He was overcome by the beauty of those deeply embayed combes, scooped in the flanks of the ridge beneath him. Curves, curves: he repeated the word slowly, trying as he did so to find some term in which to give expression to his appreciation. Curves – no, that was inadequate. He made a gesture with his hand, as though to scoop the achieved expression out of the air, and almost fell off his bicycle.
(23-year-old Denis Stone, hero of Crome Yellow, page 6)
Huxley, born in 1894, was 26 when his first novel was published. It is a short and funny comedy of contemporary post-war English manners. Its hero, Denis Stone, is a young 23, has just published a very slim volume of verse and is, sigh, a most sensitive soul. He has come down by train to the charming English village of Crome and to the house of his friends Mr Henry Wimbush and his astrology-loving wife, Priscilla.
‘I see Surrey has won,’ she said, with her mouth full, ‘by four wickets. The sun is in Leo: that would account for it!’
The silly goings-on of guests at a charming country house was an established literary genre, going back at least as far as the slender comic novels of Shelley’s friend, Thomas Love Peacock, to wit: Headlong Hall, Nightmare Abbey, The Misfortunes of Elphin and Crotchet Castle.
Anyway, half a dozen house guests are assembled at the manor house of the sweet little village of Crome and proceed to be frivolous, posh and silly. They are:
Jenny Mullion – ‘perhaps thirty, owner of a tilted nose and a pink-and-white complexion, and wore her brown hair plaited and coiled in two lateral buns over her ears, who is separated from the rest of the world by the almost impenetrable barriers of her deafness.’ The way she uses her deafness to withdraw into is described very wittily.
I’m glad to hear it,’ said Priscilla.
‘Glad to hear what?’ asked Jenny, emerging suddenly from her private interior world like a cuckoo from a clock. She received an explanation, smiled, nodded, cuckooed a last ‘I see’, and popped back, clapping shut the door behind her.
Mary Bracegirdle – ‘nearly twenty-three, but one wouldn’t have guessed it. Her short hair, clipped like a page’s, hung in a bell of elastic gold about her cheeks. She had large blue china eyes, whose expression was one of ingenuous and often puzzled earnestness.’
Mr. Scogan – ‘like one of those extinct bird-lizards of the Tertiary. His nose was beaked, his dark eye had the shining quickness of a robin’s. But there was nothing soft or gracious or feathery about him. The skin of his wrinkled brown face had a dry and scaly look; his hands were the hands of a crocodile. His movements were marked by the lizard’s disconcertingly abrupt clockwork speed; his speech was thin, fluty, and dry.’
Gombauld – an artist: ‘with more hair and less collar, Gombauld would have been completely Byronic – more than Byronic, even, for Gombauld was of Provencal descent, a black-haired young corsair of thirty, with flashing teeth and luminous large dark eyes.’
And Anne, Henry Wimbush’s niece: ‘Within its setting of light brown hair her face had a pretty regularity that was almost doll-like. And indeed there were moments when she seemed nothing more than a doll; when the oval face, with its long-lashed, pale blue eyes, expressed nothing; when it was no more than a lazy mask of wax.’
Denis is, of course, madly in love with her, included poems to her in his recently published slim volume; she, of course, merely thinks he’s a darling and a sweet boy, thus condemning him to hours of torture. Whenever they talk she doesn’t understand anything he says about the life of the mind and ethics and the soul: her philosophy is “One enjoys the pleasant things, avoids the nasty ones. There’s nothing more to be said.” Denis is tormented by the suspicion that she is attracted to the wild Provencal artist, Gombauld (and who wouldn’t be?)
They go on a tour of Henry’s farm, admiring his pigs and prize bull.
Mr Barbecue-Smith arrives. He is a writer, too, but of vulgar self-help and spiritual enlightenment books. Denis is horrified when the older man takes him aside in order to share authorly tips with him i.e. dragging him down to his level.
