John Rodker (18 December 1894 – 6 October 1955) was an English writer,
modernist poet
Modernist poetry refers to poetry written between 1890 and 1950 in the tradition of modernist literature, but the dates of the term depend upon a number of factors, including the nation of origin, the particular school in question, and the biases ...
, and publisher of modernist writers.
Biography
John Rodker was born on 18 December 1894 in
Manchester
Manchester () is a city in Greater Manchester, England. It had a population of 552,000 in 2021. It is bordered by the Cheshire Plain to the south, the Pennines to the north and east, and the neighbouring city of Salford to the west. The t ...
, into a
Jew
Jews ( he, יְהוּדִים, , ) or Jewish people are an ethnoreligious group and nation originating from the Israelites Israelite origins and kingdom: "The first act in the long drama of Jewish history is the age of the Israelites""T ...
ish immigrant family. The family moved to London while he was still young.
As a young man, he was one of the so-called "
Whitechapel Boys
The name "Whitechapel Boys" identifies a loosely-knit group of Anglo-Jewish writers and artists of the early 20th century. It is named after Whitechapel, which contained one of London's main Jewish settlements and from which many of its members ...
", a group including
Isaac Rosenberg,
Mark Gertler,
David Bomberg
David Garshen Bomberg (5 December 1890 – 19 August 1957) was a British painter, and one of the Whitechapel Boys.
Bomberg was one of the most audacious of the exceptional generation of artists who studied at the Slade School of Art under Henr ...
,
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
''The New Age'' was a British weekly magazine (1894–1938), inspired by Fabian socialism, and credited as a major influence on literature and the arts during its heyday from 1907 to 1922, when it was edited by Alfred Richard Orage. It publishe ...
'' of
A. R. Orage and elsewhere. Other "Whitechapel Boys" were the painters
David Bomberg
David Garshen Bomberg (5 December 1890 – 19 August 1957) was a British painter, and one of the Whitechapel Boys.
Bomberg was one of the most audacious of the exceptional generation of artists who studied at the Slade School of Art under Henr ...
and
Mark Gertler; they all met together at or near the Whitechapel Art Gallery.
During
World War I
World War I (28 July 1914 11 November 1918), often abbreviated as WWI, was one of the deadliest global conflicts in history. Belligerents included much of Europe, the Russian Empire, the United States, and the Ottoman Empire, with fightin ...
, Rodker was a
conscientious objector. He went on the run, sheltering with the poet
R. C. Trevelyan, before being arrested in April 1917, imprisoned, and then transferred to the Home Office Work Centre,
Princetown
Princetown is a villageDespite its name, Princetown is not classed as a town today – it is not included in the County Council's list of the 29 towns in Devon: located within Dartmoor national park in the English county of Devon. It is the ...
, in the former
Dartmoor
Dartmoor is an upland area in southern Devon, England. The moorland and surrounding land has been protected by National Park status since 1951. Dartmoor National Park covers .
The granite which forms the uplands dates from the Carboniferous P ...
Prison. He describes this in his book ''Memoirs of Other Fronts.''
In 1919 Rodker started the Ovid Press, a
small press which lasted about a year. It published
T. S. Eliot and
Ezra Pound (the first edition of ''
Hugh Selwyn Mauberley
''Hugh Selwyn Mauberley'' (1920) is a long poem by Ezra Pound. It has been regarded as a turning point in Pound's career (by F. R. Leavis and others), and its completion was swiftly followed by his departure from England. The name "Selwyn" might ...
'') and portfolios of drawings by
Wyndham Lewis
Percy Wyndham Lewis (18 November 1882 – 7 March 1957) was a British writer, painter and critic. He was a co-founder of the Vorticist movement in art and edited ''BLAST,'' the literary magazine of the Vorticists.
His novels include ''Tarr'' ( ...
,
Henri Gaudier-Brzeska
Henri Gaudier-Brzeska (né Gaudier; 4 October 1891 – 5 June 1915) was a French artist and sculptor who developed a rough-hewn, primitive style of direct carving.
