Love and Death on Long Island by Gilbert Adair

was not to know how long ago the films had been made or whether in fact they were still in circulation. For the moment, there was nothing for me to do but return to my study and continue perusing that inexpressibly foolish but precious text. And when I had finished, when I felt I had extracted from it all it had to give me, I unlocked adesk drawer and placed the copy of
Teen Dream
inside it, face downwards.
    What differentiates a true obsessive from the mere addict, the alcoholic or the unrequited lover, whose monomania will eventually seep into every vacant pocket of his existence, until it comes not merely to coincide with that existence but actually to expand at such a rate, to such a monstrous dimension, that it ends by encompassing, overwhelming, it, making the existence just a part of the mania as once that mania had been just a part of the existence – what, I say, differentiates a
true
obsessive is that although, as was true of me now, he does not seek and would vigorously reject a remedy for his mania, he yet contrives to contain the hold it has upon him within an organically determined perimeter, where it may all the more deliciously suppurate. And this brings in its train a sense of exacerbated self-mastery, an almost intoxicating sensation of power over both the obsession itself and the outer world: the first because, so far contained, it must come to seem for ever containable; the second because the world will remain always unaware of its influence over him, so seamlessly decorous, so impenetrably respectable, even bourgeois, becomes the façade he erects between it and himself.
    In the weeks that followed, my obsession with the young actor grew apace, demanding more and more of my time and my energies. Yet, by indulging it to the fullest, I was also alleviating it. My novel, now so radically transformed it bore only a titular relation to the original project, flowed as fluently from my pen asthough the complete narrative had somehow been miniaturised in advance and injected into the nib and it were merely a matter of posing the pen over the paper, teasing each word, like a droplet of ink, off its tip and having it spill on to the blank page. Effortlessly, and at an earlier stage in the process than had ever been the case with me, I passed from annotation to composition, manoeuvred with ease, word upon word, sentence upon sentence, the labyrinth of my fiction. If it was writing itself, of all the successive stages attendant on the production of a novel, which had always been the least painful and laborious for me, I had never in the past known such a state of jubilation and grace.
    I worked exclusively in the morning, however, my afternoons being reserved for Ronnie. Having learned, having all but memorised, those ‘20 Facts’ about the actor, I wanted now to learn everything I could. And on making enquiries at the shop where I had bought
Teen Dream
, as to where I might find other American magazines – I was careful to leave their precise category discreetly unspecified – I was informed of a newsagent’s in Soho that was, I was told, frequented by half the city’s émigré population.
    Off I sped, then, to this cosmopolitan emporium, where one actually
did
have the impression of all the world’s languages being spoken – in print, at least. Thousands, literally thousands, of publications, ceiling-high and classified by nationality, were racked along three of the shop’s four walls. And the American section, so comprehensive that it alone seemed to take up practically a whole wall, was further subdivided according to the specialised interest to which each type of magazinecatered:
News, News Analysis. Sports, Fashion, People
and, usefully arrayed on adjacent racks,
Movies
and
Teens
.
    For the cinema section alone it would scarcely have been worth leaving Hampstead. There was just one magazine (whose name,
Video
, the classicist that I was could not help for a split