John Rodker

John Rodker

John Rodker (18 December 1894 – 6 October 1955) was a British writer, modernist poet, and publisher of some of the major modernist figures. He was born in Manchester into a Jewish immigrant family, who moved to London while he was still young.

Contents

Career

As a young man he was one of the "Whitechapel Boys", a group including 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 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. In 1919 he 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. 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 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 and much more substantial venture, set up after Sigmund Freud arrived in 1938 in London. 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.

He was posthumously awarded the Légion d'Honneur by the government of France.

Life

He married three times. His first wife was the writer Mary Butts (1890-1937); they married in May 1918. He already had a daughter, Joan (1915-2010[1][2]), from an earlier relationship with the dancer, Sonia Cohen (1885-1979). His daughter by Mary Butts was called Camilla (1920-2007). The second marriage was to Barbara McKenzie-Smith (1902-1996), a painter, resulting in a son, John Paul (born in 1937), whose name was later changed to John Paul Morrison when his mother remarried. Their friend, Moura Budberg, was asked to be his godmother. The third marriage was to Marianne Rais (died 1984), a Paris bookseller and daughter of his translator Ludmila Savitzky, who survived him. Joan Rodker's son, Ernest Rodker (born 1937), by the actor Gerard Heinz, is British spokesperson for Mordechai Vanunu[3] and a founding member of the Battersea Power Station Community Group.[4]

Works

  • 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

References

  1. ^ Obituary: Joan Rodker, Daily Telegraph, 23 January 2011 (online edition)
  2. ^ Jenny Diski Obituary: Joan Rodker, The Independent, 13 January 2011
  3. ^ http://www.vanunu.freeserve.co.uk/htdocs/news.htm Campaign to Free Mordechai Vanunu
  4. ^ http://www.batterseapowerstation.org.uk/news/latest_news.html Battersea Power Station Community Group.

External links


Wikimedia Foundation. 2010.

Игры ⚽ Нужна курсовая?

Look at other dictionaries:

  • John Rodker — (* 18. Dezember 1894 in Manchester; † 6. Oktober 1955) war ein englischer Schriftsteller und Verleger. Inhaltsverzeichnis 1 Leben vor dem Ersten Weltkrieg 2 Erster Weltkrieg 3 Tätigkeit als Verleger …   Deutsch Wikipedia

  • John Paul Morrison — (born John Paul Rodker in 1937) is a British born Canadian computer programmer, and the inventor of flow based programming (FBP). He is the author of the book Flow Based Programming: A New Approach to Application Development J. Paul Morrison,… …   Wikipedia

  • RODKER, JOHN — (1894–1955), English writer and publisher. Rodker was born in Manchester to a recent immigrant who then moved to London s East End. In his youth, Rodker associated with other young Jewish intellectuals in London of similar background, including… …   Encyclopedia of Judaism

  • Mary Butts — Born 13 December 1890(1890 12 13) Died 5 March 1937(1937 03 05) (aged 46) Occupation novelist Nationality British Mary Frances …   Wikipedia

  • Magnus Hirschfeld — Born 14 May 1868(1868 05 14) Kołobrzeg Died 14 May 1935(1935 05 14) (aged 67) Nice, France Residence Poland, Germany, France …   Wikipedia

  • Doris Lessing — Lessing at lit.cologne in 2006 Born Doris May Tayler 22 October 1919 (1919 10 22) (age 92) Kermanshah, Persia …   Wikipedia

  • Gerard Heinz — (2 January 1904, in Hamburg, Germany – 20 November 1972), born Gerhard Hinze, was an actor. He later moved to England, where he changed his name to Gerard Heinz. He appeared in almost 60 movies (including Caravan ), and a number of stage… …   Wikipedia

  • Wyndham Lewis — Infobox Artist name = Wyndham Lewis imagesize = 200px caption = Wyndham Lewis birthname = Percy Wyndham Lewis birthdate = birth date|1882|11|18|mf=y location = Amherst Nova Scotia Canada deathdate = death date and age|1957|3|7|1882|11|18|mf=y… …   Wikipedia

  • Comte de Lautréamont — French writer Lautréamont (only known photo) Born Isidore Lucien Ducasse 4 April 1846(1846 04 04) Montevideo, Uruguay Died …   Wikipedia

  • Adolphe 1920 — Written by John Rodker and published in 1929, Adolphe 1920 is a novella set in Paris, spanning eight hours in the life of its protagonist, Dick. [John Rodker, Poems Adolphe 1920 , ed. Andrew Crozier (Manchester: Carcanet, 1996)] It is similar in… …   Wikipedia

Share the article and excerpts

Direct link
Do a right-click on the link above
and select “Copy Link”