Phoenix: The Life of Norman Bethune by Roderick Stewart and Sharon Stewart (review)

Norman Bethune – doctor, revolutionary, communist, martyr – has been the subject of a series of biographies, films, plays, and novels in the decades since his death in 1939 serving the Chinese revolution. Following an earlier, brief biography printed in 1973 that did not do credit to his own extensive research, Roderick Stewart and his wife Sharon have produced a new biography. Medical historian Michael Bliss has declared that Phoenix “should become definitive for all serious discussion of Bethune’s career.” (Globe and Mail, 2 July 2011)

By some measures, Phoenix certainly should become the definitive treatment of a highly controversial man who had the good fortune (both as a man in his era and a historical figure) to live in interesting times. Yet for all the Stewarts’ dedicated work, questions remain about Bethune that will certainly lead some biographer to decide that Phoenix is not the final word.

Phoenix certainly is comprehensive. For his earlier biography Stewart talked with a huge array of people who knew Bethune in one or more of the various facets of his life (and he had many). For Phoenix, the Stewarts have drawn more completely from that research. Yet they have not rested on that very solid base. They have delved into aspects of Bethune’s life that had previously escaped them.

For example, one of the neglected aspects of Bethune’s life is his experience in London, England from the end of World War 1 to his marriage to Frances Penney in 1923. The superficial details are known – he completed several postdegree medical programs and worked on contract with hospitals in the city. On the side, he bought and sold art and antiques and travelled to the European continent to pursue this bohemian occupation. Then there were the rumours of his affair with a wealthy widow, hinted at in a less definitive biography written earlier by Ted Allan and Sydney Gordon. But the woman’s name and the exact nature of their relationship were unknown. The Stewarts have established this to be an heiress of the Sassoon family, Isabelle Humphreys-Owen, and have discussed why Bethune was not able to establish a long-term connection with this highly attractive patroness.

In places the Stewarts’ strict attention to detail is overwhelming, even excessive. This is particularly so in their reports of the villages Bethune forged through with a modernizing zeal while in China in 1938–39. Six years before Chinese communist leader Mao Zedong wrote his paean to determination, “The Foolish Old Man Who Removed the Mountains,” Bethune personified it. He was convinced that armed with his scalpel he could excise the cancer of feudal backwardness in China, and he cut his way across a huge expanse of China in that pursuit. The Stewarts follow him to every remote hamlet, describing his dedicated attention to helping humanity and encouraging progressive change. Most readers will be exhausted just by the recounting. If nothing else it helps explain that Bethune’s death by septicaemia less than two years after reaching China was due at least as much to overwork.

And yet despite its wealth of data on Bethune, Phoenix breaks no new ground on significant aspects of Bethune’s life and, in some cases, fails to ask intriguing questions about the information it presents. Two examples stand out. One is Bethune’s reputation as a womanizer, which is a staple of almost all treatments of him. The Stewarts carry on that tradition, remarking about him in the post-World War I years that he was “never lacking in female companions.” (35) Astonishingly, however, they don’t do the simple math on their own subject and pause to consider the implications of one significant number in Bethune’s life – zero. From the time he became independent of his parents at age 17 until 3 months shy of his 30th birthday, there is no hint of a non-family female companion. Here’s a man whose love of flamboyant, fashionable clothing...