Miller and Durrell

Lawrence Durrell to Henry Miller, Corfu, Fall 1936:

"I'm tired of political people. They have confused the inner struggle with the outer one. They want to bread poultice a primary chancre. Politics is an art that deals in averages. Art is a man that deals in people. If the people are wrong, then no system is fool-proof enough to stop them cutting each other's throats. And the artist finds that the people are wrong. The driving force behind him is his self-isolation, the dislocation of the societal instinct. Vide Lawrence, Gaugin, etc....To have art you've first got to have a big personality, pass it through the social mincer, get it ready for misery. Art nowadays is going to be real art, as before the flood. IT IS GOING TO BE PROPHECY, in the biblical sense."

Art "nowadays" insofar as "nowadays" is the ever-present always. Durrell's "big personality" is analogous to Harold Bloom's "aesthetic audacity." Audacious is what the Near Eastern prophets were and those who dare follow in their footsteps. But most of those who claim to be doing so are merely playing a political game: that is, they are dealing in averages, not in women and men.