A chapter is devoted to the village’s vicar, the iron-grey Mr Bodiham. Huxley satirically includes the text of an actual sermon which correlated events of the First World War with predictions in the Book of Revelation to show that the Second Coming was at hand. Any moment. Really soon.
It is interesting that two of the themes Huxley would become famous for are clearly expressed in this, his first work:
1. Mr Scogan is an apostle of technology and efficiency. When they visit Henry Wimbush’s farm and are asked to admire the prodigious reproductive achievements of his pigs and his cows, Mr Scogan confidently predicts that in the future all this kind of thing will be managed, eventually in test tubes and bottles – a vision which clearly anticipates the work he’s most famous for, Brave New World:
With the gramophone, the cinema, and the automatic pistol, the goddess of Applied Science has presented the world with another gift, more precious even than these – the means of dissociating love from propagation. Eros, for those who wish it, is now an entirely free god; his deplorable associations with Lucina may be broken at will. In the course of the next few centuries, who knows? the world may see a more complete severance. I look forward to it optimistically. Where the great Erasmus Darwin and Miss Anna Seward, Swan of Lichfield, experimented – and, for all their scientific ardour, failed – our descendants will experiment and succeed. An impersonal generation will take the place of Nature’s hideous system. In vast state incubators, rows upon rows of gravid bottles will supply the world with the population it requires. The family system will disappear; society, sapped at its very base, will have to find new foundations; and Eros, beautifully and irresponsibly free, will flit like a gay butterfly from flower to flower through a sunlit world.
2. Spirituality. In 1937 Huxley moved to California and soon developed an interest in Vedanta, a form of Indian spiritualism. He went on to take this very seriously, becoming a follower of Hindu Swami Prabhavananda, receiving instruction in meditation, translating Indian spiritual classics and so on. The point is that some of the characters in this, his first novel, already display an interest in the spirit world, namely Priscilla Wimbush and Mr Barbecue-Smith although, as the names suggest, at this stage it is played entirely for laughs.
The plot
Things happen in nice, neat little chapters, their crisp tidiness itself contributing to the feel of slickness and cleverness.
Chapter 7
Virginal Mary knocks politely and tiptoes into Mary’s bedroom where the latter is lying catlike in bed reading, and timidly raises the subject of sex and how frightfully bad it is for you to be ‘repressed’ and ‘frustrated’ and therefore, was Mary attached to either Gombauld or Denis? Anne tries to keep a straight face and says No. Right. Mary is on the prowl.
Chapter 8
Priscilla and Mr Barbecue-Smith discuss Spiritualism over breakfast. It is interesting social history that, when Mr Wimbush asks if anyone wants to come to church with him, they all make excuses not to – interesting that there’s such widespread apathy, interesting that he’s a little shamefaced about even asking.
Chapter 9
Mr Bodiham the iron-faced vicar in the Rectory, furiously wondering why his apocalyptic sermon predicting the end of the world and the Second Coming doesn’t shake up his sleepy congregation.
Chapter 10
In the drawing room that evening Gombauld and Anne are dancing to jazz shouting out from a gramophone. Like many an intellectual, Denis is oppressed by the sight of other people having fun and wish he could be spontaneous and enjoy himself, instead he has picked up the first book that came to hand – The Stock Breeder’s Vade Mecum – and is pretending to read it. And now he finds virginal Mary suddenly standing in front of him, blocking his view of Anna and Gombauld, infuriating him with a load of damn fool questions. She earnestly asks who his favourite contemporary poets are and, savagely angry, he facetiously invents a trio based on the book he’s reading. ‘Blight, Mildew, and Smut,’ he angrily replies.
Chapter 11
Next morning they see off Mr Barbecue-Smith and all stroll round the house to the terrace and garden. Wanting to sound worldly Denis says: ‘The man who built this house knew his business. He was an architect’ only to be immediately contradicted and made to look a fool by the owner, Mr Wimbush, who gives a lengthy explanation of how the house was the design of a gifted amateur, an aristocrat who was obsessed with toilets.
