Product Code Database
John Rodker (18 December 1894 – 6 October 1955) was an English writer, modernist poet, and publisher of modernist writers.
As a young man, he was one of the so-called "Whitechapel Boys", a group including Isaac Rosenberg, Mark Gertler, David Bomberg, Stephen Winsten and Joseph Leftwich (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 the 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 the 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. 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) and portfolios of drawings by Wyndham Lewis, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska and Edward Wadsworth. 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." (2025). 9781584562863, Oak Knoll Press. ISBN 9781584562863
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'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) 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, 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 Nazism 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.
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 (1890–1937), married in May 1918. He already had a daughter, Joan Rodker (1915–2010), Obituary: Joan Rodker, The Daily Telegraph, 23 January 2011 (online edition)Jenny Diski Obituary: Joan Rodker, The Independent, 13 January 2011 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 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 (1937–2025), by the actor Gerard Heinz, was a post-World War II conscientious objector, a founder member of the Committee of 100 and serves as the British spokesperson for Mordechai Vanunu UK Campaign to Free Mordechai Vanunu and became a founding member of the Battersea Power Station Community Group.
Battersea Power Station Community Group
Works
'Imago publishing company (1939-60)'
Published by Rodker's Ovid Press
Written by John Rodker
Further reading
External links
Categories: 1894 Births, 1955 Deaths, Jewish British Poets, Jewish English Writers, English Conscientious Objectors, Writers From Manchester, Jewish Pacifists, British Recipients Of The Legion Of Honour, English Male Poets, 20th-century English Poets, Whitechapel Boys, 20th-century English Male Writers
|
|
