If at times the novel seems to have been written by a sorcerer’s apprentice, a young Merlin not in full control of his own magic or the spells and charms of his elders, Cup of Gold is nonetheless an important early experiment in what Dennis Prindle, in the single best essay on this relatively neglected novel, calls “allegorical naturalism.” According to Prindle, Cup of Gold combines “the turn-of-the-century tradition of high romance and quasi-Arthurian adventure” with an “aggressively modern” naturalism that proclaims “the primacy of instinct and the environment . . . over the claims of tradition and culture.” Rather than criticizing Cup of Gold for its lack of “harmony,” Prindle celebrates this first novel’s deliberate dissonance. Rather than viewing Cup of Gold as a “false start,” he sees it as an auspicious beginning, shaping “what will be an enduring conflict in Steinbeck between tradition and experience, framed here with Arthurian romance on one side and a slyly ironic naturalism on the other.” Throughout Steinbeck’s career, the author will continue to appropriate the older traditions of romance and allegory, adapting them to “the demands of an increasingly naturalistic vision.”
Steinbeck would successfully locate both comedy and tragedy in allegorical naturalism, continuing the experiments begun in Cup of Gold. His breakout book, the comic Tortilla Flat, transforms a group of Mexican paisanos into an Arthurian Round Table. His masterpiece, The Grapes of Wrath, treats the Dust Bowl exodus with documentary realism, embracing current events as Cup of Gold embraces history, and with the same intercalary chapters of explanation. But The Grapes of Wrath, like its piratical precursor, is still a profound allegory—both novels are violent, all-consuming passages to a Promised Land that turns out to be a Valley of Ashes. In The Pearl, we have the naturalistically rendered tragedy of a poor Mexican villager seduced by the greedy, false, ambitious dreams embodied in “the pearl of the world,” a pearl that not coincidentally makes its first appearance in Cup of Gold. As an exercise in allegorical naturalism, The Pearl was so successful that even the arch-realist Ernest Hemingway fell under its spell—The Old Man and the Sea probably would not have been written without its example. Continuing within the Steinbeck canon, we find parallels between the romance and allegory of Cup of Gold present even in The Log from the Sea of Cortez—Steinbeck’s nonfiction account of an expedition to study the marine biology of Baja California. Cowritten with pioneering ecologist Edward F. Ricketts, The Log ought to be Steinbeck’s most naturalistic book. Yet the “deep, mellow pulsation of the Tone” Henry Morgan hears at the moment of his death also sounds in the final sentences of The Log: “The Western Flyer hunched into the great waves toward Cedros Island, the wind blew off the tops of the whitecaps, and the big guy wire, from bow to mast, took up its vibration like the low pipe on a tremendous organ. It sang its deep note into the wind.” In Cup of Gold, the Tone marks the fulfillment of Gwenliana’s prophecy, the moment when “a little, struggling life” enters “the sheening Purity,” becoming part of a larger whole that renders the driving egotism of a Morgan meaningless. In The Log from the Sea of Cortez, the Tone is the keynote of Steinbeck’s spiritual ecology, his belief “that all things are one thing and that one thing is all things.” These are only a few examples of Steinbeck’s many successful experiments in devising strategies to connect romance, allegory, and fable with naturalism, a lifelong literary enterprise that began with Cup of Gold.
CONCLUSION
Paradoxically, Steinbeck’s own misgivings about Cup of Gold may hold the keys to reading this weird book with pleasure and success. On February 25, 1928, as he was putting the finishing touches on his novel, Steinbeck wrote to his friend “Dook” Sheffield:
I shall make an elegy to Henry Morgan, who is a monument to my own lack of ability. I shall go ahead, but I wonder if that sharp agony of words will ever occur to me again. I wonder if I shall ever be drunken with rhythms any more. [. . .] I am twenty-six and I am not young any more. I shall write good novels but hereafter I ride Pegasus with a saddle and martingale, for I am afraid Pegasus will rear and kick. I do not take joy in the unmanageable horse any more. I want a hackney of tried steadiness.
