John Rodker

Biography

John Rodker, named Simon Soloman at birth, was born 18 December 1894 in Manchester, England, to Leah Rodker (née Jacobson) and David Rodker, a Polish corset maker (Cloud 5). At the age of six Rodker’s father moved his family to London’s East End, where Rodker enjoyed the rich influence of the East End Jewish community that developed out of the mass immigrations of the 1880s (Crozier 7). In a letter from Ezra Pound to Margaret Anderson, editor-in-chief of the Little Review, Pound reported that Rodker excelled at language but was self-educated, and, perhaps more shockingly, that “his father did not have a library full of classics” (Cloud 5). In spite of Rodker’s perceived educational shortcomings by Pound, Rodker did receive formal education at a boarding school in London, and later at the Jews Free School until the age of fourteen, after which time he supplemented his learning with evening classes in science, German, and French. For an artist and aspiring poet, Rodker’s childhood and adolescent community provided idyllic friendships. In 1911, together with artists Joseph Leftwich, Isaac Rosenberg, and Stephen Winsten, Rodker formed a young literary circle known as “the Whitechapel boys,” a small group of friends that would critique each other’s writing and discuss favorite authors and artists (Cloud 5).

It is through Leftwich’s diary that Rodker’s early life and development as an artist is known today. Leftwich reports that Rodker served in civil service posts, first as a clerk at the London Customs House, and then at the Post Office (Crozier 10). During this time Rodker was reported to have developed an irreconcilable love for poetry and science. Spending his time dissecting plants and animals and speculating about the relativity of sexual morals, Rodker aspired to gain admittance to the Imperial College of Science. Though his scientific pursuits did not pan out, Rodker’s more morbid interests in the body led him to embrace a fascination with the “macabre” in his earlier writing (11).

During his literary career, Rodker enjoyed tight-knit connections with some of the most prominent, canonized contemporaries in the Modernist movement: Ezra Pound, H.D., Ford Madox Ford, Wyndham Lewis, and T.S. Eliot, to name a few. The breadth of Rodker’s literary influence and connections within the movement were complex, which serve in his favor when analyzing his influence as a translator, editor, and writer in the development of Modernism as a whole. The beginning of Rodker’s success as a writer was founded in the Vorticist movement with Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis in 1914, but the onset of World War I would disrupt Rodker’s literary career and Vorticist influence, which is perhaps in part what shattered the possibility of his prominence as a Modernist figure today (Cloud 7). From 1916 until 1918, Rodker endured two years away from the influence of the Modernist literary circle, in large part due to his imprisonment for deserting his military post in 1916. Years later, Rodker recalled of his military evasion that he was “determined not to kill, and that of course, was the best way of maintaining oneself alive” (8). After his time in prison, Rodker lived out the remainder of the war as a newlywed with Mary Butts, a Modernist novelist. They were married 10 May 1918, and were eventually reunited with the well-connected literary circle of other Modernist writers. It was during the war and Rodker’s time in hiding to avoid punishment for military evasion that a 1917 issue of the Little Review would first publish Three Night Pieces, a short story that reflects Rodker’s fascination with the body, subjectivity, and macabre. Though Rodker was predominantly a poet, Three Night Pieces is a prose short fiction piece that examines the body’s influence on subjective experience. The piece can be said to reflect the turmoil and shock of World War I, as well as an inability to fully grasp its significance to the human race. Reality is ghost-like, and recollection utterly disturbing. Subjectivity becomes a haunting experience, and the body and illusion a constant reminder of the horror that it is to be human—to be inside one’s own body, to never be fully able to describe reality and memory, and finally, to be imprisoned within the mystery of subjectivity.