Literature With a Capital "L"

About once a week during the late-eighties, while my mother was at the local mall (apparently intent on maxing out one credit card after another), she would drop me off at the local Powell's bookstore where I would spend three or four hours slowly perusing the bookstore aisles - reading a page here, a back cover there - familiarizing myself with the work of hundreds of different authors. This was back in those blissfully naive days before I had a concept of Literature with a capital "L," before I'd ever heard of the Literary canon, before I had any name recognition for such classic authors as Hemingway, Faulkner, Fitzgerald et. al. Quite honestly, this was at a point in my life when I thought Louis L'amour was the most important living author (don't tell anyone I said that - unless you're talking to Louis L'amour).


In those pre-Literary days I was particularly drawn to the work of (in no particular order): Berkeley Breathed (Bloom County), Herge (Tintin), Patrick F. McManus (outdoor humorist, author of such books as The Grasshopper Trap and They Shoot Canoes Don't They?), Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman (co-authors of The Dragonlance Chrinicles), and Jeffery Archer (British author and former Conservative member of Parliament whose book As the Crow Flies was, at 800 pages, the longest novel I'd ever read - though, actually, come to think of it, it might still be the longest novel I've ever read...). But you know what? All of these book are really good. I would happily re-read any of them. They may not be thought of as Literary or whatever (I mean, Tintin, obviously has cultural cache) but who cares? They're awesome.

But, anyway, there was one author, one series, in particular, that I was drawn to above all others as I trolled through those Powell's bookstore aisles: Gar Wilson's Phoenix Force. (Actually, as it turns out, Gar Wilson doesn't exist, but was rather a pseudonym for a collection of authors: Robert Hoskins, Dan Marlowe, Thomas Ramirez, Paul Glen Neuman, Dan Streib, and Mike Linaker.) With titles like, "Korean Killground," "No Rules, No Referees," and, "The Fury Bombs," and covers that depicted crouched men firing small arms into the distance, what was there not to like?

Check it out:









These books are basically the literary equivalent of a 1980s Chuck Norris movie. Think Delta Force and Invasion U.S.A. (still probably two of the most violent movies I think I've ever seen, by the way). Phoenix Force was this small, elite, anti-terrorist unit that traveled around the world covertly killing bad guys, drug lords, hijackers, terrorists, etc. I half-thought these books would have made a comeback during the Bush-Cheney years but even given the post-9/11 political environment the Phoenix Force books (I hesitate to even call them novels) were still too ridiculous to bring up as reference points. But, when I was twelve or thirteen years old, I loved them. I read like forty of them, one after the other, like a middle-aged divorcee cruising through a stack of romance novels, just sitting around waiting for Bronchial cancer to kick in.

The reality is, more than the writing, I was really drawn to the covers. It was at that point in my life when I'd spend all my time day-dreaming about gun fights, violence, explosions, hand-to-hand combat, torture, you name it. I was that little boy (but aren't most little boys like that?) and these covers were exactly what I wanted.

But everything changed when my mom sent me to a private school in eighth grade where books like Phoenix Force were, shall we say, totally looked down on. At school I started reading books like Catcher In the Rye, To Kill a Mockingbird, Of Mice and Men, Night. And I hated these books. I thought they were SO boring. Sure, there are prostitutes in Catcher..., a cold-blooded hanging in Mockingbird..., a shocking murder in Mice..., and Nazis in Night, but when you're used to your protagonist mowing down a roomful of masked Colombian drug-lords with an Uzi (in the first scene), the reading experience just isn't the same.

Seriously, though...if you were a 13 year old boy which book would you rather read?

It took me a couple years to get into capital "L" Literature. It wasn't until my sophomore year in high school when we read One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and The Sun Also Rises (and then a year or two later when we read Death of a Salesman and Denis Johnson's Jesus Son) when I started tuning into "serious" literature. I have to credit my sophomore English teacher for turning me towards Literature and away from supermarket reading (this is the same English teacher, by the way, who one day told me that Jeffrey Archer was vacation reading for old women and who, incidentally, was charged with statutory rape years later, causing him to flee to his native Ireland, never having cleared his name...but I digress). I wonder what would have happened if I kept reading those violent action/adventure books and was never introduced to "real" writing? Would I still be a writer today? What kind of writer would I be? Would I be dead? Would I have joined the armed forces?