Willa Cather | Thornfield Hall

Jimmy Carter’s sweater speech: Keep the temp down and wear a cardigan!

On a bitterly cold January day, we are freezing. The thermostat is set at 68 and we wear sweaters, in accordance with Jimmy Carter’s energy-saving suggestions in the 20th century. Carter advised Americans to wear cardigans but then he was a Southerner. We need more layers here.

Anyway, it is real winter -a layer of snow and lacy frost on the windows. My theory: the snobbish faeries of Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Kingdoms of Elfin did embroidery and fancy work and flung it into our world – a chilly Jackson Pollack – to prove mortal inferiority. The weather person says the high will be 13 degrees, and it will feel like 3 degrees. It was 13 when I woke up so I am anxious for the weather person to be wrong. Please, please get up to 20 !

Winters used to be harder though. After a week in sub-zero temperatures in the 20th century, Captain Nemo and I donned several layers of clothes and ran, yes, ran, to a movie theater. The theater was empty. We were given free popcorn. No idea what the movie was, but it was bliss to get out of the house. N.B. Running home was less fun.

In the winter of 2026, I’m thinking of snowy scenes in books and movies.

I remember Truffaut’s 1966 movie based on Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, set in a society that bans books and sends firemen to burn them. It’s been years since I read Bradbury’s novel, but Truffaut’s movie is brilliant and horrific, starring Julie Christie and Oskar Werner.

The burning of books is allegedly done to preserve morality, but actually to control thinking. (People no longer read: they watch interactive TV.) The firemen do not put out fires – they burn books – but one fireman, Guy Montag (Oskar Werner), begins to read after he meets a teacher, Clarisse (Julie Christie). Soon he is hooked on David Copperfield.

Clarisse (Julie Christie) & Montag (Oskar Werner) at the Book People’s camp.

At the end of the movie, in the dead of winter, Werner has joined a camp of dissidents, the Book People. (There are camps all over the country to resist the book-banning regime: there is no law against reciting books.) Each person memorizes a book to preserve it, and then burns it. They spend days reciting their books, so they aren’t forgotten. Montag (below) is memorizing Edgar Allan Poe’s Tales of Mystery and Imagination. Everybody is bundled up in winter clothes, and I remember thinking, “That’s my camp!” Fortunately, we don’t need it yet! It looks very cold.

There is so much winter poetry, but I am increasingly drawn to John Berryman’s work.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning John Berryman, one of the greatest American poets of the 20th century, knows the vocabulary of winter. In his stunning poem, “A Winter Piece to a Friend Away,” he shows off his stark, stripped sense of winter. In the first stanza, he cites the horror of “icy spiculae” and the winter’s undoing of the work of man: “Snow howls and hides the world/ We worked awhile to build.”

And I love the alliteration and assonance. The line “Snow howls and hides the world” illustrates alliteration with “Snow howls and hides…” and also assonance with “Snow howls…” The two “ow’s” are pronounced differently, but the effect is the same on the page.

Here is the first stanza of this gorgeous poem..

Your letter came. — Glutted the earth & cold
With rains long heavy, follows intense frost;
        Snow howls and hides the world
We worked awhile to build; all the roads are lost;
Icy spiculae float, filling strange air;
No voice goes far; one is alone whirling since where,
        And when was it one crossed?
        You have been there.

… all the roads are lost

That’s winter for you!

I am a great fan of Willa Cather’s winter scenes.

.During my last semester of college, I lived in a semi-cozy rented room – in the sense that the bed took up almost the whole room – and curled up in the evenings with Willa Cather’s novels. In those days, she was considered a “craftsman,” not an “artist,” and not taught in college. I feel that I was one of an underground of women who got her into the canon.

Raised and educated in Red Cloud and Lincoln, Nebraska, Willa Cather describes the hazards of winter, its beauty and its killing cold, sleigh-riding and ice-skating, its deathly blizzards and its eventual spring. So many of her novels have winter scenes, but I’ll write briefly about her superb novel A Lost Lady

This is the story of Marian Forrester, a vivacious young woman who spends summers in Sweet Water, Nebraska, with her much older husband, Captain Forrester. As long as Captain Forrester is in good health, she is happy, generous, and charming. She brings out cookies to the boys who fish in their stream, and is idolized by the narrator, Neil, then a young boy. But she looks forward to wintering in Denver.

It is through the narrator, Neil, that we learn about Marian. Marian loves being in Denver, but then a dreadful accident occurs. Captain Forrester hasn’t exactly lost his money, but he co-owns a bank, and gives away his money to the bankrupt customers when it fails. And then he has a stroke. Everyone admires this gallant man, but Marian becomes desperate when they move permanently to Sweet Water.

