January 13, 2022 35
The apparently more private books
he made also convey a sense, or imi-
tation, of record- keeping. The pages
resemble catalogs, newspapers, or
yearbooks: drawings of figures are in-
terspersed with wavy lines to simulate
writing, or sometimes full pages con-
tain a series of letters and numbers.
In his admirably thorough and illumi-
nating text for Memory Palace, John
Beardsley writes that the books
reveal a lexical or even indexical
quality, functioning either as dic-
tionaries of his own language or as
guides to terms whose meanings
are dependent on the context in
which they are presented—if only
we could figure them out.A phrase that recurs in many
pieces (alongside a classical Zodiac
Man figure) is the enigmatic “Purse!-
Discusses,” sometimes shortened as
“P!D.” Beardsley proposes that Castle
adapted this personal insignia from
speech drills he remembered from
school. It is hard not to interpret it,
with the near- homonym of “parse” and
interrupting exclamation point, as an
urgent cry for comprehension.
There’s an understandable anxiety,
running through almost all contem-
porary writing about Castle, to take
the circumstances of his life into ac-
count without making them the all-
encompassing explanation for his
abilities and output. Beardsley writes
that Castle’s “deafness might have been
as much a creative asset as a limitation,”
suggesting that it “enlarged Castle’s
non- hearing sensate capacities; in par-
ticular, it may have sharpened his mem-
ory of physical surroundings to a degree
nothing short of extraordinary.” Con-
sidering that many of Castle’s earliest
works were lost when the family moved,
it does seem that his depictions of the
first farm he lived on were drawn with
astonishing accuracy long after he’d left
it behind; this can be appreciated on
foldout pages in Memory Palace, where
his architectural and landscape draw-
ings line up seamlessly in panoramas.
Beardsley acknowledges, however,
that loss of hearing by no means neces-
sarily enhances a person’s other facul-
ties, and he is careful to make Castle’s
“acute visual- spatial memory, and not
his deafness per se,” the overarching
theme of his study. After quibbling
with Umberger’s suggestion that Castle
was “without any conventional linguis-
tic constructs in terms of his internal
thought process,” and dismissing an-
other writer’s supposition that Castle
may have been autistic, Beards ley ar-
gues more broadly that “speculations
about cognitive and behavioral differ-
ences are a distraction, engaging us
with possible pathologies instead of
Castle’s extraordinary achievements.”
It’s a fair point, but as Beardsley’s text
amply demonstrates, a full understand-
ing of Castle’s work benefits from both
biographical investigation and aes-
thetic engagement, just as it does for
more conventional artists. Why deny
his life the ardent conjecture less fret-
fully imposed on Louise Bourgeois or
Willem de Kooning?
Even if this reading of the work stems
from romanticized suppositions about
Castle’s psychology, it’s hard not to feel
that his drawings, even the less unset-
tling ones, radiate a profound sense of
isolation. The interiors and landscapes
that he created are almost always
empty, even as his inanimate objects—
the chairs, beds, windows, houses, and
sheds he repeatedly drew—are imbued
with intense particularity, their signif-
icance verging on talismanic. Castle
also made hats, jackets, and vests, pre-
sumably for the “friends” to model, or
simply to imagine the outfits they might
try on. Separated from their wearers,
the clothes take on independent, if for-
lorn, life.
Umberger observes that Castlefrequently instills his vistas with a
palpable sense of limitations; en-
tanglements and obfuscations are
the norm.... Bedframes impede
doors...fences challenge access to
further realms... and words are not
conveyors of shared meaning but
instead, poignantly signal an aware-
ness of a vast, inaccessible realm.It’s tempting, then, looking at these ob-
jects and pictures, to imagine Castle as
a lonely child grown into a lonely man.
