art credit rule should be: if on side, then in gutter. if underneath, then at same baseline as text page blue line, raise art image above it. editorial note editorial note THOMAS obody called him Carl, the name he shared with CHRISTENSEN his father, Carl Herman Oskar Hartmann. To N Walt Whitman he was “that Japanee.” To W. C. Fields he was “Catch-a-Crotchie,” “Itchy-Scratchy,” or “Hoochie-Coochie.” To the critic James Gibbons Huneker Sadakichi he was “a fusion of Jap and German, the ghastly experi- ment of an Occidental on the person of an Oriental,” and and America years later John Barrymore would call him “a living freak presumably sired by Mephistopheles out of Madame But- A case of terfy.” A 1916 magazine profle (calling him “our weirdest poet”) insisted he was “much more Japanese than Ger- taken identity man.” During World War II, because of his Japanese and German heritage, he was accused of being a spy, and he barely escaped internment. More recently, in 1978, schol- ars Harry W. Lawton and George Knox, in their intro- After all, not to create only, or found only, duction to his selected photography criticism, The Valiant But to bring, perhaps from afar, Knights of Daguerre, presented him as “Sadakichi Hart- what is already founded, mann (1867–1944), the Japanese-German writer and critic.” To give it our own identity, average, limitless, free; And so Hartmann is usually introduced, as if his ethnicity To fll the gross, the torpid bulk were the most important thing about him. But despite his with vital religious fre; ancestry Carl Sadakichi Hartmann was not Japanese or Not to repel or destroy, so much as German—he was an American. He lived most of his life in the United States. He wrote what stood as the standard accept, fuse, rehabilitate; textbook on American art for decades. H. L. Mencken, of To obey, as well as command—to all people, got it right: “Hartmann is an exotic—half Ger- follow, more than to lead; man and half Japanese by birth,” he noted, “but thoroughly These also are the lessons of our New World… American under it all.” Hartmann was born in 1867 in Desima, Nagasaki, of —Opening of “Song of the Exposition” a Japanese mother and a German father shortly after the by Walt Whitman, presented by him opening of Japan during the post-Edo Meiji period. But in proof sheet to Sadakichi Hartmann his mother died when he was still a toddler, and he left on their frst meeting Japan in his father’s tow shortly afterward, never to return. Still, he retained an interest in Japanese art and culture throughout his life. He is said to have introduced haiku to America. Two years after publishing A History of American Art he followed up with Japanese Art. He became expert enough on the subject to be consulted by collectors of Japanese art. Recently I encountered Hartmann in an es- say by Julia Meech in The Printer’s Eye: Ukiyo-e from the Grabhorn Collection (a book I produced for the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco). Meech writes: Between 1937 and 1941, when [Judson D.] Metzgar was acting as agent for Tod Ford and his brother PHOTO: B.J. FALK, 1907 B.J.FALK, PHOTO: 108 CATAMARAN CATAMARAN 109 editorial note editorial note Freeman, he sold the Grabhorns at least thirty-fve Maybe Hartmann’s estrangement from his father con- would publish a few years later in the New York Herald. affected Hartmann’s style of writing as that he prints, including a stunning Utamaro large-head tributed to his assuming his Japanese name rather than us- The publication irritated the poet and most of his circle, infuenced the literary pose which Hartmann portrait of a courtesan on an apricot mica ground. ing the Western name they shared. But Sadakichi was not since some of the comments were impolitic and not meant adopted toward the world. As an impressionable The asking price for the entire Ford group was the only name he used. He also maintained several others. for public consumption. Whitman called the comments youth in Philadelphia, Hartmann closely observed $25,000, based on an appraisal by the art critic Among the pseudonyms under which he published were Hartmann reported “the projected camel of his imagina- Whitman’s stance and attempted to emulate some Sadakichi Hartmann Caliban, Hogarth, Juvenal, Chrysanthemum, Innocent tion.” Friends of the poet accused Hartmann of fabricating aspects of it, refning those qualities which he De La Salle, and even A. Chameleon. (Of Sidney Allan the quotes. He insisted that he had not, and he would go borrowed until he developed his own posture as Hartmann’s “Japaneseness” was a fundamental aspect I will speak in a bit.) Gertrude Stein said, “Sadakichi is on to write about his recollections of Whitman on several