John Rodker

John Rodker c. 1955

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John Rodker

Born:

1894 Dec 18th
United Kingdom

Died:

1955 Oct 6th

Gender:

Authored By: Evi Heinz

Edited By: Anna Mukamal, Dominic Williams

John Rodker was born in Manchester on 18th December 1894. The son of Jewish immigrants originating from Poland, his family moved from Manchester to London when he was six years old. Growing up in a secular family in the Jewish East End, Rodker was active in the Young Socialist League and befriended the ‘Whitechapel Boys’ Joseph Leftwich, Stephen Winsten and Isaac Rosenberg. With the help of Ezra Pound, who took him under his wing in 1914, Rodker’s verse was published in a range of modernist little magazines, including Poetry, The Egoist, Others, and The Little Review. His first poetry collection, Poems, was privately printed in London in late 1914.

During these early years in Whitechapel, Rodker became romantically involved with Sonia Cohen, a young woman from a Jewish working-class background who shared Rodker’s interest in radical art and politics. Although they were never married, the couple briefly lived together in a small flat near Brick Lane and, in May 1915, had a daughter, Joan. Cohen was a student of the modern dance revolutionary Margaret Morris and it was through her that Rodker first became acquainted with the circle of artists around Morris’s school and studio theatre in Chelsea. During the early years of World War One, Rodker wrote experimental drama and collaborated with Morris’s students, Hester Sainsbury and Kathleen Dillon, known as the ‘Clarissa Company.’ Their theatrical experiments were cut short in the spring of 1916, however, when the introduction of conscription forced Rodker—a conscientious objector—to leave London and take shelter with the poet R. C. Trevelyan in Surrey.

For the remainder of the war, Rodker engaged in a cat-and-mouse game with the authorities, spending periods in hiding, in prison, and eventually in a work camp on Dartmoor. Back in London in spring 1918, he married the writer Mary Butts, with whom he had his second daughter, Camilla. They moved into a house in Hampstead which became the home of Rodker’s first publishing business, the Ovid Press. The press issued hand-printed editions of verse by T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and Rodker himself, and graphic work by Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, Wyndham Lewis, and Edward Wadsworth. In 1919, Rodker succeeded Pound as foreign editor of the Little Review, providing him with an important platform for promoting his own poetry and criticism over the following years.

After the demise of the short-lived Ovid Press in 1920 and an acrimonious separation from Butts in 1921, Rodker returned to publishing in 1922 with the Casanova Society, an imprint that issued luxurious limited editions of mildly salacious classics for a clientele of wealthy bibliophiles. During the 1920s, Rodker also frequently travelled to Paris where he socialised with many important literary figures of the day. This included James Joyce, whose Ulysses he published in its first British edition for the Egoist Press in 1922, and Nancy Cunard, with whom he engaged in a tempestuous love affair that inspired his novella Adolphe 1920, published by the Aquila Press in 1929. Two earlier novellas, Montagnes Russes (Stock, 1923) and Dartmoor (Sagittaire, 1926), had failed to find an English publisher and consequently appeared only in France, translated into French by Ludmila Savitzky.

Rodker was also a skilled translator himself and translated around 20 books from the French throughout his career. After the anonymous publication of his final novel Memoirs of Other Fronts—a fictionalised autobiography spanning Rodker’s experiences as a conscientious objector and aspects of his relationships with Cunard and Butts—in 1932, he dedicated himself entirely to the translation of contemporary French writing, including works by Jules Romains, Henry de Montherlant, and André Chamson. His translations of short stories by Jean Giono and Paul Nizan were published in John Lehmann’s New Writing and aired on the BBC’s Third Programme. Due to his excellent knowledge of French, Rodker was also briefly employed on the staff of the BBC’s French Section.

