Cup of Gold

by John Steinbeck

  Set in the eighteenth century, Treasure Island tells the story of young Jim Hawkins, whose mother runs the Admiral Ben-bow Inn on the west coast of England. An old and dissolute buccaneer, Billy Bones, comes to stay, and when Bones drinks himself to death, Jim finds a map in the pirate’s sea chest showing the way to buried treasure. Soon Jim sets sail to the West Indies to seek this fortune, accompanied by two pillars of the community—Squire Trelawney and Doctor Livesey—as well as the trickster Long John Silver, a pirate masquerading as their cook. A narrative of thrilling fights and adventures, Treasure Island is also an initiation story. Coming to manhood in a world of treachery, violence, and greed, Jim nevertheless finds physical and moral courage as well as Captain Flint’s treasure. Cup of Gold reverses the moral tendencies of the children’s story, yet owes a number of elements to Treasure Island—the decision to begin with Morgan’s boyhood, the arrival of Dafydd (a burned-out buccaneer resembling Billy Bones), young Henry’s innocence and vulnerability among the hard-bitten characters of a seaport tavern as he seeks a passage, and the Irish sailor Tim, who like Long John Silver simultaneously befriends, teaches, defrauds, and exploits the boy.

  Steinbeck was almost certainly indebted as well to Rafael Sabatini’s Captain Blood, a swashbuckling historical novel that became an international bestseller in 1922. Like Cup of Gold, Sabatini’s novel draws from the Henry Morgan story. In places (notably its description of Blood’s clever escape from the Spanish fleet at Maracaibo), Captain Blood so closely parallels Exquemelin’s narrative that Sabatini teasingly writes, “[T]hose of you who have read Esquemeling [alternate spelling] may be in danger of supposing that Henry Morgan really performed those things which here are veraciously attributed to Peter Blood. I think, however, that . . . you will reach my own conclusion as to which is the real plagiarist.” Yet not all of the similarities between Cup of Gold and Captain Blood are necessarily due to their common source. As Joseph Fontenrose points out:Steinbeck’s Henry Morgan owes several traits to Peter Blood. . . . Both Blood and Steinbeck’s Morgan, forced into indentures, become valuable to their superiors (Blood as physician to the governor), gain fame as pirate chiefs, and finally become governors of Jamaica. Each named a ship after his ladylove, Blood’s “Arabella,” Morgan’s “Elizabeth” (and Blood had an “Elizabeth” under his command). In fact, simply considered as a story of buccaneering on the Spanish Main, Cup of Gold is fully as entertaining as Captain Blood.

  Cup of Gold differs from Captain Blood in many important ways, however. First published as a series of short stories in the magazine Adventure, Captain Blood is literally the stuff of pulp fiction. Despite Sabatini’s relative seriousness about historically correct background, Blood is a stereotypical hero— pure-hearted, just, and brave—a pacifist physician wrongfully arrested for treating a wounded man during England’s Monmouth Rebellion. Deported to Barbados as a plantation slave, Blood saves his fellow prisoners from wretched conditions by masterminding their escape into piracy. Unlike Steinbeck’s ruthless and ambitious Morgan, Blood is a reluctant if brilliant buccaneer, with no desire but to return to respectability as soon as possible, so that he may be worthy of the governor’s niece, the lovely Arabella Bishop. After shining in the obligatory series of piratical adventures, Blood regains his good name by saving Port Royal from the French and is rewarded with the governorship of Jamaica and Arabella’s hand. Captain Blood has a classic happy ending, whereas in Cup of Gold Morgan’s governorship and marriage are hollow and ironic victories, and the novel’s true conclusion is the pirate’s lonely death. Nevertheless, Sabatini demonstrated for Steinbeck that the Morgan story contained the necessary ingredients for popular success, if only the young author could unlock them.

  Since its infancy, Hollywood had understood what Steinbeck called “melo drahmar” as well as the popular appeal of the wild, mysterious, unexpected, and racy. Pirate movies had it all—high adventure, picaresque heroes, duels and broadsides, exotic locations, opulent costumes, desperate deeds, drunken orgies, and romance flourishing on dark soil. Steinbeck came of age in the era of silent films and the swashbucklers of the time may have influenced his choice of subject. The years 1912, 1918, and 1920 each saw a film of Treasure Island, while Captain Blood first flickered onto the screen in 1924, in an early version not to be confused with the better-known 1935 rendition starring Errol Flynn.

