Rodker, John, 1894-1955

British writer, publisher, and translator.

From the description of John Rodker Papers, 1912-1982 (bulk 1920-1961). (Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center (HRC); University of Texas at Austin). WorldCat record id: 122365909

English publisher.

From the description of Autograph letter signed and typewritten letter signed : London, to Carlo Linati, 1920 Sept. 25 and 1927 Aug. 3. (Unknown). WorldCat record id: 270656163

John Rodker was born in Manchester, England, on 18 December 1894 to David Rodker, an immigrant corset-maker, and his wife Leah. After the family’s arrival in London’s East End about 1900 young John attended local schools while helping out with the family business. Increasingly fascinated with literature and languages, Rodker began about 1908 to associate with a group of like-minded young men, including the poet and artist Isaac Rosenberg and the artists David Bomberg and Mark Gertler. By 1912 Rodker had determined upon a literary career, as his poems and essays began to appear in avant-garde and little magazines like The Dial, The Egoist, and The New Age .

With the outbreak of World War I in 1914 John Rodker declared himself a conscientious objector, actively resisting military service and enduring imprisonment for a time in Dartmoor Prison. Rodker continued writing poetry even while avoiding the authorities, and with the arrival of peace he began to take a growing interest in editing and publishing, establishing the Ovid Press in mid-1919. Lasting scarcely a year, the Ovid Press was nearly a one-man show with Rodker printing and publishing limited editions of, among others, T. S. Eliot, Wyndham Lewis, and Ezra Pound. Concurrently with the beginning of this brief but notable excursion into the making of books Rodker replaced Pound as London editor of The Little Review .

While working in Paris in 1922 to bring out the second, British, printing of James Joyce’s Ulysses Rodker met his future mother-in-law, the literary translator Ludmila Savitzky. Together, Rodker and Pound persuaded Savitzky to translate Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man into French, where it appeared under the title Dedalus in 1924. Savitzky further translated two of Rodker’s manuscripts, Montagnes Russes, a novel, and Dartmoor, an excerpt from the in-progress novel of his wartime experiences.

After completing his largely successful efforts to get copies of Ulysses past the postal authorities, Rodker, now back in London, established the Casanova Society. Beginning in 1923 the Casanova Society issued expensive limited editions of classical, mostly French, literature in newly commissioned translations by Arthur Machen, E. Powys Mathers, and others. The Casanova Society was succeeded in 1927 by a publishing venture conducted under Rodker’s own name and offering additional literary translations by Montague Summers, Rosamund Mathers, and Frederick Etchells.

The arrival of the Depression after 1929 ended hopes that publishing limited editions might succeed, and Rodker finally declared bankruptcy by 1932. The process of satisfying his creditors’ claims was finally completed in 1945. The early 1930s also saw Rodker’s abandonment of an active literary career after his Collected Poems, 1912-1925 (1930), and his two final novels Adolphe 1920 (1929) and Memoirs of Other Fronts (1932) were published.

In the years from 1933 to 1939 Rodker worked as the British agent for the Press and Publisher Literary Service, a Soviet agency charged with publishing contemporary Russian fiction and nonfiction in Western languages. The work Rodker did for Preslit lacked much intellectual and cultural interest but did enable him to get back on his feet financially. Translation remained a substantial creative outlet for Rodker in the 1930s, as he produced versions of significant French literary authors (Chamson, Montherlant, Romains), along with Amedée Ozenfant’s The Foundations of Modern Art and Magnus Hirschfeld’s Sex in Human Relationships .

After the failure of Rodker’s publishing ventures of the 1920s he did not return to publishing as such until he established the Pushkin Press to issue Oliver Elton’s translation of Evgeny Onegin on the centennial of Pushkin’s death in 1937. For the next decade the Pushkin Press issued fewer than a dozen titles, works that Rodker felt should be available to the English-speaking reader, including a revised reissue of J. H. Lepper’s The Testaments of François Villon, first issued by the Casanova Society in 1924, and Blaise Cendrars’ Antarctic Fugue, finally published in John Rodker’s own translation in 1948 after he abandoned Harry Grimsditch Smith’s translation prepared twenty years earlier.

Shortly after Sigmund Freud and his family arrived in London in the summer of 1938, efforts were made to find a person qualified to superintend the publication, in German, of Freud’s Gesammelte Werke . When the aged father of psychoanalysis had fled Vienna the stocks of his published works were seized by the Nazis and burned. Freud, his family, and his disciples were determined for their part that his work should continue to be available, and in its original language. John Rodker was able to win the confidence of the Freuds for this project, for which purpose he founded the Imago Publishing Company.

Beginning in the darkest days of World War II, Rodker, working with Anna Freud as editor, saw the writings of Sigmund Freud through the presses until the final volume was completed in 1952. The massive Freud project, with the related publication of psychological, psychoanalytical, and child guidance titles by other authors, consumed most of John Rodker’s time and energies from 1940 on.

In 1951 John Rodker married Marianne Rais, a Paris bookseller and daughter of Ludmila Savitzky. Rodker’s previous marriages to the writer Mary Butts and the painter Barbara Stanger McKenzie-Smith had ended in divorce. Marianne moved to London, where she helped her husband operate the Imago Publishing Company. At his death on 6 October 1955 John Rodker was survived by Marianne, two daughters, Joan Rodker and Camilla Bagg, and a son, J. Paul Morrison. Marianne Rodker continued to manage Imago and issue additional titles until she closed the firm in 1961 and returned to France.

From the guide to the John Rodker Papers TXRC03-A15., 1912-1982 (bulk 1920-1961), (The University of Texas at Austin, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center)