Biography
Henri Gaudier was born in Saint-Jean-de-Braye near Orléans. In 1910, ...
and
Edward Wadsworth
Edward Alexander Wadsworth (29 October 1889 – 21 June 1949) was an English artist, closely associated with modernist Vorticism movement. He painted coastal views, abstracts, portraits and still-life in tempera medium and works printed usin ...
. In the opinion of one modern scholar, "the Ovid Press remains his most significant contribution for the originality of the titles he chose and for the place the imprint maintains alongside other private presses of the period."
That same 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 second edition of
James Joyce
James Augustine Aloysius Joyce (2 February 1882 – 13 January 1941) was an Irish novelist, poet, and literary critic. He contributed to the modernist avant-garde movement and is regarded as one of the most influential and important writers of ...
'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 "J. Rodker" also, until a bankruptcy in 1932, when (along with other such ventures such as the
Fanfrolico Press
Jack Lindsay (20 October 1900 – 8 March 1990) was an Australian-born writer, who from 1926 lived in the United Kingdom, initially in Essex. He was born in Melbourne, but spent his formative years in Brisbane. He was the eldest son of Norman L ...
) his business folded in the Depression. He was included in the 1930
Faber and 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
French literature () generally speaking, is literature written in the French language, particularly by citizens of France; it may also refer to literature written by people living in France who speak traditional languages of France other than F ...
, 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
''Eugene Onegin, A Novel in Verse'' (Reforms of Russian orthography, pre-reform Russian: ; post-reform rus, Евгений Оне́гин, ромáн в стихáх, p=jɪvˈɡʲenʲɪj ɐˈnʲeɡʲɪn, r=Yevgeniy Onegin, roman v stikhakh) is ...
'' and a trickle of other books.
The Imago Publishing Company was a separate, more substantial venture, set up after
Sigmund Freud
Sigmund Freud ( , ; born Sigismund Schlomo Freud; 6 May 1856 – 23 September 1939) was an Austrian neurologist and the founder of psychoanalysis, a clinical method for evaluating and treating pathologies explained as originating in conflicts ...
arrived in London in 1938. The stocks of Freud's works left when he fled
Vienna
en, Viennese
, iso_code = AT-9
, registration_plate = W
, postal_code_type = Postal code
, postal_code =
, timezone = CET
, utc_offset = +1
, timezone_DST ...
and the
Nazis
Nazism ( ; german: Nazismus), the common name in English for National Socialism (german: Nationalsozialismus, ), is the far-right totalitarian political ideology and practices associated with Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party (NSDAP) in N ...
had been destroyed; Rodker with
Anna Freud
Anna Freud (3 December 1895 – 9 October 1982) was a British psychoanalyst of Austrian-Jewish descent. She was born in Vienna, the sixth and youngest child of Sigmund Freud and Martha Bernays. She followed the path of her father and contribut ...
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
The National Order of the Legion of Honour (french: Ordre national de la Légion d'honneur), formerly the Royal Order of the Legion of Honour ('), is the highest French order of merit, both military and civil. Established in 1802 by Napoleon ...
by the government of France.
Personal life
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
A toponymic surname or topographic surname is a surname derived from a place name. based on the town of
Rodka, now in
Romania
Romania ( ; ro, România ) is a country located at the crossroads of Central, Eastern, and Southeastern Europe. It borders Bulgaria to the south, Ukraine to the north, Hungary to the west, Serbia to the southwest, Moldova to the east, and ...
and renamed to
Rădăuți
Rădăuți (; german: Radautz; hu, Radóc; pl, Radowce; uk, Радівці, ''Radivtsi''; yi, ראַדעװיץ ''Radevits''; tr, Radoviçe) is a town in Suceava County, north-eastern Romania. It is situated in the historical region of Buko ...
.
[ David married Leah Jacobson; their children were John and Peter.
John's younger brother Peter, who used the surname Roker (without the "d"), served for five years during World War I and married Helen Scott. He was institutionalized for mental illness from 1934 until his death in 1973.
