Sadakichi Hartmann in America 1887-1918, The Early Literary Works

サダキチ・ハルトマン　イン　アメリカ　（１８８７−１９１８）

初期文学作品

“Before I tell how it came about, take a good long look at me. Do you discover anything strikingly Oriental: in my sparse figure, the structure of my skull, the position of the eyes, my features (upper jawbone) skin texture, hair, my gestures and intonation of voice? Did you ever meet a Japanese who resembles me? No, you haven’t, as it is biologically impossible. Such mutations do not occur if the proper material is absent.”

Sadakichi Hartmann from ‘A Youngster Dons Mikado Garb—A Confession’1

Introduction

Identity, as I defined it in my earlier essay on Sadakichi Hartmann, is determined by both nature and nurture. (See Richard 2000.) We are born to a circumstance that we choose to live through, to escape from, and/or to add to in genetic terms. The naturally determined aspect of our identity is the one we never quite rid ourselves of though we often try to suppress it, or to alter it to our own ends. But in the end, it seems there is always a ‘going back’ or a ‘coming home.’ The genes catch up, and the birthright returns in all of its geriatric brilliance. The nurtured side of our identity is quite another matter. Through a process of evolutionary Darwinian adaptation, we mutate within the context of another targeted identity, this one of pure device, and made purely for the advancement of our cultural, artistic, and monetary aims. Japanese critics like to talk about the ways in which naturally identified Japanese nationals, after sojourns of varying lengths outside the country, decide to return, often to recapture the natural aspect of themselves they felt to have been threatened or endangered by the targeted culture. Modern literary giants like Nagai Kafu（1879-1959) and Tanizaki Jun’ichiro (1886-1965) both wrote fictional works either about a sojourn abroad, or about Japanese of their era who lived a life influenced superficially by Western culture. Kafu’s Amerika monogatari (1908 American Stories) made him famous, and his Furansu monogatari (1909 French Stories) lays out the boundaries of his youthful identity crisis. The latter was banned by the Japanese government for being critical and irreverent toward ideas of Japanese propriety and morality. Once home in Tokyo, Kafu abandoned any further escapades abroad, not, I believe, from the political turmoil and emerging militarism that prevented him from going, but because he had achieved his aim of becoming a man of the world. He had traveled. He had crossed a border, but was content to be back. In the early years of the twentieth century, travel and the short sojourn was enough to secure a sort of exalted social status. Tanizaki Jun’ichiro’s Chijin no ai (1924-25; tr. Naomi 1985) deals with a love matched couple, liberated by ideas of political and social freedom, but whose shallowness tears them apart. Tanizaki soon turned away from such dabbling in potentially socially advanced behavior, toward the bizarre side of modern life uninfluenced by Western culture.

Both Kafu and Tanizaki wrote the greater body of their literary work from within the comfortable boundaries of their natural identities.

The two greatest writers of the Meiji era (1868-1912), Natsume Soseki (1867-1916) and Mori Ogai (1862-1922) sojourned in England and Germany, respectively. Soseki’s still eminently readable novels of unrequited love, latent homosexuality, triangular affairs, owe a great deal to the fictional tastes of Victorian England of his era. His novel Kokoro (1914, The Heart, tr. Kokoro 1957) deals on a level of intense psychological scrutiny, of a heterosexual marriage threatened by the memory of latent homosexuality and the fear of culpability in the death of his male friend. Mori Ogai wrote a fetching little novel called Maihime (1890 The Dancing Girl) that deals with the requited though unsuccessful love story between a Japanese male and a German dancer.

Both Soseki and Ogai returned to write the greater body of their literary work from within the inevitable boundaries of their natural identities, and in their native language of Japanese.

But Japanese critics do not often speak of literary product that is the result of genetic mutation from the point of natural identity, i.e. the Japanese native born in Japan, who acquires additional identity nurtured by the experience of living abroad. Mixed blood and mixed identity don’t seem to interest the Japanese critic. The American journalist Lafcadio Hearn (1850-1904), known in Japan as Koizumi Yakumo, is the exception to the rule. He has been re-evaluated in recent writings by both Sukehiro Hirakawa and Miyoko Kudo.2 Hearn continued to write in his native language of English, but crossed genetic borders in his marriage to a Japanese national, and remained for some years in Japan before returning to his roots in America. He too wrote from within the boundaries of his native identity, and his native language of English, even though he had lived for a period in Japan.

Sadakichi Hartmann, born in Dejima, Nagasaki, in 1867 of mixed German and Japanese genetic identity, lived in the United States for most of his adult life, and wrote in both German and English. His natural identity became totally subsumed in the boundaries of American culture. He was a mutant—a crossover personality whose natural identity, over time, assumed the nature of a guise, while his acquired identity, that of an Anglo-Saxon American, became predominant for all his life. In his early literary works, written mainly in America in the cities of Boston and New York City between 1896-1918, one can experience the emergence of the American nurtured identity, and the gradual abandonment of his Japanese genetic identity. Clues to abandonment pop up in most of Sadakichi’s earliest poems and short stories. A sense of throwing off the past, acquiring a new identity, coexists with the fear of having been abandoned, while the loneliness of a man ‘in process’ toward a series of nurtured identities coexists with a full blown sexual appetite born of romantic and symbolist poetic ideas.

I will be examining below a few of the best of Sadakichi’s earliest short stories and poems in search of the stresses and joys of the process of a writer’s mutation, the following in particular:

1.’Christmas Eve in a Lighthouse’ 1895 from Schopenhauer in the Air. 1908. Rochester: The Stylus Publishing Co.:15-18

2.‘A Tragedy in a New York Flat’ (1896). Author’s edition, privately printed. 12 pgs.

3.’ The Deserted Cottage’ (1905?) Short story in The St. Louis Mirror: 7.3

4.‘The Game is Up’ in Mother Earth (hereafter referred to as ME) Vol. I, no.4, June 1906:57-61

5.’The Little Wayside Station’ in ME, Vol. I, no.7, September 1906:56-60

6.’Dispossessed’ in ME, Vol. II, no.1, March 1907:56-58

7.’The Flower Maker’ in ME, Vol. II, no. 10, December 1907:464-67

8.’The Ride Into the Desert’ in ME, Vol. II, no. 12, February 1908: 586-89

9.’Searchlight Vista’ in ME, Vol. III, no. 3, May 1908:162-64

10.My Rubaiyat. 1916. New York: Bruno Chap Books.4

Christmas Eve in a Lighthouse 1895

“Christmas Eve in a Lighthouse” is an autobiographical tidbit thinly veiled with a literary artistry in which Sadakichi seeks comfort in the transience of a vague and momentary detachment from the urban life he had taken up in the search for work and recognition. By 1895, the date of this short story, Sadakichi had already published his Conversations with Walt Whitman which scandalized the trustees of Whitman’s estate (he had recently died) because he had recorded verbatim Whitman’s excoriation of other major literary figures on the East Coast. Singed by this practical defeat, and perhaps inured to a sense that his writings had been so rejected by the establishment, Sadakichi rows away in a boat to a lonely lighthouse from where he can reassess his predicament and capture a bit of the purity of silence and the whiteness of the sea. He finds his lighthouse on the “edge of a steep, surf bound rock,” isolating but not isolated. (p.15) “A village with hideous polychromatic summer cottages, reflecting in their silly architecture the anarchism of our age, was within a mile’s reach.” (p.15) The world, up close, is somehow unsettling, noisy, and brutal. The stance a poet takes to move away while looking back on a world receding from view, reminds me of the poem by Yamabe no Akahito (?- 736 a.d.) in the Manyoshu (c. 750 a.d.) in which he rows from a bay until he sees the pure form of Mt. Fuji with snow at its peak:

‘Tago no ura yu From the Bay of Tago

Uchiidete mireba I row out, looking back until

Mashiro ni zo Whiteness itself!!

