Cup of Gold (6 page)

The book was published in August 1929, a little more than two months before the stock market crash of October 1929 began America’s slide into the Depression. McBride did not bother to send Steinbeck an advance copy; the author saw his first novel for the first time in a department store. He complained bitterly about his publisher’s failure to market
Cup of Gold
—book clubs turned it down, few review copies were distributed, and bookshop orders were not filled. Still,
Cup of Gold
enjoyed modest but respectable sales, with 1,533 copies sold from its first issue, more than the sales of Steinbeck’s next two novels combined.

Cup of Gold
received only a handful of reviews (helpfully collected in Luchen Li’s
John Steinbeck: A Documentary Volume
), but almost all of its first critics found something to admire in the novel: “Mr. Steinbeck’s graceful manner lifts the yarn above the adventure groceries of this degenerate age,” they wrote. “Thoroughly masculine and should find much favor with those male readers who used to delight in those bloody tales of piracy and rebellion.” “A meaty pleasing yarn wherein action sets the pace and clever writing plays the tune.” “Mr. Steinbeck’s fantasy is enjoyable reading.”

Yet for the most part, the same critics were thoroughly confused by the novel’s dueling genres and styles, and by its failure to meet their conventional expectations. The
New York Herald Tribune
expected “a novel of adventure,” probably something on the order of
Captain Blood
, and was disappointed to discover that “the tale lacks the color and spirit traditional to its genre, perhaps because the author has preferred to tinker with a realistic method.” The
St. Louis Star
expected a children’s pirate story like
Treasure Island
, and was shocked by
Cup of Gold
’s passion and brutality: “While most previous stories, whether historical or fictional of Morgan’s life, were written for the consumption of school boys, here is one that is decidedly not for juvenile perusal.” The
Ohio State Journal
expected a biography, but found “little of fact or history,” and resented the novel’s “shimmer of imagination.” The
New York Post
, also expecting a biography, objected to the intrusion of “fantasy, ” but particularly disliked the novel’s blend of “two schools of style . . . the modern naturalistic and the period manner” which “do not harmonize.” Only an anonymous reviewer for Stanford University’s newspaper, perhaps someone who knew Steinbeck, came close to capturing the spirit of this “fanciful, rather weird, and sometimes historical novel”:

These early reviewers were the first and last critics to read the novel as the work of an unknown writer.
Cup of Gold
failed to garner Steinbeck any significant attention from the literary world and was soon out of print, only to be reissued in 1936 after the author’s bestselling success with
Tortilla Flat
(1935) made his name. Now
Cup of Gold
would assume critical importance simply because it was written by John Steinbeck. Published by P.F. Collier, the 1936 edition opened with a preface by Lewis Gannett, who lauded Steinbeck’s talent as “among the most beautiful and most significant . . . in American literature today.” Gannett’s preface successfully predicted how
Cup of Gold
would be read in the years ahead: “And perhaps one may find in this glowingly youthful book, in this story of young Henry Morgan . . . a sort of key to Steinbeck himself. . . .” As Steinbeck’s oeuvre ripened with the classics
Of Mice and Men
(1937) and
The Grapes of Wrath
(1939), and as his reputation grew toward the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962 and canonization, the practice of reading
Cup of Gold
as a key to the writer only intensified. This interpretive game holds special fascination because, as Jackson Benson has noted, “After reading
The Grapes of Wrath
and
Cannery Row
, the reader may feel that this book [
Cup of Gold
] does not even seem to have been written by the same person.”

Critics, then, have tended to search
Cup of Gold
for thematic similarities between this ambitious, swashbuckling pirate fantasy and Steinbeck’s mature realistic fiction. For example, Joseph Fontenrose writes:

Biographer Jay Parini adds: “Much of what a sympathetic reader finds to admire in the mature Steinbeck is present here in Ur-form: the kernel story of a voyage, or quest; the image of an idealistic young man whose dreams go sour and end in disillusion; the conception of an intimate relationship between human beings and their environment; the understanding of how power may be abused by those who have too much of it; the theme of conflict between the sexes.”

Today, most critics regard
Cup of Gold
as a brilliant failure, a first novel flawed by overambition and overexuberance. Harry Thornton Moore’s observations are typical: “The book is patently the work of a young man, an eager and romantic young man who is not afraid to let himself go.” Young Steinbeck, writes Peter Lisca, “was an inexperienced but very ambitious writer.” Acutely alive to literary possibilities and eager to try them all, he pulled from too many clashing genres and methods, sources and influences. Steinbeck sampled every technique in the writer’s toolbox, and most of all, became drunk on language. In
Cup of Gold
, writes Howard Levant: “Many technical devices are evident, such as flashbacks, foreshadowing, interchapters, inserted brief narratives, internal monologue, a play on names, a dream sequence, a cluster of images and symbols, ironic confrontations and juxtapositions, parallels and oppositions, and a range of style that includes approximations of Welsh talk, the talk of the English gentry, the lingo of the New World half-breed, the formal talk of the Spanish grandee, and a precise observational, usually authorial language.” For Levant, as for many other critics, the novel’s very strengths, its “ambitious conception” and “richness of detail,” suggest why
Cup of Gold
is a failure: “its materials and its structure are not in harmonious relationship.”

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
.

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:

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.