Sadakichi Hartmann fried eggs with Walt Whitman, discussed poetry with Stephane Mallarme, and drank with John Barrymore, who described him as “a living freak… sired by Mephistopheles out of Madame Butterfly.” W.C. Fields said the critic was “a no-good bum.” But though Hartmann might lift your watch (he was an accomplished pickpocket), his opinion was not for sale.

Born in Japan to a German merchant and his Japanese wife in 1867, he was disowned at 14 and shipped to a Philadelphia great-uncle, an incident that, as Hartmann said, was “…not apt to foster filial piety.” Largely self-educated, he published his first newspaper articles as an adolescent. After meeting Whitman, he wrote an article for the New York Herald quoting the poet’s opinions of other writers. Whitman denounced him for misquotation; Hartmann responded by expanding the article to a pamphlet. At 23, he wrote his first play, “Christ,” which was banned in Boston and publicly burned after Hartmann’s arrest for obscenity. A critic from the original New York Sun, James Gibbons Huneker, called “Christ” “the most daring of all decadent productions.”

Hartmann lost a clerical job with architect Stanford White after publicly describing his employer’s drawings as “to be improved upon only by the pigeons, after the drawings become buildings.” He survived by writing for the New Yorker Staats-Zeitung. His “History of American Art” (1901), a standard textbook still worth reading, analyzed then-unknown painters Thomas Eakins, Winslow Homer, and Albert Pinkham Ryder, and included America’s first serious discussion of photography as an art form. He apparently published the first American criticism of Japanese verse in 1904, 20 years before the Nouvelle Revue Francaise’s famous haiku competition.

But exhibitionism undermined achievement: When pianist Moriz Rosenthal, who had studied under Liszt, added a series of rapid scales to the Hungarian Rhapsodies at Carnegie Hall, Hartmann roared from the gallery, “Is this necessary?” As ushers tossed him out, Hartmann shouted, “I am a man needed but not wanted.” Hartmann also let himself be crowned King of the Bohemians by charlatan Guido Bruno, the flamboyantly self-promoting proprietor of Bruno’s Garret, a tourist trap at 58 Washington Square South.

In 1916, Hartmann moved to California. He continued writing and played the Court Magician in Douglas Fairbanks Sr.’s “The Thief of Bagdad” (1924) for $250 and a weekly case of whiskey. A memorable visit to the Los Angeles Museum of History, Science and Art was marked by his loud complaints: van Eyck’s “Virgin and Child” was “painted on his day off” and as for a Rembrandt portrait of his wife Saskia,”…he had begun to lose his mind when he painted it.” The curator bustled up. Hartmann asked, “Where is the washroom?”

“Past that door and to the left.”

“Bring it to me.”

But by World War II, Hartmann was surviving on handouts from admirers. In 1939, New York American editor turned-Hollywood script doctor Gene Fowler was at his office when a studio policeman telephoned that a crazy old man was asking for him. “When I told him he smelled of whisky, he said I ought to be smelling his genius.” Fowler, who knew of Hartmann, went to the studio gates. The shabbily dressed critic, nearly 6 feet tall and weighing 132 pounds, announced, “Where I come from and where I go doesn’t matter. For I am Sadakichi Hartmann…You may live another century, Fowler, but you will never meet another son of the gods like me. You have something to drink?”

Fowler stammered, “As a matter of fact, I’m not drinking and -“

“What have your personal habits to do with my destiny?”

Hartmann talked Fowler into writing his biography, advising him,”…do not fall in love with your subject – in love with my wonderful character and genius. It will blind you, and your writing will suffer.” When an accident interrupted the work (Fowler wrote, “The car, with me folded inside it, turned over three times… I suffered two split vertebrae, three cracked ribs, a skull injury, and wrenched knees. Otherwise I was as good as new”), Hartmann complained, “Fowler is using this … to avoid becoming famous. He suddenly realizes that I am much too big a subject for his limited talents.”

After Hartmann collapsed on a bus (he said, “I have symptoms of immortality”), Fowler had him examined. Among other things, the doctor suggested relieving the old man’s hernia, which then required orchiectomy. One friend urged Hartmann to say farewell to the glands. “They have served their purpose,” he said, “and undoubtedly merit an honorable retirement.”

“Ghouls!” cried Hartmann. He turned on the doctor. “Why don’t you men of medicine do something worthwhile instead of castrating a genius?”

Barrymore agreed. “After all,” he said, “it is hard to cast aside comrades of happier times.”

“Other people,” said Hartmann, “talk and talk about dying. I’m doing it!”

So he did, in 1944.