Chapter 12
Mary realised Denis’s answer about Blight, Mildew and Smut was facetious and is upset. Now she sets her sights on Gombauld, the raffish painter from Marseilles and goes to see him in the upstairs part of a converted barn which has converted into a studio. First she is disconcerted to see that his current painting demonstrates that he has gone right the way through cubism and come out the other side into a form of figurativism. Second, he treats her like a child, lets her stay and witter on for precisely the length of one cigarette, then turns her round and firmly guides her back the step-ladder out of the attic, and pats her behind a few times for good measure.
Chapter 13
Henry comes down to dinner that evening and presents his History of Crome, a book which his niece Anne remembers him as working ever since she’s known him. He reads the chapter about his ancestor, Sir Hercules Lapith, who was a dwarf and so populated the staff with fellow dwarfs, had only the smallest dogs and shetland ponies to ride and even sought out and married an Italian lady dwarf. But alas when she gave birth, the son grew into a surly, normal-sized brute. After arguments and disputes, the giant one day returns from the Grand Tour with two normal-sized friends and their servants. They mock the dwarves and get the loyal butler drunk and make him dance while chucking walnuts at him. Sir Hercules spies all this through the keyhole of the dining room and decides there is no place for him in the world. He goes back to his bedroom, commiserates with his lovely wife, she takes an overdose of opium and he gets into a hot bath and slashes his wrists. It is a strangely absorbing and peculiar story.
Chapter 14
In the living room is a door cunningly made to look like part of the shelves of the library, with lots of leatherbound spines which contain no actual books. This prompts Mr Scogan to paeans of praise for the glories of these, alas, inaccessible volumes, especially the legendary ‘Seven volumes of the ‘Tales of Knockespotch’.
Chapter 15
They’re all on the terrace admiring the view. Mr Scogan descants on the oddity of the fact that in all of recorded history writers have been amused by sex until the nineteenth when it suddenly became unmentionable. At the end of the 19th century, sex reappeared in polite conversation but now seen through science: discussion of sex is frank but earnest, whereas he laments the jolly sex of Chaucer and Rabelais. Earnest Mary, proving his point, earnestly disagrees. She thinks sex is very serious. Frivolous Ivor arrives on his motorbike. He is a natural at everything, driving cars, playing the piano, singing, art, chatting up women, he even has contacts in the spirit world which he draws with gay abandon.
Chapter 16
After dinner the ladies leave the room. Mr Scogan explains his habit of comparing everyone he’s in company with to one of the first six Caesars. This frivolous thought develops into quite a serious point about the post-war climate of violence. Huxley has
‘Seventy and eighty years ago simple-minded people, reading of the exploits of the Bourbons in South Italy, cried out in amazement: To think that such things should be happening in the nineteenth century! And a few years since we too were astonished to find that in our still more astonishing twentieth century, unhappy blackamoors on the Congo and the Amazon were being treated as English serfs were treated in the time of Stephen. To-day we are no longer surprised at these things. The Black and Tans harry Ireland, the Poles maltreat the Silesians, the bold Fascisti slaughter their poorer countrymen: we take it all for granted. Since the war we wonder at nothing. We have created a Caesarean environment and a host of little Caesars has sprung up. What could be more natural?’
Since the war. A little piece of anecdotal fictional evidence which supports the conclusion of numerous commentators that the First World War unleashed previously undreamed-of levels of violence into politics and society.
And a serious point about the limits of sympathy, namely that it is only because we are such unsympathetic, unfeeling and on the whole unimaginative people, that happiness is possible.