  Then, in 1926, the year Steinbeck began work in earnest on Cup of Gold, came The Black Pirate, a silent masterpiece that made cinematic history at box offices across America. An epic on the grand scale, The Black Pirate was filmed in an early two-tone color process and featured a lively orchestral score by Mortimer Wilson. The movie starred the athletic Douglas Fairbanks as yet another pure-hearted gentleman who after out-pirating the pirates wins the girl and is restored to his rightful position. Fairbanks performed the breathtaking stunts—swinging through the rigging and, famously, sliding down a sail—that have since become an obligatory part of a pirate movie. Billie Dove played the captive Princess Isobel; Steinbeck’s La Santa Roja, also Ysobel, may be her namesake. Whether Steinbeck had such films in mind as he wrote Cup of Gold is impossible to say, but in a letter dated November 1937 he would remind his agents: “If you get any request for stories for Hollywood remember there is still that old Cup which is the only thing I have ever done that would make a good movie.”

  Thanks to Steinbeck’s first wife, Carol Henning, and her correspondence with bibliographer Robert DeMott, we do know that Cup of Gold was influenced by a contemporary play about Henry Morgan—The Buccaneer. Written by Maxwell Anderson and Laurence Stallings, popular playwrights best-known as the authors of the World War I play What Price Glory? (1924), The Buccaneer played for just a few weeks on Broadway in October 1925. Steinbeck never saw this obscure play on stage, but read it in a 1926 collection of Anderson and Stallings’s works, Three American Plays.

  Drawn from Exquemelin’s story of Morgan and the resisting female captive, and set almost entirely in Panama City, The Buccaneer is first and foremost a romance, and probably influenced the love interests twining through Cup of Gold as well as Steinbeck’s decision to emphasize La Santa Roja. Like Steinbeck’s Morgan, Anderson and Stallings’s buccaneer has left a woman behind in Wales, rejecting her love and the beauty of his native land for life as a sea-rover:“Very pleasant it is back in Wales with the mountains turning gold in autumn and green in spring. A man comes home peacefully every night but Saturday, kisses his decent little wife a frugal little kiss, and before he knows it, he’s dead and done for. That’s domesticity for you. I decided that I didn’t want to die that way. I took ship.”

  Morgan dreams instead of “a perfect city” and “a perfect woman.” On invading Panama, he commandeers for his head-quarters a hacienda belonging to the beautiful Donna Lisa, who resists his every advance. Morgan’s lust for her slowly turns to love as her bravery, wit, pride, and virtue win his respect. As in Cup of Gold, Morgan’s capture of Panama and love for Donna Lisa seem the culmination of his life’s quest. “Lady,” Morgan tells Donna Lisa, “it was at your shrine that I worshipped. It was for you I hoped as I cut my way through Spanish lines to Spanish gold. It was you I longed for. I long for you now!” Steinbeck’s Morgan too dreams of capturing the perfect city and the perfect woman, telling his friend Coeur de Gris on the eve of the attack: “You cannot understand my yearning. It is as though I strove for some undreamed peace. This woman is the harbor of all my questing.”

  In The Buccaneer, Donna Lisa slowly comes to love Morgan for his courage and unconventional ways, and especially for the exciting life he offers. “To love me is an adventure,” Morgan proclaims. She too longs to “take ship” and escape the stifling domesticity that is her lot as a woman, and her adventurous spirit is recapitulated in Steinbeck’s La Santa Roja, rumored to ride astride and handle a rapier as well as a man. When Morgan sees Donna Lisa, he feels himself struck “by tropic lightning”; Steinbeck’s La Santa Roja also possesses “the harsh dangerous beauty of ligh
tning.”

  But unlike Cup of Gold, where the captive lady defeats and humiliates Morgan, and comes to represent all dreams that turn to ashes, The Buccaneer has a traditional happy ending. When Morgan is arrested for piracy and taken to England for trial, Donna Lisa follows, and when he is released and knighted, she agrees to become his wife. “Who’ll follow Sir Henry Morgan to the Caribbean and the Spanish Main?” he asks the English court. “Who’s sick of living at the rotten center of an empire? Who’ll see Jamaica with me, and a thousand ports of call?” No man steps forward, but Donna Lisa does.