With the keenness of hindsight, we know that Steinbeck will indeed go on to write not merely good novels, but classic novels such as The Grapes of Wrath and Of Mice and Men, that he will produce a body of work that in 1962 will win him the Grail of literary awards, the Nobel Prize. A special pleasure of reading Cup of Gold is the portrait it affords of Steinbeck as a young writer—alive to the “sharp agony” of words, drunk with their rhythms, in possession of surging powers he cannot fully control. In the pages of Cup of Gold, we can observe the qualities Henry Morgan himself assigns to the young artist—“a certain obnoxious freedom [. . .] lovable and spontaneous and human [. . .] given to carelessness in the pursuit of passion.” We can trace the familiar Steinbeck of future books; we can witness genius awkwardly unfolding its wings. The reader is forewarned against complacency and set expectations of what novels should be and do. John Steinbeck’s first novel is no “hackney of tried steadiness.” Cup of Gold rears and kicks. The joy of reading young Steinbeck’s unbridled Pegasus is the joy of riding an unmanageable horse—and the successful method is to hold on tight and expect the unexpected.
SUSAN F. BEEGEL
Suggestions for Further Reading
“American Soldiers Guard Panama City; Asked by President Chiari After Rent Riots.” The New York Times (October 13, 1925): 1.
Anderson, Maxwell, and Laurence Stallings. The Buccaneer. Three American Plays. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1926. 181-263.
Benson, Jackson J. The True Adventures of John Steinbeck, Writer. New York: Viking, 1984.
Byrne, Donn. Messer Marco Polo. New York: D. Appleton-Century, 1921.
Cabell, James Branch. Jurgen: A Comedy of Justice. New York: Robert M. McBride, 1922.
Cordingly, David. Under the Black Flag: The Romance and the Reality of Life Among the Pirates. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1995.
DeMott, Robert J. Steinbeck’s Reading: A Catalogue of Books Owned and Borrowed. New York: Garland, 1984.
Diaz Espino, Ovidio. How Wall Street Created a Nation: J. P. Morgan, Teddy Roosevelt, and the Panama Canal. New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 2001.
Eddy, Darlene. “To Go A-Buccaneering and Take a Spanish Town: Some Seventeenth Century Aspects of Cup of Gold.” Steinbeck Quarterly 8 (1975): 3-12.
Exquemelin, Alexander O. The Buccaneers of America. First published 1678. Trans. Alexis Brown. New York: Dover, 1969.
Fontenrose, Joseph. John Steinbeck: An Introduction and Interpretation . New York: Barnes and Noble, 1963.
French, Warren. John Steinbeck. Boston: Twayne, 1975.
Gannett, Lewis. “Preface.” Cup of Gold: A Life of Sir Henry Morgan, Buccaneer, with Occasional Reference to History. New York: P. F. Collier, 1936. v-viii.
Jackson, Joseph Henry. “John Steinbeck: A Portrait.” The Saturday Review of Literature 16.22 (September 25, 1937): 11-12.
Li, Luchen, ed. John Steinbeck: A Documentary Volume. Dictionary of Literary Biography. Vol. 309. Detroit: Thomson-Gale, 2005.
Lisca, Peter. The Wide World of John Steinbeck. New York: Gordian, 1981.
McCullough, David. The Path Between the Seas: The Creation of the Panama Canal, 1870-1914. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1977.
Parini, Jay. John Steinbeck: A Biography. New York: Henry Holt, 1995.
Pope, Dudley. The Buccaneer King: The Biography of the Notorious Sir Henry Morgan, 1635-1688. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1977.
Prindle, Dennis. “The Pretexts of Romance: Steinbeck’s Allegorical Naturalism from Cup of Gold to Tortilla Flat.” In The Steinbeck Question: New Essays in Criticism . Ed. Donald R. Noble. Troy, NY: Whitston, 1993. 23-36.