The 1930s were a period of financial hardship for Rodker. The demise of his third publishing venture, the ‘John Rodker’ imprint, had left him with a large amount of debt. He made a scant living on his translation work and, between 1934-1940, as a literary agent for the Soviet Press and Publisher Literary Service (PresLit) in Britain. His interest in Russian literature also led him to found a fourth publishing company, the Pushkin Press. In 1936, he married his second wife, the painter Barbara Stanger McKenzie-Smith, with whom he had a son, John Paul. The marriage did not last long, however, and by 1941 the couple had officially separated.

From the late 1930s onwards, Rodker sought to turn his longstanding interest in psychoanalysis into a viable profession. Yet, as so often, his efforts were initially crowned with little success. In 1936, his request to join the Institute of Psycho-Analysis as a lay-analyst was denied, and in 1937 Leonard and Virginia Woolf rejected his offer to take over the Hogarth Press—then the most important publishers of Freud in English. Part of the reason for their rejection seems to have been a certain personal distrust of Rodker, as can be gleaned from a note Virginia Woolf made in her diary: "Rodker is nibbling at the Press. […] Rodker is a communist. Any other hand in the Press is suspect at once" (Woolf 105-6). Undeterred by these setbacks, Rodker went on to found his fifth and final publishing outfit, the Imago Publishing Company, which issued a 17-volume German language edition of Freud’s Gesammelte Werke between 1940-1952, as well as other psychoanalytical writings by authors including Anna Freud and Marie Bonaparte.

In 1951, Rodker married his third wife, Marianne Rais (daughter of Ludmila Savitzky), who was to carry on the Imago Publishing Company after his sudden death from a heart attack at the age of 60 on 6th October 1955. The range of obituaries published in English, French and German following Rodker’s death are a testament to the extensive network of literary contacts he had built up throughout his career. The most poignant assessment of his literary legacy was written by Jack Isaacs for The Times, describing Rodker as "a gentle person, who gave to publishing what should have been given to literature, yet in his contribution towards the reputations of Eliot, Pound, Joyce, Lewis, and Freud he was a not unimportant part of our time" (11). 

Further Reading

Amouroux, Remy. “’A serious venture’: John Rodker (1894-1955) and the Imago Publishing Company (1939-60).” International Journal of Psychoanalysis, vol. 92, 2011, pp. 1437-54.

Cloud, Gerald W. John Rodker's Ovid Press: A Bibliographical History. Oak Knoll Press, 2010.

Crozier, Andrew. “Introduction.” Poems & Adolphe 1920, edited by Andrew Crozier, Carcanet, 1996, pp. vii-xxiii.

Heinz, Evelyn. John Rodker (1894-1955) and Modernist Material Culture: Theatre, Translation, Publishing. 2018. Birkbeck, University of London. PhD dissertation.

---. “A Cell of One's Own: Conscientious Objection and John Rodker's Narratives of Resistance.” War Poetry Review, 2014-2015, pp. 45-51.

Isaacs, Jack. “Mr. John Rodker.” The Times, 11 October 1955, p. 11.

Lawson, Peter. “John Rodker: Minority Modernist.” Anglo-Jewish Poetry from Isaac Rosenberg to Elaine Feinstein. Vallentine Mitchell, 2006, pp. 76-110.

MacDougall, Sarah. “’Something Is Happening There.’ Early British Modernism, the Great War and the ‘Whitechapel Boys’.” London, Modernism, and 1914, edited by Michael J. K. Walsh, Cambridge University Press, 2010, pp. 122-47.

Otty, Lisa. “Small Press Modernists: Collaboration, Experimentation and the Limited Edition Book.” The Aesthetics of Matter: Modernism, the Avant-Garde and Material Exchange, edited by Sarah Posman, Anne Reverseau, David Ayers, Sascha Bru and Benedikt Hjartason, De Gruyter, 2013, pp. 128-43.