John Rodker married three times. He and his first wife, the writer ]Mary Butts
Mary Francis Butts, (13 December 1890 – 5 March 1937) also Mary Rodker by marriage, was an English modernist writer. Her work found recognition in literary magazines such as '' The Bookman'' and ''The Little Review'', as well as from fellow mo ...
(1890–1937), married 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), who married Henry Israel.
The second 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 their divorce, married E.A. Morrison III. ]Moura Budberg
Maria Ignatievna von Budberg-Bönninghausen (russian: Мария (Мура) Игнатьевна Закревская-Бенкендорф-Будберг, ''Maria (Moura) Ignatievna Zakrevskaya-Benckendorff-Budberg'', née Zakrevskaya; February ...
was John Paul's godmother.
The third 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 the actor Gerard Heinz
Gerard Heinz (born Gerhard Hinze; 2 January 1904 – 20 November 1972) was a German actor.
Heinz was born in Hamburg, Germany and later moved to Britain, where he changed his name. He appeared in almost 60 films (including ''Caravan''), and a n ...
, was a post-World War II
World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposing ...
conscientious objector, a founder member of the Committee of 100 and serves as the British spokesperson for Mordechai Vanunu
Mordechai Vanunu ( he, מרדכי ואנונו; born 14 October 1952), also known as John Crossman, is an Israeli former nuclear technician and peace activist who, citing his opposition to weapons of mass destruction, revealed details of Israe ...
and became a founding member of the Battersea Power Station Community Group.[Battersea Power Station Community Group]
/ref>
Works
Published by Rodker's Ovid Press
*John Rodker, ''Poems'' (1914)
*Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, ''Twenty Drawings from the Note-Books of H. Gaudier-Brzeska'' (1919)
*Ezra Pound, ''The Fourth Canto'' (1919)
*Wyndham Lewis, ''Fifteen Drawings'' (1920)
*T.S. Eliot, ''Ara Vus Prec'' (1920)
*Roger Fry, ''Catalogue: Paintings Drawings and Etchings by Auguste Renoir'' (1920)
*Clive Bell, ''Catalogue: Woodcuts and Drawings by Nicola Galante'' (1920)
*John Rodker, ''Hymns'' (1920)
*Ezra Pound, ''Hugh Selwyn Mauberley'' (1920)
*Roald Kristian, ''A Bestiary'' (1920)
*Oscar Wilde, ''To M. B. J.'' (1920)
*Edward Wadsworth, ''The Black Country'' (1920)
*Ezra Pound, ''Bel Esprit'' (1922)
*André Germain, ''Chants dans la Brume'' (1922)
*James Joyce, ''Ulysses'' (1922)
Written by John Rodker
*Poems (1914) first collection
*Hymns (1920) Ovid Press
*Montagnes Russes (1923) in French translation by Ludmila Savitzky
*Dartmoor (1926) in French translation by Ludmila Savitzky
*The Future of Futurism (1926)
* Adolphe 1920 (1929)
*Collected Poems, 1912–1925 (Hours Press, 1930)
*Memoirs of Other Fronts (1932)
*Poems & Adolphe 1920 (1996) Carcanet Press reissue
Further reading
* Gerald W. Cloud, ''John Rodker's Ovid Press: a bibliographical history'' (2010. Oak Knoll Press)
References
External links
Article on the Whitechapel Boys
* Anglo-Jewish poetry from Isaac Rosenberg to Elaine Feinstein by Peter Lawson:
John Rodker Papers at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at U. of Texas, Austin
* 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
Entry in Rodker's genealogy web site
built usin
Geneweb software
The Journal of the Utah Jewish Genealogical Society, "Atsmi uVsari", Issue #24, Dec., 2010
Review and bibliography of “John Rodker’s Ovid Press: A Bibliographical History” by Gerald W. Cloud
Imago Publishing Co.
a
Database – Jewish Publishers of German Literature in Exile, 1933-1945
{{DEFAULTSORT:Rodker, John
1894 births
1955 deaths
Jewish poets
English Jews
English conscientious objectors
Writers from Manchester
Jewish pacifists
Recipients of the Legion of Honour
English male poets
20th-century English poets
Whitechapel Boys
20th-century English male writers