John Rodker

John Rodker (1894-1955), circa 1955. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

John Rodker (18 December 1894 - 6 October 1955) was a modernist English poet, prose writer, and publisher.

Life

Youth

Rodker was born Simon Solomon in Manchester, into a Jewish immigrant family. The family moved to London while he was still young.

As a young man he was a member of the "Whitechapel Boys", a group that included Isaac Rosenberg, Samuel Weinstein and Joseph Lefkowitz (who coined the name in hindsight). From about 1911, when Rosenberg arrived, they began to aspire to literary careers; and in the years before 1914 Rodker was a published essayist and poet, in The New Age of A.R. Orage and elsewhere. Other "Whitechapel Boys" were painters David Bomberg and Mark Gertler; they all met together at or near the Whitechapel Art Gallery.

During World War I Rodker was a conscientious objector. He went on the run, sheltering with poet R.C. Trevelyan, before being arrested in April 1917, imprisoned, and then transferred to the Home Office Work Centre, Princetown, in the former Dartmoor Prison.

Career

In 1919 Rodker started the Ovid Press, a small press which lasted about a year. It published T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound (the 1st edition of Hugh Selwyn Mauberley) and portfolios of drawings by Wyndham Lewis, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska and Edward Wadsworth. That year Rodker took over from Pound as foreign editor of the New York magazine, The Little Review.

In the 1920s he spent time in Paris on the 2nd edition of James Joyce's Ulysses, at that time subject to censorship, and on French translations of Joyce. He then set up the Casanova Society, for limited editions. He continued in publishing, on occult subjects under the imprint "Rodker," until a bankruptcy in 1932, when (along with other such ventures such as the Fanfrolico Press) his business folded in the Depression. He was included in the 1930 Faber & Faber collection Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress of Joyceans.

For a period he dropped publishing, concentrating on translation from French literature, and agency work for Preslit, the Soviet overseas literature organ. At this time too he apparently abandoned literary ambitions for himself. In 1937, the centennial of the death of Aleksandr Pushkin, he set up the Pushkin Press, another small press, publishing Oliver Elton's English version of Eugene Onegin and a trickle of other books.

The Imago Publishing Company was a separate, more substantial venture, set up after Sigmund Freud arrived in London in 1938. The stocks of Freud's works left when he fled Vienna and the Nazis had been destroyed; Rodker with Anna Freud worked to publish a complete edition. This was done over a dozen years, being finished in 1952. Imago was wound up in 1961.

Rodker was fluent in French, writing regularly for a French literary magazine, and was posthumously awarded the Légion d'Honneur by the government of France.

Private life and family

John Rodker's father, David, joined the mass exodus of Jews from what is now Poland to escape the pogroms of the 1880s, moving to England, where, like a number of his family members, he worked as a corset-maker. As far as we know, all the Rodkers in the world are related – the name seems to have been invented for (or by) just this one family. This surname appears to be a toponymic surname based on the town of Rodka, now in Romania and renamed to Rădăuți.

John Rodker married 3 times. He married his 1st wife, writer Mary Butts (1890–1937), in May 1918. He already had a daughter, Joan (1915–2010), from an earlier relationship with the dancer, Sonia Cohen (1885–1979). His daughter by Mary Butts was Camilla (1920–2007).

His 2nd marriage was to Barbara McKenzie-Smith (1902–1996), a painter, resulting in a son, John Paul (born in 1937), whose surname was changed to Morrison when his mother, after a divorce, married E.A. Morrison III. Moura Budberg was John Paul's godmother.

His 3rd marriage was to Marianne Rais (died 1984), a Paris bookseller and daughter of his translator Ludmila Savitzky.

Joan Rodker's son, Ernest Rodker (born 1937), by actor Gerard Heinz, was a post-World War II conscientious objector, serves as the British spokesperson for Mordechai Vanunu, and became a founding member of the Battersea Power Station Community Group.

Publications

Poetry

• Poems. London: privately published, 1914.
• Hymns. London: Ovid Press, 1920.
• Collected Poems, 1912–1925. Paris: Hours Press, 1930.

Novels

• Montagnes Russes (n French translation by Ludmila Savitzky). Paris, Stock, 1923.
• Dartmoor (in French translation by Ludmila Savitzky). Paris: Éditions du Sagittaire, 1926.
• Adolphe 1920 (novella). Paris: Chez Bernard Grasset, 1927; London: Aquila Press, 1929.
• Memoirs of Other Fronts. London: Putnam, 1932.

Non-fiction

• The Future of Futurism. London: Kegan Paul, 1926; New York: Dutton, 1927.

Collected editions

• Poems / Adolphe 1920 (edited by Andrew Crozier). Manchester, UK: Carcanet, 1996.

Translated

• Comte de Lautréamont, The Lay of Maldoror. London: Casanova Society, 1924.

Edited

• Soviet Anthology. London: Cape, 1943.

Except where noted, bibliographical information courtesy WorldCat.

Poems by John Rodker

1. Under the Trees

See also

• List of British poets

References

• G.W. Cloud, John Rodker's Ovid Press: a bibliographical history. Oak Knoll Press, 2010.
• Anglo-Jewish poetry from Isaac Rosenberg to Elaine Feinstein by Peter Lawson: ISBN 0-85303-617-9

Fonds

• John Rodker Papers at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at University of Texas, Austin

External links

Poems

• "Hymn of Hymns" at Poem of the Week, The Guardian
• Rodker in Poetry: A magazine of verse, 1912-1922: "London Night," "Under the Trees," "Dead Queens," "Because Some Lover," "In a Garden," "The Searchlights"

Books

• John Rodker at Amazon.com

About

• John Rodker at Carcanet Press
• John Rodker: Life and writing at Oak Knoll Press
• John Rodker at Modernist Archives
• Dominic Williams, No History to Speak Of: Jewishness and Modernism in John Rodker's Memoirs of Other Fronts (1932) Journal of Modern Jewish Studies 9.3(2010): 289–310
• The Journal of the Utah Jewish Genealogical Society, "Atsmi uVsari", Issue #24, Dec., 2010

Etc.

• Article on the Whitechapel Boys
• Review and bibliography of “John Rodker’s Ovid Press: A Bibliographical History” by Gerald W. Cloud