The Politics of Passion: Norman Bethune's Writing and Art (review)

Larry Hannant, ed. and intro. The Politics of Passion: Norman Bethune's Writing and Art. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998. xiii + 396 pp. Ill. $45.00; £30.00 (0-8020-0907-7).

This is the latest of a small but varied list of biographical works about Henry Norman Bethune (b. 1890, Gravenhurst, Ontario; d. 1939, Hijuang Shiko, northern China). They range in genre and audience from children's books, plays, poetry, and major documentary and dramatic films to more traditional, published biographies. Bethune has been commemorated in a number of shrines and statues in Canada and has been idolized by millions of Chinese--immortalized in national shrines and in a widely published, patriotic essay by Mao Zedong. This book presents the most extensive collection of Bethune's works published to date. Arranged chronologically, with the editor's connective historical and biographical tissue, they tell a fascinating story.

Bethune accomplished much in his short forty-nine years. He was a controversially innovative and daring lung surgeon, yet gentle with his patients. His personal bout with tuberculosis as a young man and his experience treating fellow "TBs" convinced him of the need for preventive medicine and universal access to care. After visiting the Soviet Union in 1935, he campaigned for socialized medicine throughout North America. He ultimately came to believe that such reform could be meaningful only if linked to worldwide political and economic revolution. In 1936, he went to Spain to join in the government's war against Franco's fascists. There he organized and served in a successful Canadian unit that brought blood to the battlefield and heightened morale and commitment behind the lines among civilian donors. He returned to Canada in 1937 after conflict with co-workers and superiors that was seemingly caused by his dramatic and individualistic style, as well as by an amorous liaison with a suspected spy. Back home he campaigned for support for the Loyalists but was aching to return to where the revolutionary action was. In 1938, after making public his membership in the Communist Party, Bethune joined Mao's 8th Route Army, then fighting in northern China against the Japanese. He became a tireless field surgeon, as well as a rough-and-ready organizer and teacher in surgical and medical units close to the front.

All of this gained Bethune a hero's immortality, but portrayals of him in the literature and on the screen, as well as his own writings, show him, too, as a deeply flawed and vulnerable human being. He was irascible and flamboyant, sporadically alcoholic--a man with whom colleagues, friends, and lovers found it almost impossible to sustain close, long-term relationships. He could write and paint beautifully and had earned and loved the good things of life as a successful physician, yet he turned his talents to political and military struggle. It was only there that he found contentment, finally, in a lonely political/military outpost, among people whose language he could neither speak nor understand. Some three months before his death he longed for conversation with friends, and also wrote: "I dream of coffee . . . . Mirages of heavenly food! . . . Are books still being written? Is music still being played? . . . Do women still love to be loved?" (p. 356). Not long after penning this, Bethune died of an infection. He had nicked his finger while operating on a soldier with a leg fracture close to the front and without surgical gloves. There were none available.

The Politics of Passion presents Bethune in his writings and in Larry Hannant's interpretations, in both his strengths and weaknesses. The editor's analytic reflections seem true to Bethune's view of himself as expressed in letters to his wife and to friends and lovers, in exchanges with political allies, in published surgical papers, in lengthy reports regarding medical work and organizing activities, and in strong and urgent pleas...