Fuji no takane ni On the high peak of Mt. Fuji

Yuki wa furikeru’ 5 I see that snow is falling.6

Like Akabito, surprised that the whiteness of Mt. Fuji had awakened his soul, the author goes out onto the platform surrounding the lighthouse, to gaze into the darkened sea, and to experience the roar of waves crashing on the rocks below him. “ After each attack the roaring and raging grew louder, and the hissing waters cursing their aimless agitation were thrown back in different directions, crossing the eager approach of their sister waves obliquely.” (‘Christmas’:17)

Just as the urban chaos of the author’s life, from which he has just escaped, seems so pointless, so too do the waves and the wind which tear relentlessly at his ears and at his hair, until his separation is dramatically altered:

“And as my eyes looked out with dreamy bewilderment, I saw a white spot rapidly coming towards me; a sea-gull with fluttering wings dashed directly towards the luring light of the lantern, like a solitary human soul rushing blindly towards happiness, striving with selfish zeal to reach a haven of rest in the beautiful soft glow of a peaceful home. In the next moment she shattered her head against the thick panes of the beacon light and fell writhing to my feet.

Stooping, to touch the soft white down of the unfortunate bird, who only a moment before had been so full of vigorous joy, a feeling of despair came over me, realizing that all this endeavor to create something beautiful in this world of rising and falling waves and howling winds, was sheer vanity…No paltry exit from this tragical farce with revolver, rope or Paris green, but to leap consciously with heroic joy into eternity.” (‘Christmas’: 17)

For a moment the author experiences a moment of an ecstatic joy that comes from standing on the edge of life and death, being drawn toward the latter, then pulling back, tired but exhilarated from the experience:

“I still endeavored to force my emotion to soar to the majestic storm-swept summits where man willingly embraces death, but my thoughts had already turned to less imposing heights. I had learned to understand why we poor decrepit mortals cling to our existence. Needing so much skill and strength even to struggle and float on the tempestuous waves of life, how could we have the superhuman courage to dissolve in it!” (‘Christmas’: 18)

In “Christmas Eve in a Lighthouse,” Sadakichi pits the inexorable forces of nature around him against one single beautiful moment of exquisite artistry; like the white dove that meets its eternity by crashing into the blinding light of lighthouse beacon, he pulls away from death defying feats of greatness into a contentedness born of home and hearth. Humble striving prevails over genius. The author returns to the warmth of the lighthouse rooms and the family with whom he shares the tanenbaum and the feast of Christmas. He is to be contented with the small things of life.

This early story contains the seed of what is to become Sadakichi’s first mutation; from the passive observation of nature prevalent as an aspect of his Japanese identity, he becomes content to find his way within nature defined by the possibility of a flash of genius, the power of genuine conviction. He is searching for a way to contain his Japanese identity within the Western notion of divine inspiration and genius. In his unpublished manuscript Esthetic Verities (1927-33), Sadakichi sums up his philosophy as somewhat between two cultural polarities:

“If I personally have any claim of expression myself philosophically, I may state that I lean towards empiricism, moving towards some practical solution of a world and life of many causes, phenomena of irreducible variety and mobility, a pluralistic system, irreligious, skeptical and yet idealistic throughout on every turn of the rough uphill road.”7

On the power and conviction of a purely Western nature such as that to be found in the painter Manet, Sadakichi has this to say:

“Thirty-three years, to his very death in 1883, he [Manet] strove for nothing but to perfect his mode of utterance. There is something glorious and infinitely noble in fighting like that—to die, so to speak, in uniform, fully armed, on the battlefield.

What a great flamboyant energy there was in that man! He was one of the “hard riders of the winged steeds overleaping all boundaries, having their own goal;” one of the eternal fighting men who let their blood riot and their passions blaze unchecked, who keep up resistance, who never bow or cringe to any accepted authority, who at the age of fifty have the same spirit of revolt, the same fire and enthusiasm as in their youthful dreams.”8

Sadakichi had set out on his journey, one small step for himself, one giant leap for his artistry, or so this story would have us believe.

A Tragedy in a New York Flat 1896

A year after ‘Christmas Eve,’ Sadakichi wrote, among other journalistic pieces, a short drama in two scenes that he called A Tragedy in a New York Flat, publishing it privately. Still not on firm financial ground in New York and in need of a sponsor, Sadakichi notes on the frontispiece that he had written his dramatic scenes “in ’95-’96 on nothing a week.” The flat of the drama is perhaps modeled on Sadakichi’s living conditions. After the dismal failure of his biblical drama ‘Christ’ a year before in Boston, Sadakichi has not yet found a comfortable niche. This time, he attempts to write in the realistic mode of Zola with whom he A Tragedy in a New York Flat, Sadakichi makes clear testimony to his mutative qualities—he is an etranger, a stranger who is an outsider, a border crosser, an anxious terrorist carrying an opportunistic virus made of mixed blood and multi-cultural experience. He is the main character George Hatching, newly born, as the name suggests, but not yet in his element.

‘Tragedy’ is a domestic triangle that ends in infanticide. George Hatching, age 28, takes a room in the small flat shared by Charles Fisher, age 40, working class carpenter, and his newly wed wife Kathleen, age 25. Kathleen has had a brief affair with George before her marriage to Charles, it is revealed in the first scene when Charles comes home for his lunch, tells Kathleen that he has rented the room to George who has only just left the flat after a fleeting reunion with her. She has told him not to make trouble, to go away. Charles, of course, knows nothing of the relationship. As Charles returns to his job, George returns and takes Kathleen in his arms, sure that he will have his way.

He does, apparently, because in the next takes place ten months later as Kathleen bends over a large basket in which her baby son is sleeping. As in scene one, Charles returns from his work. They have both become very tired of George. He returns to the flat, noisy and drunk. In the play’s final moments, George claims his paternity. Charles goes berserk, hurling the baby to its death at Kathleen’s feet. He rushes from the room, realizing the crime he has committed. The curtain falls to George’s snoring. End of play.

We are told about the character of George Hatching that he is well dressed, but careless. Photographs of Sadakichi in New York in this era confirm that he was very much a man of George Hatching’s sartorial taste. Charles Fisher, on the other hand, is said to be heavy, awkward, with bad teeth and a guttural voice. Sadakichi may have been thinking of his friend and mentor Walt Whitman who looked very much like this. His soul, Sadakichi tells us, has depth. Whitman’s poetry is almost solely about the passionate soul. Kathleen is described as of perfect physical symmetry, marred only by her mouth and the incipient wrinkles thereon. She wears a red housedress with several buttons missing, the perfect picture of the suffering American housewife in service of her husband and her children.

The play begins with a lie and a secret: Kathleen has married Charles, not for love, but for a modicum of security, and she must hide the fact of her real love, consummated before her marriage, with George. When the bitter secret is revealed in the second scene, compounded by the progeny that has resulted from the continued sexual relationship Kathleen is having with George, the play comes to its bitter conclusion, the death of the baby, and the possible consequent dissolution of her marriage. Though left unsaid, we assume that Kathleen will carry on her life with George, but at the cost of trauma, the conviction of her husband, and the scandal.

