Cup of Gold (5 page)

After his brief stay in the city, Steinbeck boarded another freighter to continue his voyage via the Panama Canal. Now his voyage would trace the approximate line of Henry Morgan’s historic seventeenth-century march across the Isthmus of Panama. Fifty miles wide at its narrowest point, the Isthmus joins the continents of North and South America, while separating the Pacific Ocean from the Caribbean Sea. From its discovery by Balboa in 1513, movingly described by Steinbeck in
Cup of Gold
, the Isthmus has been used as a shortcut between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, a way to avoid a dangerous sea voyage of many months and thousands of miles around Cape Horn, the storm-torn southern tip of South America. The Spanish of Morgan’s day appreciated its commercial benefits. Gold and silver from Spanish mines in Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, and Chile were carried up the Pacific coast in merchant vessels to Panama City, then loaded onto mule trains for transport by land across the Isthmus to Portobello, where a waiting
flota
would carry the treasure to Spain. Henry Morgan appreciated the military significance of the Isthmus, understanding how it could be used for rapid delivery of a strike force from the Caribbean to attack Panama City—the richest port on the Pacific— from its landward side. Steinbeck’s freighter would have made the forty-nine mile transit of the canal and its locks in about ten hours, time enough for him to search for glimpses of the jungled and mountainous terrain Morgan’s men traversed in 1671.

In 1925, when Steinbeck first saw it, the Panama Canal was a fresh marvel of modern engineering and a symbol of America’s buccaneering spirit. In a sense he had grown up with its story. The United States acquired rights to and began construction on the canal in 1904, when Steinbeck was two years old. The brainchild of President Theodore Roosevelt, built with the labor of 50,000 workers from many nations, the Panama Canal cost $352 million dollars to build. Thousands of workers gave their lives; during the American effort as many as 5,000 died due to landslides, construction accidents, and endemic diseases such as yellow fever and malaria. Finished in 1914, the year Steinbeck turned twelve, it was a source of national pride. The United States now dominated the trade of two oceans, exacting tolls from every passing ship, and had become a global naval power, controlling the path between the seas. In Steinbeck’s
Cup of Gold
, Balboa dresses in his “scoured armor,” wades into the Pacific, and “firmly addresse[s] the sea and claim[s] all the lands it broke on.” Teddy Roosevelt, the “New Imperialist, ” might have done the same.

There was, however, a darker side—a piratical side—to the Panama Canal story—one that Steinbeck probably knew well. In 1903, the United States spent $40 million to purchase the rights to the canal project, ostensibly from a bankrupt French company that had been trying for years to build a canal without success. The money, however, went to a Wall Street syndicate formed by financier J. P. Morgan. Like Steinbeck’s Henry Morgan, J. P. Morgan was a man who understood that “honesty—public honesty—may be a ladder to a higher, more valuable crime.” Acting on inside knowledge of the Roosevelt administration’s interest in Panama, Morgan’s syndicate had secretly purchased the French company for a song. When Congress approved construction of a canal through Nicaragua instead, Morgan’s group used campaign contributions to help Roosevelt “persuade” legislators to reverse the vote. Thousands of French stockholders lost their investments (in French, the word “Paname” is synonymous with “swindle”) as Morgan’s syndicate raked in millions of taxpayer dollars. When newspapers broke the story, President Roosevelt himself sued for libel and veteran newsman Joseph Pulitzer was frightened enough to flee the country. When Congress mounted investigations, they lasted long but went nowhere. The analogies between J. P. Morgan and Steinbeck’s Sir Henry Morgan, who cheats his own men out of the booty of Panama and uses his riches to bribe the king, would not have been lost on readers in 1929.

“I took the Isthmus,” Teddy Roosevelt declared unrepentantly, and a buccaneer named J. P. Morgan, a robber-baron with a famous yacht not coincidentally named
Corsair
, had helped him to do it. Panama at this time was an annex of Colombia, and when Colombia refused to ratify a treaty leasing the Canal Zone to the United States, Morgan’s syndicate, with the connivance of the Roosevelt administration, arranged and underwrote a convenient “revolution” in Panama. Colombian troops were bribed to abandon their posts, while Roosevelt, in an example of his famous “gunboat diplomacy,” sent the warship USS
Nashville
to sit off the Panama coast and discourage interference. Not surprisingly, the newly installed government of Panama was eager to make a treaty ceding the Canal Zone to the United States on very favorable terms.

These recent events were still resonant as Steinbeck traversed the Panama Canal. In 1921, the scandals had been revived when the League of Nations forced the United States to grant Colombia $25 million and free access to the canal as reparations for the illegal seizure of Panama. In 1925 in Panama City, Steinbeck had learned firsthand that the United States would use military force to prop a puppet government in Panama. Steinbeck’s
Cup of Gold
, albeit set in the seventeenth century, is at least in part about twentieth-century American imperialism and the piratical ethics of American business, as exemplified by Panama. In both centuries, a Morgan had contrived to carry the Isthmus by force and to swindle workers and stockholders of their fair share in the profits. Writing about Edward Mansvelt, who formed the buccaneers of the Caribbean into the dreaded Brethren of the Coast, Steinbeck writes obliquely about the violence and greed implicit in the American Dream:

Steinbeck’s freighter steamed out of the Panama Canal and on through the Caribbean Sea to his next port of call, Havana, Cuba. In 1925, Cuba, like Panama, was a U.S. protectorate, only nominally independent after the Spanish-American War of 1898. Like the English buccaneers of Henry Morgan’s time, Americans on the threshold of the twentieth century had invested in driving the Spanish from the New World. Cuba too was associated with the belligerent imperialism of Teddy Roosevelt, who famously led his Rough Riders in the charge up San Juan Hill, and with the militant capitalism of J. P. Morgan, whose steel-hulled steam yacht
Corsair
, commissioned into the U.S. Navy, helped destroy the Spanish fleet at Santiago Bay.

In Henry Morgan’s day, Havana was the major city of New Spain, a rich and bustling port where Spanish galleons gathered in fleets before crossing the Atlantic. Coming into the harbor, Steinbeck would have seen Havana’s sixteenth-century El Morro castle and its fortifications, built to keep marauders like Morgan out. Touring the historic city, he would have absorbed atmosphere useful in his novel to come, enjoying Havana’s Spanish architecture, including a 1701 cathedral as well as Old World plazas and drives. In a 1952 memoir titled “Autobiography, ” Steinbeck recalled taking “a pretty girl around Havana in a carriage” and being “charmed and worldly about broad rum drinks like tubs of soaking fruit.”

From there, it was on to New York City, the writer’s “Cup of Gold.” For Steinbeck, New York had come to be what Panama was to his Henry Morgan, “the harbor of all my questing.” So strong was the young man’s dream of the fortune, fame, and love awaiting a writer there, that Steinbeck later remembered thinking he could simply step off the freighter and into a fantasy of the celebrity life. In “Autobiography,” he wrote, “I don’t know what I thought I was going to do with that very pretty girl [from Havana] once I got to New York—marry her, I guess, and take her into my penthouse on Park Avenue, where my guest list had no names but those of the famous, the beautiful and the dissolute.” Reality was very different.

Steinbeck was not destined for a penthouse, but for a sofa bed in his married sister’s studio apartment. Of the one hundred dollars he’d had with him on leaving San Francisco, just three dollars remained on his arrival in New York.

Like his protagonist Henry Morgan, who arrived in the West Indies to find himself sold into indentured servitude, Steinbeck was condemned by his empty pockets to hard manual labor, pushing wheelbarrows of cement on a construction project by day, and trying to write at night. But soon things seemed to be improving. Mahlon Blaine, his friend from the
Katrina
voyage, helped Steinbeck find a room in a rundown hotel. An uncle helped him find a job as a newspaper reporter. Steinbeck met and fell in love with Mary Ardath, a showgirl from the
Greenwich Village Follies
. Best of all, Blaine introduced him to the publishing firm of Robert McBride & Company. There James Branch Cabell’s editor, Guy Holt, encouraged Steinbeck to believe that if he could supply enough short stories, McBride would publish a collection. He immediately went to work on pieces including the Henry Morgan story from his Stanford days, “A Lady in Infra-Red,” the germ of
Cup of Gold
.

