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| HarperCollins Publishers/Lions Tracks UK, 1991 |
'Let me get this straight, Renault,' Brother Leon said and his voice brought the room under his command again. 'I called your name. Your response could have been either yes or no. Yes means that like every other student in this school you agree to sell a certain amount of chocolates, in this case fifty boxes. No –– and let me point out that the sale is strictly voluntary, Trinity forces no one to participate against his wishes, this is the great glory of Trinity –– no means you don't wish to sell the chocolates, that you refuse to participate. Now, what is your answer? Yes or no?'
'No.'
The Goober stared at Jerry in disbelief. Was this Jerry Renault who always looked a little worried, a little unsure of himself even after completing a beautiful pass, who always seemed kind of bewildered –– was this him actually defying Brother Leon? Not only Brother Leon but a Trinity tradition? Then, looking at Leon, Goober saw the teacher as if in technicolor, blood beating in his cheeks, his moist eyes like specimens in laboratory test-tubes. Finally, Brother Leon inclined his head, the pencil moving in his hand as he made some kind of horrible mark beside Jerry's name.
The Novel: Jerry Renault is a fourteen year old student at Trinity, a male-only Catholic high school located in the unremarkable Massachusetts town of Monument. A shy boy and an average student whose mother has recently died of cancer, Jerry's one goal in life is to earn himself a place on his new school's football team –– a goal that becomes gradually more achievable, despite his unpromising lack of height and bulk, thanks to his dogged perseverance and almost masochistic unwillingness to surrender to the pain that accompanies each grueling weekly practice session.
But Trinity is not a place where students like Jerry are left alone to pursue their individual interests by its faculty or, even more chillingly, by a secret school society known as The Vigils. The Vigils –– a group nominally led by a senior named Carter but in reality run by a contemptuous and merciless junior named Archie Costello –– work in conjunction with Brother Leon, the Assistant Headmaster, to ensure that peace is maintained and that whatever trouble that occurs on campus will be dealt with internally by the boys themselves.
Archie's job, as the group's Assigner, is to devise individual challenges designed to test the loyalty, secret keeping abilities and courage of each new victim he selects. But to Archie this is much more than just a job. In his eyes it is both an art and the ongoing proof of his intellectual and emotional superiority over those he despises for being irrational conformists, stumbling their way through life with no conception of how the world truly functions. His role as Assigner also makes him the most powerful figure on campus, the one student every other student secretly hates yet genuinely fears –– a situation he cunningly exploits to keep everybody guessing about who his next 'candidate' will be and what he will order them to do.
Naturally, it is to Archie and The Vigils that Brother Leon turns for help when he finds himself stuck with twenty thousand boxes of chocolates that must be sold to help raise money for the school's expensive football and boxing programs. This is twice the number of chocolates Brother Leon normally purchases for the annual fundraising drive, but times are hard and Trinity, as many Catholic schools already have, may be forced to close its doors soon, he suggests, unless a sufficient amount of money can be raised via this and other student-based fundraising activities. "I'm putting my cards on the table, Archie," he tells the boy during a private conference in his office, "to show you, to impress upon you, how we have to tap every source of income, how even a chocolate sale can be vital and important to us…" Brother Leon goes on to add that the Headmaster is ill and may not live much longer –– a situation that will see him step into the school's top job should the worst come to the worst –– before asking Archie if he can count on his full cooperation. Although Archie is sickened by this contemptible display of adult hypocrisy –– he and Brother Leon have discussed the matter as though The Vigils don't exist, both knowing full well what the group's true role is within the school –– he agrees to do as the priest has asked, viewing his request as another opportunity to exercise and perhaps increase his personal power.
A few days later Brother Leon announces during a special school assembly that the annual chocolate sale is about to begin, stressing that each boy will be expected, but not forced, to play his part for Trinity by agreeing to sell fifty boxes each priced at $2 per box. A chart is placed in the assembly hall, showing each boy's name with a blank box beside it that will be updated each day to display the number of boxes he has sold so far.