  Comparison of the romances in The Buccaneer and Cup of Gold also helps to highlight Steinbeck’s bold treatment of race in his pirate story. The Buccaneer changes Exquemelin’s Spanish lady into an English widow. Blonde and blue-eyed, Donna Lisa is actually Lady Elizabeth Neville, and when she marries Morgan, she becomes Lady Elizabeth Morgan. Thus Anderson and Stallings elide Exquemelin’s beautiful captive and the historic Morgan’s wedded wife. More than a plot convenience designed to end a romance with a marriage, this strategy seems fundamentally racist, belonging to the anti-immigration and nativist sentiments of the 1920s. Courting Donna Lisa, Morgan says “[M]y heart tells me that if I were to step but a pace nearer you I should catch the scent of Devonshire roses from your hair and the fragrance of English hawthorn from your sweet body. England, madame, is a passion to me, and the stench of foreigners is poison to my blood.” Steinbeck’s Morgan too imagines La Santa Roja as “a young girl with blue, seraphic eyes” and as “a perfume after filth,” but instead encounters a hawklike woman with a bold, black gaze. Here, as elsewhere in Cup of Gold, Steinbeck does not shy away from the historical realities of mixed races and cultures in the seventeenth-century Caribbean. Episodes such as Morgan’s affair with Paulette— “poor little slave of the jumbled bloods, she was Spanish and Carib and Negro and French”—remind us of his daring when set against the whitewashed pirate stories of his time.

  LITERARY INFLUENCES: JAMES BRANCH CABELL AND DONN BYRNE

  In Cup of Gold, Steinbeck drew not only from the romance and reality of the pirate tradition, but from more ambitious literary models—specifically, from two icons of the medieval revival in 1920s American literature, James Branch Cabell and Donn Byrne. Both writers were widely read and held in high critical esteem during the period when Steinbeck conceived and wrote Cup of Gold. To a young writer working in solitude far from the experiments in literary modernism then underway in Paris, Cabell and Byrne seemed to set a standard of excellence. Their embrace of fantasy and romance, their historical settings, their use of allegory and symbolism, and their preference for archaic and figurative language appealed to some of Steinbeck’s deepest instincts, and he could not know that both writers would drop out of fashion in the coming years, eclipsed by the rising sun of Ernest Hemingway and his disciples, with their contemporary settings, graphic realism, spare style, and clipped dialogue. The influence of Branch and Cabell, now all but forgotten, is important to a reading of Cup of Gold, however, helping to explain much that seems “weird” in this first novel.

  Of the two writers, James Branch Cabell was perhaps most important to Steinbeck. Cabell was best-known for a series of fantasy novels set in the mythical medieval country of Poictesme. Of these, the most famous was Jurgen (1919), the story of a middle-aged pawnbroker who regains his youth, becomes a knight, and goes questing through many imaginary lands, meeting the sorcerer Merlin and courting fabulous beauties including Helen of Troy and the princess Guenevere of Arthurian legend. The novel uses archaic language—“Thus did Jurgen abide at the chivalrous court of Glathion” and “If she avow such constant hate of love as would ignore my great and constant love, plead thou no more!” The novel is also rich in figurative language: “When Guenevere undid her hair it was a marvel to Jurgen to note how snugly this hair descended about the small head and slender throat, and then broadened boldly and clothed her with a loose soft foam of pallid gold.” It is easy, when looking at Jurgen, to see how Cabell’s work emboldened Steinbeck to insert elements of fantasy and allegory into Cup of Gold, especially those drawn from his beloved Morte d’Arthur, such as Morgan’s own meeting with Merlin, and the novel’s overarching structure of a Grail quest. Cabell’s success also gave Steinbeck license to indulge in archaic language—“And at last, when thou art girded with honor and repute, thou shalt marry a white-souled maiden of mighty rank”—and revel in metaphor—“Night drew down like a black cowl, and Holy Winter sent his nuncio to Wales” or “the ship ran before the crying dogs of the wind like a strong, confident stag.”

  But Cabell’s Jurgen, like Cup of Gold, is antichivalric in its tendencies, an essentially ironic and often comic modern novel using allegory and symbolism not to create but to deflate ideals and illusions; not to celebrate the romance of the past, but to expose the mediocrity of modern life by contrast. Jurgen can’t quite warm up to the lovely Guenevere—“Why, then, am I not out of my head about her?”—and eventually abandons his questing to return to a life of domesticity with his shrewish wife, Dame Lisa. So too Steinbeck’s Morgan will give up buccaneering and his dreams of an ideal love for respectability and marriage to his “hectoring . . . badgering . . . browbeating” cousin Elizabeth. Both novelists, in their way, use the quest motif to record the tragicomic, blundering efforts of (in Steinbeck’s words) “a little, struggling life to squirm upward, through the circles toward Gwynfyd, the sheening Purity.”

