TOO MUCH CHOCOLATE: 50 Years of Robert Cormier’s “Classic” YA Novel is More Than Enough

The Chocolate War, a young-adult novel written by Robert Cormier and published in 1974, has come to be regarded not only as a classic work of fiction but also as a litmus test of sorts for school librarians: Make the book available to students and you are a hero; fail to keep a copy on your shelves and you are a book-banning reactionary. Earlier this month, The New York Times published an article on Cormier and his most famous novel, noting that The Chocolate War “has become one of the country’s most challenged books.” The article focused specifically on a single censorship battle that took place at Mowat Middle School in Panama City, Florida, in 1986. The confrontation between the school’s teachers, who liked the book and wanted to keep it available to the students, and various parents, who thought the book was inappropriate and wanted it removed from school became extremely heated and even led to an arson attempt on the home of a local reporter. But the Times’s article makes it unclear whether the anti-Chocolate War forces wanted the book removed from the school entirely or whether they wanted the teachers to simply stop assigning it in class. Here’s how Times reporter Brian Raftery described the situation:

“The fight had been ignited not by ‘The Chocolate War,’ but by another Cormier novel: ‘I Am the Cheese,’ his 1977 thriller about a troubled young man who can’t remember his past. When the parent of a Mowat seventh-grader objected to the book — citing its language and ‘morbid and depressing’ tone — school officials immediately yanked it from classes, along with a few other titles, including ‘The Chocolate War’ and Susan Beth Pfeffer’s ‘About David,’ a 1980 novel about teen suicide.”

It is easy to see why many parents might not have wanted their middle-school children to be made to read The Chocolate War. Raftery writes that the book upset some parents because of its “mild locker-room talk,” but the book actually has a great deal of profanity. It is filled with words and phrases such as “goddamn,” “crap,” “shit,” “bastard,” “jacking off”, “son of a bitch,” “screw,” “gang bang,” and so forth. What’s more, the book contains no significant female characters. Girls exist in the novel only as objects to be ogled by high school boys, who are constantly admiring their “boobs” and tight jeans. At one point, Cormier writes, “Watching girls and devouring them with your eyes – rape by eyeball – was something you did automatically.” This type of “rape” occurs nearly every time the boys in the book are out in public.

The story of The Chocolate War is fairly simple. It takes place at Trinity High School, an all-boys school located in a working-class neighborhood of an unnamed U.S. city. The school is presided over by a Catholic brotherhood, primarily Brother Leon, a cruel and sadistic bully, who also seems to be a bit of a coward and who, depending upon your interpretation of the character, might also be a homosexual. Every year, the school raises money by encouraging the students to sell boxes of chocolates to their relatives, friends, neighbors, and even strangers. The protagonist is Jerry Renault, a fifteen-year-old freshman who refuses to sell any chocolates. Technically, participation in the fund-raising activity is voluntary, but Jerry is the only student who has ever refused to sell a single box of candy. Brother Leon has ordered an immense number of boxes of chocolate this year, 20,000, and is concerned that he may end up with a lot of unsold boxes. The school has a student body of 400, which means that each student will have to sell fifty boxes in order for the fund-raiser to be a success. To help him in this effort, Leon seeks out Archie Costello, a student who, like Leon, is a sadist and a bully. Archie is the leader of a secret student group called Vigil. The group is banned on campus and isn’t supposed to exist, but it does and everyone knows it. Run by Archie, Vigil is devoted to causing trouble for both the students and the faculty at Trinity. Archie especially enjoys playing the faculty and the students against each other. In one incident he orders the students in a classroom to jump up and dance around their desks for a few moments every time the teacher uses the word “environment.” But Archie then tips off the teacher that he plans to do it. So the teacher uses the word frequently during the next classroom meeting, forcing the students to exhaust themselves by dancing over and over again. Archie is not himself a violent person. But he has an evil genius’s understanding of human weakness and he can get others to do almost anything he wants them to simply by threatening to humiliate them in some way. In one notorious scene, Archie kicks in the door of a bathroom stall and points a camera at a student who is sitting on the toilet masturbating. After that, Archie uses the threat of passing the photo around the school to get the student, Emile Janza, to do his bidding. As the fundraiser approaches, Brother Leon makes it known to Archie that he expects him to use Vigil to make sure that every boy in school sells fifty boxes of chocolates. Archie assures him that he will. But Archie isn’t being honest. He orders Jerry Renault to refuse to sell any candy for the first ten days of the fundraiser. Jerry obliges him. But Jerry has a stubborn streak. His mother died recently of cancer and he is angry at the world. After the first ten days of the fundraiser have passed, he decides to go on refusing to sell any chocolates. This enrages Brother Leon, who orders Archie to force Jerry to participate in the sale. Eventually, things get violent (more about that in a moment).

