Isherwood dying, drawn by Don Bachardy

I never met Christopher Isherwood, but he was the sort of writer who made you feel you knew him if you read his books. In The Berlin Stories, he turned himself into a character, "Herr Issyvood," as his fellow characters called him. In his travel books, he was an easy guide, observant and wry. He had the gift of youth, too, well into middle age, and even when he wrote about the sunset years in A Meeting by the River, it was with a graceful touch. Grace, you thought, was the one quality that would never desert him.

Isherwood was also openly, even brazenly, homosexual at a time when the closet was still very full. Like his writing, this wasn't nearly as easy a performance as it looked. In 1952, though, by now established in Hollywood, Isherwood settled down with an aspiring 18-year-old artist named Don Bachardy, and they maintained a household until Isherwood's death in 1986. As the director John Boorman put it, it was the only successful Hollywood marriage he knew.

With Isherwood's help, Bachardy became a celebrity portrait painter, whose subjects ranged from Tennessee Williams to Anais Nin. The relationship became gradually paternal on Isherwood's part, but the bond remained strong.

A graphic record of dying

So it was that, when Isherwood became terminally ill with prostate cancer, the two men decided to create a graphic record of his dying. In a sense, all of Isherwood's work had been autobiographical, and this was to be the last chapter. He could no longer write, but Bachardy, using his own medium, would be his amanuensis.

At first, the two men agreed on sessions and poses—some of them in what was by then the distinctly unflattering nude— but they seem to have arranged that Bachardy would continue to work even when Isherwood couldn't give particular consent. The artistic choices were, of course, Bachardy's, but the work as a whole gradually became entirely his. This was obviously an act of great faith and trust on Isherwood's part, but equally one of love and commitment on Bachardy's.

The result was a suite of large drawings, executed with brush and acrylics, that has just ended its run at New York's Cheim & Read Gallery. Thirty-four of them were on display, distributed through the gallery's three rooms, and proceeding chronologically over the last summer and autumn of Isherwood's life to his death in early winter.

The calendar becomes irrelevant

Several of them were dated, but Bachardy signed none of them, as if to efface himself as far as possible from the record. Bachardy preserved all the dates of composition— he worked, as he always had, in a single sitting— but, for artistic purposes, a smattering of the actual dates sufficed: At a certain point, dying imposes its own time, and it is no longer by the clock or the calendar.

The risks in such an undertaking are, needless to say, formidable for both parties, as witness Annie Leibovitz's now-notorious photographs of the dying Susan Sontag. The sitter must be honest; that is, as unguarded and transparent as possible in expressing both the process at work within him and his own responses to it. The artist must keep finding the human being in the clinical subject.

The danger, on one side, is disgust and pity; on the other, sentimental evasion. For Isherwood, the latter must have been by far the greater risk, for if he had a horror of anything in life it was sentimentality. Both men, in short, had to be absolutely on their mettle, even as the powers of one faded into the artistic (and presumably medical) decisions of the other.

Few flourishes, but ample emotion

The operation, as they say, was a success, and the patient, of course, died. Bachardy's line is thin, sinuous, and spare; there are few flourishes and very little shading or embellishment— I do think of one drawing in which the bent black outline of Isherwood's robe seems to push like a prong into his neck, but that is about the extent of the commentary.

That is not to say there is no emotion; on the contrary, these drawings are suffused with it, and there is tenderness in every line. None of it, however, gets in the way of representation. In the end— as with any of Isherwood's novels— there is a story to be told.

Isherwood smiles in one of the drawings, seemingly in response to a social occasion, and in one other, his face is neutral, with the look of a man not particularly thinking or doing anything. In all the other portraits, he is very busy indeed: fierce, defiant, apprehensive, sorrowing and, finally, physically suffering, as pain overwhelms everything else.

Agony with dignity

The last room in the exhibition was frankly harrowing, and the last sketches were made post-mortem. Even when Isherwood appears reduced to a rictus of agony, though, there is no loss of dignity.

The instinct of any dying animal is to seek privacy, though modern death doesn't provide much of it. Christopher Isherwood risked exposure instead, and put himself unreservedly into the hands of another. The gamble paid off. Isherwood and Bachardy took the work of dying and made it a work of art: a very modern ars moriendi, and a very moving one.