Kathleen is the star of this play because she is the most modern. Where Charles and George bellow and rage, Kathleen ponders her state of mind in several interior monologues. In fact, most of her lines are both meant to be heard and still internal. Her conscience tells her to follow the dictates of her heart, while her wish for emotional and financial security lead her into a false marriage and motherhood with a false family sanctioned by the Christianity and American society. Here is Kathleen in the first scene murmuring to herself about her marriage:

“Who would have thought of that when Charles—he wooed so seriously, blushing all over—asked if I wanted to go as his wife through life. I did not refuse; a little home is better than uncertainties. George, I thought, might act like others. But, strange, at the wedding, at the minister’s house, when I had to say the “Yes,” I thought of George—but then the dinner, the wine, the congratulations and Charles to kind—I felt happy; yet is it love, when I cook for him, talk to him, even at night, even at night?” (‘Tragedy’: 6)

Here is Kathleen in the first scene again, this time right after George exits in great expectation that when he comes back, she won’t refuse his advances, even though she has a husband:

“Kathleen (takes a deep breath, arranges her wrapper and brushes her hair back with her right hand): Oh, I am so frightened—it came too sudden. (Holds herself on a chair.) Why did he not stay away?…I wish he had died!…No, I can’t think of anything.—Tell everything to Charles, that would be best, he would protect me—but then he had to know all, would lose faith in me, despise me. (At the window.) The jewess is beating her children again. Mrs. Thompson has already [sic.]her washing on the lines; how white it is! (The whistles of factories at noon are heard.) Something must be done. I must be strong (with a painful smile), resist his temptation—for he will come again; he will come again.” (‘Tragedy’: 7)

Amidst the grime and infidelity of her life, Kathleen vows to try to correct the lies and the secrets. She soliloquizes to her infant son in his cradle basket:

“Why does he not leave, the brute, as he is tired of me. He will stay here as long as he gets free board and can spend his money in drink. Oh, I hate all men! You, little man, only two weeks old and already obliged to take medicine. How he looks at me. Just as if he accused me of all the guilt and sin through which he was born.” (‘Tragedy’: 9-10.)

Though short, Sadakichi’s A Tragedy in a New York Flat is densely written, passionate without letup, and extremely modern for its time in its characterization of Kathleen. The play reveals a sense of social consciousness that comes much more to the forefront in the stories Sadakichi was to write for Emma Goldman’s magazine Mother Eart’ in the next decade. Sadakichi is obviously exploring ideas of free love, the hypocrisy of Christian marriage, and the taboo subject of parental infanticide in the context of urban and immigrant America. Sadakichi was perhaps the first American writer (he had become a naturalized American citizen in 1887) to deal with these subjects among the working class poor, while Ibsen in Norway, and others in Europe was writing of similar subjects of marital hypocrisy among the middle class. Ibsen’s ‘Hedda Gabler’ is contemporary with A Tragedy in a New York Flat. Puritanism and the work ethic, the strength of the organized labor movement in the United States, kept such plays away from American audiences.

Sadakichi’s experience as an immigrant to the United States had allowed him a crossover position from which to view American society from the outside. And though he proudly claimed his American citizenship, and was patriotic enough to write the first History of American Art which he published in 1901, he continued to maintain a mutant position derived from his mixed genetic background and, in equal measure, from his association with the liberal and artistic element of urban America in the first two decades of the twentieth century.

“Dedicated to the Trinity of My Artistic Faith,

Berlioz, Steinlen, Whitman”

says Sadakichi on the frontispiece to A Tragedy in a New York Flat.

Hector Berlioz (1803-1869) was a musical genius who main characteristic was the use of mixed media in such works as ‘Romeo et Juliette’ in the 1840’s which combined operatic choral with the idea of symphony. Berlioz borrowed the themes of literary works for his compositions, among them Shakespeare and Virgil, as in his opera Les Troyens (1856-58). Sakakichi was drawn to Berlioz because of the idiosyncratic way he crossed the boundaries of literature and music, and to the Berlioz’s intensely passionate personality, which can be heard in the music. Sadakichi was also subject to violent emotional changes. They can be heard in A Tragedy in a New York Flat. He also combined poetry with drama in other works.

Theophile Alexandre Steinlen (1859-1923), a Swiss-French painter and poster artist (he became justifiably famous for his posters ‘Tournee du Chat Noir’ (date) and ‘Yvette Guilbert‘ (1894) as well as for many others of cats and scenes in an impressionist style. (See below) One finds a sense of humanity and social sensitivity in his works. His works were grouped with naturalists such as Zola and paired with Lautrec. He knew and associated with both.

(Steinlen, ‘Tournee du Chat Noir’ 1896)

( Steinlen, ‘Yvette Guilbert’ 1894)9

Sadakichi both knew and appreciated Steinlen’s style and popularity.

Walt Whitman (1819-1892) was Sadakichi’s favorite poet, of whom he had written on several previous occasions, the most prominent being Conversations with Walt Whitman, 1895. Whitman had encouraged Sadakichi to be open, to adapt to American culture, taking unto his own whatever sense of freedom, or open space, or personal dignity that that provided. Whitman’s Leaves of Grass,had given Sadakichi ample example in the ways of a passionate love, love beyond marriage, love in the open spaces, and a glorious, unfettered and untethered view of the world. Sadakichi carries Whitman’s worldview within his own mutation and social sensitivity.10

The Deserted Cottage c.1905

Published in The Mirror, a newspaper in St. Louis, and kept as a clipping in the Hartmann collections at the University of California-Riverside, with other materials from the period 1900-1905, “The Deserted Cottage” is the best key to Sadakichi’s mutant state as a writer and as a personality. Torn from his roots in Nagasaki, Japan before the age of six, then disowned by his German family in Hamburg at the age of fourteen, and once again orphaned by the ill treatment he received from his German-American relatives in Philadelphia, Hartmann had been forced to undergo a number of identity crises, each one embedding in his subliminal memory, traces of light, shadow, and tactile responses. In ‘The Deserted Cottage,’ Sadakichi encounters his lost identity as a Japanese in the form of an uninhabited two-story house he stumbles on while out on a walk in the parklands of St. Louis.

After a day of being in company, the narrator finds his walk has taken him onto an open road where he is quite alone with himself, a happy situation, as the writing would indicate, until the narrator confronts the deserted house. The windows are broken, the gate on rusty hinges, while the grass has overgrown the path to the entrance. The door is unlocked. Sadakichi’s description of the garden, with its cicadas, is a memory of a lost Japan, and the tiger lilies a memory of the designs on a Japanese kimono:

“The former garden had changed into one vast field of tiger lilies, embedded in a thick, soft undergrowth of weeds, a beautiful sight of orange red and dark green.

I felt a strange desire to enter the forbidding mansion. I made my way slowly along the former path, breaking one of the tiger lilies and scrutinizing its large golden pollen-sacs. The katydids, all around me, hummed a shrill and endless melody, like some Eastern cacophony of sound played on quaint stringed instruments.” (‘Deserted’: 7)

His description could very well fit a Japanese garden, with its summer buzzing of semi; a Japanese cicada; the Eastern cacophony and stringed instruments could well be a koto or a shamisen, or both. Sadakichi often uses flower names to refer to the passionate love of a woman, or to a lovely muse of a past era. For example, here is the third and last stanza from his poem “Dawn-flower”’ (To Maurice Maeterlinck). The dawn-flowers are perhaps a reference to the Japanese asagao, morning glory or literally morning face, which denotes a lost or abandoned identity.

