Caleb Carr, a military historian and author whose experiences with childhood abuse led him to explore the roots of violence — notably in his 1994 best-selling book, “The Alienist,” a period thriller about the hunt for a serial killer in 19th century Manhattan. – died Thursday at his home in Cherry Plain, New York. He was 68 years old.
The cause was cancer, his brother Ethan Carr said.
Mr. Carr was 39 when he published “The Alienist,” an atmospheric detective novel about a child psychiatrist — or alienist, as those who studied the mind were called in the 1890s — who investigates the murders of young prostitutes using forensic psychiatry. , which was an unorthodox method at the time.
Mr. Carr had initially presented the book as nonfiction; it wasn’t, but it read that way because of the exhaustive research he had done over that period. He captured the dark horrors of life in Manhattan’s tenements, its sadistic gangs and seedy child-peddling brothels, as well as the city’s lush centers of power, like Delmonico’s Restaurant. And he populated his novel with historical figures like Theodore Roosevelt, who was the reform-minded New York police commissioner before his years in the White House. Even Jacob Riis made an appearance.
Mr. Carr had also been a regular contributor to the letters page of The New York Times; he notably chastised Henry Kissinger for what Mr. Carr called outdated theories about international diplomacy. He was 19 at the time.
“The Alienist” was an immediate success and received rave reviews. Even before its release, the rights to the film were acquired by producer Scott Rudin for half a million dollars. (The paperback rights sold for over a million.)
“You can practically hear the clicking of horses’ hooves echoing down old Broadway,” Christopher Lehmann-Haupt wrote in his Times review. “You can taste good food at Delmonico’s. You can feel the fear in the air.
Magazine editors were captivated by Mr. Carr’s downtown cool — he lived on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, had been in a local punk band, wore black high-top sneakers and had medium-length hair. -long – and by its literary provenance. His father was Lucien Carr, a journalist who was the muse and best friend of Beat royalty: writers Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg. Handsome and charismatic as a young man, “Lou was the glue,” Ginsberg once said, who held the group together.
The eldest, Mr. Carr, was also an alcoholic, and Caleb grew up in bohemian chaos. The Carr house was the scene of drunken revelry, and much worse. Mr Carr was furious with his wife and three sons. But he directed his most terrifying outbursts at Caleb, his junior, whom he singled out for physical violence.
Caleb’s parents divorced when he was 8 years old. But the beatings continued for years.
“There’s no doubt that I’ve always been fascinated by violence,” Caleb Carr told New York magazine’s Stephen Dubner in 1994, just before the publication of “The Alienist,” explaining not only the driving force behind the book but also why he was attracted to the army. history. “This resulted in part from a desire to find violence that was, first, directed toward a determinate end and, second, governed by a definable ethical code. And I think it’s pretty obvious why I would want to do that.
Lucien Carr had also been mistreated. Growing up in St. Louis, he was sexually assaulted by his scoutmaster, a man named David Kammerer, who followed him to the East Coast, where Lucien entered Columbia University and met Kerouac, Ginsberg and Burroughs. One drunken night in 1944, Mr. Carr killed his longtime predator in Riverside Park, stabbing him with his Boy Scout knife and rolling him into the Hudson River. Kerouac helped him get rid of the knife. Lucien turned himself in the next day and served two years for manslaughter in a reformatory.
The murder was a cause celebre and became a sort of origin story for Beat history. Kerouac and Burroughs rendered it in purple prose in a novel they titled “And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks,” which was rejected by publishers and then mired in legalities before finally being published in 2008 , when all the directors were dead. (It was profiled by Michiko Kakutani in The Times.) In 2013, he was the subject of a film, “Kill Your Darlings,” starring Daniel Radcliffe as Allen Ginsberg.
Caleb Carr and his family found “Kill Your Darlings” more than flawed, challenging the film’s thesis that Lucien was a conflicted homosexual in a repressive society — and that Kammerer was the victim and their relationship was consensual.
“My father fit the ‘cycle of abuse’ perfectly,” Mr. Carr told an interviewer at the time. “Of all the terrible things Kammerer did, perhaps the worst was teaching him this, teaching him that the most fundamental way to bond was through abuse.”
