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

Trevor S. Raymond is a teacher and librarian with the Peel Board of Education and editor of Canadian Holmes.

The mystique of Norman Bethune has grown through television dramas, a
play, novels, poems, a feature movie, two biographies, an illustrated
selection of his writing, and even a comic book. And now historian Larry
Hannant has retrieved “almost everything of Bethune’s writing that
has survived,” all of his oil paintings, and several sketches, and
arranged them in chronological order in this revealing book. The
emphasis is on writing; only 14 of the near 400 pages feature
Bethune’s art.

Included are propaganda essays, short fiction, poems, many letters,
radio broadcasts (with a play), reports on his work and on the wars in
Spain and China, poems, and a lengthy manifesto for socialized medicine
written during a Quebec provincial election. The only period of his life
not covered by Bethune’s own words is that time following his return
from the Spanish Civil War. Here, Hannant provides newspaper reports of
Bethune’s speaking tour.

Bethune is remembered less for his Spanish adventure or his tumultuous
medical career in Montreal than for his last two years with Mao
Zedong’s Eighth Route Army during China’s war with Japan.
Appropriately, about half the book is given to that time, and these
pages are enthralling. “A man who by habit poured his passion onto the
printed page,” Bethune wrote textbooks, articles, stories, and letters
while living and working in appalling conditions, cut off from contact
with the outside world, and “even in the midst of battle.” For much
of the time, he “was the only trained physician in the entire region
of thirteen million people.”

Annotations would have been helpful to identify in more detail people
to whom Bethune refers, or to clarify the historical record. For
instance, a 1937 newspaper report describes Bethune as “a former chief
medical officer of the Canadian air force,” and nothing is appended to
tell us that there is a record of any such appointment. Still, Hannant
does correct some distortions found in previous accounts. Bethune’s
six months in Spain, where he made his most important contribution to
medicine—the mobile blood transfusion unit—are still difficult to
sort out, but Hannant includes a newly discovered 1937 report which
suggests that Bethune’s recall from Spain may be related to an affair
with a mysterious Swedish woman.

Hannant asserts that this book “is not intended to be a new
biography,” but he has given us the best and most revealing book to
date on the life of Norman Bethune.