(The following article is from the October 1-15, 2009, issue of People's Voice, Canada's leading communist newspaper. Articles can be reprinted free if the source is credited. Subscription rates in Canada: $30/year, or $15 low income rate; for U.S. readers - $45 US per year; other overseas readers - $45 US or $50 CDN per year. Send to: People's Voice, c/o PV Business Manager, 133 Herkimer St., Unit 502, Hamilton, ON, L8P 2H3.)

Norman Bethune, by Adrienne Clarkson, Penguin Group (Canada), Toronto, 2009, ISBN 978-0670067312, review by Liz Rowley

     Adrienne Clarkson's new book on Norman Bethune, at 190 small pages of big-print, is interesting, mostly factual, and a contribution to the literature about this extraordinary Canadian patriot and Communist.

     But it's not the book that still reigns as the authority on the life and times of Norman Bethune - Ted Allen and Sydney Gordon's The Scalpel, The Sword, published in 1952.

     What's different is the class perspective that Allen and Gordon display in their retelling of the 1930s in Canada, and the much deeper appreciation of the movement of which Bethune was a part and a leader.

     Clarkson attributes Bethune's internationalism and his travel to Republican Spain and China, to his parents' Presbyterian religious convictions, and their missionary zeal for religious conversions in China. It was his childhood and his father's ministry that propelled him to the anti-fascist cause, she asserts. In fact, Bethune's work in Spain was the result of a decision taken by the Communist Party of Canada that he should go there, and then return to undertake a speaking tour to mobilize recruits and material support for Republican cause.

     Bethune was a member of the Communist Party, a fact Clarkson deals with as an oddity, not as a core part of his personality and world outlook. She mentions his self-penned obituary, written when he was battling tuberculosis: "Norman Bethune: Born a bourgeois, Died a Communist", and his artistic renderings of himself in a hospital bed reading Karl Marx. These, she suggests, are somehow the evidence of oddity, perhaps brilliance, but not wisdom.

     At a speaking engagement about her book, held at a medical symposium in Toronto last June, Clarkson said that had Bethune survived the war in China, she was quite sure he would have soon left the Communist Party of Canada.

     Such statements are astonishing - baseless conjecture, without facts to back them up. Everything Bethune did was connected to the Communist Party, and he is fact the Party's most celebrated member. His views about the need for a system of socialized medicine in Canada, and his work with others to develop a plan for how that system might be achieved, were embraced and reflected in the Communist Party. He made his home in the CPC because its policies and outlook (developed from its birth in 1921) reflected his own ideas. More than anything, Bethune raged against the class foundations of capitalist society, which were the cause of war, exploitation, and oppression, and he fought for and extolled the virtues of socialism.

     This is what is missing in Clarkson's book - well, almost missing. A section near the end deals with Bethune's time in China with Jean Ewen, a Canadian nurse and the daughter of prominent Canadian Communist Tom McEwen. Along with Tim Buck and six other Party leaders, McEwen was arrested in 1931 for sedition and jailed in Kingston Penitentiary. The play Eight Men Speak is about them.

     Clarkson focuses on Jean Ewen's anger at her father "who was more interested in socialism than in being a father", and on petty criticisms of Bethune which reflect the abysmal conditions in which they were forced to work medical miracles by dint of fascist occupation and war. Bethune personified courage, valour and determination to save lives without any thought to himself, and little to Jean. They were the only doctor and nurse for hundreds of miles, and civilians and soldiers alike were dying by the hundreds and thousands. Could it have been any other way?

     It seems unfair that Clarkson would choose to spend so much time on Ewen's memoirs. No doubt the hardships in China were real, and no doubt Bethune had a strong personality (like Ewen's, it seems), and little time for democracy on the battlefield. 

     What we get from Clarkson's telling is that Bethune was an extraordinary man, whom most Canadians aren't familiar with, and should be. That he was a great Canadian, who fought fascism in Spain and China (thanks mainly to his Presbyterian missionary upbringing), and that he should be recognized by his country as a great anti-fascist. We also learn that he was, oddly, a Communist; something that Clarkson tells her readers was a passing thing, a brief encounter that he would have shucked had he lived. 

     Allen and Gordon give a much fuller and truer picture of Bethune's life and activities. Yes, he was an anti-fascist, a Communist, a humanitarian, an artist, a lover of life. And yes, his life was complicated by his politics, including his personal life. He could have stayed home, made a lot of money from his medical innovations, remained married to a woman largely disinterested in his life and activities, and made peace with the Canadian establishment.

     But he didn't, and not because of his Presbyterian parents. He fought against fascism, but he also fought for socialism, for a new world. He wasn't ordinary. He knew what the future looked like, and he wanted the world to get there without passing through the fascist fire that left 50 million dead. This is what Allen and Gordon more accurately portray in The Scalpel, The Sword. 

     Read Clarkson's book for a taste; read Allen and Gordon for the meat and potatoes.