On September 18, 1917, 23-year-old Aldous Huxley was hired to teach French at Eton, his alma mater, a temporary posting to replace a schoolmaster who was serving in the war (Huxley himself had been disqualified from service due to his abysmal eyesight).
One of his students was Eric Blair, who would later write a few famous books under the pen name George Orwell. Another was the future historian Steve Runciman. History in the making! But as it turned out, Huxley hated teaching—and relatedly, he was not very good at it.
“He taught us rare and strange words in a rather reflective way,” Runciman told Orwell’s biographer Bernard Crick. “Orwell and J enjoyed him, although he was an incompetent, a hopeless teacher. He couldn’t keep discipline and was so blind that he couldn’t see what was happening, so was hopelessly ragged.”
“He must have been one of the most incompetent schoolmasters who ever faced a class,” recalled another student, Edward Sackville-West, who would also become a novelist and music critic. “His solution was to read aloud, with occasional comments on the poems of Verlaine. This he did in his scholarly, highly modulated voice. It was impossible to hear more than an occasional word of what he read or said for the general tumult was indescribable. … From time to time, Aldous would pause, look up, and say, in an imploring tone, ‘Oh! Do be quiet!’ No one took the slightest notice.”
“I find that I am not cut out for a teacher of boys; or rather I find that all my knowledge, such as it is, is quite of the wrong sort; remote and vague,” Huxley wrote.
But it wasn’t a complete wash, as Crick points out.
“At first we thought his voice affected,” Runciman told Huxley’s biographer Sybille Bedford, “but soon some of us were trying to copy it. Above all it was his use of words that entranced us. Eric Blair … would in particular make us note Aldous’s phraseology. ‘That is a word we must remember,’ we used to say to each other … The taste for words and their accurate and significant use remained. We owe him a great debt for it.”
For his part, Huxley drew on the experience for his second novel, the satirical Antic Hay (1923), in which a schoolmaster attempts to develop pants with an inflatable seat, to help its wearers sit more comfortably on hard surfaces. Classic.
