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The Scourge as Safety-Valve: John Rodker’s Analysis of the Avant-Garde

2023; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 30; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/mod.2023.a913153

1080-6601

Alex Grafen,

Modernist Literature and Criticism

The Scourge as Safety-Valve: John Rodker’s Analysis of the Avant-Garde Alex Grafen (bio) In a series of letters written to John Rodker from St. Elizabeth’s, Ezra Pound variously wheedled, interrogated, and criticized. In one letter, Pound proposed that Rodker publish an anthology of The Exile, the magazine which Pound had edited for four issues (1927–28) and in which Rodker’s Adolphe 1920 had been serialized. In fact, added Pound, it had been “the MAIN reason fer the mag.”1 There was also precedent with the republication of other work by Pound: Kulch [Guide to Kulchur] is out again / Of course yr / stinckging Freud racket is useful fer gittin in the rent / but no need to sink into that sewer entirely / AND “Adolf” never did git across by itself / AND yu were toodam lazy to rewrite two pages of it / and prob / too far off to try that now. (Pound to Rodker, c. 1953) Nothing came of the plan but, in later letters, Pound returned to the ideas the plan had prompted: Rodker’s regrettable interest in Freud; Rodker’s debt to Pound for publishing Adolphe 1920; Rodker’s laziness in not editing it in line with Pound’s guidance. Also worth noting are Pound’s antisemitic identification of an interest in Freud with money and filth and his hint that, since Adolphe 1920, Rodker’s literary career had stalled. The last suggestion was not entirely unjust. Since the anonymous publication of Memoirs of Other Fronts in 1932, Rodker had primarily worked as a publisher and translator. Adolphe 1920 and Rodker’s publication of work by Pound, Wyndham Lewis, and T. S. Eliot with the Ovid Press mark the high point [End Page 375] of Rodker’s involvement in the Pound circle. While Rodker was being published in The Exile, he was also becoming closer to the circle around transition, the magazine which posed the greatest threat to the cultural authority of Pound’s magazine (Alpert, “Ezra Pound,” 443). Rodker’s early work, during the peak of his involvement with the Pound circle, has received more critical attention than his later work which, with important exceptions, has tended to be overlooked. A too exclusive focus on Adolphe 1920, however, risks reinscribing Poundian priorities on a writer who came to be increasingly at odds with them. One corrective would be to construct a new theoretical scaffolding for the interpretation of Rodker’s later texts. Such an approach would provide new figures for comparison and new contexts in which Rodker’s works might be read; it would put Pound and Lewis in the background and might suggest a new, overlooked thread of modernism. Evi Heinz and Ian Patterson explore these possibilities with particular success in their doctoral theses.2 This article is indebted to their work but follows a different course: my focus lies on Rodker as an analyst of the avant-garde. I take him as a model, less for an alternative type of modernism, than for a criticism of modernism as it was instantiated in one of its most familiar forms: the prewar avant-garde in London. Rodker’s critique of the avant-garde anticipates influential discussions of modernism’s “entanglement” and the capacity of “weakness” to make theory and modernism “strange to themselves.”3 It also draws together both the observer and the object observed in a way often blocked to criticism. Rodker’s participation in the avant-garde and subsequent distance from it situated him well to analyze it, and he did so with tools acquired through his study of psychoanalysis. As such, his analysis of the avant-garde was also a reflexive critique of the role he had played as one of its members. The most sustained outcome of Rodker’s fascination with psychoanalysis was the Imago Publishing Company. He founded the company in 1939 to publish Freud’s collected works in German, though the project was eclipsed by the increasing supremacy of English as the language of psychoanalysis.4 His interest in the subject preceded Adolphe 1920 by at least ten years and formed part of the complex of scientific and literary curiosity that caused his childhood friend Joseph Leftwich to ask...