‘I had once been a cat’ – the feline fantasies of Caleb Carr

One of my favourite cartoons is of the owl and the pussycat going to sea in their pea-green boat. The caption is the owl’s guilty admission: ‘I’m afraid there have been… other cats.’ Caleb Carr, in this memoir of his own love affair with a pussycat, is straightfaced: ‘I should own up to the fact that I’d had similar relationships with other cats – even (and in some cases especially) cats who were not mine.’

I have a high tolerance for cat books, but after this one I turned in relief to a ‘Simon’s Cat’ animation on YouTube. There’s one in which a hapless man opens the door for a kitten who has spent hours scrabbling hysterically at the glass like a prisoner longing for escape. The animal then decides that, on reflection, outdoors is overrated. Carr, on the same situation: ‘The issue may not be the door: it may be the spaces either side of it, and the question of being able to access those spaces.’ Often exhaustingly humourless, he misses cats’ wit, which is to miss their seriousness.

But I must use the past tense. A best-selling novelist and military historian, Carr died of cancer in May, a sad fact through which My Beloved Monster, his swansong, or at least his catsong, must now be read – and reviewed. Another memoir, possibly more interesting, hovers between its lines. Most intriguing is an early chapter on Carr’s boyhood. He suffered physically and psychologically at the hands of an abusive father, mentioned only in passing, who was imprisoned for stabbing a sexually obsessed stalker. We are never told that Caleb’s father was Lucien Carr, a pillar of the Beat Poets, nor that the cast list of Caleb’s traumatic youth included William Burroughs, Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg.

In adulthood, as in infancy, Caleb preferred cats. His gory crime novels are thick with violence and murder, and he published forensic but divisive studies of terrorists and serial killers. Evidently he witnessed early on the cruelty of which humans were capable, and turned to cats for solace and safety. He and Masha, the subject of this book, lived together in isolation on his vast property, called Misery Mountain Farm, in New York state. Around its boundaries stalked genuine danger for this Siberian Forest kitten, who adopted her human in a rescue centre (Carr would agree I have it the right way round). And for 17 years there they both were, alone together, scholar and cat.

Their world’s claustrophobia and topsy-turvydom are exacerbated by Carr’s use of proper names only for animals: Masha and Suki, Bess and Echo. Humans are distinguished by their breed, so to speak: the Manager, the Lady Vet, the Actor. The book creates an eerie hinterland between anthropomorphism, where Masha becomes like any one of those horrid sketches by Louis Wain, human in all but anatomy, and zoomorphism. Carr believed himself feline: ‘I had once been a cat. And, on finishing that life, I had been what I would eventually label imperfectly or incompletely reincarnated.’ The tone can be hard to gauge but reading of Masha’s taste for music (‘Mashie loves her Wagner’) or her philosophical ponderings on mortality, I feared him in deadly earnest. Maybe such attitudes are any cat’s just deserts. ‘She saw something in the sunset,’ Carr believed; ‘time itself was a fascination of hers.’ We are all of us in the litter tray, but Masha was looking at the stars.

That great literature can be forged from animal memoirs is not in question. Witness My Dog Tulip, that wonderful account of J.R. Ackerley’s Alsatian. Carr has little of Ackerley’s elegant economy; his book is overlong, its audio version just shy of 14 hours, which is a great deal of time to listen to a man talking about his cat. Guiltily, I wondered whether his descriptive powers – rapturously acclaimed on this book’s American release – are actually up to all that much (‘that kitten face with its wide, innocent eyes’; ‘her eyes… were an absolute study in innocence’; ‘I looked into her eternal kitten face… ageless, wide-eyed’). He had a habit of responding intemperately and litigiously to poor reviews, but I’ll risk the ire of his ghost by saying that, while you can’t libel the dead, you can edit them.

Memoirs of this kind end the same way. Carr doesn’t shy from sentimentality (‘Don’t be afraid – the sun will be up soon baby’), but by that time I was crying too much to care. Why is it that the mute stoicism of a suffering animal renders us blind with tears, even as we grow ever more habituated to human distress? An epitaph for Masha, whose health fails in symbiosis with her sick companion, My Beloved Monster is really an auto-obituary, by an author who outlived his cat by just two years. There was less of him left to die: surveying his beloved in her makeshift coffin, he bade farewell to ‘my other self’. Whatever eccentricities there are in this portrait serve to reveal the portraitist, for it is his strange narrative voice that sticks in the mind, compulsively chronicling and loving his cat from beyond the grave, solitary and wounded.

The loss of a beloved animal makes gashes in the heart to which society is oddly oblivious. Few employers offer compassionate leave for such a grief, which often results from a death sanctioned and paid for by the bereaved. T.H. White’s letters on the death of his Irish Setter are among the most upsetting ever written; they document the despair of a grieving lover. Ackerley said he would have willingly thrown himself on his dog’s funeral pyre. But these are canine examples, and the achievement of Carr’s devotional book may be the moving blow it strikes for those who choose cats for their love, finding them its best repository and its most steadfast source. But, oh, so achingly mortal.