yet he was never able to commit himself in a genuinely activist way to radicalism, remaining throughout his life skeptical about the extent to which it was possible for mankind to find a freer, saner life through political activity. As an early proselytizer for the Symbolists, he may well have had some effect on literary currents after the turn of the century—such as the Imagist poets. Taking for granted his unquestionable significance in championing the revolt of American art in the Camera Work period, it seems probable that one of his most important roles was as a gadfly and catalyst for American art in the provinces. From 1906 to the end of his life, he brought ideas on art to small cities across the nation. On his annual lecture tours, he assisted in bringing together art collections, helped organize art departments in museums and libraries, and did much to stimulate young artists who felt themselves isolated in the Winesburgs of America.

He was instrumental in discovering many artists, and in his old age he spoke of them as "my art children." These are men and women who still respond to his memory with fierce, devoted partisanship, overlooking his excesses and his posturings. His exotic visage was a favorite subject for numerous painters and sculptors whom he discovered, as well as such noted artists as Jo Davidson, Marcus Waterman, Robert Henri, and Marius de Zayas. He was immensely popular with photographers and probably the most photographed literary figure of the century, prominent photographers, from Eugene White in the 1890's to Edward Weston in the 1930's, seeking to capture the elusive moods of his unique face.

Holger Cahill described Sadakichi as one of the most extraordinary characters that ouf century has produced, saying: "He is too much of an original for us Americans. He is one of the remarkable singulars who do not fit into our machine way of life." When Hartmann died in 1944, he appeared to be peculiarly dated and anachronistic, out of step with the currents of post-Depression America, his Bohemianism quaint and curiously gaslight in vintage. Even the newspapers of the time, reporting his death, spoke of him as a vagabond from the Mauve Decade—our last Bohemian.

Now, suddenly, Hartmann is being rediscovered. Dr. Fred E. H. Schroeder of the University of Minnesota recently wrote an article on him for the Dictionary of American Biography. Barbara Rose's Readings in American Art Since 1900 (1968) includes a selection of his essays. He appears as a major fictional character in J. F. Burke's novel Noah. And he has been the subject of a number of recent articles in critical journals. Several popular magazines have even chosen to describe him as America's "first hippie."

In the age of Aquarius, the man in the Prince Albert jacket who surveys the world with proud hauteur in J. C. Strauss' 1896 photograph appears surprisingly contemporary. After all, he was writing haiku and tanka as early as 1898, long before the Imagists. In 1895, he drafted the script for the first psychedelic light show, noting that its presentation would have to await the invention of chemical, mechanical, or electrical means of projection. In 1902, he held the first perfume concert in New York City. And as early as 1923, he was urging composers to experiment with "electro-magnetic music whose vibrations do not simulate orchestral instruments but open up horizonless vistas of pure sound." The examples might be multiplied. Hartmann's primary interest for contemporary readers, however, lies in his battle against the technological juggernaut that he insisted was destroying all individuality in America, his refusal to be herded along by the prevailing consensus, his challenge to Americans to avoid "stagnant crowd-thinking and mass-meeting mentality."

Both Hartmann's diaries and notebooks have disappeared and are probably gathering dust in some forgotten attic or collector's library. In the process of editing Hartmann's unpublished papers, however, it became evident to the editors that a volume might be put together of analecta that would give some of the flavor of Hartmann as raconteur and coiner of epigrams. White Chrysanthemums therefore is a collection of fragments from many sources—ideas Hartmann jotted on scraps of paper, notes he made on the back of lecture programs, and paragraphs salvaged from longer manuscripts. We are aware that Hartmann's ideas may seem old hat to many sophisticated readers and that others will resist his penchant for striking phrases. At the same time, it may be hoped that what Sadakichi Hartmann had to say in 1890, in 1910, or in 1930 to unreceptive ears, may today, particularly for young people, sound right and true.