  Cabell also uses a kind of stylistic dissonance to reinforce his novel’s thematic ironies at the sentence level. An inflated speech in archaic language might end with a modern pinprick: “And so on, and so on!” Or Cabell will deliberately undercut his own metaphoric language, as he does after Jurgen’s elaborate description of Guenevere’s golden hair: “[W]hen I proclaim that my adored mistress’s hair reminds me of gold I am quite consciously lying. It looks like yellow hair, and nothing else: nor would I willingly venture within ten feet of any woman whose head sprouted with wires, of whatever metal.” Steinbeck engages in similarly comic deflations, as when Gwenliana ends her lofty and lurid prophecy of Morgan’s future—“There shall be fighting and shedding of blood, and the sword shall be thy first bride. . . . The terror will precede thee like a screaming eagle over the shields of men”—with a plaintive, “I could have done better with a sheep’s shoulder.” Perhaps the most-cited example in Cup of Gold occurs when Morgan’s father considers the “cruel difference” between himself and his son Henry:“[W]hereas he runs about sticking his finger into pot after pot of cold porridge, grandly confident that each one will prove the pottage of his dreaming . . . I believe all porridge to be cold. And so—I imagine great dishes of purple porridge, drenched with dragon’s milk, sugared with a sweetness only to be envisioned.”

  The purple porridge and dragon’s milk are apt to disturb readers who miss Steinbeck’s Cabellesque method and intention— using ludicrously inflated language to underscore the harshness of everyday reality and the folly of dreams.

  Jurgen became notorious—and a literary cause célèbre that could not have escaped Steinbeck’s attention—when the New York Society for the Prevention of Vice seized the plates and all copies of Cabell’s novel, and charged his publisher, Robert McBride & Company, with violating anti-obscenity law. The trial, held in 1922, vindicated the novel (only very mildly erotic by today’s standards) and made Cabell a bestselling sensation and literary cult figure. Steinbeck may have been hoping for a little of the same sort of notoriety when he created the character of Paulette, who possesses:... hair like a cataract of black water, eyes as blue as the sea, set in oriental slits, and a golden, golden skin. Hers was a sensuous, passionate beauty—limbs that twinkled like golden flames. Her lips could writhe like slender, twisting serpents or bloom like red flowers. . . . Henry thought of her as a delicate machine perfectly made for pleasure, a sexual contraption. . . . He built for her a tiny, vine-clad house roofed with banana leaves, and there he played at love.

  Even the fac
ts of Steinbeck’s early career demonstrate his affinity with Cabell. Cabell’s editor, Guy Holt, named in the Jurgen obscenity trial, would become the first editor to encourage young John Steinbeck, while Cabell’s publishing house, Robert McBride, would eventually publish Cup of Gold after many other firms had turned it down. In the end, Cabell’s influence on Steinbeck may have cut both ways. In 1946, Cabell published a pirate fantasy of his own—There Were Two Pirates. Cabell’s protagonist, based on the historic pirate Jose Gasparilla, ravages the coast of Florida, all the while longing, like Steinbeck’s Morgan, for the lost love he left behind in the Old World. Unlike Morgan, however, Cabell’s hero—by separating himself from his shadow—is allowed to experience his life as it would have been had he chosen not to “go a-buccaneering,” but to remain with his Isabel.

  Like James Branch Cabell, Donn Byrne (baptized Bernard Byrne, and sometimes known as Brian Oswald Donn Byrne or Donn-Byrne) wrote serious fiction in the vein of historical fantasy and enjoyed a critical reputation that gave the genre both respectability and marketability during the years when Cup of Gold was conceived and written. Byrne published a number of novels very much in vogue in the 1920s. Among those known to have influenced Steinbeck are Messer Marco Polo (1921), the story of the thirteenth-century Italian explorer’s love for the daughter of Kubla Khan; Brother Saul (1927), a fictional account of the biblical tyrant King and his jealousy of and attempt to murder his friend David (echoed in Morgan’s murder of Coeur de Gris); and Blind Raftery (1928), a tale of a wandering eighteenth-century Gaelic poet and his Spanish wife. Such popular works helped reinforce Steinbeck’s decision to choose an historical fantasy about the pirate Henry Morgan for his first novel.