Reviewing Edmund White's recent biography of Marcel Proust, Peter Ackroyd offers a text-book example of critical legerdemain that is lethal for gay writers. It will introduce us indirectly to the anti-homosexual tactics of Marguerite Duras:

Ackroyd's writing here is uncharacteristically murky, probably because the thinking behind it would not survive too much clarity of expression. If we dust it off and lift it up to the light, the core idea might look something like this: we readers can't tolerate too much insistence on Proust's gayness; it kills our interest in him. Edmund White ‘asserts’ Proust's gayness. Consequently, Proust doesn't ‘live upon the page’ of this biography.

It is not altogether clear why Ackroyd thinks any of this is true. One thing is clear, however: the extraneous business about ‘biographical art’ is like the squid's ink, as is the later suggestion that the word ‘gay’ is anachronistic when applied to Proust. These gambits function mainly to camouflage the egregious insinuation that a gay biographer who ‘asserts’ Proust's ‘gay life and consciousness’ has failed to ‘intuit the personal stirrings’ of his subject, and thus, has failed to make him live upon the page. It is the other way around, of course: Edmund White asserts Proust's gayness because he intuits his personal stirrings so keenly. Indeed, for some of us this is a big part of what makes Proust come alive in White's biography.