NEW YORK — Caleb Carr, the gifted and scarred son of Beat founder Lucien Carr, who endured a traumatizing childhood and became a best-selling novelist, accomplished military historian and memoirist of his devoted cat, Masha, has died at age 68.
Carr died of cancer on Thursday, according to an announcement from his publisher, Little, Brown and Company.
A native of Manhattan, Caleb Carr was born into literary and cultural history. Lucien Carr, along with Columbia University colleagues Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, helped found the Beat movement, an early and prominent force in the post-World War II era for improvisation and nonconformity—on and off the page. Kerouac, Ginsberg, and fellow Beats like William Burroughs and Herbert Huncke were frequent visitors to Carr’s apartment, where Caleb Carr recalled enriching, disconcerting, and sometimes terrifying meetings.
“Kerouac was a very good man. Allen (Ginsberg) could have been a really nice guy,” Carr told Salon in 1997. “But they weren’t kids.”
Lucien Carr would be his son’s biggest nightmare. The elder Carr was arrested in the 1940s for manslaughter in the death of former friend David Kammerer, who had clashed 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 “cheerful” spirit, his father slapped Caleb on the back of the head and regularly knocked him down flights of stairs, all the while trying to blame Caleb for the falls.
Through suffering, Caleb Carr learned to despise violence, to fear insanity, and to investigate the origins of cruelty. In his best-known book, “The Alienist,” John Schuyler Moore is a New York Times crime reporter in 1890s Manhattan who helps investigate a series of violent murders of teenage boys. Carr would call the novel both a “why” and a “whodunit,” and wove in references to the emerging discipline of 19th-century psychology as Moore and his friend Dr. Laszlo Kreizler tracked not only the identity of the killer, but what led him to his crimes.
“The Alienist,” published in 1994 and the kind of old-fashioned, carefully researched page-turner that the Beats rebelled against, combined fictional characters like Moore with historical figures ranging from financial magnate JP Morgan to restaurateur Charlie Delmonico. Carr also introduced the city’s police commissioner at the time, Theodore Roosevelt.
Carr was such a successful novelist that his training as a military historian has been obscured or even trivialized. 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 Chace, with whom he wrote “Invulnerable America: The Quest for Absolute Security from 1812 to Star Wars.”
Carr’s other books included the Sherlock Holmes novel “The Italian Secretary,” the historical study “The Devil Soldier” and a 2024 memoir that was her literary farewell, “My Beloved Monster: Masha, the Half-Wild Rescue Cat Who Rescued Me.”
Since childhood, Carr was so repulsed by human behavior that he identified with cats – and became convinced that he used to be one. Carr lived alone — or at least lived without other people — for much of his adult life, spending his final years in a huge stone house in upstate New York, made possible by royalties from “The Alienist” and other books, an area of 1,400 acres. property situated at the foot of Misery Mountain.
In “My Beloved Monster,” he called his own story one of “abuse, distrust, and then the search for just one creature on Earth” he could trust. In 2005, his search led him to the Rutland County Humane Society in Vermont, where he noticed a gold and white kitten with large, deep amber eyes, a Siberian who meowed “conversationally” when Carr approached his cage.
“I responded to her with sounds and words and, most importantly, raised my hand so we could smell myself, I was pleased when she inspected the hand with her nose and found it satisfactory,” he wrote. “Then I slowly closed my eyes and reopened them several times: the ‘slow blink’ that cats can interpret as a sign of friendship. She seemed receptive, taking the opportunity to confirm with a similar wink.”
Carr and Masha would share a home for the next 17 years, in tune with each other’s moods and even taste in music, until Masha’s death. “My Beloved Monster” was a double elegy of sorts. As Masha’s health began to decline, Carr had problems of his own, including neuropathy and pancreatitis, illnesses he believed were caused by his childhood abuse. Watching Masha die and be placed inside a makeshift coffin was like saying goodbye to her “other self”.
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