Cup of Gold (3 page)

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:

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 lightning.”

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.

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:

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:

Even the facts 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.

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:

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.