Sabatini, Rafael. Captain Blood. 1922. New York: Penguin Classics, 2003.
“Saw a Rebellion Started in Panama.” The New York Times (October 19, 1925): 16.
Steinbeck, John. “Autobiography: Making of a New Yorker.” The New York Times (Febru
ary 1, 1953): SMA 26.
———. Cannery Row. 1945. New York: Penguin, 1994.
———. The Log from the Sea of Cortez. 1941. New York: Penguin, 1995.
———. Steinbeck: A Life in Letters. Ed. Elaine Steinbeck and Robert Wallsten. New York: Viking, 1975.
Stevenson, Robert Louis. Treasure Island. 1881. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1911.
Timmerman, John H. John Steinbeck’s Fiction: The Aesthetics of the Road Taken. Norman: University of Oklahoma, 1986.
Valjean, Norman. John Steinbeck, The Errant Knight: An Intimate Biography of the California Years. San Francisco: Chronicle, 1975.
CHAPTER 1
I
All afternoon the wind sifted out of the black Welsh glens, crying notice that 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 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. A few goats clambered to the tops of high lone rocks and long stared upward with their yellow eyes and sniffed the heavens.
The afternoon passed slowly, procession-like with an end of evening, and on the heels of the evening an excited wind rushed out, rustled in the dry grasses, and fled whimpering across the fields. Night drew down like a black cowl, and Holy Winter sent his nuncio to Wales.
Beside the high-road which lined the valley, ran up through a cleft in the hills, and so out into the world, there stood an ancient farm-house built of heavy stones and thatched. The Morgan who had built it played against Time and nearly won.
Inside the house a fire was burning on the hearth; an iron kettle hung over the blaze, and a black iron oven hid in the coals which fell about the edges of the flame. The brisk fire-light glinted on the tips of long-handled pikes in racks upon the walls, weapons unused in the hundred years since Morgan clamored in Glendowers’ ranks and trembled with rage at the flinty lines of Iolo Goch.
The wide brass bindings of a great chest, which stood in a corner, sucked in the light and glowed resplendently. Papers there were in the chest, and parchments, and stiff untanned skins, written in English and Latin and the old Cumric tongue: Morgan was born, Morgan was married, Morgan became a knight, Morgan was hanged. Here lay the history of the house, shameful and glorious. But the family was few now, and little enough likely to add records to the chest other than the simple chronicle: Morgan was born—and died.
There was Old Robert, for instance, sitting in his high-backed chair, sitting and smiling into the fire. His smile was perplexity and a strange, passive defiance. You would have said he sought to make that Fate which was responsible for his being, a little ashamed of itself by smiling at it. Often he wearily considered his existence, ringed around with little defeats which mocked it as street children torment a cripple. It was strange to Old Robert that he, who knew so much more than his neighbors, who had pondered so endlessly, should be not even a good farmer. Sometimes he imagined he understood too many things ever to do anything well.
And so Old Robert sipped the burned ale of his own experimenting and smiled into the fire. His wife would be whispering excuses for him, he knew, and the laborers in the fields removed their hats to Morgan, not to Robert.
Even his aged mother, Gwenliana, here beside him, shivering to the fire as though the very wind sounds about the house called in the cold to her, was not so judged incompetent. In the cottages there was a little fear of her and a great respect. Any day when she sat in the garden, holding her necromantic court, you might see some tall farm lad blushing and hugging his hat across his chest while he listened to Gwenliana’s magic. For many years, now, she had been practicing the second sight and taking pride in it. And though the family knew her prophecies to be whole guesses whose shrewdness grew less sharp with her years, they listened to her with respect, and simulated awe, and asked of her the location of lost things. When, after one of her mystic recitations, the scissors were not discovered under the second board of the shed floor, they pretended to find them there anyway; for, had she lost the robe of augury, there would have remained only a little wrinkled old woman soon to die.
