Among the many recent books about him (from the austere "Proust and Signs" by the late French theorist/demigod Gilles Deleuze, to the bizarre "Proust’s Lesbianism" by Elisabeth Ladenson, to the popular "How Proust Can Change Your Life" by Alain de Botton, and the respectable "Proust’s Way: A Field Guide to 'In Search of Lost Time'" by Roger Shattuck), William C. Carter’s magnificent new biography, "Marcel Proust: A Life," makes it pretty clear that Proust was very consciously in the closet, and that he liked it there, the door always just slightly ajar so that he could see out but no one could quite see in.

Proust apparently had two types: one early on, the other later in life. When he was young, says Edmund White in his short biography for the Penguin Lives series, "Proust liked artistic young men with mustaches and dark eyes: that is, those who resembled himself." Eventually he fell prey to a passion for more-or-less heterosexual, lower-class studs who generally took their time taking his money and breaking his heart.

Just how much sex Proust actually had remains, as it should, a secret, even to Edmund White. It’s not easy to imagine the frail, thin, asthmatic Proust engaging in anything too athletic or aerobic but it does seem clear, particularly from Carter’s biography, that he had a healthy enough interest in and appetite for that aspect of human relations that sometimes complements and sometimes vividly contrasts with the more purely social.

Although he always publicly denied that he was homosexual (to the bitter chagrin of his friend Andre Gide) -- going so far as to fight a duel to defend his reputation against a journalist who dared to imply that he was having an affair with the beautiful Lucien Daudet -- there is, in addition to the many disguised, gender-bending and metaphorical references to the subject in his novel, plenty of open analysis of the spectacle of "inversion" as seen in Paris circa 1910.

Private Life Romance, relationships, and the personal side of Table Talk