Cup of Gold (4 page)

Proud of his Irish ancestry on his mother’s side, Steinbeck also experimented with Irish dialect, placing it in the mouth of Morgan’s Welsh father—“What time will you be starting, the morning?”—and more appropriately using it to color the speech of the Irish sailor, Tim—“ ’Twas when I was a boy like this one here, and I sailing in a free ship that tucked [sic] about the ocean. . . .”

Not long after completing
Cup of Gold
, Steinbeck understood that he would need to sweep “all the Cabellyo-Byrneish preciousness” out of his prose “for good.” “I seem to have outgrown Cabell,” he wrote to his friend A. Grove Day, and “I have not the slightest desire to step into Donn Byrne’s shoes.” Already Steinbeck knew that he had “twice [the] head” of these two early influences. Yet in some respects his protests are disingenuous. Long after the triumph of
The Grapes of Wrath
(1939), Steinbeck remained attracted to medievalism as well as to the comic and satiric possibilities of fantasy, as we see in
The Short Reign of Pippin IV
(1957). At the time of his death in 1968, Steinbeck was working on his own translation of Malory’s
Morte d’Arthur
. The “Cabellyo-Byrneish” strain underlies his canonical works as well. Throughout his career, Steinbeck would continue to combine allegory and fantasy with naturalism, to strive unabashedly for melody and sensuality in his descriptive writing, and to value the poetic properties of dialect, albeit more realistically deployed (as in
The Grapes of Wrath
). Cabell and Byrne were unusual models for an American writer serving an apprenticeship in the 1920s, and
Cup of Gold
provides an important look at young Steinbeck experimenting with their methods—methods that would give his mature work a distinctive stamp.

Cup of Gold
is not solely a historical-biographical-swashbuckling pirate fantasy with literary ambitions. The novel also has a strong autobiographical strain. Writing to his friend A. Grove Day on December 5, 1929, Steinbeck confessed that
Cup of Gold
was written in part “for the purpose of getting . . . all the autobiographical material (which hounds us until we get it said) out of my system.” Into the story of young Henry Morgan, Steinbeck wove the experiences of his own young life and of his quest to become a writer. Those experiences included Steinbeck’s own very real voyage to Panama—a country torn by political unrest and speaking volumes about American corporate and military imperialism in the 1920s. His literary quest included an abortive assault on that Cup of Gold for all American writers—New York City. These autobiographical currents make
Cup of Gold
not only a portrait of the artist as a young man, but an allegory of the Faustian bargain implicit in the American dream— whether the dream of an aggressive young nation, Steinbeck’s “Republic of Buccaneers”—or the dream of an aggressive young individual ambitious for fortune, fame, and love.

John Steinbeck was born to John Ernst and Olive Hamilton Steinbeck on February 27, 1902, in the small town of Salinas, California. His father resembled Henry Morgan’s father, Robert, in being a failure, a dreamer, a gardener in his spare time, and a compassionate man loved and respected by others. Having lost his own business, the senior Steinbeck nevertheless maintained his wife and four children (three daughters and John) in modest comfort through his work as a bookkeeper for the Spreckels Sugar Factory and as Treasurer for Monterey County. Olive, a schoolteacher before her marriage, was a dominant force both in her family and in the community— known for her energy, her determination, and her ambition for her children. Aspects of Olive’s character mark the pragmatic, iron-willed Mother Morgan. About his protagonist in
Cup of Gold
, Steinbeck would write:

Young Steinbeck found something to decide about in the pages of books. From enchanted boyhood readings of works including the Caxton
Morte d’Arthur
and Robert Louis Stevenson’s
Treasure Island
, books that would leave indelible marks on
Cup of Gold
, he acquired a passionate love of language and a desire to become a storyteller as strong as Henry Morgan’s desire to “go a-buccaneering and take a Spanish town.” Steinbeck must have felt, very early, the conviction that he could achieve greatness as a writer if only he could avoid entrapment in the mundane concerns and expectations of the adult world. Steinbeck’s Merlin, an elderly failed poet who understands the dangers of the path, looks sadly at his own idled harps and says to Henry Morgan:

Before Steinbeck could drink from the moon, there was college. His parents insisted. He arrived at Stanford University in the fall of 1919 and attended sporadically for the next six years. Single-minded about his dream, Steinbeck focused largely on creative writing and literature classes, voracious reading in Stanford’s excellent library, meetings of the English Club, and his own writing. He may have viewed some of his professors as Henry Morgan views James Flower—quiet and kindly, ineffectual and inefficient men and women who cried out to be creators and were not, but who recognized in him “one of those divinely endowed creatures who control[led] the fire” they lacked altogether. Steinbeck’s contempt for Stanford’s required curriculum meant a wealth of incompletes and failures, as well as quite a few leaves of absence. During these periods, Steinbeck found employment supervising migrant workers on the Spreckels ranches, where sugar beets were grown and harvested by gangs of hobos and bindlestiffs, as well as by Japanese, Mexican, and Filipino labor. His education resembled Henry Morgan’s in
Cup of Gold
, alternating between self-directed study in James Flower’s magnificent library and overseeing the plantation’s multiracial work force.