This play of claque to a simpleton was a harsh tax on the convictions of Mother Morgan. It outraged her nature, for she was one who had, apparently, come into the world to be a scourge to all foolishness. Such matters as had so obviously no connection either with the church or with the prices of things were plainly nonsense.
Old Robert had loved his wife so well and so long that he could think sharp things about her, and the thoughts could not injure his affection. When she had come home this afternoon, raging over the price of a pair of shoes she hadn’t wanted anyway, he had considered: “Her life is like a book crowded with mighty events. Every day she rises to the peak of some tremendous climax which has to do with buttons or a neighbor’s wedding. I think that when true tragedy comes in upon her, she will not see it over her range of ant-hills. Perhaps this is luck,” he thought, and then—“I wonder, now, how she would compare the king’s own death with the loss of one of the sow’s red pigs.”
Mother Morgan was too busy with the day itself to be bothered with the foolishness of abstractions. Some one in the family had to be practical or the thatch would blow away—and what could you expect of a pack of dreamers like Robert and Gwenliana and her son Henry? She loved her husband with a queer mixture of pity and contempt born of his failings and his goodness.
Young Henry, her son, she worshiped, though of course she could not trust him to have the least idea of what was to his benefit or conducive to his health. And all of the family loved Mother Morgan and feared her and got in her way.
She had fed them and trimmed the lamp. Breakfast was on the fire. Now she searched about for something to mend, as though she did not mend everything the moment it was torn. In the midst of her search for busyness, she paused and glanced sharply at young Henry. It was the kind of harsh, affectionate look which says, “I wonder, now, if he is not in the way of catching cold there on the floor.” And Henry squirmed, wondering what things he had neglected to do that afternoon. But immediately she caught up a cloth and went to dusting, and the boy was reassured.
He lay propped on one elbow and stared past the fire into his thoughts. The long gray afternoon, piercing to this mysterious night, had called up strong yearnings in him, the seeds of which were planted months before. It was a desire for a thing he could not name. Perhaps the same force moved him which collected the birds into exploring parties and made the animals nervously sniff up-wind for the scent of winter.
Young Henry was conscious, this night, that he had lived on for fifteen tedious years without accomplishing any single thing of importance. And had his mother known his feeling, she would have said,
“He is growing.”
And his father would have repeated after her,
“Yes, the boy is growing.” But neither would have understood what the other meant.
Henry, if you considered his face, drew from his parents almost equally. His cheek bones were high and hard, his chin firm, his upper lip short and thin like his mother’s. But there, too, were the sensual underlip, and the fine nose, and the eyes which looked out on dreams; these were Old Robert’s features, and his was the thick, wiry hair coiled like black springs against the head. 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 about which to decide. Here were three before the fire, Robert and Gwenliana and young Henry, whose eyes looked out beyond the walls and saw unbodied things— looked into the night for the ghosts.
It was a preternatural night; a time when you might meet corpse-candles gliding along the road, or come upon the ghost of a Roman legion marching a
t double quick to reach its sheltering city of Caerleon before the full storm broke. And the little misshapen beings of the hills would be searching out deserted badger holes to cover them from the night. The wind would go crying after them through the fields.
In the house it was quiet except for the snapping fire-noises and for the swishing sound of blown thatch. A log cracked on the hearth; and out of the crevice a thin blaze leaped up and curled about the black kettle like a flower of flame. Now Mother flurried to the fireplace.
“Robert, you will never be paying attention to the fire. You should be poking at it now and again.”
Such was her method. She poked a large fire to make it smaller, and, when it died, she stirred the embers violently to restore the flame.
A faint sound of footsteps came along the high-road—a sound that might have been the wind or those walking things which cannot be seen. The steps grew louder, then stopped in front of the door from whence came a timid knocking.
“Come!” Robert called. The door opened softly, and there, lighted against the black night, stood a bent, feeble man with eyes like weak flames. He paused on the threshold as though undecided, but in a moment advanced into the room, asking in a strange, creaking voice,
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