“ WE [sic.] do not know and we cannot know,

And all that is left for us here below

(Since “songs and singers are out of date”

And the muses have met with a similar fate)

Where the dawn-flowers grow

In the dawn-winds blow,

As morn-rays over life’s dream-waste flow

To drown the moon in their ambient glow.” 11

Here, the tiger lilies, as elsewhere in traditional Japanese poetry, indicate the passion of a young woman who loved willingly, without regret. In “The Deserted Cottage,” Sadakichi finds the image of the Japan and of the mother he has lost, fragments of a memory he can never regain.

Subsequently, the narrator goes inside the house where he finds a fireplace filled with cobwebs. Everything is in decay. The floor is earthen. He walks upstairs, not without some awe and unacknowledged fear:

“What child had been romping up and down these rickety steps? What woman holding her hand on the banister had stood here contemplating some domestic scene below! It seemed to me as if I heard the trailing of some robe.” (‘Deserted’: op.cit.)

The narrator is trying vainly to recapture the spirit of the mother who had perhaps once lived in the house, and to imagine the child running up and down the rickety stairs. The child is himself as a child in Japan, and the mother is his own. In the Japan of his childhood, private dwellings were permitted only a single story. In the licensed pleasure quarters of Maruyama in Nagasaki, from where Sadakichi’s mother had most likely been introduced to his father, two story buildings were permitted that offered patrons a better look at the garden, and private rooms for entertaining male customers. Second floors were the pleasure grounds in Japanese brothels. Could Sadakichi be remembering a vague episode from his early childhood?

Elsewhere on the second floor, the scene is more like the house in Germany where he spent more unhappy years:

“The paper hung in shreds from the walls, the plaster had fallen from the ceilings and displayed the woodwork of the roof. The sills were covered with dead moths and flies.” (‘Deserted’: op.cit.)

This too Sadakichi had abandoned when he came to America. It is as though he is seeing a vision of that German room transposed to the present.

As the day draws to a close, the narrator gazes from the window out into the distant fields, as though from the Germany of the second floor, he is gazing back on the Japan of the katydids in the garden as well as in the fields beyond the house. His description of the sunset is cast in the Japanese national colors of white and red:

“The horizon looked as if flooded with some white fluid in which the blood-red disc of the sun dimmed so rapidly that I actually saw it sink deeper and deeper, second by second, and finally disappear. The song of the katydids seemed louder and more piercing than ever.” (‘Deserted’: op.cit.)

The din and vivid color of Japan oppress the narrator. His response is like a Gothic statement from Edgar Allan Poe whom Sadakichi greatly admired and often included in his public lectures on poetry and esthetics:

“A feeling of depression had come over me. It had crept into me with the languor of an opiate, and I now felt the one desire to leave this place, and yet I stood motionless as if rooted in the floor.” (‘Deserted’: op.cit.)12

Sadakichi uses Poe’s diction to bring himself to the point of escape from this abandoned place. Just as he has abandoned his Japanese and German identities in favor of an American version, he finds his key to escape in the ghostly sound of a bat flapping its wings, as does Poe in many of his gothic stories. The narrator bolts out of the house which is his Germany, runs through the garden which is his Japan, back to the highway which is his America, rushing to embrace the present in favor of some dim memory of an unhappy past.

And then at the end of “The Deserted Cottage,” Sadakichi indulges in some philosophical speculation that the sweeping fear he experienced while in the deserted cottage had been due to his fear of death, and his fear of the uncertainty of life. He says:

“This thought of sadness—not of doubt—which may drift into any thinking mind, perchance when we lie awake at night as I remember from my childhood days when my imagination changed the figures of the patterned curtain in my nursery into the most gruesome forms and shapes. The tragic thought that the child whose little hand has caressed us, that the woman whose limbs have embraced us, that they, as all other experiences, will be lost for all eternity, that we shall never recall them again, no matter how longingly we may stretch forth out arms in to the darkness.

Absolute denial, absolute belief—I haven’t either. My reasoning power tells me that there can be no recollection when we have lost our identity, and yet I wish most ardently that there might be something beyond the dimensions of what we call existence.” (‘Deserted’ op.cit.)

Looking toward the future, Sadakichi, as narrator, admits to the dangers involved in transgressing the borders of identity, and to the always-unfinished task of settling on the final mutation, or of finding a fixed identity. Identity is mutation, with endless variation:

“This is the fear of death. Some may be ashamed to own up to it. But I live my life as it comes, and I give way to feelings of sentimental regrets whenever these thoughts occur…” (‘Deserted’ op.cit.)

‘The Deserted Cottage’ says as much, in as few words, as any of Sadakichi’s other literary works, about the problem of past, future, and fixed identity. And, as his notations in Esthetic Verities attest, this piece is simultaneously inspired, meant to pleasure, intellectual, open to individual judgment, artistic, and beautiful in its description of a ruinous place.

Stories from Mother Earth Magazine 1906-08

Emma Goldman (1869-1940), Red Emma as she was called, was born into a Jewish family in Lithuania, emigrated to the United States at age 16, two years after Sadakichi had arrived from Germany, spent her entire life fighting for the rights of workers, traveling throughout the United States to spread her ideas of resistance to government authority. She was the first woman in America to promote the idea of birth control as a woman’s inalienable human right. She was arrested in 1916 for violating a law that forbid distributing information about contraceptives. She believed in the emancipation of women, and that they should be permitted a life of sexual and spiritual ‘free love’ beyond the institution of marriage. She opposed everything that big business and big government held as sacrosanct privilege: private property, slavery, religion, marriage, the military, and the very idea of government itself.

Emma Goldman was deported from the United States in 1919 because she had been active in organizing an anti-draft opposition. She spent two years in Russia, even believing in the Bolshevik cause and the socialist revolution, but soon became disillusioned by new repressions of speech and assembly that sprung up to replace older Czarist restrictions. She left the new Soviet Union after two years, and spent the rest of her life in Canada and Europe. In 1923, she published a book My Disillusionment with Russia (New York: Doubleday, Page & Company). Though she never regained her prominence in the radical political and intellectual circles in New York that she had once reigned over as editor of its best periodical Mother Earth, she continued to write and to give voice to her ideas. Her huge autobiography Living My Life was published by Knopf in two volumes in 1931. Since then it has remained required reading on many college syllabi in the United States. It is still in print.

Mother Earth was published by Emma Goldman in New York continuously from March 1906 to August 1917. It was designed as a showcase for her essays on anarchism and women’s rights, but it also published excellent original poems and short stories, and excerpted works by writers such as Tolstoy, Maxim Gorky, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Oscar Wilde. I noticed, for example, among the tables of contents that Oscar Wilde had published his ‘Notes from Reading Gaol’ in Mother Earth.13

Sadakichi Hartmann found a place for his early short stories in the pages of Mother Earth, in some extremely good literary company as the various issues attest. Emma Goldman writes of her first meeting with Sadakichi in Living My Life. Orleneff, a prominent Russian actor of the day who, with Alla Nazimova, his leading lady, had been encouraged by U.S. fans such as Ethel Barrymore, to stay on and perform more extensively in the United States, knew Emma Goldman. He agreed to stay on with a financial guarantee and if Goldman would act as his manager. Though all the details had yet to be worked out, Orleneff agreed to do a benefit performance, with Nazimova, of Strindberg’s ‘Countess Julia.’ A kitty of several hundred dollars was expected to provide the start up money for a new magazine that Emma had in mind. Here is Goldman’s account:

     “Before long, Orleneff had set a definite date for the performance. We rented the Berkeley Theatre, printed announcements and tickets, and, with the help of Stella and a few young comrades, set to work to fill the house. At the same time we arranged a gathering at 210 East Thirteenth Street, to which we invited a number of people we knew would be interested in the magazine venture we had in mind: Edwin Björkman, the translator of Strindberg, Ami Mali Hicks, Sadakichi Hartmann, John R. Coryell, and some of our comrades. When our friends left that night, the expected child had a name, The Open Road, as well as foster-parents and a host of others anxious to help in its care.