The Chocolate War was published in 1974 and, presumably, takes place in that year. Jerry Renault is fifteen years old. In 1974, I was a fifteen-year-old student at Central Catholic High School, an all-boys school in Portland, Oregon. Our school held an annual candy sale to raise money. We sold a product called Almond Roca. I dreaded the days that I was required to go door-to-door and try to sell this unappetizing admixture of toffee, chocolate and ground peanuts to strangers. I rarely sold all of the boxes I was assigned, and my father, a graduate of the same high school, usually ended up buying the unsold boxes. For weeks afterwards, my mother would serve Almond Roca for dessert after dinner. To this day I get sick at the thought of Almond Roca. In 1974, I was already an avid reader. But I didn’t read The Chocolate War until the late 1970s, after I had left high school. I’m fairly certain that, in the 1970s, the powers-that-be at my high school would never have shelved a book like The Chocolate War in its library. And they certainly wouldn’t have assigned it to the students. In any case, probably no one has ever been better situated to appreciate The Chocolate War than I am. Alas, I am no great fan of the book. I have a grudging admiration for it, but it certainly didn’t reflect my own experiences as a Catholic high-school student. The brothers who teach at Trinity are portrayed as unflatteringly as possible. They are either bullies or ineffectual milquetoasts. For the most part, the priests and nuns and lay people who taught me in high school were decent human beings and good at their jobs. With the lone exception of Jerry Renault, the students in The Chocolate War are portrayed as cowardly, sadistic, evil, stupid, easily coerced, or a combination of several of those traits. The student body of my high school included plenty of upstanding and decent human beings, many of whom have gone on to become pillars of their community, good fathers and husbands and doctors and lawyers and teachers and so forth. Even the worst of my classmates didn’t strike me as evil or sadistic, and if any of my old classmates ended up a real-life villain, I haven’t heard about it. Jerry Renault aspires to be a quarterback on the Trinity football team. I served as the equipment manager on my high school’s varsity football team for four years. When I was a freshman, our team’s best football player was a senior named Fred Quillan. He was invariably kind to me. He went on to win two Super Bowl titles with the San Francisco 49ers, in 1981 and 1984. But his post-football life went haywire, and he died in 2016, at the age of 60, after years of battling depression and alcoholism. His life and career illustrated a wide variety of human experience. It takes an insane amount of focus to become an all-pro in the National Football League. Fred was able to summon that focus for ten grueling seasons, playing one of the toughest positions in American football, center. Fred had a great deal of good in him and apparently he had some weaknesses too. No character in The Chocolate War has any kind of depth. They can generally be summed up as bully, coward, follower, leader, brainiac, idiot, and so forth.

Women and girls, as noted above, play almost no part in the story. The most prominent female character is Jerry’s mother, who is completely absent but whose loss still haunts Jerry and his father. The story is bleak and the ending is even bleaker. Cormier is to be congratulated for having the courage of his convictions. The novel ends with a boxing match between Jerry and Emile Janza (who has been blackmailed into it by Archie because of the photograph of Janza masturbating, which, in fact, doesn’t really exist). The set-up of this match is convoluted and, in my opinion, ridiculous. In short, the students have each written down on a slip of paper the name of one of the two fighters and a boxing maneuver: i.e., “Janza, Right to Jaw.” These slips of paper are drawn at random by an emcee who calls it out. Then the action is carried out in the boxing ring. If the slip says “Janza, Right to Jaw,” Jerry has to stand there while Janza smashes him in the jaw. When one fighter is incapacitated or resigns, the student whose written instruction was the last one read will win the grand prize (Jerry’s 50 unsold boxes of chocolate). I can’t imagine anyone – even a dumb high-school boy – just standing there and letting himself get slammed in the face without even putting up a defense. And it certainly seems out of character for Jerry Renault, the only character in the book with a bit of spine and some real courage, to participate in this charade. After his weeks-long refusal to participate in a fairly painless fundraiser, why would he participate in something as ludicrous as Cormier’s bizzaro boxing match?

