Naturally all were more or less radical (except the cynical and now
somewhat anaemic elders who gave up hope for a world that had ceased to
hold out hope to them). The artists were disturbed by futurism and cubism,
although as neither paid they were forced to devote the greater part of
their inspiration to the marketable California scenery.
But the writers: potential or locally arrived novelists, playwrights,
poets, essayists, were the real intelligenzia! They went about with the
radical weeklies of the East (or Berkeley) under their arms and discoursed
under their breath (when foregathered in small and ardent groups) upon The
Revolution, the day of Judgment for all but honest Labor, and hissed
their hatred of Capital. And if they had much in common with those
"intellectuals" to be found in every land who caress the chin of radicalism
with one hand and plunge the other into the pocket of capital as far as
permitted, who shall blame them? One must live and one must have something
to excite one's intellect when sex, the stand-by, takes its well-earned
rest.
Several of these ardent ladies and gentlemen, with the sanction of the
Club's President, a business man whose contributions were the financial
mainstay of the Seven Arts, and who sincerely envied the gifted members,
denying them nothing, invited James Kirkpatrick to be the guest of an
evening and deliver an address on Socialism and the Proletariat.
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