‘At this very moment,’ he went on, ‘the most frightful horrors are taking place in every corner of the world. People are being crushed, slashed, disembowelled, mangled; their dead bodies rot and their eyes decay with the rest. Screams of pain and fear go pulsing through the air at the rate of eleven hundred feet per second. After travelling for three seconds they are perfectly inaudible. These are distressing facts; but do we enjoy life any the less because of them? Most certainly we do not. We feel sympathy, no doubt; we represent to ourselves imaginatively the sufferings of nations and individuals and we deplore them. But, after all, what are sympathy and imagination? Precious little, unless the person for whom we feel sympathy happens to be closely involved in our affections; and even then they don’t go very far. And a good thing too; for if one had an imagination vivid enough and a sympathy sufficiently sensitive really to comprehend and to feel the sufferings of other people, one would never have a moment’s peace of mind. A really sympathetic race would not so much as know the meaning of happiness. But luckily, as I’ve already said, we aren’t a sympathetic race.’
I wholeheartedly agree. We are a blunt unimaginative species. It is the only thing that allows us to live. But our inability to see beyond the little circle of our families, friends and pleasures will be the death of our planet.
Chapter 17
It is night. The younger members of the party go out into the garden and then set off running down the slope in the dark. First Ivor tries it on with Jenny and gets a slap for his troubles. Then waiting at the bottom of the slope he puts his arms around Anne only to discover it is Mary. Still, he sings so divinely and it is such a beautiful evening that she soon forgets and then succumbs to his charms. Meanwhile Denis discovers that Anne has tripped and twisted her ankle and scraped her hands. He sits next to her, cleans her wounds, puts his arms around her and then experimentally kisses her. For a fleeting moment it works but then she averts her face and tells him ‘It’s not our stunt,’ an interesting turn of phrase. He volunteers to carry her back up to the house and makes it for five paces before he stumbles and drops her. Anne bursts into tinkling laughter and, as usual, poor Denis is covered in confusion and mortification.
Chapter 18
Mr Wimbush attends church. Mr Bodiham preaches a sermon about the necessity for a war memorial. Various ideas have been mooted – a memorial library, lich gate or stained glass window – but no decision has been made and not much money has been raised. Mr Wimbush walks home in a pensive mood, passing through a group of surly, loutish village youths who just about tug their forelocks before bursting into sniggers. They reminded me of the bored village teenagers in Posy Simmonds’s graphic novel Tamara Drewe.
Chapter 19
Mr Wimbush reads another chapter from his History of Crome. (The reader realises this is going to be a recurring feature.) This time the short happy life of Sir Ferdinando Lapith, the rough rude son of the dwarf Sir Hercules, who drank to excess, especially when celebrating defeats of the tyrant Napoleon and drank himself silly on a coach heading west after the victory at Waterloo, fell off as it approached Swindon, was run over and died, from excess of patriotic zeal!
This leads into the comic tale of his ancestor George who was in love with three thin and everso spiritual sisters of a local landowner. They indicated this extraordinary spirituality by eating little or nothing and rhapsodising about Death in a Shelleyan manner. One night George is dozing in a deep armchair when he sees a serving woman carrying a heavy tray press a secret button, open a false door and disappear up some stairs. Following on tiptoe George burst into a hidden room to find the three sisters stuffing their faces. They’re as shocked as he is. After a muttered apology he turns tail, flees back down the stairs, then bursts into laughter at the bottom. Next day he blackmails the prettiest of the daughters, Georgiana, into marrying him. Her mother Lady Lapith, was disappointed but after all, he wasn’t such a bad catch.
When Henry has finished reading the young people complain what a stuffy night it is. Mary and Ivor suggest they sleep in mattresses up on the towers, and so they do, and when everyone has gone to sleep, Ivor perilously tightrope walks along the roof ridge, over to Mary’s tower, where they have a snog and watch the sunrise. Sounds wonderful.
Chapter 20
Ivor departs in his lemon yellow sedan, leaving a fluent poem in the visitors book. This prompts a conversation wherein Denis explains the nature of literature and poetry to Mr Scogan, namely in the magic of words.
