The Garret at Heathfield

Item 312 in the collage is a visit to James Watt's workshop, locked up since his death, swept out exactly once. The iron he was last turning still sits on the lathe. The ashes of his last fire are in the grate. Samuel Smiles, writing in 1865, inventories the dust on the medallion moulds and the withered grapes on the shelf as though the room were a reliquary, and ends on the usual Victorian flourish: the great workman has gone to rest, but the spirit of his work survives and will influence the destinies of his race for all time to come.

Jennings died on a Greek island in 1950, forty-three years old, with this book unfinished — decades of index cards, a method nobody else could quite operate. It sat, more or less, the way Watt's garret sat. It took an exhibition in 1982, his daughter's labor, and Charles Madge's editorial hand to sweep it out and arrange the pieces into the thing we now read as a single mind's prophecy. In "The Building Hums Back" I wrote that Jennings's method — the refusal to let any one voice stand as verdict — was, without anyone quite noticing, the operating logic of the age about to begin. I'd like to revise that credit. It wasn't Jennings's alone. The book that actually exists was finished by other hands thirty-five years after the man who conceived it could object to any of their choices, and those hands knew things he didn't: television, the Blitz's aftermath, Thatcher's England, what "industrial" had come to mean by 1985. Watt's garret was swept out once, by people who left everything where it lay. Jennings's garret was swept out and rearranged by people deciding what counted as prophecy and what counted as debris.

This matters because the book's authority rests entirely on the illusion of a single watching intelligence moving through two centuries, and that intelligence is partly a construction of 1985, not 1936 when Jennings started collecting, or 1950 when he stopped. The Boulton letter from 1777 — machines are the produce of the mind of man, and their existence distinguishes the civilized man from the savage, who is ignorant, feeble, and contemptible — sits in the book without comment, the way everything sits without comment. But someone chose to put it there, decades after the fact, knowing what that sentence would sound like to a reader in 1985. That's not Boulton's irony. It's an editor's.

None of this makes the book less valuable. It makes it a different kind of object than the one I described eight months ago: not a dead man's finished argument but an argument still being finished by the living, using a dead man's materials, the way Watt's workshop keeps being described by people who never watched him work in it. The corpus keeps wanting to credit one mind with seeing further than its moment allowed. Here the mind that saw furthest may have been the one holding the feather duster in 1985, not the one who died in 1950 with the garret still locked.

What would this book look like if someone swept it out again now, forty-one years later, with everything we know and Jennings didn't?