2.7 It Might All Be Redrawn: To Love and To Honor by Octavus Roy Cohen (1925)

Things were always going to be different when they looked back. It was not always clear how but in the midst of twenty-five years, life had changed and the friendship built between George Potter but his attorney continued to grow. Though the attorney worried about George’s social life, he was excited to participate in the 25^th anniversary celebration of Mr. and Mrs. Potter. He’d been there for their wedding and he would be there for this fete. George had set everything up—the event would look exactly as the wedding had a quarter of a century ago. George was still a bit romantic and his longing for the past coincided with his eagerness for the future.

That wedding is the central conceit of Octavus Roy Cohen’s 3 page story "To Love and to Honor." A clinic in the economy of storytelling, the romantic engagements of George Potter are relayed through his friend and attorney who fills in all the details we need to know, and some that we don’t (George had a "very excellent collection of postage stamps.")

Illustration accompanying Los Angeles Times reprint of "To Love and to Honor" (November 30, 1926)

The attorney, who goes unnamed, was there at George’s wedding 25 years ago. He was also there before the marriage during the "youthful and frantic courtship" of George’s first wife, Althea Deane. That coupling seemed to mark the "last spark of romanticism" in George's life. As the attorney recounts, Deane "left him abruptly" and everyone heard that she had died while abroad a few years later. It was only then, as a widower, that George began to develop his relationship with Esther.

The brilliance of this story is in its seeming simplicity. We have the setup and then there is the final turn as Cohen brings back the twist in the concluding lines. Whatever the past is to these men, however they have used it to move forward, it never remains static. 

At this point, it is trite to comment, following Miles Davis, that in jazz "its not the notes you play, its the notes you don’t play." In a self-parodying opening on SNL this past week Ryan Gosling uttered those very words. Cohen’s story has the power to communicate a winding emotional path through life reminiscent of the best versions of "My Funny Valentine." But Cohen’s skill is not relying on what is said or what isn’t but what exists in the relationships between the explicit and the untold.  The plot twist requires this just as the weight of the story does.

September 12, 1925 issue of Collier's where "To Love and to Honor" first appeared as a "short short story"

It is not what is said, and it is not what isn’t—it is how the two together sculpt the world off the page.

I may have said too much—perhaps I’ve danced around this story in the most awkward of ways. It is a startling few pages, and that surprise comes from both the story and its placement in Overton’s collection. In a volume with long tales of individual lives, Cohen uses a few pages to extract the symbolic moments of Potter’s adulthood. 

Flipping through this story, the paper is so delicate it almost breaks apart. That delicateness, in conjunction with the Latinate name Octavus in big letters (certainly a less popular name now, though according to Social Security database, never has it been in top 1000), provide a rather different experience. It has usually taken me over thirty minutes to read a story—I read "To Love and To Honor" two times in ten minutes. I’m not sure what to make of how that might change the reading of Cohen’s tale.

Cohen was a prolific writer. He published more than 56 novels including a series of detective novels with a lead named Jim Hanvey. He also appears to be one of the many white authors invested in depicting racist visions of black life. Cohen created the black detective Florian Slappey. I’ve not read any of these stories; however blogs and writers online have laid down countless prefatory statements about the racist dialectic in the story of a character from "Bummingham."

Octavus Roy Cohen (1891-1959)

Some of those works, like so many of Cohen’s were turned into films. It is of note that the Florian Slappey character (as played by Charles Olden) appeared in two shorts that starred the legendary director Spencer Williams and actress Evelyn Preer. Williams was a successful actor and comedian but is best known now as a director while Preer was one of the earliest and most important black entertainers of the 20^th century. A blues singer and an actress, Preer appeared in many of Oscar Micheaux’s films and changed the landscape of acting. 

Would Cohen have expected such talent in his adaptation? Would he have cared? What is missing in Cohen’s stories that is made available to us through these versions?

Cohen’s stories were also adapted to feature the likes of Douglas Fairbanks, William Powell and Myrna Loy. 

Well, now  I’ve opened more doors than I can close. The complicated circulation of a character like Slappey tells us something about the prominence of a certain kind of writer in the early part of the 1900s. It would be interesting to trace that figure and see how other artists (such as a black actor) would rewrite Cohen’s character. Similarly it would be worthwhile to follow a story like "To Love and to Honor" from the pages of Collier’s, where it first appears, to anthologies like Overton’s, to reprints in the Los Angeles Times. 

I hope we can work to accompany some of those long histories and the changes here. 

After all, George Potter spent much of his life with a false understanding of his past. Even when he came to reckon with it, even as he opened new possibilities, the past never left. It couldn’t.

The entire story, reprinted in the Los Angeles Times (November 30, 1926)

First line: "It was rather amazing to discover a deep vein of sentiment in pudgy little George Potter."

Last line: "And in case anything ever comes up—well, I want you to understand that this affair to-night was a real wedding."

Here is a Google nGram for the name "Octavus" beginning in 1900: