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:
But there was a power of dream in him. Out of his mob of ragamuffin heroes he wanted to make a strong, durable nation, a new, aggressive nation in America. As more and more of the buccaneers flocked to his command, his dream solidified. He consulted the governments of England and France. They were shocked, and forbade him to consider such a thing. A race of pirates not amenable to the gibbets of the crowns? Why, they would be plundering everybody.
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.”
THE BIG APPLE AS CUP OF GOLD
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.
From a porthole, then, I saw the city, and it horrified me. There was something monstrous about it—the tall buildings looming to the sky and the lights shining through the falling snow. I crept ashore—frightened and cold and with a touch of panic in my stomach.
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”:
He shouted and raged and threatened to tear the editor limb from limb and started to do so. He was half-carried out of the office, down the stairs, and ejected onto the sidewalk, his manuscript
pages slipping from his grasp and floating out in a trail behind him.
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.
THE COMPOSITION AND PUBLICATION OF CUP OF GOLD
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.”
The book was published in August 1929, a little more than two months before the stock market crash of October 1929 began America’s slide into the Depression. McBride did not bother to send Steinbeck an advance copy; the author saw his first novel for the first time in a department store. He complained bitterly about his publisher’s failure to market Cup of Gold—book clubs turned it down, few review copies were distributed, and bookshop orders were not filled. Still, Cup of Gold enjoyed modest but respectable sales, with 1,533 copies sold from its first issue, more than the sales of Steinbeck’s next two novels combined.
CRITICAL RECEPTION
Cup of Gold received only a handful of reviews (helpfully collected in Luchen Li’s John Steinbeck: A Documentary Volume), but almost all of its first critics found something to admire in the novel: “Mr. Steinbeck’s graceful manner lifts the yarn above the adventure groceries of this degenerate age,” they wrote. “Thoroughly masculine and should find much favor with those male readers who used to delight in those bloody tales of piracy and rebellion.” “A meaty pleasing yarn wherein action sets the pace and clever writing plays the tune.” “Mr. Steinbeck’s fantasy is enjoyable reading.”
Yet for the most part, the same critics were thoroughly confused by the 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, swashbuc
kling 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 kernel story of a voyage, or quest; the image of an idealistic young man whose dreams go sour and end in disillusion; the conception of an intimate relationship between human beings and their environment; the understanding of how power may be abused by those who have too much of it; the theme of conflict between the sexes.”
Today, most critics regard Cup of Gold as a brilliant failure, a first novel flawed by overambition and overexuberance. Harry Thornton Moore’s observations are typical: “The book is patently the work of a young man, an eager and romantic young man who is not afraid to let himself go.” Young Steinbeck, writes Peter Lisca, “was an inexperienced but very ambitious writer.” Acutely alive to literary possibilities and eager to try them all, he pulled from too many clashing genres and methods, sources and influences. Steinbeck sampled every technique in the writer’s toolbox, and most of all, became drunk on language. In Cup of Gold, writes Howard Levant: “Many technical devices are evident, such as flashbacks, foreshadowing, interchapters, inserted brief narratives, internal monologue, a play on names, a dream sequence, a cluster of images and symbols, ironic confrontations and juxtapositions, parallels and oppositions, and a range of style that includes approximations of Welsh talk, the talk of the English gentry, the lingo of the New World half-breed, the formal talk of the Spanish grandee, and a precise observational, usually authorial language.” For Levant, as for many other critics, the novel’s very strengths, its “ambitious conception” and “richness of detail,” suggest why Cup of Gold is a failure: “its materials and its structure are not in harmonious relationship.”
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