Cup of Gold by John Steinbeck Read Free Book Online

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