Patterson, Ian. Cultural Critique and Canon Formation 1910-1937. 1996. University of Cambridge, PhD dissertation. Apollo, repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/244805

---. “John Rodker, Julius Ratner and Wyndham Lewis: The Split-Man Writes Back.” Wyndham Lewis and the Cultures of Modernity, edited by Andrzej Gasiorek, Alice Reeve-Tucker and Nathan Waddell, Ashgate, 2011.

---. “The Translation of Soviet Literature: John Rodker and PresLit.” Russia in Britain 1880-1940, edited by Rebecca Beasley and Philip Ross Bullock, Oxford University Press, 2013, pp. 188-208.

---. “Writing on Other Fronts: John Rodker and Translation.”, Translation and Literature, vol. 12, no. 1, Mar. 2003, pp. 88-113.

Pender, Elizabeth. “Mawkishness, or Literary Art: John Rodker’s Adolphe 1920 in Modernism.” Modernism/modernity, vol. 21, no. 2, Apr. 2014, pp. 467-85.

Phillips, Adam. “Unofficial Modernist.” Jewish Quarterly, vol. 45, no. 4, 1998/99, pp. 69-71.

Pryor, Sean. “Satyriasts' Beatitudes: John Rodker's Hymns.” Texas Studies in Literature, vol. 55, no. 4, Winter 2013, pp. 473-92.

Rodker (née Cohen), Sonia. The End Has Various Places. Privately published, 2018.

Williams, Dominic. “’No History to Speak Of’: Jewishness and Modernism in John Rodker's Memoirs of Other Fronts (1932).” Journal of Modern Jewish Studies, vol. 9, no. 3, Nov. 2010, pp. 289-310.

Woolf, Virginia. The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Vol. V. 1936-1941, Anner Olivier Bell, ed., assisted by Andrew McNeillie, Hogarth Press, 1984, pp. 105-6.

 

 

 

Isaacs, Jack. “Mr. John Rodker.” The Times, 11 October 1955

Woolf, Virginia. The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Vol. V. 1936-1941, Anner Olivier Bell, ed., assisted by Andrew McNeillie, Hogarth Press, 1984

Selected Bibliography

Amouroux, Remy. “’A serious venture’: John Rodker (1894-1955) and the Imago Publishing Company (1939-60).” International Journal of Psychoanalysis, vol. 92, 2011, pp. 1437-54.

Crozier, Andrew. “Introduction.” Poems & Adolphe 1920, edited by Andrew Crozier, Carcanet, 1996, pp. vii-xxiii.

Heinz, Evelyn. John Rodker (1894-1955) and Modernist Material Culture: Theatre, Translation, Publishing. 2018. Birkbeck, University of London. PhD dissertation.

Patterson, Ian. “The Translation of Soviet Literature: John Rodker and PresLit.” Russia in Britain 1880-1940, edited by Rebecca Beasley and Philip Ross Bullock, Oxford University Press, 2013, pp. 188-208.

Pender, Elizabeth. “Mawkishness, or Literary Art: John Rodker’s Adolphe 1920 in Modernism.” Modernism/modernity, vol. 21, no. 2, Apr. 2014, pp. 467-85.

Selected Translations

Le Comte de Lautréamont. The Lay of Maldoror. Casanova Society, 1924.

Amédée Ozenfant. Foundations of Modern Art. John Rodker, 1931.

Henri Barbusse. Inferno. Joiner & Steele, 1932.

Jules Romains. The Body’s Rapture. Boriswood, 1933.

Ella Maillart. Turkestan Solo: One Woman’s Expedition from the Tien Shan to the Kizil Kum. Putnam, 1934.

Magnus Hirschfeld. Sex in Human Relationships. John Lane, 1935.

Henry de Montherlant. Pity for Women. Routledge, 1937.

André Chamson. A Mountain Boyhood. John Lehmann, 1947.

Marie Bonaparte, Myths of War. Imago Publishing, 1947.

Blaise Cendrars, Antarctic Fugue. Pushkin Press, 1948.