In the spring of 1925, Steinbeck left Stanford without taking a degree or even completing the equivalent of three years’ course work. This was failure by the standards of the adult world, and his parents, especially his mother, were understandably disappointed. He had little to show for himself except a sheaf of unpublished manuscripts, including a short story about the pirate Henry Morgan—“A Lady in Infra-Red.” But still Steinbeck had the resolve to continue to test his dream, and again like his own young Henry Morgan, he proposed to do that with a voyage. If Panama, that fabled Spanish treasure port, was the “Cup of Gold” for the aspiring seventeenth-century buccaneer, then surely New York City, America’s vibrant capital of the arts, was an equivalent Grail for the aspiring twentieth-century writer. Somehow, Steinbeck persuaded his long-suffering father to buy him a $100 tourist-class ticket for travel by freighter from San Francisco to New York. In
Cup of Gold
, Robert Morgan also finds the courage to let his son go, and the novel contains this insight into a father’s hope:

On November 1, 1925, Steinbeck left San Francisco on board the
Katrina Luckenbach
, a 449-foot-long steamship with twin screws, four turbines, and the modern conveniences of electric lights and wireless. With a black hull, red boot-topping, and buff ventilators,
Katrina
was not a passenger liner, but a working freighter owned by the Luckenbach company. She carried about forty crew members and had space for only a few passengers in her two-story deckhouse. Thanks to boyhood summers at his family’s cottage on the Pacific shore, Steinbeck had the sea in his blood. “The water slapping smooth hulls was a joy to him to the point of pain,” he wrote of Henry Morgan. On the waterfront, “He felt that he had come home again to a known, loved place . . .” At one point during his Stanford years, Steinbeck had even tried to run away to sea and work a passage to China, but could not find a shipboard job. Now he was outward bound on his first voyage. As a tugboat towed
Katrina
out of the harbor and her foreign crew hustled about the deck, Steinbeck must have felt some of the excitement he ascribes to Henry Morgan as the
Bristol Girl
casts off: “They were starting for the Indies—the fine, far Indies where boys’ dreams lived.”

Katrina
was actually bound first to Panama, Morgan’s “Cup of Gold.” She cruised down the coasts of California, Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica at a top speed of 13½ knots (about 15 miles per hour). This leisurely pace gave Steinbeck time to observe birds and marine life such as the storm petrels and flying fish described in
Cup of Gold
. He also had time to get to know the vessel’s crew. Perhaps, like Henry Morgan, he found “wise, kind men . . . [who] taught him what they could,” not only about the working of the ship, but about “songs of death and mutiny and blood in the sea,” “the peculiar clean swearing of sailors,” and tales “of wonders seen and imagined.” At least one sailor, resembling the treacherous Tim in
Cup of Gold
, found a way to part a naïve young man from his money. In a 1937 interview about his voyage to New York, Steinbeck told Joseph Henry Jackson that “On the way he learned to his astonishment that plain, ordinary, unloaded dice could be controlled if one knew how. The discovery came to him through the medium of a large and very black sailor and was slightly expensive, but at least it was something to know.”

Steinbeck’s voyage on
Katrina
also gave him time to form a friendship with a young, California-born artist named Mahlon Blaine. Like Steinbeck, Blaine was headed for New York to seek his fortune. Specializing in the fantastic, the surreal, the sensuous, and even the satanic (illustrations for Edgar Rice Burroughs’s
Tanar of Pellucidar
, Gustave Flaubert’s
Salammbô
, William Beckford’s
Vathek
, Paul Verlaine’s
Hashish and Incense
, the Marquis de Sade’s
Justine
, and a tome on
Satanism and Witchcraft
are among his best-known works), Blaine would soon make a career for himself as a book illustrator in the style of Aubrey Beardsley. The two shipmates would remain in touch. Four years after the voyage of the
Katrina
, Blaine would illustrate a striking dust jacket for
Cup of Gold
.

Steinbeck left the
Katrina
at Panama City for a stay of several days. According to Joseph Henry Jackson, the writer planned “to absorb color there for a book he had in mind, the romanticized life of the pirate Henry Morgan.” But Panama City in 1925 was neither colorful nor romantic. In mid-October 1925, just a few weeks before Steinbeck’s departure from San Francisco, the city erupted in violence, as thousands of workers joined in a general strike and marched to protest high rents. The situation deteriorated into widespread rioting when Panamanian police killed a leader of the protests, Marciano Mirones. Would-be revolutionaries flying red flags massed in Cathedral Square, and American tourists told the
New York Times
of hearing a “thunderstorm” of rifle volleys from the protesters, followed by the sound of machine-gun fire as government troops responded. President Rodolfo Chiari asked the United States for military assistance, and on October 12 three steel-helmeted battalions of the Thirty-Third Infantry marched into the city from their barracks in the Canal Zone, dispersing mobs at bayonet point and setting up machine-gun nests to guard government buildings and the president’s palace. On October 23, with order restored, U.S. troops withdrew. The
Christian Science Monitor
reported a subsequent wave of arrests, deportations, and evictions of troublesome ringleaders, as well as President Chiari’s declaration that the Panamanian legislature did not need to meet because “the recent disturbances . . . might influence the lawmakers toward partial legislation in favor of tenants.”

In Panama City between two and three weeks after the withdrawal of American forces, Steinbeck must have heard talk about the riots and seen the anger still smoldering in the eyes around him. In what reads as a racist attempt to trivialize the Panamanian crisis, the
New York Times
quoted an eyewitness, Captain George Zeh: “The nucleus of a revolution is a bottle of rum, two half-breeds, and a negro armed with rifles and machetes.” Steinbeck, whose Henry Morgan will lay waste to Panama City with a mob of such have-nots, would not have seen any irony in Zeh’s statement. From Steinbeck’s visit to Panama,
Cup of Gold
would derive not local color, but a sense of how vulnerable a people “grown soft in their security” might become, and of how the oppressed, once armed, might go “marauding like tigers from a broken cage.”