Hanks typecasts himself
Actor pays tribute to America and vintage typewriters in his first book of short stories
Tom Hanks has helped to define the mythology of America. As the unwitting revolutionary Forrest Gump, or Saving Private Ryan’s war hero Captain Miller, Philadelphia’s AIDS activist Andrew Beckett or Apollo 13’s Jim Lovell, his face is one of the most famous on the silver screen and his characters some of the most memorable.
And so that sensibility is echoed in the two-time Oscar-winning actor’s first book of short stories, “Uncommon Type,” which plays on the themes Hanks has explored in many of his films.
When you pick up this book, you’ll notice his stories have an unmistakable Hanksian feel. The themes are wide-ranging — and he clearly loves America while gently satirizing it. You can hear his soothing voice of reason as you read every sentence. Even certain words (“Yowza!”) seem like they were made to be spoken by Hanks himself. His characters, too, like the crotchety newspaper columnist Hank Fiset.
Sure enough, in an interview with the Star, Hanks broke out into a cranky old man’s voice to imitate the character: “Who needs that? I can get a great hotdog right here in town!”
The late screenwriter Nora Ephron, who directed him in “You’ve Got Mail” and “Sleepless in Seattle,” was the one who first really encouraged him to write, Hanks says. “Uncommon Type” is dedicated to her as well as to his family.
“She would read it over and she would give very, very specific advice, as in, ‘I don’t know what you mean here’ and ‘This paragraph should not be here,’” he says. “But she would also just say to me, ‘Voice, voice, voice. What voice are you using? What is your voice?’”
The voice he used in his first short story “Alan Bean Plus Four,” about a group of friends who go to the moon, got him published in The New Yorker in 2014. After that, he says, he was contacted by Penguin Random House, asking whether he had any more stories.
“I said no. And they said, ‘If you’d like to, you want to try some?’ and I said ‘Well, OK, I guess.’”
And so he started writing. He already had some characters in his head; he wrote down titles and themes as they came to him, winding up with 17 stories in all.
The other thing you’ll notice about this book is the immediate connection with typewriters — a conceit Hanks uses to link the stories. Each begins with a photo of a typewriter from Hanks’s own collection, taken by the award-winning photographer Kevin Twomey. Each story also mentions a typewriter — whether in general terms or a specific model; sometimes in passing and sometimes at the centre of the tale.
“These Are the Meditations of my Heart,” for example, is a story that comes up quite a few times in our conversation. It’s about an unnamed woman enduring a breakup and aspiring to a more minimalist life, who decides to buy a toy typewriter at a church sale. The keys stick; she takes it for repair but ends up buying a better one instead. Once she starts writing she comes to a realization.
“I want my yet-to-be-conceived children to someday read the meditations of my heart,” she says.
It’s an optimistic end to a story filled with heartbreak and images of rust and brokenness. “You are seeking permanence,” the old typewriter salesman tells her.
This tale, and others in the book, speaks to Hanks’s relationship with typewriters — and how he acquired his first good model, the Hermes 2000. He’s a keen collector and counts 25 or so in his office alone as we’re on the phone.
“When you are putting something down ... you are literally stamping ink into the fibres of paper. And outside of chiseling it in stone, it’s about the second-best way in order to make something last forever,” he says.
“That’s not the first reason you want to put it down on paper, but it’s a fact. The test is: are we still reading Metamora; or The Last of the Wampanoags here in the year 2017? I’m not sure we are but that was the real title of a book from a long time ago. But we might still every now and again be reading Nevil Shute or someone like P.G. Wodehouse or H.G. Wells.”
That sense of permanence washes through Hanks’s stories; it verges often on nostalgia, like a Norman Rockwell painting capturing a certain type of American scene, but with a bit more edge. There’s a reference to TV-dinner trays that have rusted; a son who watches his mother fly away in a plane without him; marriages that don’t last; good times long passed; and hard work and dreams in between.
His stories jump between times — remembering a Second World War battle in “Christmas Eve 1953,” to looking into the future and going to the moon in “Alan Bean Plus Four” — and genres. There are bits of science fiction, traditional narrative, magic realism.
“You take a look at everything that comes down the pipe by way of media and popular entertainment. You think you’re going to be seeing a story about people growing up hardscrabble in Kansas and it turns into a ghost story about ancient settlers or something ... whatever mode of storytelling helps you explore the theme and make your point, well, it’s open game.”
Despite his love for the esthetic of a typewriter, he didn’t write his book on one. Well, not all of it.
“Hell, no, that would be impossible!” He did use a typewriter for the first four pages of the first draft of “A Month on Greene Street,” he said, because he had some momentum going. “But once I started getting involved in the mechanics of the story itself and the real process, you can’t do that on a typewriter. You have to go to the laptop.”
Although the laptop does nag. With a typewriter “there’s no blinking cursor that is just reminding you again and again that you haven’t done anything, you haven’t said anything,” Hanks says. “You’re also getting ... a sensory manifestation of your progress. There is a sound to typing that comes specifically from the manual typewriter. It is a percussive beat and when it starts going faster you hear it and you get involved in it like it’s rock ’n’ roll music, a rock ’n’ roll record or something like that. And you roll along. And sometimes what is required in the process is dead silence, in which case there’s no buzzing, there is no sound, there is no sight other than what almost always is a very beautiful work of engineering.”
Either way, Hanks figures the luckiest person in these stories is the guy “who dabbles in real estate. His mom died so he doesn’t really have to have a job anymore ... he’s driving an old car but there’s a level of contentment.”
A level of contentment he believes people yearn for in this era where “we’re constantly being sold something that we’re supposed to want, or being shown lives that other people are leading and we’re not.
“I’m the kind of guy like, hey, if you can afford takeout Chinese food and you always have half a tank of gas, I think you’re doing OK.”