McGill-Queen’s University Press, Montreal, 2011
493 pp., illus., $39.95 hardcover
When former Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau decided to seek diplomatic relations with the People’s Republic of China at the time of its Cultural Revolution, he made use of the NFB film Bethune. Canadian doctor Norman Bethune had already become a heroic figure for millions of Chinese for his selfless work to save soldiers’ lives during the country’s war with Japan. The film recorded Bethune as a battlefield surgeon in the remote mountains of China, where he died from blood poisoning at forty-nine years of age.
Phoenix: The Life of Norman Bethune is a new biography by Roderick Stewart and Sharon Stewart that contains a wealth of additional details about the last months of Bethune’s life. The book also answers many questions about the controversial, charismatic surgeon and humanitarian who lived by his favourite quotation of Walter Pater: “Not the fruit of experience, but the experience itself is the end.... To burn always with this hard gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life.”
The biographies Roderick Stewart penned previously, Bethune and The Mind of Norman Bethune, though the best in their times, seem now to be stepping stones towards this rock-solid and riveting book. Stewart came across recently released archival materials — two memoirs by people who had worked alongside Bethune in Spain and in China, letters and reports by Bethune, and other fresh sources that required a whole new book.
Certainly the heroic character of Bethune takes on a darker tone in Phoenix, as if the biographer finally saw his lifelong subject in all his complexities, bravery, and foolhardiness.
The title Phoenix alludes to Bethune’s ability to rise, so to speak, from his own ashes, whether psychically or physically. As a young successful doctor in Detroit, he contracted tuberculosis but survived to lead a crusade to find a cure for the epidemic disease in the 1930s. This biography also depicts Bethune’s torturous relationship with Frances Penney, a naive Scottish belle he married and divorced twice and for whom he carried a torch until his death. Other amorous relationships with women, such as the artist Marian Scott, are also highlighted and show Bethune’s vulnerabilities.
Bethune found himself an outsider in the conservative medical establishment of the 1930s for his pioneering efforts towards a form of medicare and for becoming a member of the Communist Party of Canada. His career as a social and medical activist led him to perform his surgical work everywhere from state-of-the-art North American operating theatres, to secret operating rooms under brilliant chandeliers in a palace in Spain, to primitive farm kitchens and ruins of Buddhist temples in China.
As the authors point out, Bethune’s perceived flaws as an establishment doctor (his mentor, Dr. Edward Archibald, branded his quick style of operating “a little dangerous”) became positive qualities in guerrilla warfare conditions.
Canadian missionary Dr. Richard Brown wrote of how Bethune had only impatience for cultural differences and how in China he angrily refused to climb into a rickshaw because he didn’t want to be pulled by another human being. His desire to relieve human suffering was so deep that when a pot of chicken soup, a luxury during the war, was cooked to boost his diminishing strength, he refused to eat it and fed the broth to the sick Chinese soldiers in his care.
Phoenix is an outstanding biography that establishes Norman Bethune, once and for all, as an extraordinary healer and humanitarian, a Canadian who wanted to change the world and who wilfully walked on the hot coals of despair and rejection in order to accomplish that.
Reviewed by Anne Cimon, a Montreal freelance writer. Her latest book is the biography Susanna Moodie: Pioneer Author.
— Anne Cimon (Read bio)
Anne Cimon is a Montreal poet and freelance journalist.