The Arithmetic of Aspiration: Josephine Lawrence's If I Have Four Apples

In 1931, "middlebrow historian" James Truslow Adams wrote The Epic of America, a onevolume history of the United States that went on to become a best seller in 1932 after becoming a Book-of-the-Month Club selection (Decker 97). Adams's book is widely cited as the first use in print of the phrase "American Dream." While he acknowledges that the Dream has been "the dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for every man, with opportunity for each according to his ability or achievement" (374), in his view the Dream had come to mean a "better and richer" life, in the narrow, materialist senses of the terms, to the detriment of Americans. Rather, says Truslow, we must ask, "what is better and what is richer?" (377). What are our standards, as Americans? What are our values? Truslow specifically criticizes "keeping up with the Joneses" (380), questioning the materialism that had come to overshadow everything else. During the first part of the twentieth-century literary critiques of the values emanating from America's then-emerging consumer economy came mostly from the political left, and they often were written in the tradition of literary naturalism, which typically showed individual men and women to be at the mercy of larger social forces, such as business and government. Influential American novelists from the period with pronounced anticapitalist sensibilities include Frank Norris (The Octopus, 1901), Upton Sinclair (The Jungle, 1906), Sinclair Lewis (Babbitt, 1922), and John Dos Passos (U.S.A. Trilogy, 193036). Less overtly political writers such as Edith Wharton (Custom of the Country, 1913), F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Beautiful and Damned, 1922; The Great Gatsby, 1926), and arguably, even William Faulkner (Absalom, Absalom!, 1936) also explored the spiritual degradation associated with excessive materialism and obsession with social status. But Josephine Lawrence stands out as a rare, politically conservative, best-selling author of the Depression era who also condemned the ethos of unbridled consumerism. However, while most leftist critiques centered on the ethical shortcomings of social institutions and of individuals who wielded power and wealth, Lawrence insisted that fundamental responsibility for one's lot in life still resides with each individual, who must not only behave morally, but also act wisely, free from self-deception, in an informed and realistic fashion. In a 1936 issue of The Saturday Review of Literature, Margaret Culkin Banning defined the task of the contemporary woman writer this way: [L]ife is not one vital problem but a succession of small problems, most of them recurrent, many of them incapable of solution. It is these I personally think the woman novelist should tackle. . ..Most women wake to no breakfast or no job, to a child with a cold, a husband with a boil, the tender memory of a love scene. They wake to a reality of which few write. Why have we no Jane Austen? Why have we not even a Louisa May Alcott?. . . It's been a pretty long time since we had "Main Street" or "Babbitt" (16-17) Josephine Lawrence had set just that task for herself several years before Banning's essay. Children's author and journalist, Lawrence began writing fiction for adults in 1932. With the publication of /// Have Four Apples (1935), a Bookof-the-Month Club featured selection in 1936, Lawrence placed before the book-buying public the problems of lower-middle-class life in hard times. She brought a journalist's eye to the contemporary scene, her goals as a novelist strikingly consistent with the aims of solid reporting. She once told an interviewer, "Stylistically, my endeavor is to be clear, to be understandable. But my real job is to tell, as ably as I can, the truth about some aspects of my own time. After all, I am capable of honesty. And if what I write is honest, that is enough" (Fraser 2:1). Born in 1890 in Newark, New Jersey, the daughter of a physician, Josephine Lawrence attended Newark public schools and later took courses at New York University. …