     I walked on air. At last my preparatory work of years was about to take complete form! The spoken word, fleeting at best, was no longer to be my only medium of expression, the platform not the only place where I could feel at home. There would be the printed thought, more lasting in its effect, and a place of expression for the idealists in art and letters. In The Open Road they should speak without fear of the censor. Everybody who longed to escape rigid moulds, political and social prejudices, and petty moral demands should have a chance to travel with us in The Open Road.”14

Well, Orleneff was arrested on behalf of creditors before he could do the benefit, and when, finally, a benefit of sorts could be arranged (of another play), it poured cats and dogs, and netted a pitifully small amount of money, just enough and no more to put out the first issue of Emma’s magazine. She initially called it The Open Road, after the poem of the same name by Walt Whitman. But here is what happened in her words:

     “We had enough for the first number, which we decided to issue in the historic revolutionary month of March. What other free-lance publication had ever started with more? Meanwhile we sent out a general appeal to our friends. Among the responses we received one from Colorado bearing the heading: The Open Road. It threatened to set the law on us for infringement of copyright! Poor Walt Whitman would have surely turned in his grave if he knew that someone had dared to legalize the title of his great poem. But there was nothing for us to do except to christen the child differently. Friends sent in new names, but we did not find one expressing our meaning.

     While visiting the little farm one Sunday, Max and I went for a buggy ride. It was early in February, but already the air was perfumed by the balm of spring. The soil was beginning to break free from the grip of winter, a few specks of green already showing and indicating life germinating in the womb of Mother Earth. "Mother Earth," I thought; "why, that's the name of our child! The nourisher of man, man freed and unhindered in his access to the free earth!" The title rang in my ears like an old forgotten strain. The next day we returned to New York and prepared the copy for the initial number of the magazine. It appeared on the first of March 1906, in sixty-four pages. Its name was Mother Earth.”15

Perhaps the personal connection Sadakichi had enjoyed with Walt Whitman from the Camden days had given him introduction to New York intellectual circles. Certainly, Emma Goldman’s Jewish background gained her entrée to the German Jewish radical socialists in New York, and Sadakichi, whose second language was German, one must remember, had entrée there. And so the two met. Henceforth, Sadakichi became one of the contributing writers for Mother Earth as well as a founding member. His stories for Mother Earth I find among his best. I am not presently aware of how many of his stories appeared in ME, nor of how long he continued to write for the magazine. I’ll come back to those stories in a moment, but first let me tell you the rest of the story of Sadakichi and Emma Goldman because it reveals a little known aspect of Sadakichi’s early activism and idealism.

In Living My Life, Emma Goldman makes two additional references to Sadakichi: one in her entries for 1909-10, Chapter 37,in which she praises him for writing a manifesto on behalf of Kotoku Shusui and his wife Sugano Kanno, a young Japanese anarchist, who had been arrested in Japan for allegedly plotting to overthrow the Emperor. The manifesto had little effect and Shusui was executed in 1911, but his part in the worldwide support of anarchists was much appreciated by Emma Goldman, it seems. She writes:

   “At the same time news reached us from Japan about the arrest of a number of anarchists for an alleged plot on the life of the Mikado. The outstanding figure of the group was Denjiro Kotoku. He knew his country better than European writers like Lafcadio Hearn, Pierre Loti, or Mme Gauthier, who had painted Japan in roseate colours. Kotoku had personally experienced the miserable conditions under which the workers slaved, and the barbarism of the political régime. For years he had devoted himself to awaking the intelligentsia and the masses of Japan to the needs of the situation. He was a man of brilliant mind, an able writer, and the translator of some of the works of Karl Marx, Leo Tolstoy, and Peter Kropotkin. In cooperation with Lien Sun Soh and Mme Ho Chin he had propagated anarchism in the University of Tokio among Japanese and Chinese students. The Government had repeatedly imprisoned him for his activities, without dampening our comrade's ardour. The authorities finally decided to "eliminate" him by involving him in the plot against the Emperor.

    On November 10 the Associated Press announced that "the special tribunal appointed to try the plotters against the life of the Mikado found twenty-six persons guilty, including the ringleaders, Kotoku and his wife, Sugano Kano. The Court recommended the severest penalty under clause 73, which provides capital punishment for conspirators against the Imperial family."

    There was no time to lose if anything was to be done to stay the hand of the executioner in Japan. With the help of our friend Leonard D. Abbott, president of the Free Speech League, we initiated a protest that soon assumed national proportions. Letters and telegrams were forwarded to the Japanese Ambassador in Washington, the Consul-General in New York, and the American newspapers. A committee of persons prominent in public life interviewed the Japanese representatives in the United States. The great American protest was evidently not to the liking of the satraps of the Mikado. They strove their utmost to blacken the character of the condemned men and exerted their persuasive powers to prevail upon our committee to give up their efforts. In response we intensified our work, holding private and public meetings, bombarding the press, and otherwise working strenuously to arouse public opinion over the judicial crime about to be committed in Japan.

    Among the many friends who participated in this campaign was Sadakichi Hartmann, poet, writer, painter, and a marvelous reader of the poems and stories of Whitman and Poe. I had first met him in 1894; subsequently he had become a steady contributor to our magazine. Partly Japanese himself, Sadakichi was familiar with conditions in Japan and the case of Kotoku. At our request he wrote a powerful manifesto that was widely distributed in behalf of the condemned comrades.”16

The second and last reference Emma Goldman makes to Sadakichi is from Chapter 41, most likely detailing the events of 1914. She refers to him not as a writer anymore, but as that man of “weird dance fame,” a hobo and a bohemian down on his luck, so by the time of the writing, it can be assumed that Sadakichi had fallen out of favor with the radical socialists and with Emma Goldman. Here is her last mention of Sadakichi:

“ One day my friend Bolton Hall called on me. I had worked hard and he no doubt noticed my exhausted condition. "Why not go out to the little farm in Ossining?" he suggested. "Not for worlds," I replied, "as long as my pest is there." "What pest?" he queried in wonder. "Why, Micky, whom for years I have tried vainly to escape." "You mean Herman Mikhailovitch, the timid-looking fellow who used to help in the Mother Earth office and the Ferrer Center?" "The very one," I told him; "his apparent timidity has been my curse for a long time." Dear Bolton looked his blank surprise. "Tell me about it," he urged.

    I related the story to Bolton. Herman had been a reader of Mother Earth for a long time, had faithfully paid his subscription, and often ordered literature. He lived in Brooklyn, but none of us had ever met him. Then one day I received a letter from Omaha asking permission to arrange my meetings there. It was from Herman. Glad that someone in that city had offered to assist, I wired him to go ahead. On my arrival there I found our unknown comrade in rags and looking starved. Ben helped him and we also procured his release when he was locked up for distributing our handbills announcing my meetings. Before I left the city I enabled him to join the painters' union and secure a job. In Minneapolis three days later we were unexpectedly faced by Herman. He wanted to organize my meetings along the route, he declared. I assured him that I appreciated his offer, but that I already had one manager; two would be too much to endure. Herman said nothing more, but when we reached the next town, he was there, and again in the next and in the next. There was no shaking him off; he was either ahead of us or at our rear. The proceeds from my lectures were not sufficient to pay his railroad fare, and I feared lest Herman meet some accident while stealing rides. He became an additional worry and burden. In Seattle I could not stand it any more. He would find a job, he said, if I would secure him for a few weeks. I did, and he solemnly promised to remain in Seattle. When we came to Spokane, who should meet us but Herman Mikhailovitch? He did not like the West, he declared, and had decided to return to New York. For the rest of our tour Herman stuck like glue. He was a good worker, ready to do anything to help my meetings; and he was shrewd enough to make himself indispensable to Ben. I gave a sigh of relief when we finally arrived in New York.