a literary fgure. What remained, however, was of his identity, not only because of his interest in Japanese singular, never plural,” yet in many ways he was plural. more occasions. Hartmann’s reliance on Whitman’s techniques of culture but also because everyone kept reminding him of “My father was a genuine freethinker; the rest of my fam- He got in trouble too for his attempt to start a Walt self-promotion, a belief in democracy despite his it. Japanese had visited America, and even settled in the ily were mildly Lutheran. My stepmother was a Catholic. Whitman Society in Boston, where he had relocated tendency toward seeing art as primarily for the port of Acapulco before the closing of Japan at the begin- One of my aunts a French Jewess. My mother presumably in 1887. elite, the use of press-agentry methods pioneered by ning of the Edo period (as I described in my 1616: The was a Buddhist,” he pointed out. “These infuences shaped Whitman, and an assertive Bohemianism traceable World in Motion). But after the closing of Japan, that con- my early view point.” I dreamt of having a huge sign in gold lettering to Whitman. nection was shut down, with the result that most Ameri- Arriving in Hoboken in 1882 at the age of fourteen, across my bay window announcing “The Walt cans had never seen a Japanese person (apart from a few Hartmann found no relatives or their agents there to meet Whitman Society.” Of course I would also rent But just as Hartmann had multiple identities, so he rare shipwrecked individuals) until 1860, when two ships him, and he made his own way to Philadelphia. There he the lower foor. We would have a reading room, a had multiple mentors. After selling his library, he returned carrying Japanese diplomats landed in San Francisco. It worked for a time in a printmaking shop and at other jobs, Whitmanea department, lectures, classes, and many to Europe in 1885. At that time he still thought of Europe was Japan’s frst offcial diplomatic delegation to a West- though at no time in his life did he excel at steady em- other wonderful things. And I, of course, would be as home. It was the frst of four trips he would make to the ern nation in nearly two and a half centuries. And it was ployment. He frequented libraries and bought many books. the curator of this self-created establishment. continent over the next eight years. There he attended only a couple of decades after that frst contact that Sada- One of the booksellers suggested he visit Walt Whitman, theater performances, visited art galleries, and called on kichi came to an America that had never seen anything who was just across the Delaware River in Camden. Unfortunately, he appointed offcers to his society literary fgures, including Stephane Mallarmé, whom he like him. In November 1884, Hartmann paid a call. He was without informing either them or others. When he con- would meet in 1893, and with whom he would keep up a Unlike those initial ambassadors, and most of the Japa- seventeen; the good gray poet was sixty-fve. Lacking a fa- vened the frst meeting, it did not go well, and the society correspondence; he could lay claim to being the frst to nese immigrants who would follow, he arrived in America ther in his life, the teenager imprinted strongly on the old fzzled. Hartmann was too young, too impecunious, and introduce Symbolist poetry to the u.s. He ended up in across the Atlantic. After the death of his mother he had man. The two met often. “The depth of the relationship too advanced and European in his literary tastes for Boston Munich, where he attached himself to its leading literary been raised by his father’s family in Hamburg. There he between the young Hartmann and the old Whitman,” says society. His attempt to introduce Bostonians to the works fgure, Paul Heyse, who would be awarded the Nobel Prize attended private schools and received a solid European scholar Jane Calhoun Weaver, “was apparently astonish- of Ibsen, for example, also ended in failure. in 1910. (Hartmann kept in contact with Heyse over the education. (By nine he had read the works of Goethe and ingly deep.” Hartmann’s relationship with Whitman, she Despite these sorts of annoyances, Whitman seems intervening years. After Heyse received the Nobel, Hart- Schiller.) As a result, Hartmann’s cultural foundation was says, “adds credibility to the notion that Hartmann’s zeal- to have retained an affection for Hartmann. “I have more mann, in an echo of his experience with Whitman, would strongly European. He was particularly interested in the ous Americanism sprang from the purest source imagin- hopes of him, more faith in him than any of the boys,” cause a strain in his relationship with his former mentor theater.