Graham Greene & Esperanto (1): quotes from novels

He went on, 'All the same, the other does represent a mood. It's we who are the materialists. The scrapping of all the old boundaries, the new economic ideas . . . the hugeness of the dream. It is attractive to men who are not tied—to a particular village or town they don't want to see scrapped. People with unhappy childhoods, progressive people who learn Esperanto, vegetarians who don't like shedding blood.'

SOURCE: Graham Greene, The Ministry of Fear (1943).

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It was a very obscure poem, full of words which were like Esperanto. He thought: So this is English poetry: how odd.

SOURCE: The Power and the Glory (1940).

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There were coloured photographs of naked girls outside and in night-club Esperanto one neon-lighted word, Strippteese.

SOURCE: Our Man in Havana (1958).

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. . . he was like a man without a passport, without a nationality; like a man who could only speak Esperanto.

SOURCE: England Made Me (1935).

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And besides he was happy here, sitting where the rat had sat, in his own world. He began to think of the Esperanto, and of the next day's work.

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"One more glass," the captain of the Esperanto, said.

SOURCE: The Heart Of The Matter (1948).

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For the most part, Greene's references to Esperanto are negative. In my next post I will focus on Greene's novel The Confidential Agent (1939), which includes a satirized Zamenhof-like figure and his artificial language Entrenationo, along with some secondary sources that highlight Greene's negative disposition towards Esperanto and artificial languages.