Steinbeck was most interested, however, in Byrne’s unique use of language. Born in New York City but raised in Ireland, the Irish American Byrne attended Dublin University and later studied Romance languages at the Sorbonne and the University of Leipzig. Byrne’s Irish patriotism and linguistic flair led him to write most of his novels in Irish dialect. Messer Marco Polo, for example, is narrated by a wandering Ulsterman. This gives Byrne’s prose a deliberately poetic quality, as in:But the young people would know it was spring, too, by token of the gaiety that was in the air. For nothing brings joy to the heart like the coming of spring. The folk who do be blind all the rest of the year, their eyes do open then, and a sunset takes them, and the wee virgin flowers coming up between the stones, or the twitter of a bird upon the bough. . . . And the young women do be preening themselves, and young men do be singing, even though they have the voices of rooks.
It also creates some extremely strange dialogue. Byrne’s Marco Polo speaks with an Irish accent—“ ’Tis only a saint can perform miracles”—and even Kubla Khan says things like “Well, now, laddie.”
Contemporary readers may cringe at the thought of the far more gifted Steinbeck imbibing such syrupy and silly stuff. But the young writer saw possibilities. In Cup of Gold’s descriptive passages, Steinbeck too would reach—and even overreach—for poetry—a poetry that immediately surpassed Byrne’s and that would only grow stronger as his career advanced.
Winter was come sliding down over the world from the Pole; and riverward there was the faint moaning of new ice. It was a sad day, a day of gray unrest, of discontent. The gently moving air seemed to be celebrating the loss of some gay thing with a soft, tender elegy. But in the pastures the great work horses nervously stamped their feet, and all through the country small brown birds, in cliques of four or five, flew twittering from tree to tree and back again, seeking and calling in recruits for their southing.
Proud of his Irish ancestry on his mother’s side, Steinbeck also experimented with Irish dialect, placing it in the mouth of Morgan’s Welsh father—“What time will you be starting, the morning?”—and more appropriately using it to color the speech of the Irish sailor, Tim—“ ’Twas when I was a boy like this one here, and I sailing in a free ship that tucked [sic] about the ocean. . . .”
Not long after completing Cup of Gold, Steinbeck understood that he would need to sweep “all the Cabellyo-Byrneish preciousness” out of his prose “for good.” “I seem to have outgrown Cabell,” he wrote to his friend A. Grove Day, and “I have not the slightest desire to step into Donn Byrne’s shoes.” Already Steinbeck knew that he had “twice [the] head” of these two early influences. Yet in some respects his protests are disingenuous. Long after the triumph of The Grapes of Wrath (1939), Steinbeck remained attracted to medievalism as well as to the comic and satiric possibilities of fantasy, as we see in The Short Reign of Pippin IV (1957). At the time of his death in 1968, Steinbeck was working on his own translation of Malory’s Morte d’Arthur. The “Cabellyo-Byrneish” strain underlies his canonical works as well. Throughout his career, Steinbeck would continue to combine allegory and fantasy with naturalism, to strive unabashedly for melody and sensuality in his descriptive writing, and to value the poetic properties of dialect, albeit more realistically deployed (as in The Grapes of Wrath). Cabell and Byrne were unusual models for an American writer serving an apprenticeship in the 1920s, and Cup of Gold provides an important look at young Steinbeck experimenting with their methods—methods that would give his mature work a distinctive stamp.
CUP OF GOLD AND YOUNG JOHN STEINBECK
Cup of Gold is not solely a historical-biographical-swashbuckling pirate fantasy with literary ambitions. The novel also has a strong autobiographical strain. Writing to his friend A. Grove Day on December 5, 1929, Steinbeck confessed that Cup of Gold was written in part “for the purpose of getting . . . all the autobiographical material (which hounds us until we get it said) out of my system.” Into the story of young Henry Morgan, Steinbeck wove the experiences of his own young life and of his quest to become a writer. Those experiences included Steinbeck’s own very real voyage to Panama—a country torn by political unrest and speaking volumes about American corporate and military imperialism in the 1920s. His literary quest included an abortive assault on that Cup of Gold for all American writers—New York City. These autobiographical currents make Cup of Gold not only a portrait of the artist as a young man, but an allegory of the Faustian bargain implicit in the American dream— whether the dream of an aggressive young nation, Steinbeck’s “Republic of Buccaneers”—or the dream of an aggressive young individual ambitious for fortune, fame, and love.