‘That’s the test for the literary mind,’ said Denis. ‘The feeling of magic, the sense that words have power. The technical, verbal part of literature is simply a development of magic. Words are man’s first and most grandiose invention. With language he created a whole new universe; what wonder if he loved words and attributed power to them!’
Chapter 21
Gombauld is painting Anne’s portrait in the granary. He infuriates her by claiming she is flirting with him, and then even more by claiming she is leading Denis on. Anne delivers a feminist lecture complaining that men simply project onto passive women their own lusts and fantasies and then blame the women for it. Hundred years old, this book is.
‘So like a man again!’ said Anne. ‘It’s always the same old story about the woman tempting the man. The woman lures, fascinates, invites; and man—noble man, innocent man—falls a victim. My poor Gombauld! Surely you’re not going to sing that old song again. It’s so unintelligent, and I always thought you were a man of sense.’
‘Thanks,’ said Gombauld.
‘Be a little objective,’ Anne went on. ‘Can’t you see that you’re simply externalising your own emotions? That’s what you men are always doing; it’s so barbarously naive. You feel one of your loose desires for some woman, and because you desire her strongly you immediately accuse her of luring you on, of deliberately provoking and inviting the desire. You have the mentality of savages. You might just as well say that a plate of strawberries and cream deliberately lures you on to feel greedy. In ninety-nine cases out of a hundred women are as passive and innocent as the strawberries and cream.’
Chapter 22
In a lazy post-prandial mood, Denis lazily tries to write a poem. Then out the window he glimpses Gombauld and Anne walking by towards the granary and is so angry he throws the poem in the bin, and rushes downstairs.
Straight into the arms of Mr Scogan who insists on taking him for a walk through the herb garden where he expounds his vision of a perfectly rational future state – the Rational State – in which psychologists allot every new-born baby to a particular class or species. There may be hundreds of these but there will be three master categories – the commanding Intelligences; the Men of Faith, i.e. fanatical believers who translate the Intelligence’s plans into the kind of emotional rhetoric the masses understand along with ’causes’ and ‘battles’; and then the masses, the Herd.
Chapter 23
Denis persuades Mr Scogan to accompany him on his original errand, which was to interrupt whatever Anne and Gombauld are up to in the granary. In fact they are in bad moods with each other and happy to be interrupted. Mr Scogan admires Gombauld’s portrait of Anne but goes on to explain why he in fact likes cubism because it so utterly banishes huge, unwieldy and incomprehensible nature – which is why he likes travelling on the Tube in London. Denis rests his hands on the back of Anne’s chair as they both look at some of Gombauld’s other paintings, both aware of a special mood. Suddenly, in a strangled voice, Denis says, ‘Anne, I love you’. She laughs but blushes. Is she starting…
Chapter 24
Denis comes across the secret journal Jennifer is always writing in. He is aghast to discover it’s full of blisteringly accurate caricatures of all the house guests, not least him, portrayed in an armchair watching Gombauld dance with Anne and entitled Sour Grapes. In a flash he realises he is not the only person in the world – that people talk about him all the time behind his back. He is watched (this is the anxious feeling – that, for others, we are no more than objects that Jean-Paul Sartre would examine in depth 20 years later).
He mopes.
Oh, these rags and tags of other people’s making! Would he ever be able to call his brain his own? Was there, indeed, anything in it that was truly his own, or was it simply an education?
Depressed, Denis walks down to the boathouse by the lake where he finds Mary sitting, depressed after receiving a postcard from Ivor who has moved on to his next house party, and which makes it quite plain he’s moved on from her, while she has fallen fatally in love with him.
Chapter 25
Mr Wimbush announces the annual Charity Fair and Anne groans in horror. Quickly she signs up all the guest to perform functions. Gombauld cheerfully says it sounds like a holiday. This triggers a long disquisition by Mr Scogan about holidays, we can never have holidays because we can never escape from ourselves or our human nature.