For years, people who have objected to the novel have been pilloried as censorious prudes. In 1987, Cormier said of his critics, “The fundamentalists are certainly rolling in high gear, and it gives me chills.” I’m not exactly sure what “rolling in high gear” means. Cormier’s prose in The Chocolate War is often clichéd (“the sky was the limit,” he felt “lighter than air,” etc.) or ungrammatical (“Caroni had felt badly for Jerry Renault.”). Cormier was a journalist for years and his prose rarely rises above the level of a decent newspaper article. What’s more, the book’s cultural references are likely to ring no bells (as Cormier might say) for young readers who aren’t familiar with Jimmy Cagney or Sammy Davis (Cormier omits the “Jr.”) and other once-famous entertainers. His insights into human nature aren’t always that keen either. At one point Archie orders Emile to harass Jerry by calling him a “fairy.” Jerry responds violently to this provocation. Later, Emile asks Archie if Jerry really is a homosexual. Archie, supposedly a master of human nature, responds, “Of course not. That’s why he blew up. If you want to get under a guy’s skin accuse him of being something he isn’t. Otherwise you’re only telling him something he knows.” This gets human psychology exactly backwards. Most of us will react more strongly to an insult we suspect is true than to one we know to be without merit. In my high-school days “fag” was a fairly common term of derision. Few students reacted strongly to this smear because, presumably, very few of them were actually gay. Call a man who is six and a half feet tall “shorty” and he’s likely to laugh at you. Call a man who is five and a half feet tall “shorty” and he’s likely to punch you in the nose (if he can reach it).

Recently, an American football player named Harrison Butker, a Catholic, gave a commencement speech at a Catholic College in Kansas. He expressed thoughts about women and Jews that were typical of a conservative Catholic mindset. His speech drew a standing ovation from the crowd but has since been heavily criticized in liberal media. But that same liberal media regularly defends The Chocolate War, a book in which virtually every character is a Catholic and all but one of them is either spineless, venal, or worse. I don’t believe that Cormier was anti-Catholic. He was raised a Catholic and was a columnist for a Catholic newspaper for many years. But I can certainly understand why a Catholic parent might not want their middle-school child to be assigned a book like The Chocolate War in class. If the book were set in a high school where virtually every teacher and student was Black and all but one of them were spineless or venal, I can imagine many Black parents objecting to it. And I imagine that those in the liberal media would probably support those objections.

The Chocolate War is a book that probably would have long since passed into obscurity if it hadn’t been turned into a target in America’s ongoing culture wars. Minus its raw language and its references to masturbation and girls’ breasts, the book isn’t all that objectionable. But it also isn’t the brilliant piece of literature that its defenders have to pretend it is in order to keep fighting for its inclusion in the YA literary canon. I would strongly object to anyone trying to have the book dropped by its publisher or pulled from bookstore shelves, but I also don’t believe that every school library in America should have to be furnished with a copy. School libraries tend to be small and shelf space in them is often scarce. Why should today’s libraries be required to make space for a mediocre novel written by a white man born 99 years ago, a novel that has little to say to say to contemporary American young people?

In a 1998 letter, Cormier (who died in 2000 at the age of 75) wrote to a woman who was critical of the novel: “Yes, there is language in the book that reflects how some young people really talk, and there are references to sex.” Those who champion the book claim that Cormier was making a brave choice by filling his book with the language that schoolboys of the 1970s actually used. But that isn’t really true. Take it from me, if Cormier’s book were to actually represent the language that could be heard in an all-boys Catholic school of the 1970s it would have to include numerous f-bombs and c-words and “faggots” and even a few n-words, to say the least. Cormier knew this himself. Later in the abovementioned letter, he tells his correspondent, “As to language, the words used in the book are mild compared to what one hears in any school corridor or school bus these days.”

In other words, Cormier self-censored the book, substituting mild profanity for the more offensive stuff that kids were actually using. That being the case, it seems that he could have gone a bit further and turned his “bastards” and “sons of bitches” into “jerks.” He could have turned his “goddamns” into “dangs.” He censored his book just enough to make it palatable to liberal sensibilities but not to the sensibilities of those fundamentalists he was so frightened of. It was a stroke of genius, in a way, because it seems unlikely that contemporary liberals would otherwise care so much about a novel that is so white, so male, and so straight.

My freshman English teacher in high school was Fred Quillan’s mother. She was one of the people who helped instill in me a love of language and literature. Because of teachers like Mrs. Quillan, I learned to feel strongly about books, and I learned to stand up for my opinions about them and not kowtow to the conventional wisdom. The conventional wisdom says that The Chocolate War is a bona fide classic of American YA fiction. If I had to give it a grade, it would be a C+. But thanks to its smuttier aspects, I suspect the war over The Chocolate War will go on and on.