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  • Phoenix: The Life of Norman Bethune by Roderick Stewart and Sharon Stewart
  • David Webster (bio)
Stewart, Roderick and Sharon Stewart. Phoenix: The Life of Norman Bethune. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2011. xiii, 464 pp.

Millions of Chinese have memorized Mao Zedong's 1939 lines "In Memory of Norman Bethune," written soon after the Canadian surgeon's death amidst the war against Japan. As a result, Bethune remains the best-known Canadian in China, still outstripping comedian Dashan (Mark Rowswell).1

"Comrade Bethune's spirit, his utter devotion to others without any thought of self, was shown in his great sense of responsibility in his work and his great warm-heartedness towards all comrades and the people," Mao wrote, extolling Bethune's "spirit of absolute selflessness." If Bethune was pure selflessness and internationalist heroism after coming to China, it was only after arising phoenix-like from a selfish, dissolute life plagued by betrayal, self-aggrandizement, brushes with death and perhaps mental illness, according to the authors of a new biography.

Roderick and Sharon Stewart trace Bethune's life from his youth in the small towns of Upper Canada to his death in the Shanxi-Hebei border area, the result of infection incurred while operating on a People's Liberation Army fighter. The figure that emerges is heroic only in the sense that he finally found "my mission in life" (p. 294) once he arrived in China in 1938 to work as a battlefield surgeon.

Roderick Stewart's interest in Bethune runs back to the 1960s, and he has published three previous biographies on aspects of Bethune's life. This book, co-authored with his wife Sharon Stewart, draws on additional research in China, Canada, and Spain. With documentary sources drawn from almost a hundred different archives, it is unlikely to be surpassed in depth of research or attention to Bethune's psyche.

His life, the Stewarts argue, "exhibits recurrent cycles of achievement and self-destruction—the pattern of the phoenix." Brought up by a Protestant minister, his faith turned from religion to communism, and he was "driven throughout his life to act as a saviour" (p. 375). This did not prevent a history of bullying of comrades, his off-and-on wife, and periodic alcoholism.

The young Bethune was conservative and loyal to the British Empire. Family tradition has him the eighth man in Toronto to volunteer to fight in the First World War. At the same time, he rebelled against the strict Christian moral code of his parents, insisting on drinking liquor on his visits home—though he agreed to take his drinks into the bathroom to avoid corrupting others.

Bethune trained to become a surgeon. The poverty of many of his patients led him towards the political left—first to the social-democratic League for Social Reconstruction, Canada's answer to the British Fabian Society (this partly out of attraction to the wife of one of the League's founders, social activist Marian Dale Scott). After visiting the Soviet Union, he became a secret member of the Canadian Communist Party. Secrecy, the party hoped, would make him a more credible activist during the campaign to raise funds for Republican Spain as it fought fascist forces in the 1930s.

Bethune chafed under these restrictions and under party discipline, and sought adventure and service in the Spanish Civil War, the international left's great cause of the 1930s. There, he created a mobile blood transfusion unit designed to operate near the battlefield, but was removed from his post by the Canadian Communist Party over his heavy drinking, womanizing and misuse of donations for such purposes as buying himself monogrammed shirts in Paris. The Spanish authorities refused to permit him re-entry into the country, though this was kept quiet because of his value as a passionate speaker and fundraiser in Canada. The Bethune who left Spain, never to be permitted back, was a flawed hero at best.

More importantly, he was a man desperately in search of a mission, a cause where he could serve communism and his own thirst for adventure. The desire to aid Communist China, besieged by imperial Japan, combined with "the...

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