Understand the Weapon, Understand the Wound

The Selected Writings of John Cornford

Author

John Cornford, edited by Jonathan Galassi

Publisher

Carcanet New Press, Manchester, 1976

Understand the Weapon, Understand the Wound

Printing Details

First edition, first printing. Hardback in dustwrapper. 22 × 14cm, 203pp.

Full title: Understand the Weapon, Understand the Wound, Selected Writings of John Cornford, with some letters of Frances Cornford

John Cornford (1915–1936) has long been held in high estimation as the outstanding English writer who fell to the Fascists in the Spanish Civil War. This collection of his writings from his thirteenth to his twenty-first year, when he died of wounds received in action, are a revealing biography, showing the sources of Cornford's political and literary commitments. As a Marxist interpreter, his analysis of the Spanish situation is, even today, illuminating, but the quality of his commitment has an element of nostalgia—for Cornford died before the great legend of Stalin's benevolence and humanity had been undermined, first by the Soviet-German alliance, and then by the revelations about the Soviet Labour Camps and the purges. In this new selection of Cornford's writings, Jonathan Galassi has included poems, essays and letters, much of it previously inaccessible.

Condition

The book is in good sound readable condition, but with some tanning to the pages. The dustwrapper is faded to the spine, and with light bumping to the edges and has been neatly price-clipped.