‘Isn’t a complete and absolute change precisely the thing we can never have—never, in the very nature of things?’ Mr. Scogan once more looked rapidly about him. ‘Of course it is. As ourselves, as specimens of Homo Sapiens, as members of a society, how can we hope to have anything like an absolute change? We are tied down by the frightful limitation of our human faculties, by the notions which society imposes on us through our fatal suggestibility, by our own personalities.’
Mr Scogan is described as beaky and saurian, with claws instead of hands. Is he a caricature of the philosopher Bertrand Russell?
Chapter 26
Feeling soulful and sad, as usual, Denis looks down at the hubbub of the annual Fair, and then goes down amongst it, among all those people, amazing to think they all have souls and minds like his, are individuals full of hopes and fears and criticism. He steps down into the crowd and visits the stalls, the Tattooed Lady, the Largest Rat in the World, the funfair rides, a balloon flying loose up into the sky.
Chapter 27
Mr Scogan is dressed up as a gypsy palm reader, ‘Sesostris, Sorcoress of Ecbatana’, and very funnily gives people dark hints about their doom-lade futures. The result is that he is wildly popular and a big queue forms outside his tent. We watch him reading the palm of one susceptible young woman and – it appears – predicting that a short beaky-faced man will meet her next Sunday afternoon at 6pm and she will take him down to the woods for some rumpy-pumpy. Hmm.
Denis wanders on to the trestle table where Anne is serving mugs of tea. There’s a neat pile of the poem Denis wrote specially for the fair. They had five hundred copies printed. It is a page long and mournful and completely inappropriate for a people’s fair. He asks Anne how many copes have been sold (at tuppence a go). Three.
Old Mrs Budge who, when the government announced that it needed peach stones (for unknown reasons) bravely did her bit for the war effort and in 1916 ate 4,200 peaches and sent the stones to the government. In 1917 the government called up three of her gardeners and she was only able to eat 2,900 peaches, which may explain why the allies fared so badly in that disastrous year.
Denis strolls on to the Young Ladies Swimming Competition where he sees two local worthies, old Lord Moleyn and Mr Callamay ‘congratulating’ the winner of the latest heat, standing trim and nubile in her dripping swimming costume. Hmm. Or leching over her. Walking on he hears voices and looks up to see the vicar and his wife peering over a high yew hedge, staring at the schoolgirl swimmers in their costumes, and tut-tutting and saying, ‘Disgusting, disgusting.’
Elsewhere earnest, rational Mary is swamped by schoolchildren who she is organising into a three-legged race, red-faced and efficient. Denis sneaks away from all thus vulgar racket, back up to the empty manor house, makes himself a cheeky gin and tonic, and settles into a deep armchair to read the French critic, Sainte-Beuve (1804-69).
Chapter 28
In the evening there is a band. Two or three hundred couples dance under the hard white acetylene lights. Henry finds Denis and asks if he’d like to come and view the old oak log pipes he’s dug up which were part of the original house. Far enough away from the noisy dance floor, Henry sighingly laments how much he doesn’t like people. Life would be so much simpler if we could just read books and didn’t have to engage with the smelly, noisy and completely unknowable people of the present. How comforting history is, where life is wrapped and defined and finished and comprehensible. As to the present he has no idea about news or current affairs and lacks the energy to find out. One day all our ‘human’ interactions will be carried out by machines.
Chapter 29
10pm the evening of the Fair. The crowds have left, things are being packed away. Denis sees Gombauld and Anne necking and smooching down by the swimming pool and runs inside in despair. In fact, Anne is furiously trying to escape Gombauld’s clutches and he is irritated at being balked.
Denis reads till 2.30am but is still upset. He sneaks down the hall to the little pantry which houses the ladder up to one of the mansion’s towers, pushes open the trapdoor and emerges on the tower top. O Life. O Death. O Love. What is the meaning of it all? Denis looks down at the terrace far below and deliciously imagines plummeting to his death. Then they’d be sorry.