Is Marian a sympathetic character? Well, no, and after the captain’s stroke she becomes outrageous – making out with a guest during a sleigh ride, perhaps having an affair with him while her husband is at home. She seems very shallow, and the reader grieves as she falls from grace. What Cather does so well is to tell story from the young narrator’s point of view, whose disgust increases when Marian begins to do business with a sleazy lawyer, Ivy Peters. We are shocked by Marian’s behavior, but in the end Cather allows us, and the narrator, to understandt Marian’s perspective. And that is a relief: she’s not strong, but she’s not lost, either.

There is a 1934 movie of A Lost Lady starring Barbara Stanwyck. I love Barbara Stanwyck, and she would be great in the title role – steamy, shallow, but not a villain.

If asked to list midwestern women writers of the early 20th century, you might be perplexed momentarily. Then you remember Willa Cather, the Pulitzer Prize winner, and the effect of her brilliant novels on generations of women. Her masterpieces, A Lost Lady, The Professor‘s House, and Lucy Gayheart, are incomparable, deftly mixing tragedy and humor.

Cather fans used to feel like rebels in a secret society, since academics dismissed Cather as a “craftsman.” That has changed due to the passion of readers, scholars, and the National Willa Cather Society in Red Cloud, Nebraska, where Cather grew up. Finally her books are in the canon.

We have read her books again and again, but it took us years to discover Bess Streeter Aldrich and Edna Ferber, her less famous peers. We searched bins in shabby trolleys in front of used bookstores. We browsed the webpages of university presses. We acquired cheap omnibus volumes of their work (Aldrich $3, Ferber 50 cents). And again we felt like members of a secret society reading Willa’s “second-rate peers.”

Of the two aforementioned writers, you are most likely to know Edna Ferber, who won the Pulitzer Prize in 1925. Several of her novels have also been adapted as movies, including Giant, starring Elizabeth Taylor, Rock Hudson, and James Dean, and Cimarron, starring Glenn Ford and Maria Schell. (I recommend Giant.)

Born in Michigan in 1885, Ferber was a prolific writer. Her style may seem old-fashioned and sentimental, but her novels are impeccably-plotted and fast-paced. Her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, So Big, is a revelatory portrait of the brilliant, unconventional Selena Dejong, who turns a failing truck farm into a success after the death of her inefficient husband. She is hard-working and shrewd, but devotes her personal life to her undeserving beloved son, Dirk, who was nicknamed “So Big” during his childhood. He ruins his life, falling in love with a manipulative, mercenary woman, not quite appreciating his mother. What a sad, intense novel.

There is also plenty of humor. I love the dialogue in the passage below, when Selena scandalizes her neighbors by driving her vegetables to market alone, accompanied only by her son Dirk.

“It ain’t decent a woman should drive to market.”

Mrs. Klaas Pool… smiled her slippery, crooked smile. “What could you expect? Look how she’s always acted.”

Klasas did not follow this. “It don’t seem hardly possible. Time she come here as a school teacher I drove her out and she was like a little robin or what, set up on the seat…”

But in the long run, I prefer Bess Streeter Aldrich’s quieter books. Born in Cedar Falls, Iowa, in 1881, Aldrich moved to Nebraska with her husband Charles after their marriage. (You can visit her home in Elmwood, Nebraska.) In the writing of her novels, she often relied on the stories of her mother, who was a pioneer in Iowa. She also interviewed early settlers in Nebraska and studied documents and letters before she wrote her most famous novel, A Lantern in Her Hand.

This heartbreaking novel is powerful but uneven. It is the story of Abbie Deal, who as a young woman moves from Iowa to an unforgiving farm in Nebraska with her husband, Will, a Civil War veteran. Their farm is a failure: there is always a drought or a plague of grasshoppers, and Abbie struggles beside Will in the fields. Tragically, she has to give up the music that nurtured her when she was younger, because she also raises the children and does the housework. After Will dies, her 18-year-old son John comes home to help her with the farm. (He hates farming.) Aldrich does not romanticize the never-ending struggle with the farm.

There are some joyful, funny bits, though. Here is a description of a picnic.

There were biscuits and pressed chickens, cakes and lemonade out on the side porch. Christine Reinmueller and Sarah Lutz took turns in shaking the fly-brush with its long paper streamers over the tables, so that no unusual number of flies would light on the food. There was only one queer thing about the whole affair, – a new dish among the refreshments which no one in the community had served before. Men folks going home asked their wives why in Sam Hill the potatoes were all cold…

(It was potato salad.)

In the sequel, A White Bird Flying, Aldrich focuses on Abbie’s children and grandchildren, who have easier lives in town. Only one granddaughter appreciates Abbie’s achievements and sacrifices.

Aldrich is not a great writer, but many of us love her. Her work is uneven, but she is good, sometimes very good, and her books are well-researched. A Lantern in Her Hand begins awkwardly but is historically important, a realistic book about a pioneer woman in the 19th century. It is well worth reading. It may not be her best, but it is the most read.