The Brass Check: A Study of American JournalismSinclair, Upton
General
The Brass Check: A Study of American Journalism
Sinclair, Upton
Associated Press; Journalism -- United States; Press -- United States
And then there was the famous adventure with Sadakichi Hartmann. One day
there arrived a post-card, reading: “Sadakichi Hartmann will call.” The
announcement had a sort of royal sound, and I made inquiry and
ascertained that I ought to have known who Sadakichi Hartmann was. Just
about dinner-time there appeared two men and a girl, all three clad in
soiled sweaters. One of the men was the Japanese-German art-critic, and
the other was Jo Davidson, the sculptor, a lovable fellow, who made
sketches of us and kept us entertained. But Hartmann had evidently been
drinking, and when he told us that he had come to spend the night, we
assured him quite truthfully that we had no room and could not
accommodate him. There happened to be a meeting of the executive
committee that night, with important problems to be settled; and when I
came out from the committee-room at eleven o’clock, I found the
art-critic making preparations to spend the night on one of the couches
in our living-room. He was told politely that he must leave, whereupon
there was a scene. He spent a couple of hours arguing and denouncing,
and next day he wrote a letter to all the newspapers, telling how he and
his companions had been turned out of Helicon Hall at one o’clock in the
morning, and had spent the night wandering about on the Palisades.
And then there was a gentleman from Boston via Montmartre, Alvan F.
Sanborn by name. He had written a book about the revolutionists of
Paris, looking at them through a microscope as if they had been so many
queer kinds of bugs; and now he came to turn his microscope on us. He
proved to be a gentleman with a flowing soft necktie and a sharp
suspicious nose. He accepted our hospitality, and then went away and
criticized the cooking of our beans. His article appeared in the
“Evening Transcript” of Boston, a city which is especially sensitive on
the subject of beans. Mr. Sanborn found our atmosphere that of a
bourgeois boarding-house. I have no doubt it was a different atmosphere
from that of the Quartier Latin, where Mr. Sanborn’s standards of taste
had been formed.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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