John Steinbeck was born to John Ernst and Olive Hamilton Steinbeck on February 27, 1902, in the small town of Salinas, California. His father resembled Henry Morgan’s father, Robert, in being a failure, a dreamer, a gardener in his spare time, and a compassionate man loved and respected by others. Having lost his own business, the senior Steinbeck nevertheless maintained his wife and four children (three daughters and John) in modest comfort through his work as a bookkeeper for the Spreckels Sugar Factory and as Treasurer for Monterey County. Olive, a schoolteacher before her marriage, was a dominant force both in her family and in the community— known for her energy, her determination, and her ambition for her children. Aspects of Olive’s character mark the pragmatic, iron-willed Mother Morgan. About his protagonist in Cup of Gold, Steinbeck would write:
Henry, if you considered his face, drew from his parents almost equally. His cheekbones were high and hard, his chin firm . . . like his mother’s. But there, too, were the sensual underlip . . . and the eyes which looked out on dreams; these were Old Robert’s features. . . . But though there was complete indecision in Robert’s face, there was a great quantity of decision in Henry’s if only he could find something to decide about.
Young Steinbeck found something to decide about in the pages of books. From enchanted boyhood readings of works including the Caxton Morte d’Arthur and Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, books that would leave indelible marks on Cup of Gold, he acquired a passionate love of language and a desire to become a storyteller as strong as Henry Morgan’s desire to “go a-buccaneering and take a Spanish town.” Steinbeck must have felt, very early, the conviction that he could achieve greatness as a writer if only he could avoid entrapment in the mundane concerns and expectations of the adult world. Steinbeck’s Merlin, an elderly failed poet who understands the dangers of the path, looks sadly at his own idled harps and says to Henry Morgan:
“You are a little boy. You want the moon to drink from as a golden cup; and so, it is very likely that you will become a great man—if only you remain a little child. All the world’s great have been little boys who wanted the moon. . . . But if one grow to a man’s mind, that mind must see that it cannot have the moon and would not want it if it could. . . .”
Before Steinbeck could drink from the moon, there was college. His parents insisted. He arrived at Stanford University in the fall of 1919 and attended sporadically for the next six years. Single-minded about his dream, Steinbeck focused largely on creative writing and literature classes, voracious reading in Stanford’s excellent library, meetings of the English Club, and his own writing. He may have viewed some of his professors as Henry Morgan views James Flower—quiet and kindly, ineffectual and inefficient men and women who cried out to be creators and were not, but who recognized in him “one of those divinely endowed creatures who control[led] the fire” they lacked altogether. Steinbeck’s contempt for Stanford’s required curriculum meant a wealth of incompletes and failures, as well as quite a few leaves of absence. During these periods, Steinbeck found employment supervising migrant workers on the Spreckels ranches, where sugar beets were grown and harvested by gangs of hobos and bindlestiffs, as well as by Japanese, Mexican, and Filipino labor. His education resembled Henry Morgan’s in Cup of Gold, alternating between self-directed study in James Flower’s magnificent
library and overseeing the plantation’s multiracial work force.
