In the late John Gregory Dunne’s book Monster, in which the critic and novelist recounts his experiences as a screenwriter in Hollywood, cowriting scripts with Joan Didion, his wife, many sections are devoted to Dunne’s weakening heart, and the cost—both financial and physical—that powered and metered his work. In the interest of covering the price of doctors’ visits, tests, and hospital bills following his first collapse, in 1988, while speed walking in Central Park, Dunne needed to remain a member of the WGA in order to benefit from the union’s health insurance plan. Consequently, Didion and Dunne wrote movies: The Panic in Needle Park (1971), an adaptation of Didion’s Play It as It Lays (1972), A Star Is Born (1976), an adaptation of Dunne’s Black Dahlia murder case–inspired True Confessions (1981), and Up Close and Personal (1996), of which the eight-year, twenty-seven-draft saga is detailed in Monster. “We’ve written twenty-three books between us,” he told The Paris Review in 1996. “And movies financed nineteen out of the twenty-three.”
In 1991, Dunne underwent aortic valve replacement surgery at Columbia-Presbyterian and recovered in the hospital’s McKeen Pavilion. Throughout Monster, Dunne avoids indulging in every writer’s more obvious belligerence; our fixation and phobia with End. How to ward it off in our work and still conclude with presence, hope. A hatch. Even when Dunne describes first fainting that crisp February morning in Central Park, the episode seems cursory. “I was stretched out in the middle of the road rising behind the Metropolitan Museum,” he writes, describing regaining consciousness seconds after his collapse. “A stream of joggers detouring past without looking or stopping, as if I were a piece of roadkill.” The image would be gruesome if it weren’t for the Met. For the joggers. For the whole uptown mise-en-scène. Or perhaps it’s gruesome because of it. Life could end—conk!—at any moment, and uptown joggers might treat you like New York roadkill, and hours from now, the Met will be mobbed with tourists wearing sensible walking shoes. And you’ve been swatted down, and tomorrow the joggers will return, running faster, having improved on their times. And the tourists—still in town, wearing their sensible shoes—will be riding the ferry to Ellis Island or eating pastrami at Katz’s.
Though, in a rare moment of self-reflection, Dunne describes the replacement valve’s clicking sound and how it signified “reassuring proof [he] was still alive.” This newer, louder heartbeat was a reminder of his impermanence and how in illness, what’s been assumed can no longer be assumed. We develop a habit of converting the everyday into souvenir. Of holding off what’s meaningless. That, or we veer off script. Illness compels us to ad-lib. As Katharine Hepburn once suggested—again Hepburn because she’s never far from my mind—“Wouldn’t it be great if people could get to live suddenly as often as they die suddenly?” To live without delay. To come to just as tersely as death comes for. I’d like to think Hepburn—who I’m now picturing in a photo I’ve seen of her riding a skateboard wearing a white pantsuit—I’d like to imagine she meant, despite all of its concerns, that life should be lived unusually.
The clicking from Dunne’s plastic valve, which replaced his calcified one, also resonated with his daughter, Quintana. The click, click, click entertained her. She began calling her father the Tin Man. When I first read Monster, Quintana’s nickname for Dunne reminded me of that scene near the end of the movie where the Wizard tells the Tin Man, “As for you, my galvanized friend, you want a heart. You don’t know how lucky you are not to have one,” he warns. “Hearts will never be practical until they can be made unbreakable.” Regardless, the Tin Man still desires one. He’s tired of sounding like an empty kettle. Of never registering emotion, he sings at the movie’s start. The Tin Man wants all of it. For his soul to light up. To feel the hot swell of jealousy, devotion, he continues. To really feel the part.
Those four words, as plain as they are, toll. An unassuming way of saying he’s ready to be human. Or possibly, some impersonation of it. The role of humanhood as he’s imagined it.
But to consider his song as such, tilts the sentiment. To really feel the part, the Tin Man needs his prop: a heart. It’s fundamental to the costume. Perhaps I’m overthinking it and the Tin Man has it all figured out. The lub-dub sound is what’s keeping record after all. Evidence of a narrative build. Maintenance despite life’s lows; its howling moods and those days when you find yourself in bed before dinner with the windows open, disaffected by the sounds trickling in. How mobile those sounds are: a neighbor riffling through a cutlery drawer; sandaled feet on dusty pavement; a fire engine’s ungainly siren.
Even when life presents one disincentive after the next—“I’m fine,” she’ll say. “It’ll be okay,” she insists unconvincingly. Even when hopes aren’t met or the comedown from an emotional night cedes to birds chirping before five a.m.—which, honestly, is too early for birds to chirp—even then, despite the guilt you feel from greeting morning having not yet slept, the heart stays lub-dubbing. Even when love is unreturned; when I’ve been hurt but refuse to get furious—would I even know how?
Even when someone forces you to articulate what you find intolerably hard to articulate, the heart is at work. On board, howbeit. In this way, the heart seems inhuman. Or actually, superhuman. It doesn’t acquiesce. It’s motored. It’s motiveless.
In her 2004 book, Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric, Claudia Rankine considers Mr. Tools, who, in July 2001, was the world’s first recipient of a self-contained artificial heart. “His was a private and perhaps lonely singularity,” notes Rankine. “No one else could say, I know how you feel.” Mr. Tools didn’t have a heartbeat but a whirr. “It was not the same whirr of a siren, but rather the fast repetitive whirr of a machine whose insistent motion might eventually seem like silence,” she writes. “The weight on his heart was his heart.” Mr. Tools survived 151 days with his artificial heart, dying at the age of fifty-nine in Louisville, Kentucky, from complications unrelated to the heart device.