The word “slut” scrawled at the end of the manuscript for John Steinbeck’s seminal novel The Grapes of Wrath may have been explained, thanks to a handful of Swedish academics.
The Grapes of Wrath was written by Steinbeck in a frenzy of creativity in under 100 days, between May and October 1938. Independent press SP Books released the first ever facsimile of the handwritten manuscript last week, showing Steinbeck’s increasingly tiny handwriting, his swear words, which were excised from the final novel – and a faint “slut”, written in red, at its conclusion.
Welcoming the manuscript’s release last week, Steinbeck expert Susan Shillinglaw described the word “slut” as “an archival mystery”, pondering whether Steinbeck’s wife Carol might have “playfully” written it in red and then erased it, or if someone in the University of Virginia archives had defaced the manuscript. “I suspect the latter, but we’ll never know for sure,” she told the Guardian last week.
But after the Guardian article about the facsimile was published, a handful of Swedish scholars got in touch with Shillinglaw, pointing out the meaning of “slut” in Swedish.
“It is the Swedish expression for ‘the end’, used on the last page of all kinds of books, especially children’s books,” wrote Jonathan Shaheen, an academic at Stockholm University, to Shillinglaw. “A well placed ‘slut’ always makes me laugh. I wonder if it might’ve been the same for Steinbeck or his wife, who I believe visited Sweden in 1937. As bookish types they might well have discovered the word. They might even have used it as an inside joke, as I have known other Americans around here to do.”
Shaheen said he wasn’t sure if it was a stupid thing to email Shillinglaw about: “I’m not generally convinced that senior female academics are interested in emails about multilingual, arguably misogynistic wordplay from random men from the internet.” But he decided that “even highly literate anglophones don’t typically know the Swedish expression for ‘the end’, so Professor Shillinglaw might not yet have had occasion to consider whether it was Swedish”, and “eventually decided there was enough of a chance that I was right that it was worth emailing”.
Shillinglaw, who was contacted by two other Scandinavians with similar suggestions, was delighted to hear from Shaheen, and believes he has solved the mystery. She said that the Steinbecks went to Sweden in the summer of 1937, and they also knew the Swedish artist and author Bo Beskow, whose mother was the children’s author Elsa Beskow.
“I’m sure that both Carol and John knew what slut meant in Swedish. Carol must have added the word at some point – it’s so like her. She was funny, extravagant, loved wordplay, loved to shock and amuse. It’s just the sort of touch she would add to the manuscript in jest,” said Shillinglaw. “Perhaps the word was added in 1938. Perhaps later, as Carol kept the manuscript until she sold it to a San Francisco bookseller (who sold it to Virginia). Perhaps she added the word long after the manuscript was complete, perhaps in jest or in anger. She was not happy with John after they divorced in 1943.”
Shillinglaw had been discussing the “slut” issue with scholars and archivists “for about five years”, with no inkling of the Swedish angle.
“When the matter was brought to my attention by the University of Virginia archivist, I had no idea when the word was added to the manuscript. I thought perhaps someone was objecting to the final scene, and that the word referred to Rose of Sharon’s actions, offering her breast to a dying man,” she said. “I consulted with Steinbeck scholar Bob DeMott. He had no idea about what the light ‘slut’ at the end meant or who might have written it – a visitor to special collections, perhaps? But when I wrote Bob this week, he said, ‘Mystery solved.’ I felt the same way.”
Slut.
