Cup of Gold by John Steinbeck Read Free Book Online Page B

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”:
    Cup of Gold is the picture of a dreamer—of a dreamer who eternally searched for some ephemeral happiness. Cities and countries richer than man ever dreamed of fell before his armies. He had women, gold, ships, power. But peace was not there and Henry Morgan was a lost soul looking for something he could never find. And thus he died.
    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:
    Here, too, are the Steinbeck themes of loneliness, mystic identity with the whole world (notice the great Tone at the end), women’s secret knowledge, the speed of rumor, degeneration caused by too much security. Visible here are Steinbeck’s interests in social justice, Greek and Latin literature, occult powers, the inner life of children. And in this, his first novel, we meet the Virgin Whore, the prostitute, the competent mother, the religious bigot, the madman, the wealthy amateur scientist, and the wizard-seer—recurring character types in Steinbeck’s novels.
    Biographer Jay Parini adds: “Much of what a sympathetic reader finds to admire in the mature Steinbeck is present here in Ur-form: the