One of these students is, of course, Jerry Renault –– a boy who, when his name is called in his homeroom class the following morning, is the only one who refuses to demonstrate the appropriate level of school spirit by 'voluntarily' accepting the required fifty boxes. Brother Leon is outraged by this brazen show of dissent, struggling to contain his outrage in front of Jerry's shocked classmates, unaware that Jerry is simply carrying out an assignment given to him by Archie as a means of testing and, if possible, permanently undermining the teacher's authority. Each day Jerry's name is called and each day he replies 'No,' leading his friend Roland Goubert, better known to everyone as 'The Goober,' to suspect The Vigils are behind it. The Goober is right. Jerry has been ordered to refuse to sell the chocolates for ten days, after which his task is to answer 'Yes' when Brother Leon asks him to do so.
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| Bantam/Dell Books USA, 1974 |
But when the eleventh day arrives Jerry shocks Brother Leon –– who has learned about the assignment by browbeating a straight A student into telling him the truth by threatening to give him a failing grade on an exam –– as well as himself by once again answering 'No' when his name is called. Jerry isn't completely certain why he's done this, asking himself over and over again what has inspired him — a kid who has gone out of his way to avoid trouble all his life — to make such a popular (many students admire him for refusing to sell the universally hated chocolates) yet potentially self-destructive decision. It also creates problems for Archie and his resentful assistant Obie, who points out that Jerry's refusal to cooperate may compromise the future of The Vigils on two levels –– via Archie's promise to Brother Leon that he would guarantee to dispose of all the chocolates and in the sense that the group's power is wholly dependent on Archie's victims following each one of his sometimes ludicrous instructions to the letter. The only thing to do, Archie realizes, is to summon Jerry to a meeting of The Vigils and force him to say that he'll accept his fifty boxes the next time Brother Leon calls his name.
The priest, however, is deeply concerned by the fact that, thanks to Jerry's insolence, the sale appears to be failing, adding to his fears that he may be held responsible by his superiors for spending far more than he should have on acquiring so many boxes of chocolates for the fundraising drive in the first place. Afraid he may be overlooked for the Headmaster's position (if and when the job becomes available) should the matter remain unresolved, Brother Leon makes it clear to Archie that it is now his responsibility to guarantee Jerry's participation by whatever means possible. "I'll make it clear, Archie," he coolly informs his teenaged accomplice on the telephone one evening. "If the sale goes down the drain, you and The Vigils also go down the drain."
Jerry is summoned before The Vigils as expected, where Archie gives him a new assignment –– say 'Yes' the next time Brother Leon asks him to accept his fifty boxes. No force is exerted, no threats or other forms of intimidation are applied. Archie simply attempts to reason with Jerry, explaining that it will be in his own best interests, and those of the school, to cooperate. But Obie knows that Jerry will not do this, seeing in the scared freshman the one thing Archie has never encountered before –– a kid who refuses to obey him and appears willing to accept the consequences of defiance, however personally damaging these may prove to be.
Soon, the power of Archie and The Vigils is directly threatened as other students, inspired by Jerry's example, begin to put up posters around the school reading 'Screw the Chocolates and Screw The Vigils.' This in turn inspires a campaign of retaliation that sees Jerry attacked on the football field and harassed at home by prank telephone calls. Still, he refuses to back down, inspired by the line from the TS Eliot poem The Love Song of Alfred J Prufrock (1917) printed on the poster he has taped inside his recently trashed locker –– 'Do I dare disturb the universe?'. Up till now, he wasn't sure he had the right to disturb anything. But now he knows he has no choice, that the issue is less about the chocolate sale than it is about individuals opposing the kind of tyranny personified by the likes of Archie Costello and the even more dangerous power broker Brother Leon.