    Nothing was heard from Herman for some time. Then he showed up again, all in rags. He was working in a laundry, he told me, eighteen hours a day for five dollars a week. In the midst of his story he fell to the floor in a faint. A hurried agreement with Sasha and Hippolyte, to the effect that Herman could earn his keep by assisting in the office, saved him from returning to the laundry, and incidentally also from further fainting spells. He was an intelligent chap, but fame affects some people worse than liquor. Touring with us, getting arrested, and seeing his name in the papers had turned Herman's head. His condition became worse after Ben put him up as one of his stars at a hobo meeting. Herman shared honours with Chuck Connor, the Chinatown celebrity, Sadakichi Hartmann, of weird dance fame, Hutchins Hapgood, widely known for his books on the underworld, Arthur Bullard, intellectual Bohemian and globe-trotter, Ben Reitman, pseudo-king of Hoboland, and others of the over- and underworld milieu.”17

Though I have not seen it, Prof. Sidney Berger, former head of the Special Collections Library at the University of California-Riverside, told me of a short film of Sadakichi performing such an amusing and gangly dance. So, by 1914, Sadakichi, nearly fifty years of age, had gone from a life of radical social consciousness, to a life of un-abandoned freedom and boozing, and he had lost his contact with the grande dame of American anarchism, yet the stories from his period as a writer for her magazine still provide poignant evidence of his idealism, and his social conscience. His characters are all working class laboring people. Their dynamism stems from the bitterness of their ‘real’ experience in the world when they experience various moments in their lives, like a series of epiphanies, which awaken their understanding of their human value being on a higher plane than the mere value of exchange of labor for salary in the commercial marketplace. Each has a dignity that comes from an esthetic awakening to experience for which there can be no monetary equivalent.

The Game is Up

In “The Game is Up,” Morrison, a sculptor friend of the tall, lean man, a writer, is preparing to end it all. His friend offers what little money he has, ten dollars, to tide Morrison through his difficulties. Morrison’s difficulties, it turns out, are not financial, but the sort that come from not being accepted in the art world anymore. It is personal, unavoidable. He takes the money:

“Thanks,” Morrison answered, though he did not take the money right away. He looked about absentmindedly, as in a dream. This was friendship indeed. He had not believed that anybody could so completely enter another man’s state of mind. Not a word of opposition. This was glorious!” (‘Game’: 58)

Shocking not to pass judgment on Morrison, yet the tall, lean man has respected Morrison for the work he had accomplished, a professional respect. What right has he to pull Morrison back from what he believes is a perfect completion? The tall, lean man, we are told, is both a visionary and a brutal realist, and both he and Morrison are cynics who find life rather futile. While the literary man maintains a theoretical view, Morrison, Sadakichi tells us, is really embittered with life. To his decision to end his life, the literary man smiles and says only:

“Could any man influence you one way or another? As far as I can make out you are beyond mortal influence.” (‘Game’: 59.)

Accompanying him on Morrison’s last journey, the two take a bus to New Haven where Morrison has decided to use the revolver he has bought on the way to the rail station. They drink in a New Haven bar, and then say their good-byes. Morrison walks into the darkness. The literary man’s eyes follow him.

The literary man passes no moral judgment on his friend’s fate. Suicide is neither sanctioned, nor deniable. It is simply the end of esthetic pleasure in life, that is all. The story is radical in its absence of moral outrage, and in its lack of a religious affirmation of life.

The Little Wayside Station

In “The Little Wayside Station,” a young actress in a traveling troupe, now stranded in a lonely station on the Gulf Coast of Alabama, a ‘soubrette’ as she is called, has a brief encounter with nature. For the first time, the artificiality of the theatre, the unnaturalness of living only in dressing rooms, or on stage, or in dingy hotel rooms, is replaced by the real experience of a scent in the night air to which she is drawn. Sadakichi has drawn on a Japanese and Buddhist idea that scent triggers memory. One of the most famous poems from the Kokinwakashu of 905 a.d. is about the scent of orange blossoms at night that though they cannot be seen, give off such a fragrance that the poet is reminded of the scented sleeves of a former lover, now dead:

“Satsuki matsu When I read the scent

Hanatachibana no Of orange blossoms

Ka wo kageba That wait till May to bloom,

Mukashi no hito no The scent of her sleeves comes back

Sode no ka zo suru To remind me of how she was. 18

“Lost in the contemplation of this weird, nocturnal scene she suddenly became conscious of a faint aroma that was lingering in the air. There is nothing that arouses one’s senses as much as the sudden appreciation of some scent, so vague in character that its origin cannot be defined. It is like recollecting a life that we might have led before our present one.” (‘Wayside’: 57)

The vague scent is of tall-stemmed flowers. She brings an armful back, distributes a few, and then tells the rest of her troupe to pick their own. She sits down and holds the flowers up to her bosom:

“There were no moon nor stars. All forms faded into each other. Everything seemed motionless, only the breeze toyed with her hair, as might the fingers of a lover. It came from far over the sea, and had wandered over dale and dell, over palm tree thickets, and perhaps orange groves, to continue its journey inland, just like the homeless folks who wandered about the earth for the delectation of others. A sail became discernible in the distance. She sat motionless as in a trance.” (‘Wayside’: op.cit.)

She has had an out-of-mind experience of something beyond her acting skills, her first sensual experience of the world. She knows what she will make of it:

“Then suddenly—perhaps with the passing breeze or the heavy perfume of the flowers—an inspiration came over her. Yes, she would—try at least to bring some truth of nature upon the stage, real emotions that were born out of the experiences of her own heart and in harmony with the elements of nature. She needs must enter upon the big stage of life, revel in the warmth and joyousness of nature, struggle, suffer, experience everything, and then transform it into art.” (‘Wayside’: 59)

Sadakichi’s credo, exactly; experience, then transform to art. The train pulls out, the girl returns to her real world of “frowsy caricatures of women and vulgar men with greasy faces, to which the railroad coaches furnished a prosaic background, shutting out the beauty of the scenery” as the story comes to an end. Here Sadakichi makes perhaps the central statement of his artistic life:

“We all have had such moments in our life, moments when we dreamt of great things we would accomplish, but most of them have faded like the nameless flowers in which the little soubrette had buried her tear-stained face. We all act our parts badly, we all are stilted at times, and the glare of selfish desire throws an unnatural light over all of us. Yet these dreams of unrealized hopes are so beautiful that we should cherish them in our memory. They alone make life worth living, no matter whether we realize them or not.” (‘Wayside’: op.cit.)

Idealism and the pure hopes of this young girl certainly parallel Emma Goldman’s dreams in publishing Mother Earth. Sadakichi had hit the right note with ‘The Little Wayside Station.’ The story was later republished with others from the magazine. Championing the working class in these stories helped reinforce the idea, in Sadakichi’s mind, of the possibility of going beyond one’s present, to live beyond the reality of one’s environment, to cross over, and to struggle to the next stage. Endless mutation with repeated patterns echoes in these stories like the shaded variations of color in the repeating pattern of a jacquard loomed obi.

