The London Venture, as being semi-autobiographical, then we will never know why Arlen made this "silly mistake" of going to Edinburgh instead of Oxford. We know however what led Arlen to London, where he would make his break into a literary career. In The London Venture, Arlen wrote: "I, up at Edinburgh, was on the high road to general fecklessness. I only stayed there a few months; jumbled months of elementary medicine, political economy, metaphysics, theosophy – I once handed round programs at an Annie Besant lecture at the Usher Hall – and beer, lots of beer. And then, one night, I emptied my last mug, and with another side-glance at Oxford, came down to London; 'to take up a literary career' my biographer will no doubt write of me." (p. 132) In 1913, after a few months of university, Arlen moved to London to live by writing. A year later, the First World War broke out and made Arlen's position in England as a Bulgarian national rather difficult. Arlen's nationality was still Bulgarian, but Bulgaria had disowned him because he would not serve in Bulgaria's army. Bulgaria being allies with Germany made England suspicious of Arlen, who could neither be naturalized as a British citizen, nor change his name. In London, Arlen found company in modernist literary circles with others who had been looked upon suspiciously or had been denied military service. Among these were Aldous Huxley, D. H. Lawrence, Nancy Cunard, and George Moore. Young adulthood Arlen began his literary career in 1916, writing under his birth name, Dikran Kouyoumdjian, firstly in a London-based Armenian periodical, Ararat: A Searchlight on Armenia, and soon afterward for The New Age, a British weekly review of politics, arts, and literature. For these two magazines, Arlen wrote essays, book reviews, personal essays, short stories, and even one short play. His last submissions to The New Age, a series of semi-autobiographical personal essays entitled "The London Papers", were assembled in 1920 and published with slight revisions as The London Venture. From this time onward he began to sign his works as 'Michael Arlen'. In January and April 1920, he had already published two short stories in The English Review signed thus. He became naturalized as a British citizen in 1922, and legally changed from his birth name to Michael Arlen. Arlen spent some time in France with Nancy Cunard in 1920, although she