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REVIEW | MEMOIR
My Beloved Monster by Caleb Carr review — a love letter to cats
Carr always believed he was a reincarnated cat. This book is a moving account of his bond with a rescue pet, Masha
Sunday October 20 2024, 12.01am BST, The Sunday Times
Caleb Carr grew up certain that he had once been a cat. He first expressed the concept as a five-year-old, when he presented his mother with a self-portrait. It showed a boy’s body, dressed in trainers, jeans and a shirt, and a huge cat’s head with bright green eyes on top of his neck. “This is me before I was born,” he told her. The conviction never left him. For all his life, the American military historian and author was sure he had been “imperfectly or incompletely reincarnated” human. How else to explain his intense connection with cats?
And boy, is it intense. For the final two decades of his life Carr lived in a big stone house on a 1,400-acre property on a foothill of Misery Mountain in upstate New York. Winters were long and savage while for the rest of the year, bears, giant weasels, coyotes and men up to no good roamed outside. His only housemate was Masha, a half-wild Siberian forest rescue cat. For anyone who dared to ask the question, “How could you live for such a long time, alone on a mountain with just a cat?”, Carr had a terse rebuke. Masha was very much not “just a cat”. This memoir, My Beloved Monster, is there to prove so.
Carr, who died in May aged 68, came to fame with his bestselling 1994 novel The Alienist, a whydunnit about a serial killer, set in 1890s Manhattan. He wrote further murder mysteries as well as military history. My Beloved Monster: Masha, the Half-Wild Rescue Cat Who Rescued Me, his final book, is a different beast. It is a warm, heavy love letter to Masha and her feline predecessors. Between James Middleton and his spaniel, the civil servant Chloe Dalton and her poorly hare, and Rory Cellan Jones and his rescued Romanian mongrel, there’s no shortage of writers extolling the life-altering bonds they forged with their animals. But Carr’s relationship feels more extreme. Like much of his previous work, questions about the dark cycle of violence and its enduring repercussions are its backbone.
Carr was the middle son of Lucien Carr, a member of the Beat Generation who was convicted of manslaughter for killing his predatory former scoutmaster, who was obsessed with him, and rolling his body into the Hudson when he was a 19-year-old student at Columbia.
Until his parents’ divorce, Carr grew up in a sketchy neighbourhood of downtown Manhattan. Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and William S Burroughs were regular visitors to the house. The parties were raucous, the arguments passionate. If that sounds cool, for Carr and his brothers it very much was not. “Unbearable,” is how Carr puts it. His childhood was defined by abuse and alcoholic parents. Lucien would find his son in his bed and dole out blows, while his most pernicious habit was to push his son down flights of stairs. “I began to understand that he was trying to kill me,” Carr writes.
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Throughout all this, it is Carr’s cat Zorro, a superlative mouser who once stole an entire roast chicken, who remains his only faithful companion, his “defiant model and heroine”. It is no exaggeration, Carr insists, to say that she saved his young life, as other cats would later do too, by teaching him “not simply a talent for survival but compassion, affection, love, and joy”. None of which Carr was getting from the humans around him.
Later he resolves that he will break the legacy of abuse and never have children. That explains why so little of My Beloved Monster is given over to humans. Indeed it is only his cats (Carr never stoops to terming his animals “pets”) who are given names. And there are many of them, colourfully captured in all their idiosyncrasies. But it’s Masha, with her long white whiskers, magnificent tail and walnut-shaped amber eyes, in whom Carr believes he has found his “alter ego”.
Masha was rescued from an abandoned locked apartment before being taken in by Carr
It is Masha who, at least in Carr’s telling, chooses him when he visits the animal rescue centre in Vermont. She holds out one of her enormous paws to his hand and doles out “affectionate” bites. Staff are shocked. Since Masha was rescued from an abandoned locked apartment, she had pretty much exclusively attacked handlers and potential adopters. “You have to take the cat,” one staff member implores Carr.
He takes her home to Misery Mountain. Unlike dogs, a cat’s trust is earned, Carr explains, and in a lifetime a cat will usually form just one special bond. Carr is well versed in cat language (he has, remember, “all the qualities that I had taken from members of the species in the first place”) and soon wins Masha’s trust. They become a pair, in tune with one another, their rhythms aligning. They share a love for the Romantics — “nothing soothed her like the deep strains of a Wagnerian orchestra” — and enjoy being alone in each other’s company. It all feels frightfully human.
Problems come from the outside world, from the danger posed by the fierce predators that lurk in the surroundings to which Masha is drawn. She earns her mantle of “warrior queen”, impressing even the hardened vet with her fights with weasels and bears. Unfortunately for the reader, her habits can mean that Carr seems to spend a lot of time searching for her outside.
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Carr is a voracious researcher and he does try to back up the more extreme of his cat pronouncements with science. But there are points when it gets a bit much. Exceptional as Masha is, I just couldn’t swallow the idea that “she saw something in the sunset that surmounted the enormous, uninhabited expanse of countryside to the west: time itself, I came to believe, was a fascination of hers”.
He knows he must not over-identify with her yet the parallels are there — and poignantly told. She develops neuropathy, which vets believe came from her being kicked as a kitten. Carr is likewise beset by chronic health problems that stemmed from his father’s abuse. Their health declines in tandem. And by the point at which Masha is dying and Carr is whispering “be where I can find you”, the idea that she is his spirit animal and he was once a cat remarkably makes sense.
My Beloved Monster: Masha, the Half-Wild Rescue Cat Who Rescued Me by Caleb Carr (Allen Lane £25 pp352). To order a copy go to timesbookshop.co.uk. Free UK standard P&P on orders over £25. Special discount available for Times+ members
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