He is holding his arms up and out like wings when he is startled by a voice from close behind him and very nearly does topple over the parapet by accident! It is Mary. Ever since that magical night with Ivor she has slept up here on a mattress. Now Denis confesses everything i.e. his doomed love for Anne, his rage and frustration. An hour later he is lying with his head on her knees as she stroke his hair, having herself confessed her undying love for Ivor. O love!
There’s only one way out of Denis’s torment. He must leave.
Chapter 30
So he arranges for a telegram to be sent to him declaring ‘Urgent Family Business. Come At Once.’ Of course, as soon as the plan is laid, Anne starts to become more sympathetic, coming to sit with him on the terrace. After lunch the telegram arrives, is handed to him, he opens it and announces he must leave. All the other guests tut tut and say how sad they are, but Anne really does look sad and Denis is in torment, wondering whether he’s made a huge blunder. Again. As usual.
The final chapter is as funny as the first, with Mary urging Denis on in her brisk, no-nonsense fashion, Anne expressing what seems to be genuine regret that he’s leaving, and then the car is at the door, Denis’s stuff is loaded into it, and the novel ends.
Roman à clef
Wikipedia confirms my hunch that Mr Scogan is a portrait of Bertrand Russell. By extension the lovely manor house with its relaxed atmosphere is based on Garsington Manor, a favourite venue for posh literati between the wars, owned by Lady Ottoline Morrell who is the basis for the mannish, astrology-reading Priscilla Wimbush. Gombauld is – apparently – loosely based on the energetic young painter Mark Gertler (1891 to 1939) and earnest Mary Bracegirdle on Dora Carrington.
Knowing this only makes it more intriguing to wonder who the other characters – the fragrant willowy Anne, Mr Barbecue-Smith, the charming Ivor – are based on. But thinking about this much reminds you that the whole thing may be loosely based on real-life characters, but has been hugely perfected and rounded out by Huxley’s comic invention.
To give a sense of the period and the people and what they looked like, here’s a photo of the American poet T.S. Eliot visiting Garsington, with Mark Gertler seated in the middle, and the manor’s owner, the weird-looking Lady Ottoline Morrell swathed in silk and sitting in an uncomfortable-looking posture (look at her feet) on the right.
T.S. Eliot, Mark Gertler and Lady Ottoline Morrell
Related links
Books from or about the 1920s
First World War
- Storm of Steel by Ernst Jünger (1920)
- In Our Time by Ernest Hemingway (1925)
- Ashenden by William Somerset Maugham (1928)
- Undertones of War by Edmund Blunden (1928)
- Goodbye to All That by Robert Graves (1929)
- The Middle Parts of Fortune: Somme And Ancre, 1916 by Frederic Manning (1929)
- All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque (1929)
The Good Soldier Švejk
- The Good Soldier Švejk, the Life of Jaroslav Hašek
- The Good Soldier Švejk, Volume One: Behind the Lines (1921)
- The Good Soldier Švejk, Epilogue to Volume One (1921)
- The Good Soldier Švejk, Volume Two: At the Front (1922)
- The Good Soldier Švejk, Volume Three: The Glorious Licking (1922)
- The Good Soldier Švejk, Volume Four: The Glorious Licking Continues (1923)
Russian Revolution
- Tales From the Don by Mikhail Sholokhov (1926)
- The White Guard by Mikhail Bulgakov (1926)
- Red Cavalry by Isaac Babel (1926)
William Somerset Maugham
- The Circle (1921)
- Our Betters (1923)
- The Painted Veil (1925)
- The Constant Wife (1927)
- Ashenden: Or the British Agent (1928)
- The Sacred Flame (1929)
Franz Kafka
- The Castle by Franz Kafka (1922)
- Investigations of a Dog by Franz Kafka (1922)
- A Hunger Artist and other stories by Franz Kafka (1924)
- The Burrow by Franz Kakfka (1924)
Books & Boots 