But as Jacqueline Crist, the managing
partner of the James Castle Collection
and Archive, writes in her foreword
to Memory Palace, what we know of
the artist’s personality doesn’t easily
fit with the desolate mood of his best-
known work. “He laughed a lot and
found joy in simple pastimes like read-
ing newspaper comics,” Crist writes.He seems to have possessed an in-
ternal clock that allowed him never
to miss a TV comedy he loved. He
sensed when his nieces and neph-
ews were misbehaving, prompting
him to make it known to his sister
Peggy that she needed to check on
the children. He was a man com-
pletely integrated into his family’s
life and was a respected member of
the household.None of this, of course, precludes an
artist from rendering alienation and
despair, or from consciously or un-
consciously gravitating toward images
and scenarios that suggest he was not
as “completely integrated” as he might
have appeared. If he made images of
cheerful family life, not many of them
have survived to be reproduced, and his
inability to communicate clearly with
most of his family members couldn’t
have been easy on him. He was prob-
ably sent away to board at the Idaho
State School in 1910 or 1911. Following
the trends in deaf education, advocated
at the time by Alexander Graham Bell,
the school encouraged students to vo-
calize and read lips, and strongly dis-
couraged signing. His representations
of the school indicate mixed feelings.
There’s an unusually convivial draw-
ing of a room crowded with seemingly
happy students and teachers sitting in
a circle, the walls covered in Castle’s
characteristic scribbled circles and an-
imal forms. There are also drawings
more in keeping with Castle’s standard
aesthetic: empty stairwells and empty
classrooms, and a picture with the hand
sign for “dumb” in place of the subject’s
head. A neighbor who grew up around
Castle remembered that other chil-
dren called him “Dummy” with such
consistency that the acquaintance was
“somewhat along in years” before he
learned James’s actual name.
Castle was spared most of the chores
around the house and farm, and spentmuch of his time making his art. His
parents were the local postmasters for
Garden Valley and the surrounding
area, with part of the house serving
as a general store and post office. This
provided Castle with access to a wealth
of printed materials that served both as
visual influences and, once discarded,
as materials from which to create
his art. (In more than one image, the
pointed flap of an envelope becomes a
gable roof.) It may have also informed
the habit of bundling his material—
perhaps in imitation of, or homage to,
the mail bundles that came in and out
of the house on a regular basis. Though
his family provided him with standard
art supplies, Castle preferred his own
methods, and in later years they went
to great lengths to supply him with ma-
terials to his liking. According to a let-
ter written by Beach, after the Castles
traded their woodstove for an electric
range and oil furnace, they acquired
soot for him from the Veterans Hospi-
tal in Boise.As Castle’s work is integrated into the
canon, it has been justifiably placed in
conversation with his contemporaries.
Stephen Westfall has compared Castle
to Giorgio Morandi and Philip Guston,
noting that, like those two giants of
twentieth- century figurative painting,
Castle “developed a slow line that itself
feels like an animate creature becom-
ing the consciousness of the form that
it fills out with a nearly comic dogged-
ness, without flourish or ornament.” It’s
a fittingly idiosyncratic way of linking
a group of artists who, while resisting
or rejecting abstraction, conjured her-metic, metaphorical worlds that are as
open to interpretation as those of Rot-
hko or Frankenthaler.
Including Castle in this com-
pany requires one to forgo the more
straightforward measures of conscious
influence and instead consider how
the visual culture of a society perme-
ates the art created within it. After all,
Beardsley writes,Castle was responding to some of
the same cultural circumstances
that attracted the attention of other
artists—print media, advertising,
and the larger culture of abun-
dance, obsolescence, and disposal.Reading this, I thought of Warhol’s ten-
dency to instinctively repurpose Amer-
ican society’s clutter without offering
explanations or judgments, as well as
his working- class origins and child-
hood illness, establishing his identity
as an “outsider” from an early age in
much the same way that Castle’s cir-
cumstances made him an artist.
John Yau finds a link between Castle’s
transcription of his surroundings and
a typically gnomic statement by Jasper
Johns, another artist, notably, from a
rural background who found inspiration
in metropolitan detritus. “Sometimes,
I see it and then paint it,” Johns said.
“Other times I paint it and then see it.
Both are impure situations, and I prefer
neither.” The ambiguity of the distinc-
tion between these two “situations”—
between that of the conjurer and the
recorder—is present for all artists, but
especially acute in Castle’s case. He
can’t tell us what to look for in his work,
but we can see what he shows us. QCelebrating our fourteenth anniversary, the Writers’ Institute
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We’re accepting 12 fi ction writers and 12 nonfi ction writers
for fall 2022. Workshops are held online.For more information on this unique program please visit
http://www.gc.cuny.edu /thewritersinstituteAN EXCEPTIONAL
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