Suddenly, the chocolate sale becomes a huge success, with every student selling his required fifty boxes. Even kids like The Goober, who knows for a fact that he has only sold half that many boxes, are being congratulated for having sold their full quota. Again, The Vigils are behind this, just as they're behind the ambush that begins with Jerry being taunted by Emile Janza, a smart-mouthed psychopath-in-training who accuses him of being a homosexual. 'They were small, pygmy-like, and they moved so swiftly towards him that he couldn't get a good look at them, saw only a smear of smiling faces, smiling evilly… A dozen fists pummeled his body, fingernails tore at his cheek and a finger clawed at his eye. They wanted to blind him. They wanted to kill him.' But his assailants have no need to go that far to make their point. It's enough for them to knock Jerry unconscious and leave him to limp home alone — bleeding, badly bruised but in no doubt as to where their true allegiance lies.
Soon the pranks begin again –– more harassing telephone calls, unseen kids calling his name in the street in the middle of the night, everyone at school going out of their way to antagonize and ostracize him. In the meantime, the chocolate sale is winding down, with a relieved Brother Leon declaring that school spirit has won through despite the truculence of certain unnamed members of the student body. "We have disproven a law of nature," he proudly reminds the boy whose job it is to keep track of the sales figures for him, "–– one rotten apple does not spoil the barrel. Not if we have determination, a noble cause, a spirit of brotherhood…"
But Archie, whose status as a member of The Vigils is hanging in the balance thanks to Jerry's seemingly defeated one man rebellion, has one last trick up his sleeve. Convinced that Jerry will be eager to take his revenge on his stooge Janza, he offers him the chance to participate in a boxing match, organized by him exclusively for the amusement of his fellow students, on the school's athletics field. But what he fails to tell Jerry, who bravely but unwisely accepts the challenge, is that there's a catch to his decision to participate. Every punch he and Janza throw at each other will be pre-determined by their schoolmates, each of whom has paid $1 for a ticket which grants them the right to call out their blow of choice. After the fight, their tickets will be entered in a raffle, first prize being $100 and the fifty left over boxes of chocolates that Jerry stubbornly refused to sell.
The night of the fight arrives, with Jerry and Janza both standing on the platform ready to start pounding on each other, when Obie produces the black box that is an essential element of every Vigils meeting. The box contains five white marbles and one black marble, the rule being that the Assigner himself must perform the assignment he himself has devised should the black marble be chosen. So far, Archie has been uncannily lucky. Every time, he's somehow managed to select the white marble. But will his luck hold out? Fortunately for him, it does. The fight goes ahead as scheduled, with The Goober arriving just in time to see Jerry, who makes a noble effort but has no chance of winning such an unfair and shamelessly one-sided contest, knocked senseless by the older, much larger Janza before the lights are mysteriously switched off.
It is left to Archie, sickened by the sight of so much blood, to discover the cause of the black-out, only to find himself confronted by the school's history teacher Brother Jacques. The teacher demands to know what's going on so Archie, as contemptuous of so-called adult 'authority' as ever, tells him. "Look, brother," he begins, "the school wanted the chocolates sold. And we got them sold. This was the pay-off, that's all. A fight. With rules. Fair and square." Before Brother Jacques can answer him, they are interrupted by the arrival of Brother Leon, who hastily dismisses the whole incident –– and Jerry's injuries, which prove to be so serious that an ambulance has to be summoned to convey him to the hospital –– as a typical case of 'boys being boys.' He has achieved his ultimate goal and so has Archie. The powerful have triumphed and the threat posed to the status quo by the defeated and now-unconscious non-conformist has been ruthlessly and permanently neutralized.
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| Penguin/Puffin Books UK, 1998 |
Re-reading a novel like The Chocolate War –– a book I first encountered at high school more than thirty years ago –– confirms my long-held belief that terms like 'timeless classic' and 'groundbreaking masterpiece' are over-used if not grossly misapplied in a world where hyperbole has all but annihilated clear thinking and any attempt to dispassionately assess what makes 'great literature,' and the men and women who create it, more than overexposed proponents of the latest literary fad. The terms 'great' and 'groundbreaking' are genuinely applicable in the case of Robert Cormier, a writer of boundless depth and fearless emotional honesty who in this, his most popular if most notorious novel, explores what appears to be a relatively straightforward subject with skill, perception and an unwavering determination to tell young people the truth about the world and the seemingly endless assortment of moral and ethical pitfalls it contains.
