“Behind every word of Amis’s corpus, Wilde lurks…”

Look again at Amis on Burroughs – at his “weary instancing” of King Lear as a reproof to those who imagine that a work of art can be depressing. This is Wilde, in “The Soul of Man Under Socialism” (1891): “To call an artist morbid because he deals with morbidity as his subject-matter is as silly as if one called Shakespeare mad because he wrote King Lear.” Similarly, when he writes, “Only in art will the lion lie down with the lamb, and the rose grow without thorn” (Koba the Dread, 2002), it is a contemporary edition of Wilde’s “It is through Art, and Art only, that we can realise our perfection” (“The Critic as Artist”). Further examples proliferate…