Norman Bethune

One wonders what Americans would say if one of their ex-heads-of-state – say, Jimmy Carter or Bill Clinton – published a book about a communist he greatly admired. But that is what Adrienne Clarkson did earlier this year when her book about Norman Bethune came out, in the series of publications about Extraordinary Canadians her husband John Ralston Saul edits. (The Queen is Canada’s head of state, but before her retirement Adrienne Clarkson was her representative in Ottawa, appointed on the commendations of the Canadian prime minister. Therefore, she exercised the Queen’s constitutional powers.)

So far no Canadian has raised any objections.

This is a synopsis.

Norman Bethune, the son of a Presbyterian minister, was born in 1890 in Gravenhurst on Lake Muskoka, now the centre of cottage country, then a rough place on the Canadian Shield. He studied medicine at the University of Toronto, joined the army in 1915 as a stretcher-bearer, then served in the navy. After the war, he did postgraduate work in the U.K. and was subsequently in private practice in Detroit. In 1926 Bethune became gravely ill with TB. This led to his determination, after his recovery, to specialize in thoracic surgery and to do his best to help victims of TB. He worked first in Montreal’s Royal Victoria Hospital and later at the Hôpital du Sacré Coeur in Cartierville.

After a visit to the USSR in 1935 he became a communist. In 1936 he went to Spain and designed and organized a blood transfusion service for the republican army, returned in 1937 to raise money for the republican cause and in 1938 went to China to serve as a doctor, under primitive conditions, in the war against Japan. In 1939 he died of septicemia at the battle-front at the age of forty-nine. He has been sanctified in China.

An effective public speaker, he had caught the imagination of many Canadians even in his lifetime, but nothing compared to the posthumous influence he exercised in China. Mao Tse Tung’s tribute to him became obligatory reading in the schools during the Cultural Revolution. In 2004 they made a thirteen-hour television series about him, not for the first time.

Norman Bethune clearly had an arresting, original, mesmerizing personality. Everybody paid attention to him when he came into the room. He found the callousness in the society around him unbearable and was convinced that, as a doctor, he had special social responsibilities. One of the reasons for his conversion to communism was his admiration of Soviet efforts in the area of medical services for children.

In the mid-thirties he was incensed by the lack of response in Canada – and in the U.S. and England – to the challenges posed by fascism. He saw clearly that if it wasn’t stopped in Spain it would spread and provoke a major war.

Norman Bethune wrote poetry; he painted. In his years in Montreal he became the centre of a group of avant-garde artists and writers.

He was a difficult, irascible character, always in a hurry, impatient with those he found, and who found him, uncongenial. In Montreal, tensions with his superiors at the Royal Victoria Hospital had made him move to the less eminent Hôpital du Sacré Coeur in Cartierville, but he was perfectly content to work in a French atmosphere. In Spain, his human relationships seem to have been deplorable, with some exceptions, of course. Nothing like the improvised blood transfusion service he had put together in Spain had ever existed before anywhere in the world. He was single-minded in the pursuit of his cause and unconcerned about the people he offended.

In 1923, in London, after a courtship of three years, Bethune married Frances Penney, an uninteresting, conventional Scottish lady. Within ten years they were divorced twice. In dramatic contrast to this semi-marriage, he had a passionate unconsummated love affair with the important painter Marian Dale Scott, the wife of the prominent socialist McGill lawyer Frank Scott who later became a good friend of Pierre Elliot Trudeau. The letters between them, and her diary, make is clear that Bethune was haunted by premonitions of an early death.

Before leaving for Spain he gave a note to the painter Charles Comfort:

Epitaph.
Norman Bethune,
Born a bourgeois
Died a communist.