And what is the subject he puts so rigorously under the microscope? Corruption and its all-pervasive presence at every level of society –– a subject that begins to assume a greater significance when you recall that 1974, the year in which the book was published, was also the year in which incumbent US President Richard Nixon was threatened with a Senate impeachment trial and forced to resign as the result of his self-confessed involvement in the Watergate scandal.
A lot of North Americans, including the 'children' Cormier was supposedly writing for, were plunged into a deep state of shock by this event which, for many, marked the beginning of their disillusion with their own political system and what, thanks to Nixon, became and remains a suspiciously cynical view of their nation's democractically elected representatives. (Hello, Donald Trump. Fired any FBI Directors lately because they wanted to investigate your links to Russian vote fixers? Falsely accused anyone of rigging a federal election that you didn't happen to win? Engaged in any acts of sedition by actively encouraging right-wing extremists to storm your nation's Capitol Building in an effort to undermine and overturn the entire democratic process? Or has today been a slow day for you?)
Without perhaps consciously setting out to do so, Cormier wrote a book which directly addressed the problems of individual freedom and personal integrity at a time when both appeared to be meaningless in a United States being torn asunder by political scandal and racial division, led by a President whose actions confirmed that no one, especially those who held the greatest positions of power, could or should be unquestioningly trusted not to put their personal agendas first and the well-being of the nation a somewhat distant second. (Hello again, ex-President Trump. Is any of this beginning to sound familiar yet?) Brother Leon, worried about selling all the chocolates before his superiors find out just how much he spent on them, could easily be viewed as a kind of minor league substitute for the President, fretting in the Oval Office about losing the 1972 election to the unpopular and, in the end, easily defeated Democrat candidate George McGovern. And Archie Costello could be any of Nixon's aides –– HR Haldeman, John Ehrlichman, Egil 'Bud' Krogh, the expendable 'informer' John Dean –– doing whatever they felt (and/or were told) was justified in order to protect his administration and their own positions of influence within it.
Jerry Renault has no idea why he rebels against the tradition embodied by Brother Leon and The Vigils. What becomes important to him, as the narrative progresses, is not that he understand the reason for his behavior but that he continue to say 'No!,' refusing to abandon his principles despite the various tactics employed by Archie — bullying, intimidation, brutal physical violence — to make him back down. The idea of a seemingly defenceless kid standing up for his principles no matter what was a powerful message to be sending out to young readers in 1974 –– a timely reminder of the fact that it is necessary if not essential to question the actions and statements of seemingly incorruptible authority figures, recently disgraced occupants of the White House included. This is why a novel like The Chocolate War will never become irrelevant. As long as there are people who knowingly abuse their power to serve and protect their own selfish interests, there will hopefully be at least a few Jerry Renaults left in the world willing to speak out against that and other forms of tyranny despite what doing so may cost them.
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| ROBERT CORMIER, c 1980 |
The Writer: Robert Cormier made a lot of people very angry and uncomfortable by writing bestselling novels like The Chocolate War (1974), I Am The Cheese (1977) and After The First Death (1979). These people were almost always adults –– parents of pre-teen or teenaged children, for the most part –– who objected to the violence and sexual content (never explicit in any way) featured in the eighteen so-called 'children's books' he wrote prior to his death in November 2000. (The more market-friendly classification 'Young Adult Fiction' had yet to be invented when Cormier's first novel for teenaged readers was published.) The Chocolate War, which remains his best-known and arguably most enduring work of fiction, established the model for everything that followed by showing the world as the cruel, evil and unjust place it so often can be rather than as the benign and benevolent paradise that many parents, predominantly fundamentalist Christians, would have their so-called 'innocent' offspring believe it is. Cormier's novels were banned in many schools and withdrawn from the shelves of many a town library and even today continue to attract controversy for their unflinching depictions of what remain harsh if unignorable emotional, social, educational and political realities.
