, John Rodker, Martha Dennison,
Tristan Tzara,
Margaret C. Anderson, ca. 1920s John Rodker was born on 18 December 1894 in
Manchester, into a
Jewish 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", a group including
Isaac Rosenberg,
Mark Gertler,
David Bomberg,
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. 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." 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
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. 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. ==Personal life==