Dispossessed

From the March 1907 issue of Mother Earth, “Dispossessed” is a graphic portrait of an old woman evicted from her urban tenement, sitting on the sidewalk among her shabby grey possessions on a cold, rainy day. Not even an artist would be able, the narrator tells us, to invest these objects with some delicate pictorial detail that would give it the slightest expression of sentiment. She has lost her mind, her connection, so it hardly matters. “She hums, hardly audibly, a quaint melody: Time’i tum ta, tum time’i pa ta.” (‘Dispossessed’: 57) At last, some kind passerby places a few pennies in a saucer, atop an overturned pail, to begin the begging. Relentlessly grim, the story comes to its inevitable end, as does life, when uniformed men are to appear to cart her things away, and to commit her to an asylum. It is too late, in the story, for Sadakichi’s redeeming forces of nature, or spring fields filled with tall stemmed flowers, to save the woman. Not my favorite story from Mother Earth, still it tugs at my conscience, as it must have impressed readers in its day, with the futility of existence without beauty or an awareness of a higher value than mere economics of survival. Sadakichi makes this abundantly clear:

“What a panegyric to civilization, what a song of praise to society and its charity organizations. Everywhere, in the fashionable thoroughfares, mansions hardly occupied for more than two months a year, and here, an old wench, cowering in an armless chair, shelterless in the rain on the sidewalk? Where are the historians that take notice of these daily occurrences?” (‘Dispossessed’: op.cit.)

The grimness of New York City streets, in Sadakichi’s 1907 story, has been transformed into other city streets, in countries all over the third world, images of which, in our era, now accost us day and night on televised news programs. Locational change yes, institutional change no. What Emma Goldman and Sadakichi Hartmann saw, we still see. ‘Dispossessed is the bleakest yet the most universal predicament in all of his stories from Mother Earth.

The Flower Maker

“The Flower Maker” from the December 1907 issue of Mother Earth returns us to the world of the younger working girl, this time to a maker of false violets. She lives in a one- room tenement where she makes thousands of repetitive movements, which go into making the flowers. She has had no real experience of seeing flowers or sky. She has no real experience of love. She allows a seller of patent cheap perfume to make love to her, but she initiates the encounter, starts the process of her feminine liberation:

“Timidly she touched his knee with hers. He looked at her with a curious look and placed his arm around her waist, never spanned before save by a girl, and kissed her. She could not resist. A lethargy came over her. His force bewildered and blinded her…the blood merged through her cheeks, her eyes glistened, and her body involuntarily advanced toward his. She felt the crude caresses of his hand. She feebly repulsed him for a moment, but when he became more vehement, she lost all consciousness and gave herself as frankly as only a woman can, whose passion is awakened for the first time.” (‘Flower Maker’: 466)

Several months later, after sleeping with the man again, we find the girl lying motionless on her couch:

“Her breath was hardly perceptible, only her eyes—darker and deeper than ever before—were wide open, and on the lashes glistened a tear.

There she lay among her violets, having experienced a love that was artificial as they, those flowers that would still adorn so many women going through the same experience as she had done.” (‘Flower Maker’: op.cit.)

The story then abruptly shifts to the narrator’s encounter with the girl many years later. Stella, as she is now known, works in a brothel, completely liberated from the life she had once led making artificial flowers in a cheap tenement. Just as the narrator passes no judgment on Morrison in an earlier story, the first person narrator here passes no judgment on Stella’s choice:

“Poor Stella, your bark of life did not glide, foam garlanded, on clear blue waters towards a land of happiness and love and dreams. Why regret it! We here on earth all live in eternal captivity, and long just for such moments of oblivion.

To some they come oftener, to others they seem to be barred forever. Who knows if those few hours, even though you yourself lent all the glamour to them, were not worth the vast stretches of nocturnal monotony in your life…Would you exchange those madcap excursions into the Nirvana of the senses for a life of accidental purity? No, you wouldn’t Stella. Let’s have another bottle! I paid the Madam. Take this for yourself, dear. No, I can’t stay to-night. So long!” (‘Flower Maker’: 467)

So the story ends. Liberation from one sort of life, one identity, for another, perhaps equally fraught with danger, but still a life of momentary pleasure far outweighs the deadening brutality of a life lived in predictable greys, in the mind of the first person narrator. Sadakichi lived a life of the full gestalt, equal measures of yin and yang, positive and negative, passive and active, bipolar acculturation to the rhythms of American life. Many mutations were yet to come, but in this story, Sadakichi predicts the paths his lifestyle will follow.

The Ride into the Desert

“The Ride into the Desert,” from the Feb., 1908 issue of Mother Earth, reintroduces the theme of the escape from urban life. Disheartened by love and friendship, a solitary rider makes his way into the desert:

“He was riding away from civilization—into the desert, to escape the torturing memories of his past. He was tired of the life of large cities, sad and empty as the burning course over the trackless plain and shadowless land that lay before him. Such is life, sere and parched as the desert’s floor. Those who are happy do not realize their happiness. Man, earth-soiled and toil-worn, is blind until misfortune teaches him to see.” (‘Ride’: 586)

The ride is from a place that is sere and parched in spirit, the city, to a place that is its physical equivalent, the desert. Unlike the young soubrette of the “The Little Wayside Station” who finds freshness and flowers in the darkened field beyond her temporary stop in the wilderness, and who takes the memory of it back with her to her career in the theatre, the rider in this story does not expect to find the moment of epiphany. Perhaps he expects never to return, though we are not told. The sight of a cloud might be the equivalent to the tall-stemmed flowers of the earlier story, but such is not to be:

“One solitary white cloud drifted along the sapphire wall of the sky, a strange companion on his nocturnal ride. Where was she drifting too! On what shore would she be stranded! Was her journey aimless like his. Alas, to be as unconcerned, as roving free, heeding neither time nor space, as that fair white pilgrim of the sky!” (‘Ride’: 587)

As in “The Deserted Cottage,” the rider comes upon a house that seems a “weird whitewashed structure” because he does not care to be reminded of any sign of civilization. Yet he sees the warmth of lights in the window, and “in the garden some tall flowers of vague tarnished tints rose motionless into the grayness of the night.” He does not stoop to pick them. Nothing moves except the “foliage of a row of trees which quivers in the moonlight.” He imagines he sees the leaves like a rippling stream flow from their branches. He hears the “vague murmur of their wavelike motion.” (‘Ride’: 588)

Unlike any of the other stories, the moment of redemption, the moment when nature refreshes the soul, comes in this case, in the form of a woman playing piano and singing fragments of a melancholy song. The rider is pulled back:

“All the feelings that he deemed long buried and forgotten welled up in strange agitation not unlike the spinning swirls of dust that rise from the sand of the desert.

He knew he could not go any farther. He was not born for the hermit life among the sunshot hills under domes of turquoise blue. He lifted his tear-dimmed face into the moonlight night—suddenly turned his horse, pressed his spurs into its flanks and galloped back, like a madman pursued by the furies of desolation, back the road whence he came, back to civilization.” (‘Ride’: 588-89)

The story end on this positive note. Gone are the young girls, abandoned crones, and suicidal artists of the earlier stories. In their place in “The Ride into the Desert” we find a middle-aged, mature male, somewhat like Sadakichi must have been at the time, looking for not an end to his civilizing experience, but for a break in the monotony, and for an illuminating moment. He finds it in the white house, in a piano and in a song. The woman sings, but not to him. He carries back the effect of sound—the rustling of leaves representing the natural nurturing, and the sound of the overheard piano, the civilized nurturing. It is enough. The character no longer has another bottle of wine with the prostitute. He internalizes his moment of awakening without the sexual abandon that informs many of the other stories.