Robert Edmund Cormier was born on 17 January 1925 in the northern Massachusetts town of Leominster, the second of eight children born to French Canadian immigrant Lucien Cormier and his English-speaking wife Irma (née Collins). Like many poor residents of the impoverished, Church-dominated province of Québec, the Cormiers came to the United States in search of secure paid employment in the many mills and factories that were considered, at that time, to be the economic backbone of the nation. (Cormier himself was only three years younger than Jack Kerouac, another writer of French Canadian descent whose parents arrived in the Massachusetts mill town of Lowell at roughly the same time in search of work and a more prosperous life for themselves and their three children.) Apart from time lost to strikes and Depression-era layoffs, Lucien Cormier would work in the same Leominster comb and brush factory for forty-two years, his death from cancer eventually inspiring his son to write his first book as a means of moving beyond the profound sense of grief he experienced after having lost him. This book, Cormier's debut novel, would be published in 1960 as Now and At The Hour. Like the other two 'adult' novels he wrote and published during that decade, it has long been out of print.
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| Random House first US edition, 1985 |
Cormier would remain in Leominster all his life, never moving further than three miles from his childhood home located in the largely French Canadian neighborhood known, logically enough, as French Hill. (His vacation home was only a ten minute drive from his everyday home –– a source of great amusement to his friends but entirely typical of a man who felt a strong sense of connection to his hometown and everything it represented to him both culturally and emotionally.) Naturally, he also attended school in Leominster, his education beginning at a private Catholic institution known as St Cecilia's Parochial School and continuing at Leominster High School, from which he graduated, after being voted President of the senior class, in 1942.
Although he began writing fiction as a schoolboy, encouraged by a nun who believed his writing showed promise, it was not until 1943 –– when he became a college freshman in the neighboring town of Fitchburg –– that Cormier began to seriously consider the idea of one day becoming a writer, a career choice that began to seem a little more realistic when one of his instructors, impressed by a story he had written for a class assignment, submitted it to a local magazine without his knowledge, earning him the very welcome publication fee of $75.
Yet Cormier remained unsure of his vocation and worked for a time in a comb factory (not the same one, oddly enough, which employed his father and several other members of his family), having been classified 4F by the US Army due to the combination of poor eyesight and pneumonia which, it was feared (luckily without justification), would eventually see him contract the lung disease tuberculosis. 'It was a very comfortable job,' he later recalled in an interview. 'I was friendly with the owner's daughter. I had a couple of dates with her. In fact, the owner brought me in one day and said that I had a future there, that they did have sales reps who went out on the road and that I might work myself into something like that. It was a velvet rug. They treated me very nicely. It was a family-owned organization. Then a man gets married and has a couple of kids and he's there for forty years. I sensed this. And I burned to write. I was writing at night, at home. I thought, I can't do this for the rest of my life.'
Determined to follow his calling, Cormier paid a visit to the neighboring town of Worcester where he hoped to speak to the editor of the town newspaper about obtaining a job as a reporter. In addition to housing the editorial offices of The Worcester Telegram and Gazette, the building was also home to the office of its affiliated local radio station. It was the radio office Cormier entered by mistake and where he was soon found wandering its corridors by Herbert Kruger, the intrigued owner of both media enterprises. Kruger hired the newcomer on the spot to write radio advertisements, a job Cormier would keep from 1946 until he married local girl Constance Senay in 1948 and finally made the full-time switch to the newspaper.
Cormier continued to work for The Worcester Telegram and Gazette until 1955, after which he became a reporter and then the wire editor for The Fitchburg-Leominster Sentinel and Enterprise before becoming that newspaper's associate editor in 1966. Three years later he was asked to write a weekly human interest column by the editor which he agreed to do only on the understanding that it would be published under the pseudonym 'John Fitch IV.' During this period –– which saw him become the father of four children and win several local journalism awards –– he somehow found time to write and publish two further 'adult' novels and the critically acclaimed YA novels The Chocolate War (1974) and I Am The Cheese (1977). Although he officially quit the newspaper in 1978 –– encouraged to do so by his wife after he told her he needed six uninterrupted months in which to write his next novel, which would be published in 1979 as After The First Death and go on to permanently alter the definition of 'children's literature' for publishers and readers alike –– he continued to publish freelance articles in its pages right up until his death.
