Slashed and Scribbled: 1st Draft Extracts from Berlin Bromley, A Memoir
The romantic view of the writer is one of crippling writer’s block followed by a massive burst of inspiration accompanied by frantic typing—Jack Kerouac popping benzos and staying up for days to create the scroll that was to become On The Road. But that’s usually not the case. Writers are more the meticulous sort, editing and re-editing their texts, laboring on word selection, style, and narrative. But rarely do readers get to peak behind Oz’s curtains at the choices made along the way. Lo and behold, Bertie Marshall’s project in issue #21, “Slashed and Scribbled: 1st Draft Extracts from Berlin Bromley, A Memoir.” This excerpt follows Bertie’s passage to London and transformation into Berlin Bromley as part of a formative group of the punk era including Siouxsie Sioux, Steve Severin, Billy Idol, and Jordan.
The pages of the project are very much in the aesthetic of a manuscript—underlines, cross-outs, and changes marked up by hand in the margins. However, there’s an air of self-consciousness in the edits, borderline performance, and certainly projective of the personality behind them. At times Bertie becomes occupied by choice of song listed, giving multiple alternatives to Nico’s “Desertshore,” Patti Smith’s “Horses,” and Yoko Ono’s “Approximately infinite universe.” To most these details might seem trivial, but clearly these decisions are of high priority to Bertie. Another minute, yet important choice is a potential change of “haute” to “hoi-ta”—does the reader need the phonetic version of this work to really grasp its glamour? And then there are certain marks that are mostly indiscernible in intention, words that are boxed with lines connecting to words in other paragraphs, for example “old actresses” to “my genes” to “maid” to “My” to “-tea”. There’s a semblance of meaning, but what’s to be changed here? All that can be scene is the writer’s mind at work. In any case, to be able to see the edits enliven an already lively text, adding a meta-level that is as enjoyable as the original. Certainly a good way to leave readers wondering about the memoir’s final form.
View the rest of the project here.
