Farewell, Africa
I.
No one, apparently, had thought to test the pool before the party to see that it worked. The pool, which was the size of a comfortable Brooklyn or Queens apartment, had been designed by Harold Cornish and had been commissioned as a memorial installation for the Memorial Museum of Continents Lost. It was the centerpiece of the museum as well as the party celebrating the museum’s opening. In the center of the long, wide pool was a large, detailed model of the African continent. According to Cornish, the pool, an infinity pool, would be able to re-create the event of Africa sinking into the sea. “Not entirely accurately,” he told me early into the party, before anyone knew the installation wouldn’t work. “But enough to give a good idea of how it might have looked when it happened.”
Harold Cornish is the artist responsible for The Cube as well as The Barge, both of which are larger installation pieces — respectively, an overlarge cube perched, by some mysterious mechanism, on top of a cube not much larger than an end table and which has been set on its side, and a brushed-steel barge city that floats in the middle of Lake Erie that, for a year, was Cornish’s home and studio and that can easily accommodate, according to Cornish’s estimates, a population of a hundred thousand people. The pool, which he has named The Pool of African Despair Pool, is his first commissioned work and is the first work he has constructed as a memorial. It is also the smallest work he has designed since leaving art school, and it is the first piece of his to utilize hydraulics.
The walls of the pool, which stop at just below the water’s level, are retractable and are set on hydraulic lifts, and should have slowly begun to creep upward so that less and less water could escape over the pool’s edge. The walls would continue to rise, then, until no water could escape, so that soon the pool would fill up and the water level would rise and then cover the sculpture of Africa completely. This was all supposed to happen quite gradually over the course of the entire evening, leading up to the time Owen Mitchell would deliver his speech.
As I made my way through the party, though, I walked by the pool on occasion to check its progress, but couldn’t tell that anything was happening, which I at first attributed to my own ignorance of the mechanism of memorial installations or of art itself. But when I mentioned this to Mitchell, who seemed to be paying as much attention as I was to the pool and then to his watch, he shook his head, sighed, and said, whispering, “The damn thing’s not working.” Then he took a sip of champagne and said, “Too bad this didn’t happen with the real Africa.”
II.
If you were to ask Owen Mitchell about his speech, his most famous speech, the speech often referred to as the Farewell, Africa speech, he would tell you that it was a full fifteen minutes too long.
“You look at that speech,” he told me shortly after I met him in his hotel room as he was preparing for the party. “You read the whole thing; I think you’ll agree with me. You can say about twenty minutes, about twenty minutes’ worth of words, real and good words about the sinking of the African continent, and the rest is fluff, is posturing, or you start to see the speech repeat itself or traffic in generalities, which, fine, which, okay, that’s standard practice, that’s not great, but it’s acceptable, for another ten minutes, that’s acceptable, and another ten minutes puts you up to a thirty-minute speech.” Mitchell shook his head and then sighed and said, “The president, however. The president had a time block. Forty-five minutes, he told me. ‘It’s up to you to write me that speech,’ he said. And frankly, forty-five minutes? At least fifteen minutes too long.”
Mitchell has been known to edit the speech down. Whenever he would come across the speech in a bookstore or when he was at someone’s house and saw that they owned a copy of the speech, which was, for a long time, being reprinted in textbooks and on its own, he would pull it off the shelf and turn to the beginning of the speech and then start to cross out words and sentences and, sometimes, entire sections.
“Once,” he told me, “I got carried away and accidentally edited a friend’s copy of the speech down to a five-minute affair. Ten minutes if you read it really slowly.” He laughed and said, “I saw what I’d done and quietly put the book back on the shelf and then, later in the evening, made a show of finding it on the shelf again and pulling it down and then pretended to be shocked at what someone had done to it. My friend was so embarrassed and upset that for a moment I almost told him the truth, but I never did.”
I asked him what he cut out when he edited these, if he had specific passages he always cut out, or if his edits were subject to some kind of whim.
“Whim, mostly,” he said, wrestling with the bow tie that went with his tuxedo. “But there are parts that I will always edit out.”
“Like what?” I asked him.
“The very beginning, those first lines,” he said. “Every time. Those are the worst. No matter what, I always cross out that first part.”
When he told me this, I was surprised and not a little disheartened, for while I am not a huge fan of the Farewell, Africa speech — I find his first inauguration speech and the speech he wrote for Jameson when Jameson first proposed the creation of the office of world governor to be both more eloquent and full of more promise and sturdier judgment than the Farewell, Africa speech — what I liked most about the speech were its beginning lines, which, with their oddly syncopated repetitions, create a verbal space, in my opinion, anyway, of unsettled comfort or discomfiting calm, the only kind of space, in any case, that might prepare the public for the announcement that the African continent was sinking inexorably, inevitably into the sea.
“Must we say”—the speech begins—“have we come to that moment when we must finally say, are we now at that final moment when we must say, with sadness in our hearts but determination in our hearts, too.”
“That part?” I asked him. “That’s the part you will cut out no matter what?”
“Every time,” he told me. Then he checked himself and his tie in the mirror, and then he checked his profile, and then he shook his head and looked at me and smiled, and then he said to me, “Tonight, the speech I’m reading tonight? I’ve knocked it down to twenty-five minutes. And that’s without trying to rush through it.”
When the museum’s board of directors first approached Mitchell about the museum opening, he politely declined. He left the administration shortly after the Farewell, Africa speech to run for office himself, hoping the speech would thrust him onto the political stage, but he was handily defeated in an ugly, vicious campaign, and since then, he has done his best to distance himself from his failed foray into politics and the speech. Not because he dislikes the speech, so he explained to me, but because for so long he found himself defined by that speech and that speech alone.
At first, then, he had little interest in resurfacing at a party celebrating the opening of a museum commemorating the sinking of Africa. When the board of directors contacted him again and asked him to reconsider, however, he had a change of heart.
In the past ten years, Owen Mitchell has published a novel to little acclaim and designed various portable housing models, which he has submitted to competitions and to the World Disaster Relief Organization, but, for his troubles, has so far only received letters thanking him for his interest in world disaster relief. He worked briefly as a lobbyist and then as a lawyer. He has taught both graduate students and high school students, and once he was the host of the Academy Awards—“the technical stuff, you know, the part they film and record and show clips of during the real thing,” he told me — but he has yet to rediscover the success or pleasure he had achieved while working as a speechwriter.