Cormier's work proved to be as popular with teenagers as it proved to be unpopular and even hateful to many of their parents, with several of his novels being banned in schools and public libraries in a great number of North American towns and cities. The Chocolate War was a particularly controversial work, becoming the fourth most challenged work of fiction in the country between 1990-2000 according to a 2008 survey conducted by the American Library Association. Cormier himself remained unapologetic for the controversy he caused, insisting that children –– or, in his case, his fiercely loyal teenage readers –– had the right to be told the truth about the nature of evil and how the world really operates. 'I have my own standards,' he told those who came to hear him speak at a censorship conference shortly before his death. 'As to that sensitive child out there, I know they exist, but maybe a good dose of the truth would be a warning for what's waiting. You seldom get a censorship attempt from a 14 year old boy. It's the adults who get upset.'
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| ROBERT CORMIER, 2000 |
His later work, beginning with the short story collection Eight Plus One (1980) and ending with The Rag and Bone Shop (2000), generally depicts lonely and troubled adolescents living in situations in which adults are generally oblivious to what's going on around them and, in several instances, right under their noses. His 1998 novel Tenderness develops this theme further, being the story of a teenage girl who becomes obsessed by and eventually falls in love with a murderer. 'Tenderness is a very tough book,' its elderly author once confided to a journalist. 'But it's written in a minor key. When you're dealing with a serial killer and a sexually precocious girl, it's easy to let the blood flow and the sex roll. The harder part is to contain it and suggest it. So my conscience is clear.' Even his elegiac smalltown 'novel-in-verse' Frenchtown Summer (1999) –– a book several critics have described as his masterpiece –– features a corpse, its appearance inspired by murders which took place in Leominster when he was a boy, terrifying and traumatizing the local community.
But it's not these controversies that Cormier is most likely to be remembered for by future generations. His work also contains moments of lyricism and profound emotional truth, revealing an understanding of the human psyche that, while often disturbing, also hints at the delights that have yet to be experienced by his troubled young protagonists. 'I have always had a sense,' he once remarked, 'that we are all pretty much alone in life, particularly in adolescence.' It was his timeless ability to understand and dramatize this belief that will ensure his work will continue to be read and admired, by teenagers and adults alike, for as long as people have the desire to understand what makes certain human beings so eager to act in their own best interests while ignoring the moral and ethical implications of their unchecked greed, pettiness and corruption.
Use the link below to read a short two part interview with ROBERT CORMIER published in July 2000:
Many novels by ROBERT CORMIER, including The Chocolate War and its 1985 sequel Beyond The Chocolate War, remain available in both print and digital editions.
I Am The Cheese was the first ROBERT CORMIER novel to be adapted for the screen, with a film version starring ROBERT McNAUGHTON, HOPE LANGE and DON MURRAY, directed by ROBERT JIRAS, being released in 1983. The book was filmed again in 1992 as Lapses of Memory starring MATHEW MACKAY, JOHN HURT and MARTHE KELLER, directed by PATRICK DeWOLF, but like its predecessor has not been released on DVD.
The Chocolate War was adapted for the screen by writer/director KEITH GORDON in 1988, starring ILAN MITCHELL-SMITH as Jerry, JOHN GLOVER as Brother Leon and WALLACE LANGHAM as Archie, and has since been released as a Region 1 DVD.
The same novel was adapted again in 2012 under the title The Assignment by Canadian director CAM PETERS, starring GARRETT HNATIUK as Jerry, ADAM DOLMAN as Archie and ERICA MARKS as his embittered female assistant Obie who serves as the story's pivotal character. (Obie, of course, is a supporting male character in the original novel.)
The Bumblebee Flies Away, based on the 1983 novel of the same name, was released in 1992 starring JANET PAPARAZZO, ELIJAH WOOD and JANEANE GAROFALO. Perhaps the most controversial film to be adapted from a ROBERT CORMIER novel is Tenderness, released in 2009 and starring RUSSELL CROWE, JON FOSTER and SOPHIE TRAUB.
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Last updated 5 October 2023