In the spring of 1925, Steinbeck left Stanford without taking a degree or even completing the equivalent of three years’ course work. This was failure by the standards of the adult world, and his parents, especially his mother, were understandably disappointed. He had little to show for himself except a sheaf of unpublished manuscripts, including a short story about the pirate Henry Morgan—“A Lady in Infra-Red.” But still Steinbeck had the resolve to continue to test his dream, and again like his own young Henry Morgan, he proposed to do that with a voyage. If Panama, that fabled Spanish treasure port, was the “Cup of Gold” for the aspiring seventeenth-century buccaneer, then surely New York City, America’s vibrant capital of the arts, was an equivalent Grail for the aspiring twentieth-century writer. Somehow, Steinbeck persuaded his long-suffering father to buy him a $100 tourist-class ticket for travel by freighter from San Francisco to New York. In Cup of Gold, Robert Morgan also finds the courage to let his son go, and the novel contains this insight into a father’s hope:
“Why do men like me want sons?” he wondered. “It must be because they hope in their poor beaten souls that these new men, who are their blood, will do the things they were not strong enough nor wise enough nor brave enough to do. It is rather like another chance with life; like a new bag of coins at the table after your fortune is gone. Perhaps the boy is doing what I would have done had I been brave enough in years past. Yes, . . . I am glad this boy finds it in his power to vault the mountains and stride about the world.”
STEINBECK’S PASSAGE TO PANAMA
On November 1, 1925, Steinbeck left San Francisco on board the Katrina Luckenbach, a 449-foot-long steamship with twin screws, four turbines, and the modern conveniences of electric lights and wireless. With a black hull, red boot-topping, and buff ventilators, Katrina was not a passenger liner, but a working freighter owned by the Luckenbach company. She carried about forty crew members and had space for only a few passengers in her two-story deckhouse. Thanks to boyhood summers at his family’s cottage on the Pacific shore, Steinbeck had the sea in his blood. “The water slapping smooth hulls was a joy to him to the point of pain,” he wrote of Henry Morgan. On the waterfront, “He felt that he had come home again to a known, loved place . . .” At one point during his Stanford years, Steinbeck had even tried to run away to sea and work a passage to China, but could not find a shipboard job. Now he was outward bound on his first voyage. As a tugboat towed Katrina out of the harbor and her foreign crew hustled about the deck, Steinbeck must have felt some of the excitement he ascribes to Henry Morgan as the Bristol Girl casts off: “They were starting for the Indies—the fine, far Indies where boys’ dreams lived.”
Katrina was actually bound first to Panama, Morgan’s “Cup of Gold.” She cruised down the coasts of California, Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica at a top speed of 13½ knots (about 15 miles per hour). This leisurely pace gave Steinbeck time to observe birds and marine life such as the storm petrels and flying fish described in Cup of Gold. He also had time to get to know the vessel’s crew. Perhaps, like Henry Morgan, he found “wise, kind men . . . [who] taught him what they could,” not only about the working of the ship, but about “songs of death and mutiny and blood in the sea,” “the peculiar clean swearing of sailors,” and tales “of wonders seen and imagined.” At least one sailor, resembling the treacherous Tim in Cup of Gold, found a way to part a naïve young man from his money. In a 1937 interview about his voyage to New York, Steinbeck told Joseph Henry Jackson that “On the way he learned to his astonishment that plain, ordinary, unloaded dice could be controlled if one knew how. The discovery came to him through the medium of a large and very black sailor and was slightly expensive, but at least it was something to know.”
Steinbeck’s voyage on Katrina also gave him time to form a friendship with a young, California-born artist named Mahlon Blaine. Like Steinbeck, Blaine was headed for New York to seek his fortune. Specializing in the fantastic, the surreal, the sensuous, and even the satanic (illustrations for Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Tanar of Pellucidar, Gustave Flaubert’s Salammbô, William Beckford’s Vathek, Paul Verlaine’s Hashish and Incense, the Marquis de Sade’s Justine, and a tome on Satanism and Witchcraft are among his best-known works), Blaine would soon make a career for himself as a book illustrator in the style of Aubrey Beardsley. The two shipmates would remain in touch. Four years after the voyage of the Katrina, Blaine would illustrate a striking dust jacket for Cup of Gold.
