The Mystery of Right and Wrong

by Wayne Johnston

  My obsessions and compulsions ultimately became the answer to the question I mentioned above, which Wade, the narrator who is based on me in The Mystery of Right and Wrong, poses to himself: What toll had Rachel’s childhood taken on her psyche?

  Hypergraphia, hyperlexia, these were things about which I could write with hard-won authority. Rachel’s would be the kind of unquiet mind I knew all too well. It would be the fictional proxy of the mind behind the “Rosa Lisa” smile, as I called it, of the woman I was living with, a mind that Rose thought both of us would be better off leaving unexplored and unexplained.

  Rachel would be, as I was, hypergraphic and hyperlexic, at times unable to stop writing or reading until she reached the point of mental breakdown and physical exhaustion.

  I also would have to invent a way to set some sections of the book apart from Wade’s. This mystery was solvable. I could do it by admitting poetry into the prose. Poetry, the near companion of madness—and near, therefore, to the truth, or the closest thing to it that I, in my prosaic but obsessive sanity, could manage.

  The Mystery of Right and Wrong is mostly prose, but the recurring sections, one called “The Ballad of the Clan Van Hout,” written by Rachel’s father, and the other, written by Rachel, called “The Arelliad,” are, respectively, entirely poetry and partly poetry.

  “The Ballad” is, ostensibly, a fanciful family history written in verse and read by Hans van Hout every night to his daughters. In fact, it is a vehicle of indoctrination, almost an ongoing form of hypnosis, as well as a tract of self-justification, an elaborate sleight-of-word played on the girls and, to a degree that lessens as the novel proceeds, on the reader. I thought it was crucial that Hans’s personal propaganda be rendered in a way that both set it apart from the dominant prose sections and joined them in telling what I believed I could only tell in a highly dramatic and propulsive way.

  As for “The Arelliad,” I thought it just as crucial that, when Rachel fell into psychosis, there would be a kind of colour change in the language that was analogous to the illusory world of her mind. It also seemed natural and inevitable that, after twenty years of indoctrination by her father’s verse, she would sometimes write poetry in what was essentially her diary. At the same time, however, as Rachel was fighting for her sanity—and gradually winning that fight—I thought it necessary that in her diary she would only “lapse” into poetry—meaning deeper into madness—from time to time, especially when she was most distraught and her grip on reality most tenuous. Even when she wrote poetry, however, she would not entirely mimic her father, as her poetry would be quite lyrical and honestly self-searching.

  I set out writing the novel in the kind of frenzy in which Rachel, and I, were secretly accustomed to writing. In two and a half years of exhausting exhilaration—the kind of exhilaration that comes from at last addressing a long-silenced truth—I wrote a meditation on the mystery of right and wrong. Not a solution, for that eludes me still.

  I owe a debt to two books by the psychologist Kay Redfield Jamison, without which I could not have written the character of Rachel van Hout: An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness and Touched with Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament. It was from Rachel’s unquiet mind and fire-touched heart, and my own, that the poetry emerged.

  Rachel van Hout is a writer by nature who, because of the trauma of chronic sexual and mental abuse, slips in and out of psychosis when she reads and writes. During a psychotic break from reality, a person sees and hears and experiences things that aren’t real. For some reason that psychiatrists and psychologists cannot explain, the worlds into which psychotics descend are often monochromatic, everything tinged with the same colour. The colour of Arellia, the alternate world into which Rachel is transported while writing, is yellow. Another famous woman, Joan of Arc, who is now widely believed to have been schizophrenic, saw her psychotic world in lurid red, and sometimes in a brilliant cerulean blue.

  Rachel, like Rose, is also an historian. For very similar reasons, both are fascinated by, even obsessed with, Anne Frank. I have read the books written most recently about Anne Frank, which tend to focus on the question of who it was that betrayed the Frank family and the other Jews who were hiding out from the Nazis. That question has never been authoritatively resolved, although new answers seem to crop up at an average of more than one a year. Because of Rachel’s own profound experience of betrayal and her belief that she committed an act of treachery that led to a young girl’s murder by her father, Rachel’s life and mind become intertwined with those of Anne Frank, who went into hiding at age thirteen—the same age at which Rachel’s mind and body turned against her (and Rose’s, too, as I have newly discovered). The same age that mine turned against me.

  Mainly for the sake of others, but also, I thought, for my own sake, I have kept a lot of things secret from everyone but the succession of therapists I have been fortunate to find. Some things about my illness and the consequences of it I couldn’t bear to tell even them. Perhaps I never will. I don’t mind saying that I’ve often pretended to be unfazed by what, even for the unafflicted, is one of the most exacting professions. The secrets I kept took a great toll on me and on others who, in one way or another, were affected by them.