He added: “When I confronted him several years later about his extreme violence towards me, after I had started therapy, he finally asked (after denying that such violence had occurred). produced for as long as he could, then admitted it): “Does this mean there is a special bond between us? And I remember my blood had never been so cold.
Caleb Carr was born on August 2, 1955 in Manhattan. Her father, after being released from the reformatory, worked as a journalist and editor for United Press International, where he met Francesca von Hartz, a journalist. They married in 1952 and had three sons, Simon, Caleb and Ethan. After their divorce ten years later, Mrs. von Hartz married John Speicher, an editor and novelist and the father of three daughters. The couple and their six children moved into a loft on East 14th Street, a dangerous area in the late 1960s and 1970s. It was another chaotic house overseen by alcoholics, and the children often saw themselves as “the dark Brady Bunch”.
Caleb attended Friends Seminary, a Quaker school in the East Village, where his interest in military history made him an exception and a misfit. His high school transcript described him as “socially undesirable.” After graduating, he attended Kenyon College in Ohio and then New York University, where he earned a bachelor’s degree and studied military and diplomatic history.
In 1997, Mr. Carr published “The Angel of Darkness,” a sequel to “The Alienist.” It featured many of the same characters, who come together to investigate the case of a missing child. It was also a bestseller, “just as winning as a historical thriller” as its predecessor, Mr. Lehmann-Haupt of the Times wrote.
Mr. Carr is the author of 11 books, including “The Italian Secretary” (2005), a Sherlock Holmes mystery commissioned by the estate of Arthur Conan Doyle; “Surrender, New York” (2016), a well-reviewed contemporary crime procedural that nevertheless sold poorly; and “Lessons of Terror: A History of Warfare Against Civilians” (2002), which he wrote in the wake of the September 11 attacks.
Even in the pre-Twitter era, “Lessons in Terror” caused a ruckus on the Internet. It was both praised and vehemently criticized – and became a bestseller, to boot – and Mr. Carr ridiculed its reviews on Amazon. Many have disputed his assertion that some “conventional” wars – such as General Sherman’s barbarity during the Civil War and Israel’s behavior toward the Palestinians – were tantamount to terrorism, a thesis that has irked military historians, as well as Ms. Kakutani of the Times.
What propelled Mr. Carr in all his work were the origins of violence, the mysteries of nature and nurture. In his own life, he was determined to end the cycle of his family’s dark legacy by not having children. This choice restricted his love life, and as he grew older, he became more solitary. When he bought 1,400 acres in Rensselaer County, N.Y., in 2000 and built a home near a ridge called Misery Mountain, he became even more so.
“I have a dark view of the world, and particularly of humanity,” he told The Times’ Joyce Wadler in 2005. “I spent years denying it, but I’m very misanthropic. And I live alone on a mountain for a reason.
Her latest book, published in April, was “My Beloved Monster: Masha, the Half-Wild Rescue Cat Who Saved Me.” It is both a memoir of his time there and a love story with the creature that was his most constant and sustained companion during the last decades of his life.
“But how could “You live so long,” his friends asked him, “alone on a mountain with just a cat?” He took umbrage with the expression “just a cat”.
“It must be understood that for Masha I have always been enough,” he wrote. “How I lived, what I chose to do, my very nature, it was all good enough for her.”
Masha, like her human roommate, had suffered physical abuse at one point, and as Mr. Carr and his companion grew older, their early horrors took a devastating physical toll. The beatings inflicted on Mr Carr created scarring in his organs, which led to further serious illnesses. Each of them was diagnosed with cancer, but Masha died first.
Besides his brother Ethan, Mr. Carr is survived by another brother, Simon; his half-sisters, Hilda, Jennifer and Christine Speicher; and his mother, now known as Francesca Cote. Lucien Carr died in 2005.
Despite the early hype, “The Alienist” never made it to the big screen. The producers wanted to make it a love story or modify Mr. Carr’s creation. But after decades of coming and going, it found its home on television, and in 2018 it was seen as a 10-episode miniseries on TNT. James Poniewozik of The Times called it “lush, brooding, a little stiff.” But mostly it was a success, reaching 50 million viewers and earning six Emmy nominations. (He won one,…
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News Source : www.nytimes.com
