Fighting for a banned book shaped his life
Early in 1986, English teachers at Mowat Middle School protested a schoolwide ban against a select number of novels, including Robert Cormier's The Chocolate War.
Robert Cormier
By Brian Raftery
NEW YORK: In the 50 years since it came out, The Chocolate War has become one of the country's most challenged books. But the tensest battle over the novel may have been fought in Panama City, Fla., in the mid-1980s. That's when an attempt to ban The Chocolate War divided the town, leading to arson and death threats against middle-school teachers.
Early in 1986, English teachers at Mowat Middle School protested a schoolwide ban against a select number of novels, including Robert Cormier's The Chocolate War. The book, published in 1974, had been long been criticized by some parents for its modest locker-room talk and anti-authority worldview and enjoyed by the young in part for the same reasons.
The Mowat teachers endured all sorts of harassment because of their stand. Pranksters called in the middle of the night, calling them lesbians and witches. Parents harangued them at community meetings. Even some of their colleagues turned against them.
That fall, a sloppily addressed letter was found at the Mowat offices. It featured the words YOU ALL SHALL DIE in letters cut out from magazines, and mentioned several teachers by name including Alyne Farrell. That was when the you-know-what really hit the fan, said Farrell, now 76. I was a single woman with a young child, and I lived alone. We had police sitting in our driveway for three days and nights. Yet the teachers had a notable ally: Cormier himself.
Not long after the YOU ALL SHALL DIE message arrived in the mail, another letter made its way to Mowat. This one was part apology, part lament. I have been at a loss for words, Cormier admitted in his note. The ironic thing is that words are my business, and the words I used in my books have been the cause of so much trouble. Cormier died in 2000 at age 75. A trove of his letters and essays at Fitchburg State University provide a glimpse at how an author's life is affected when a book unexpectedly inflames a long-running war. Many writers are having a similar experience today, with books facing opposition at libraries and schools nationwide including, once again, in Panama City.
As Cormier would remark to one of his children, I'm weary of the battle, but a tired fighter can still be a fighter. For a book that proved to be so provocative, The Chocolate War had an innocuous enough birthplace: the Cormier family dining table in Leominster, Mass. During dinner one night in the fall of 1968, Cormier's son, Pete, told his father he'd been tasked with selling chocolates as part of a fund-raiser for his private school.
The elder Cormier, who was no fan of authority, told his son he had his permission not to participate he didn't have to go along with the crowd. He was encouraging me to take a stand, Pete Cormier said in a recent video interview. I was a skinny freshman a low man on the totem pole and this made me feel like a rebel.
Over the next few years, while working as a newspaper editor and columnist, Robert Cormier stayed up late at night, spinning Pete's minor act of defiance into The Chocolate War. The book follows a small-town freshman named Jerry Renault, whose refusal to sell candy for his school earns him the ire of a manipulative headmaster and the vengeance of an underground student group known as the Vigils. By the book's end, Jerry has been harassed, beaten and ostracized, leaving him just as alone as ever.
Various attempts to ban the book pointed to the novel's negativism, its pervasive vulgarity and its portrayal of less than wholesome sexual activity. The Chocolate War wasn't an easy sell: Several editors rejected the book, citing its violence, language and pessimistic message. But teens in the 1970s were eager for stories that reflected their angst and anxieties, and novels like S.E. Hinton's The Outsiders and Judy Blume's Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret had become hand-me-down hits.
The relatably bummed-out tone of The Chocolate War paired with Cormier's economical prose and hyper-specific recall of adolescent cruelty was aimed at young readers who'd become skeptical of the grown-ups running their world.
You don't have to go to a Catholic boys high school to realize that the school system is inherently screwed up and manipulative, said the actor and filmmaker Keith Gordon, who wrote and directed a 1988 adaptation of Cormier's book.