  I think that readers of my other books will now see in them the reasons for the recurrence of certain themes: the secrecy that underlies and often undermines family history; the mercurial, unfixed and unfixable nature of history; the idea, which now seems self-evident to me but often comes as a great surprise to others, that history is something quite different from the past. Histories are merely records of the past and are always, to one degree or another, inaccurate because of the innate biases of their writers, because of inadvertent misinterpretation, because of censorship, self-imposed and otherwise…and because none of us are as virtuous as we would like to think.

  * * *

  —

  Eventually, all three of Rose’s sisters broke off all contact with their parents. One by one, they wrote to Rose and, though euphemistically, in the same decorous manner I had come to expect of them, they admitted that all of the accusations Barbara had made years ago, all the things her ex-husband had told me the afternoon he appeared out of nowhere, were true.

  Jan and Mary Langhout died within nine days of each other in the summer of 2014 in Cape Town, both in their nineties. Consequently, my wife reconciled with her three sisters, from whom she had so long been estranged. Soon after, I began to write The Mystery of Right and Wrong. I completed it in April of 2020, at the start of a period of near-hermetic confinement that, though nothing like the one the Franks endured, loaned me some appreciation of it.

  People are shocked on a more or less daily basis by revelations about heretofore revered public, usually male, figures. Since that day now more than thirty years ago when that distraught young man came to visit me, I have not been shocked by anything of which anyone has been accused or to which they have confessed.

  My book’s theme of indoctrination by systematic manipulation of language and mistruth is frequently found in the news of the day—propaganda of the Orwellian kind, though few of those who invoke his name seem to have read Orwell. Indoctrination of that kind is something that happens not only within society but within society’s most crucial unit, the family. Every family has a culture of its own, and in certain families, that culture is pathological.

  The Mystery of Right and Wrong is not, in its ultimate form, a dark book, but one that sheds light—a lot of light—on things that, once illuminated, once brought to consciousness, lose their power to distort the truth. It is also a memorialization of the lost, the missing girls and women of the world.

  As for me, I have never been able to recollect in tranquility the true events that inspired me to write this book. Only in fiction have I been able to sublimate the story of my wife and her sisters into something that I think is truly beautiful.

 
; * * *

  —

  When the book is published, I’ll be able to elaborate publicly on some of these things, in some cases sparingly, but in some cases not at all because of the still-living survivors of the crimes Jan is suspected of committing and their families.

  The Mystery of Right and Wrong reaches no answers to the questions that it poses. It concerns itself with the enigma of survival in a time when to survive requires that you do things to your persecutors that, to some, may seem as unforgivable as what they have done to you. What the van Hout sisters do in the novel doesn’t seem unforgivable to me, but that may be the cause of considerable debate and controversy.

  Rose’s sisters have not yet read the book, but they know of it and have given this fictional rendering of their fight for survival their full support. The Langhout daughters have survived, all uniquely marred. Perhaps they are not such women as, under other circumstances, they might have become. But they endured and, almost immediately after the deaths of their parents, they reconciled and reunited. They are, in my mind, all four of them, unutterably beautiful and heroic. The Mystery of Right and Wrong is my attempt to do justice to their beauty and their strength. It is a wonderful, terrible miracle of womanhood that there are millions more like them.

  Acknowledgements

  Patience and brilliance do not often go hand in hand, but my editor, Anne Collins, is gifted with both. I owe to her an unrepayable debt that grows with every book I write. My deepest thanks to her, this book’s first reader, and the first person to whom I told the true story that inspired it. Thank you, as well, to my agent, Jackie Kaiser, who, after hours one wet November afternoon, unlocked the door and let me in, and to my long-time friends at Penguin Random House Canada, who never knew until they read, because I could not bring myself to tell them face to face: Kristin Cochrane, Marion Garner, Scott Sellers, Louise Dennys, Diane Martin and the late Ellen Seligman. Many others, too numerous to record, loaned me their own memories and knowledge of Cape Town, Amsterdam and St. John’s. I am not an expert on any of those places, only on what happened in them to me and to the scores of women whose lives and deaths inspired this book.

  WAYNE JOHNSTON was born and raised in Goulds, Newfoundland. Widely acclaimed for his magical weaving of fact and fiction, his masterful plotting, and his gift for both description and character, his #1 nationally bestselling novels include The Divine Ryans, A World Elsewhere, The Custodian of Paradise, The Navigator of New York and The Colony of Unrequited Dreams. His first book, The Story of Bobby O’Malley, published when he was just 26 years old, won the WH Smith/Books in Canada First Novel Award. Baltimore’s Mansion (1999), a memoir about his father and grandfather, won the inaugural Charles Taylor Prize for literary non-fiction. The Colony of Unrequited Dreams, published in 1998, was nominated for sixteen national and international awards including the Scotiabank Giller Prize and the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction, and was a Canada Reads finalist defended by Justin Trudeau. A theatrical adaptation of the novel recently toured Canada. Johnston’s most recent novel, First Snow, Last Light, was a national bestseller and longlisted for the IMPAC Dublin prize.