Yet it would take New York City just six months to tear the wings off a young man’s dreams. The first blow to fall was a “Dear John” letter from Mary, a materialistic beauty who believed he should give up writing fiction for the advertising business and who would soon marry a banker. Mary would become the model for the woman who destroys Merlin’s gift in
Cup of Gold:
“She was vague as to the nature of success, but she made it very plain that song was not a structure of success.” Days later, Steinbeck was fired from the newspaper job he had been neglecting for his own writing. Unemployed, his rent in arrears, he wrote feverishly until he had assembled enough short stories for McBride. But when Steinbeck returned to the firm with his manuscript in hand, expecting publication of his first book, he learned that Guy Holt had left the company. Instead, Steinbeck found a new editor who not only refused to honor Holt’s verbal commitment, but refused even to look at the manuscript. According to biographer Jackson Benson, Steinbeck “went berserk”:

New York, like La Santa Roja, had proven to be a fickle muse, not to be taken either by fawning or force. At first seething with the anger and humiliation of rejection, Steinbeck next gave way to anxiety and depression. In “Autobiography,” he remembered locking himself in his room for two weeks, living on rye bread and dried herrings, afraid even to go out on the streets. Like Henry Morgan in
Cup of Gold
, he may even have feared himself “sick with mediocrity.” Unemployed and with no prospects, Steinbeck had little choice but to return home in defeat. Unable to afford a passenger ticket, he sailed for San Francisco as a workaway on another Luckenbach freighter, assisting the steward in serving and cleaning up after meals.

Most aspiring writers would have given up at this point. Instead, with an iron will unmatched even by his piratical protagonist, Steinbeck took a job as caretaker of a large summer estate on Lake Tahoe, at the foot of California’s Mount Tallac. This time he would try a Thoreauvian approach, seeking among the mountains of home a simple, rural muse more akin to Morgan’s barefoot Elizabeth than to the hard-bitten, sophisticated La Santa Roja. Having learned the hard way that publishers preferred novels to short story collections, Steinbeck now began the work of transforming “A Lady in Infra-Red” into
Cup of Gold
.

The caretaker’s position was ideal for writing. Steinbeck was given a little cabin of his own and the run of the library in the main house. There was a phonograph in the cabin, and as he wrote he often listened to Antonín Dvořák’s symphony “From the New World.” Written not long after the Czech composer’s arrival in New York City, the symphony features a heroic, hard-driving horn movement emblematic of determined ambition, contrasted with a tender, nostalgic largo—making a perfect “score” for
Cup of Gold
. In good weather, Steinbeck wrote outdoors in the woods—the family reported finding cups and glasses under the trees for years after his departure. In the winter, with the family gone, Steinbeck was entirely alone and often snowbound, with little to do but read and write. He would stay in the Tahoe job for two years, and through two long winters, until his first novel was done.

In the summer of 1928, Steinbeck sent a messy manuscript full of typos, crossings-out, and scribblings-in to his friend Ted Miller in New York. Miller, after arranging to have
Cup of
Gold
retyped, agreed to act informally as Steinbeck’s agent, taking the manuscript around to publishers. A series of rejections followed—seven in all—and then, in January 1929, Steinbeck received the exciting news that Robert McBride & Company, the same publisher that had turned down his short stories, had accepted his first novel. By now, Steinbeck was down out of the mountains, working on another novel, living in his parents’ Pacific Grove cottage, and courting Carol Henning, who would become his first wife. He was grateful for an advance of $250.

At first, he was glad to learn that his friend Mahlon Blaine, by now enjoying considerable popularity as an illustrator, would create the dust jacket for
Cup of Gold
. Brightly colored, Blaine’s jacket featured a mustachioed Sir Henry Morgan in the regalia of a seventeenth-century nobleman, including a plumed hat, cloak, lace collar and cuffs, knee britches, silk stockings, silver-buckled shoes, and sword. Morgan clutches an immense golden chalice, and is joined by two barefooted pirates with gold earrings and neckerchiefs, pistols tucked in their sashes. But when Steinbeck saw the cover, he was badly disappointed. He thought the colors were “ghastly,” and the jacket more appropriate to a boys’ adventure story than a work of art. That, however, may have been the publisher’s intention. Perhaps because of its exciting dust jacket,
Cup of Gold
sold best at department stores during the Christmas season. Biographer Jackson Benson writes, “One wonders how many little boys were lost in the swamp of Steinbeck’s prose as they tried to follow Henry Morgan’s trek across Panama.”