‘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.