Searchlight Vista

In “Searchlight Vista” from the May, 1908 issue of Mother Earth, we meet a most impassioned and mature woman who, like the horse rider of the previous story, keeps on going in life by recognizing that her passionate need for love will be better when left as an unfulfilled memory of potential ecstasy than by an unhappy reminder of a painful relationship. The lady lives with her husband of some years in a house above the river, whose balcony overhangs it, and from where she can see riverboats passing by in the shadowy night. She has stepped out onto her balcony for a breath of river air; to refresh her spirit, “brush the cobwebs out of her brain.” She is described as:

“…one of the sufferers from over-abundance of emotion, people who go through life with open hands ready to scatter the treasure of their souls. They may find a few people who appreciate their generous gifts, but hardly ever any who voluntarily return the kindness.” (‘Searchlight’: 162)

Her husband is described as self-centered, lacking in affection: “ To him love was no poem of passion; he sat down to it as to an evening meal.” (‘Searchlight’: 163)

She has spoken to him about his lack of response, and he has agreed to try to change. But, she is certain that nothing will come of it:

“Now she knew it. That she was doomed to a life without passion, without tenderness, that her soft, misty maidenly qualities of her womanhood would never be understood, that certain parts of her body which she had wished to be kissed all her life would never be kissed. A laugh, half haughty, half ironic and yet more mournful than either, came to her lips.” (‘Searchlight’: op.cit.)

A steamer approaches on the river, flashing its searchlights on various landmarks along the river’s edge. From her balcony, the woman is reminded how her sexual need had often been fixed on men other than her husband:

“And strange to say, the men she loved or imagined she loved, she always saw like moving statues deprived on their earthly garb, transported, as it were, to some realm where nothing had the heaviness of earth and everything was dissolved in poetical mist.” (‘Searchlight’: 164)

Yet, her need for new experience, new sensations, must be repressed in her respect for her husband and her father. She is left with a “subtle fire [that] seemed to run under her skin, threatening to consume her,” but never quite raging out of control. She finds her satisfaction in the “quiet nooks and corners in the white glow of the searchlight which seemed to her like fata morgana pictures, an enchanted world where she might find the rare pleasure she desired.” (‘Searchlight’: op.cit. Fata morgana pictures are photographic images of desert mirages.)

Finally, the searchlight, instead of skipping from spot to spot, settles on the woman:

“Suddenly the light that had crept busily along the shore, fluttered uncertainly about her white cottage and then centred upon her. As she stood there, bathed in the radiant light—a huge white night moth alighted on her shoulder at the very moment—she felt as if happiness had come to her at last. She was all air and fire. But it lasted like all great joys, only for a second, then the light in ghostly fashion continued its pilgrimage, lit up other places of beauty, and left her in darkness.” (‘Searchlight’: op.cit.)

***

Sadakichi’s stories in Mother Earth all point us to the truth that our sense perceptions can be trusted, and that we progress through life’s stages by allowing momentary experiences of great intensity to determine our mutation to the next stage, the next, and to the final. And, as Emma Goldman believed, society, civilization, and life therein can only be modified through realization of the greatness of motivation to change. Both Sadakichi and Emma Goldman trusted in the sensual revolution they knew was coming in the twentieth century. Emma Goldman was thrown out of the country before she had a chance to experience the real fruits of her campaigns for women. Sadakichi stayed, but drifted away from radical politics.

Conclusion

19

The stories under discussion above are, by no means, the sum total of Sadakichi’s literary activity during the New York years. Though he continued to advocate, in his lectures and criticism, the pure and open lyric style of Walt Whitman, his real preference for the lush, romantic, symbolist, turns of phrase common in contemporary European poetry plays a bigger role in his own writing.

By 1915, Sadakichi had become the man of the ‘weird dance’ that Emma Goldman mentions in her memoirs. He entertained. He had left the radical Jewish intelligentsia in favor of a younger crowd of artists in lower Manhattan. He became known as the ‘King of Bohemia,’ hanging out with other avant garde artists and painters in the Washington Square area. His first wife Elizabeth Blanche Walsh a poet, had been set aside when he met Lillian Bonham, a painter, at the Roycroft Colony of Elbert Hubbard in East Aurora, N.Y. By 1915, he was back in New York at the garret studio of one Guido Bruno at 58 Washington Square South as one of his stable of bohemians. In this atmosphere of freedom with perhaps less political intensity than his association with Mother Earth, Sadakichi republished in the Bruno Chap Books series, in 1916, his own My Rubaiyat, a collection of 75 sextains (six line stanzas). As the title suggests, the poems are about sex, pleasure, and passion. Were they not so dense with the images of Western romanticism, one might take them for translations of Japanese sentiments from such classical collections as the Manyoshu (c. 750 a.d.) and the Kokin wakashu (905 a.d.) In an essay published in 1904, making it possibly the first ever published in the United States about Japanese poetry, Sadakichi makes clear the essential difference between Japanese poetry and European experience:

“They [Japanese poems] are limited entirely to “lyrical” emotions…The classic poets of Japan deliberately refrain from didacticism and satire. Even the glorification of war, which plays such a conspicuous part in their dramas and novels, seems to contain no poetical element for them. There are no angers, despairs, enthusiasms, hatreds, violent emotions of any sort, in their stanzas. They are no banner bearers of revolt or reform.”20

　

While Sadakichi’s stories for Mother Earth were cast in evocation of such “lyrical” emotions as he attests are important to Japanese poetry, they are set in the context of radical social and political agendas. I believe this is why Sadakichi could not last forever as a writer for Emma Goldman. He needed to mutate again to his perceived source of inspiration in his native Japanese identity, abandoned in fact, but seen as both contrast and counterpart to the European tradition he had adopted in his second major mutation during his years in Germany. He says elsewhere in his essay on Japanese poetry:

“They [the Japanese] have amatory verses, which faintly resemble Herrick, poems of sadness and longing, not unlike Heine minus his irony, fervent praises of women and wine of which even an Anacreon would not be ashamed, and lamentations over the uncertainties of life which sound like a faint echo of Omar Khayyam’s rose-scented quatrains.”21

And hereupon Sadakichi sets his artistic vision; like the Persian poet, like the Japanese sense of amatory verse, his My Rubaiyat 22poems repeat and refine the particulars of his Mother Earth stories:

1.) the theme of woods, leaves, and lovers as in “The Ride Into the Desert”-- poem XI:

“In open woods some summer night,

The sound of the wind in the leaves—

Two vagrant lovers hand in hand—

O’er treetops the errant moon.

Oh, this mad desire to possess!

To waste the soul on blood-red lips.” (Rubaiyat: 87)

2.) the theme of sex and its transformational power as in “The Flower Maker”—poemXII:

“Sex is a power all cherish,

We worship it on bended knees,

Like old wine it yields the magic,

Of oblivion and ecstasies,

The moments drift on golden clouds

To regions of the white beyond.” (Rubaiyat: op.cit.)

3.) the theme of real and healing power of nature when returned to the artifice of the city, or of the theater as in “The Little Wayside Station”—poem XIII:

“Alas, that pleasures never last,

That we must leave the fairy woods

And pass along the great highway.

As much as horizons may beckon,

They flee us the more we pursue

To distances we ne’er can reach.” (Rubaiyat: op.cit.)

4.) the theme of escape from the city as in “Christmas in a Lighthouse”—poem XIX:

“Oh, to escape from the city,