Because It Is Bitter, And Because It Is My Heart

Excerpt

The young black man in the photograph, formally, even a bit stiffly posed, in his dress uniform, hands clasped against his knees, hat smartly set on his head, was certainly Jinx Fairchild: the shock of seeing him after so long, of seeming empowered to look, in an instant, into his eyes, ran through Iris and left her weak . . . weakened. Her eyes began to sting with tears she wiped impatiently away.

* * *

On the reverse of the print Jinx had written in that large looping lazy-seeming hand, Honey—think I'll "pass"?
Iris read, reread these words; she was standing with both hands pressed against a glass-topped counter, leaning forward, eyelids fluttering . . . it wasn't tears she beat back but a sensation of starkest horror, a certitude beyond grief. She was aware of her uncle's voice, his words, the movement of his mouth, aware too of Houdini the midnight-black cat nudging and rubbing with persistent affection against her legs, purring loudly, yet she heard nothing, comprehended nothing, simply stood there in a place not known to her on a warm May afternoon leaning her weight on a glass-topped counter, a weight heavy against the palms of her sweating hands.
Leslie touched her shoulder, asked gently, "Are you upset, Iris? Is he a close friend?"
Iris said, "I loved him."
And burst into uncontrollable tears.

Reviews

• Booklist, February 1, 1990, p1050
• Publisher's Weekly, February 23, 1990, p203
• New York Times, March 30, 1990, C29
• Library Journal, April 1, 1990, p138
• Atlanta Journal Constitution, April 8, 1990, N8
• Washington Post Book World, April 8, 1990, p1
• Chicago Tribune Books, April 15, 1990, p1
• Denver Post, April 15, 1990, E8
• Detroit News & Free Press, April 15, 1990, P5
• San Francisco Chronicle Book Review, April 15, 1990, p1
• Los Angeles Times, April 16, 1990, E4
• Washington Times, April 16, 1990, E8
• New York Times Book Review, April 22, 1990, p7
• Houston Post, April 29, 1990, C6
• USA Today, May 7, 1990, D5
• Detroit News, May 9, 1990, C3
• Newsweek, May 14, 1990, p70
• New Yorker, May 28, 1990, p109
• Nation, July 2, 1990, p27
• New York Review of Books, August 16, 1990, p22
• Georgia Review, Fall 1990, p539
• America, November 17, 1990, p378
• Guardian, January 31, 1991, p23
• Observer, February 3, 1991, p55
• Times Literary Supplement, February 15, 1991, p17
• New Statesman & Society, February 22, 1991, p34
• Commentary, March 1991, p52
• Belles Lettres, Summer 1991, p12
• World Literature Today, Autumn 1991, p708
• Seventeen, September 1997, v56 n9 p202-203
  

Other Editions

Interview

From INTERVIEW
in The Writing Life : National Book Award Winners. NY: Random House, 1995.

Where do you place your novel Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart within the body of your work?

The novel is very central to my body of work, as to my experience, and was extremely difficult to write. So much of my heart seems to have gone into it, I believed afterward that I would never attempt another long novel. The first chapter alone must have been revised, sentence by sentence, as many as seventeen times. The voice was elusive—for many months, hovering just out of reach.

How did you develop the structure of this novel?

Form is very important to me; I have to divide the work into a structure that has coherence in its various parts. It's often divided in terms of years, certain spaces of time, and each space of time encompasses a development or movement in the narrative.

With Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart, I wanted to write the novel in present tense, omniscient narrative, so that while we sometimes go into different people's heads, we're actually not in anybody's head; we're experiencing everything from the outside. I wanted to write it this way because I'd never written in that form. Why I chose to do it the hard way I don't know.

What do you see as the novel's theme?

It is very hard for writers to extract from the complexity of their material anything so clear as a theme; for instance, one would not want to reduce Thomas Mann's Buddenbrooks to the theme of decadence. I think we write to give life to experience. I suppose my novel has much to do with the separation of races in America.

Where did your characters come from?

That's like asking a composer, "How do you write music?" It's virtually unanswerable. I think you can say they're composite characters, sometimes taken from life, but more often invented.

I knew a young black boy who is in some ways reminiscent of two of the black boys in the novel, Jinx Fairchild and his brother. The novel is actually dedicated to him. I think he's no longer living—I've been out of contact with him for more than forty years—but the novel is fiction. This boy did not commit a murder, even in self-defense.

We were students at a junior high school in Lockport, New York. Being a white girl, I was in some cases very interested in the African-American students, who were at that time called Negro students. I was brought in by school bus to the city—I was from the outside—and I think I felt that they were outsiders too, and there was a kind of alliance. I don't want to make too much of this because I didn't know this boy very well. He just had a strong personality. He was the kind of boy who could have been a leader if he hadn't been perhaps a little too rebellious.

Iris is very much based upon aspects of myself, but I did not have an alcoholic mother and father; that part is fiction. I did know someone, a very close friend, who died of alcoholism, and who is the model for Persia.

Awards

• New York Times Notable Books of the Year
• National Book Award finalist

Notes

In the desert
I saw a creature, naked, bestial,
Who, squatting upon the ground,
Held his heart in his hands,
And ate of it.
I said, "Is it good, friend?"
"It is bitter—bitter," he answered;
"But I like it
"Because it is bitter,
"And because it is my heart."

—Stepen Crane
from The Black Riders and Other Lines

• Working Title: Song of Innocence