NEW YORK — Caleb Carr, the gifted son of Beat poet Lucien Carr, who endured a traumatic childhood and became a bestselling novelist, accomplished military historian and author of a memoir about the life of his devoted cat, Masha, has died at 68.
Carr died of cancer on Thursday, according to his publisher, Little, Brown and Company.
A Manhattan native, Caleb Carr was born into literary and cultural history. Lucien Carr, along with Columbia University classmates Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, helped establish the Beat movement, an early and major force for reform and nonconformity in the post-World War II era—on and off the page. Kerouac, Ginsberg, and fellow Beats such as William Burroughs and Herbert Huncke frequented the Carr apartment, where Caleb Carr recalls gatherings that were rich, awe-inspiring, and sometimes frightening.
“Kerouac was a very nice man. Allen could have been a very nice man, too,” Carr told Salon in 1997. “But they weren’t kids.”
Lucien Carr proved to be his son’s greatest nightmare. The poet was jailed for murder in the 1940s for killing one-time friend David Kammerer, who had a quarrel with him and was later found in the Hudson River. Caleb Carr, born more than a decade later to Lucien Carr and Francesca von Hartz, feared he would be the next victim. With a “jolly” spirit, his father would slap Caleb on the back of the head and regularly kick him down stairs, while trying to blame Caleb for the fall.
Caleb Carr considered his parents “mostly drunken architects” of their home, and they divorced when he was young. His mother, after rejecting Kerouac’s proposal, married author John Speicher, the father of three girls. Carr and his two brothers called their new, blended family “the dark Brady Bunch.”
Out of his misery, Caleb Carr learned to hate violence, fear madness and investigate the origins of cruelty. In his most famous book, “The Alienist,” John Schuyler Moore is a New York Times police reporter in 1890s Manhattan who helps investigate a series of brutal murders of teenage boys. Carr calls the novel a “why did it” as well as a “who did it,” and includes references to the emerging psychology of the 19th century as Moore and his friend Dr. Laszlo Kreizler discover not only the killer’s identity but also what motivated him to commit his crimes.
“The Alienist,” published in 1994 and the kind of meticulously researched, old-fashioned page-turner Beats had rebelled against, paired fictional characters like Moore with historical figures ranging from financial tycoon J.P. Morgan to restaurateur Charlie Delmonico. Carr also featured Theodore Roosevelt, the city’s police commissioner at the time, with whom the author felt a surprising affinity.
“Personally and psychologically, I had always found TR to be one of the most compelling figures in American history,” Carr told Strand Magazine in 2018.
“Later I realised that part of it had to do with the fact that, as a young man suffering from physical ailments and the fears they caused, he was pulled through his worst times by his father, who was a very kind and caring man. This is often important for great men who have a noble heart: an extremely caring father. Having the opposite – a father who was the main cause of my childhood fears and illnesses – I was drawn to what was, for me, an alien upbringing.”
“The Alienist” sold millions of copies, inspired the bestselling sequel “Angel of Darkness” and was adapted into a TNT miniseries starring Daniel Brühl, Luke Evans and Dakota Fanning. Carr was such a successful novelist that his background as a military historian became obscure, or even unimportant. He taught military history at Bard College, was a contributing editor to the Quarterly Journal of Military History and had a close relationship with scholar James Crace, with whom he wrote “America is Invulnerable: The Quest for Absolute Security from 1812 to Star Wars.”
Carr had written for several years about potential terrorism against the United States and published a book-length study a few months after the September 11, 2001 attacks. In “The Lessons of Terror,” he argued that military operations against civilian populations inevitably failed and drew lessons from ancient Rome. “The Lessons of Terror” sold well, but some critics felt he was not up to the task.
New York Times critic Michiko Kakutani wrote that Carr “has little credibility as a military historian or political analyst,” and suggested he stick to thrillers, while Salon’s Laura Miller called some of his arguments “as slippery and elusive as a handful of live fish.” Outraged, Carr responded with a capital letter to Salon’s editor, in which she suggested that Miller and Kakutani should abandon military history and instead “talk about stories of bad women.”
He later posted on Amazon.com, in which he gave his book a 5-star rating, that “Several reviews make claims about my credibility that are downright defamatory, and will be dealt with promptly.”
Carr’s other books include the Sherlock Holmes novel “The Italian Secretary,” the historical study “The Devil Soldier” and a 2024 memoir that serves as his literary farewell, “My Beloved Monster: Masha, the Half-Wild Rescue Cat Who Rescued Me.”
From childhood, Carr was so disgusted by the behavior of humans that he identified himself with cats — and was convinced that he had once been one of them. Carr lived alone for much of his adult life — or at least lived with no one else — spending his later years in a large stone house in upstate New York, made possible by royalties from “The Alienist” and other books, a 1,400-acre estate in the foothills of Misery Mountain.
In “My Beloved Monster,” he told his story of “abuse, distrust and then the search for the one creature on Earth he could trust.” In 2005, his search led him to the Rutland County Humane Society in Vermont, where he saw a blonde and white kitten with huge, deep amber eyes, a Siberian cat who meowed “talkatively” when Carr came near his cage.
“I responded to her with both sounds and words, and most importantly, I raised my hand so we could smell my scent, I was delighted when she examined my hand with her nose and found it satisfactory,” he wrote. “Then I slowly closed my eyes and opened them several times: the ‘slow blink’ which cats can take as a sign of friendship. She seemed receptive, taking time to confirm by blinking likewise. Finally, she mimicked the movement of my hand by placing her large paws against mine, as if we had known each other for quite a long time: an intimate gesture.”
Carr and Masha lived in the same house for the next 17 years, adapting to each other’s moods and tastes in music, until Masha died. “My Beloved Monster” was a kind of double elegy. As Masha’s health began to fail, Carr began to have troubles of his own, including neuropathy and pancreatitis, ailments he believed were brought on by the abuse he suffered as a child. Watching Masha die and lie in a makeshift coffin was like saying goodbye to his “other self.”
“Some say grief brings healing; I’ve never found that to be the case. It wounds, and healing is not healing. I’ve never had someone who was my everyday reality for so many years, like Masha, stripped from my life, my world, and my soul; how can that be healing?” Carr wrote.
“It seems that since coming to this earth I have proven to be as difficult for my fellow human beings, beyond the easy points of social convention and entertainment, as they have often proved to be for me. But on Masha’s behalf, there is no such question. I was enough; not just enough, but enough to deserve being defended.”
This article is generated from an automated news agency feed without any modifications to the text.