Steinbeck left the Katrina at Panama City for a stay of several days. According to Joseph Henry Jackson, the writer planned “to absorb color there for a book he had in mind, the romanticized life of the pirate Henry Morgan.” But Panama City in 1925 was neither colorful nor romantic. In mid-October 1925, just a few weeks before Steinbeck’s departure from San Francisco, the city erupted in violence, as thousands of workers joined in a general strike and marched to protest high rents. The situation deteriorated into widespread rioting when Panamanian police killed a leader of the protests, Marciano Mirones. Would-be revolutionaries flying red flags massed in Cathedral Square, and American tourists told the New York Times of hearing a “thunderstorm” of rifle volleys from the protesters, followed by the sound of machine-gun fire as government troops responded. President Rodolfo Chiari asked the United States for military assistance, and on October 12 three steel-helmeted battalions of the Thirty-Third Infantry marched into the city from their barracks in the Canal Zone, dispersing mobs at bayonet point and setting up machine-gun nests to guard government buildings and the president’s palace. On October 23, with order restored, U.S. troops withdrew. The Christian Science Monitor reported a subsequent wave of arrests, deportations, and evictions of troublesome ringleaders, as well as President Chiari’s declaration that the Panamanian legislature did not need to meet because “the recent disturbances . . . might influence the lawmakers toward partial legislation in favor of tenants.”
In Panama City between two and three weeks after the withdrawal of American forces, Steinbeck must have heard talk about the riots and seen the anger still smoldering in the eyes around him. In what reads as a racist attempt to trivialize the Panamanian crisis, the New York Times quoted an eyewitness, Captain George Zeh: “The nucleus of a revolution is a bottle of rum, two half-breeds, and a negro armed with rifles and machetes.” Steinbeck, whose Henry Morgan will lay waste to Panama City with a mob of such have-nots, would not have seen any irony in Zeh’s statement. From Steinbeck’s visit to Panama, Cup of Gold would derive not local color, but a sense of how vulnerable a people “grown soft in their security” might become, and of how the oppressed, once armed, might go “marauding like tigers from a broken cage.”
After his brief stay in the city, Steinbeck boarded another freighter to continue his voyage via the Panama Canal. Now his voyage would trace the approximate line of Henry Morgan’s historic seventeenth-century march across the Isthmus of Panama. Fifty miles wide at its narrowest point, the Isthmus joins the continents of North and South America, while separating the Pacific Ocean from the Caribbean Sea. From its discovery by Balboa in 1513, movingly described by Steinbeck in Cup of Gold, the Isthmus has been used as a shortcut between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, a way to avoid a dangerous sea voyage of many months and thousands of miles around Cape Horn, the storm-torn southern tip of South America. The Spanish of Morgan’s day appreciated its commercial benefits. Gold and silver from Spanish mines in Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, and Chile were carried up the Pacific coast in merchant vessels to Panama City, then loaded onto mule trains for transport by land across the Isthmus to Portobello, where a waiting flota would carry the treasure to Spain. Henry Morgan appreciated the military significance of the Isthmus, understanding how it could be used for rapid delivery of a strike force from the Caribbean to attack Panama City—the richest port on the Pacific— from its landward side. Steinbeck’s freighter would have made the forty-nine mile transit of the can
al and its locks in about ten hours, time enough for him to search for glimpses of the jungled and mountainous terrain Morgan’s men traversed in 1671.
In 1925, when Steinbeck first saw it, the Panama Canal was a fresh marvel of modern engineering and a symbol of America’s buccaneering spirit. In a sense he had grown up with its story. The United States acquired rights to and began construction on the canal in 1904, when Steinbeck was two years old. The brainchild of President Theodore Roosevelt, built with the labor of 50,000 workers from many nations, the Panama Canal cost $352 million dollars to build. Thousands of workers gave their lives; during the American effort as many as 5,000 died due to landslides, construction accidents, and endemic diseases such as yellow fever and malaria. Finished in 1914, the year Steinbeck turned twelve, it was a source of national pride. The United States now dominated the trade of two oceans, exacting tolls from every passing ship, and had become a global naval power, controlling the path between the seas. In Steinbeck’s Cup of Gold, Balboa dresses in his “scoured armor,” wades into the Pacific, and “firmly addresse[s] the sea and claim[s] all the lands it broke on.” Teddy Roosevelt, the “New Imperialist, ” might have done the same.
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