NEW YORK — Caleb Carr, the scarred and gifted son of founding Beat Lucien Carr who endured a traumatizing childhood and became a bestselling novelist, accomplished military historian and late-life memoirist of his devoted cat, Masha, has died at 68.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Carr died of cancer Thursday, according to an announcement from his publisher, Little, Brown and Company.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cCaleb lived his writing life valiantly, with works of politics, history and sociology, but most astonishingly for this historian, with wildly entertaining works of fiction,\u201d Carr’s editor, Joshua Kendall, said in a statement.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A native of Manhattan, Caleb Carr was born into literary and cultural history. Lucien Carr, along with Columbia University classmates Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, helped launch the Beat movement, an early and prominent force in the post-World War II era for improvisation and non-conformity \u2014 on and off the page. Kerouac, Ginsberg and such fellow Beats as William Burroughs and Herbert Huncke were frequent visitors to the Carr apartment, where Caleb Carr remembered gatherings that were enriching, bewildering and, at times, terrifying.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cKerouac was a very nice man. Allen (Ginsberg) could be a very nice guy,\u201d Carr told Salon in 1997. \u201cBut they weren\u2019t children people.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Lucien Carr would prove his son\u2019s greatest nightmare. The elder Carr had been imprisoned in the 1940s for manslaughter over the death of onetime friend David Kammerer, who 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 \u201cgleeful\u201d spirit, his father would slap Caleb across the back of his head and regularly knock him down flights of stairs, while trying to blame Caleb for the falls.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Caleb Carr thought of his parents as \u201cthe mostly drunken architects\u201d of his household, and they divorced when he was young. His mother, after turning down Kerouac\u2019s proposal, married writer John Speicher, the father of three girls. Carr and his two brothers referred to their new, blended family as \u201cThe Dark Brady Bunch.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Out of his suffering, Caleb Carr learned to despise violence, fear insanity and probe the origins of cruelty. In his best-known book, \u201cThe Alienist,\u201d John Schuyler Moore is a New York Times police reporter in 1890s Manhattan who helps investigative a series of vicious murders of adolescent boys. Carr would call the novel as much a \u201cwhydunit\u201d as \u201cwhodunit,\u201d and wove in references to the emerging 19th century discipline of psychology as Moore and his friend Dr. Laszlo Kreizler track down not just the killer\u2019s identity, but what drove him to his crimes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThe Alienist,\u201d published in 1994 and the kind of carefully researched, old-fashioned page-turner the Beats had rebelled against, combined fictional characters such as Moore with historical figures ranging from financial tycoon J. P. Morgan to restaurateur Charlie Delmonico. Carr also featured the city\u2019s police commissioner at the time, Theodore Roosevelt, with whom the author felt a surprising kinship.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cPersonally and psychologically, I had always found TR one of the most compelling figures in U.S. history,\u201d Carr told Strand Magazine in 2018.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cLater I realized that some of this had to do with the fact that, as a young man stricken by physical ailments and the fears they inspire, he was brought through his darkest times by his father, a deeply compassionate and caring man. This is often key to great men with noble hearts: an overtly caring father. Having had the reverse \u2014 a father who was the chief cause of my childhood fears and ailments \u2014 I was drawn to what was, for me, an exotic upbringing.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThe Alienist\u201d sold millions of copies, inspired the bestselling sequel \u201cAngel of Darkness\u201d and was adapted into a TNT miniseries that starred Daniel Br\u00fchl, Luke Evans and Dakota Fanning. Carr was so successful a novelist that his background as a military historian became 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 the scholar James Chace, with whom he wrote \u201cAmerica Invulnerable: The Quest for Absolute Security from 1812 to Star Wars.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Carr had written for years about possible terrorism against the U.S. and published a book-length study a few months after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. In \u201cThe Lessons of Terror,\u201d he contended that military campaigns against civilian populations inevitably failed and drew upon lessons dating back to ancient Rome. \u201cThe Lessons of Terror\u201d sold well, but some critics thought he was not up to the job.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
New York Times critic Michiko Kakutani wrote that Carr \u201chas little credibility as military historian or political analyst,\u201d and suggested he stick to thrillers, while Salon\u2019s Laura Miller called some of his contentions \u201cslippery and elusive as a handful of live minnows.\u201d Enraged, Carr answered with an all-caps letter to the editor of Salon, in which he suggested that Miller and Kakutani should lay off military history and instead \u201cchatter about bad women\u2019s fiction.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cSeveral reviews have made claims concerning my credibility that are, quite simply, libelous, and will be dealt with soon,\u201d he later posted on Amazon.com, on which he gave his book a 5-star rating.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Carr\u2019s other books included the Sherlock Holmes novel \u201cThe Italian Secretary,\u201d the historical study \u201cThe Devil Soldier\u201d and a 2024 memoir that stood as his literary farewell, \u201cMy Beloved Monster: Masha, the Half-Wild Rescue Cat Who Rescued Me.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
From childhood, Carr was so repulsed by human behavior that he found himself identifying with cats \u2014 and becoming convinced he used to be one. Carr lived alone \u2014 or at least lived with no other people \u2014 for much of his adult life, spending his later years in a massive stone house in upstate New York made possible by royalties from \u201cThe Alienist\u201d and other books, a 1,400-acre property set in the foothills of Misery Mountain.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In \u201cMy Beloved Monster,\u201d he called his own story one of \u201cabuse, mistrust, and then the search for just one creature on Earth\u201d on whom he could rely. In 2005, his quest would take him to the Rutland County Humane Society in Vermont, where he noticed a gold and white kitten with outsized, deep amber eyes, a Siberian who mewed \u201cconversationally\u201d when Carr approached her cage.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cI answered her with, with both sounds and words, and more importantly held my hand up so that we could get my scent, pleased when she inspected the hand with her nose and found it satisfactory,\u201d he wrote. \u201cThen I slowly closed my eyes and reopened them several times: the \u2018slow blink\u2019 that cats can take as a sign of friendship. She seemed receptive, taking the time to confirm with a similar blink. Finally, she imitated the move of my hand by holding up her rather enormous paws to mine, as if we\u2019d known each other quite a long time: an intimate gesture.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Carr and Masha would share a home for the next 17 years, attuned to each other’s moods and even taste in music, until Masha\u2019s death. \u201cMy Beloved Monster\u201d was a kind of dual elegy. As Masha\u2019s health began to decline, Carr had his own troubles, including neuropathy and pancreatitis, illnesses he believed brought on from his childhood abuse. Watching Masha die, and laid inside a makeshift coffin, was like saying goodbye to his \u201cother self.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cSome people say that grief is healing; I\u2019ve never found it so. It is scarring, and scarring \u2014 is not healing. I have never had someone who was my daily reality for so many years as Masha cut out of my life, my world, and my soul; how can it heal?\u201d Carr wrote.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cSince falling onto this Earth, it seems, I have proved as difficult for my fellow human beings, past the easy points of social convention and amusement, as they have often proved for me. But from Masha, no such questions. I was enough; not just enough, but enough that I warranted defending.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n