the prince
arrives too late
by Douglas Messerli
Andrew Hodges Alan Turing: The Enigma (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton
University Press, 1983, 2014)
Andrew Hodges’ mammoth book on Alan
Turing stands out as not simply a definitive biography of the man, but as a
Gibraltar-sized monument to Turing’s life. There is nothing that can replace
it, and, although Hodges argues there is still a great deal more to know about
the human “enigma” at its center, I might counter that anything coming after
can serve merely as an addendum. This book represents a kind of perfect meeting
of forces in its author’s sensibility: who else could so ably describe the
science. straddling mathematics, physics, engineering, biology, game theory,
cryptology, and all the branches thereof (which Hodges presents without
simplifying the concepts while still, somewhat amazingly, giving the
intelligent reader just enough clarity to feel that, even if he cannot entirely
grasp the ideas, he can sense where they are going. Had I ever encountered a
math teacher like him, I might have altered my crippling confrontations with
math and science) and yet present us with an empathetic and intelligent
exploration of what it meant, during the period of Turing’s life, to be a
British gay man. One perceives, in reading Hodges’ sentences, that science and
the humanities need never fear one another, coming so perfectly together as
they do in the author’s mind. Quoting from Whitman, Forster, Orwell, Carroll,
Huxley, and others with an equal facility in describing “word group theory” in
mathematics, explaining quantum physics, and diagraming the alphabetical of the
German Enigma machine, Hodges simply astonishes us with his breadth and depth
of his knowledge. If he might have been tempted, however, to put his eclectic
intelligence on display for its own sake, he humbly puts it to use primarily in
the service of his subject, a fact which, in turn, makes us even more startled
by Turing’s own genius and the complexities, both cultural and scientific, he
faced.
After living with this tome now for several weeks, I see it as even
stranger that a film such as The
Imitation Game might claim, or even want
to claim that it was “based” on this biography; one can imagine that the
film, as this book claims on the current edition’s cover, was “inspired” by
Hodges work, but the movie bares so little in common with the biography that to
suggest the two have any major relationship is almost comic. Just to get it out
of the way, let me suggest that, if Hodges is to be believed (and how could one
possibly doubt him?), Turing did not present himself before British military
authorities, cockily suggesting that they needed him to solve the problem of
the Enigma machine; he did not select, interview, or test Joan Clarke for her
position at Bletchley; he did not create a full computer at Bletchley, but with
others created smaller machines, Bombes (based on an earlier Polish prototype,
and named for the noise they made)—the computer he might have created, ACE, was
imagined but never actually realized until after the war; he did not discover
that one of his fellow workers was a spy, and he did not attempt to report such
an affair or control other aspects of their work at Bletchley to an agent of
GCHQ or any other such organization; he did not even continue to run the Enigma
program throughout the war, leaving the work to others as he traveled to the US,
particularly Princeton University; he did not suddenly make a break-through in
his computer analyses by accidently (or purposefully for that matter)
discovering that a German operator was repeating signals (although repetitive
signals did help the cryptologists break certain codes); and, although he was
certainly eccentric and somewhat absent-minded in his behavior, he was not
generally rude, dismissive of others, or unlikeable—indeed he was well-liked by
his fellow works and jokingly named the “prof” (although after the war he did
become difficult with his fellow-workers at Manchester University); after being
arrested for homosexual activities, no officer or other official uncovered his
activities during the war, not did Turing interrogate any official about
whether or not he was a “machine” (although he certainly might have liked to do
so). And those are just some starters in a vast list of differences between the
film-script—which we must always remind ourselves is a work of fiction—and the
Turing biography by Hodges.
I don’t particularly care whether or not the facts of the film perfectly
line up with the real story. And clearly the film, in its broadest outlines,
retained some of the character and essence of the real man. But I do feel, as I
expressed in my review of the film, even more strongly after reading Hodges
probing masterwork, that by focusing on the science of Turing the film lost the
other half of what made up the man and created the terrible dilemmas in his life
that ultimately destroyed him: his quite openly gay sexuality. If in the film,
he reveals this fact to only a couple of individuals, both resulting in
dangerous situations, in fact he openly expressed his sexuality to his closest
friends and, even more importantly, he had several close friends with whom he
traveled during holidays who were quite aware of his sexual preferences, some
of them also gay.
Hodges argues that, if Turing was decades
ahead of others with regard to his mathematical theories, his concepts—both
theoretical and practical—about computers, his experiments with encrypting
messages involved with his Delilah
machine, and his biological morphogenetic studies, he was just as ahead of his
time with regard to the British acceptance of homosexuality, identifying
himself as a “gay” man at a time when many homosexuals still referred to themselves as “puffs,” “poofs,”
“queers,” “queens,” and in other self-demeaning terms. It was his openness and
essential honesty (in all matters) that so shocked him when his
straight-forward admissions that he had been (indirectly) robbed by a man with
whom he had had sexual encounters brought him to a trial resulting in probation
and experimental doses of hormones which scientists of the day believed—quite
erroneously—would alleviate homosexual desires. Turing simply could not get it
into his head that a society could refuse to accept the idea that some individuals
were sexually different from others. But even more radically, at least in terms
of the establishment, is that he argued for his right to have homosexual
encounters, with no embarrassment involved. After having been arrested, Turing
himself visited his closest friends and scientific associates to explain to
them the situation. The only person whom he did not wish to openly face was his
somewhat religious and authority-minded mother. And the only individual who
reacted to his revelations rather priggishly was his brother.
Despite his forward vision and current openness, nonetheless, Turing
seemed to endure his punishments—despite the fact that he temporarily developed
breasts from the treatments—in good spirits, even joking to friends that he was
steering clear any sexual involvements, including a young man whom he had met
in Norway (he permitted himself over-seas dalliances), who unadvisedly
attempted to visit him (unsuccessfully) in the United Kingdom. During the
period of his homebound treatments, Turing continued his experiments in
morphogenesis, and, the two years after seemed in good spirits. His sudden
suicide on June 7, 1954, accordingly, was a shock to nearly everyone who knew
him, and comes as a startlement to the reader even within the structure of
Hodges’ biography, expressed in one of the few cruelly objectified sentences of
the book: “A year later, on the evening of 7 June 1954, he killed himself.”
Apparently, despite his anarchic spirit—or perhaps because of it—Turing
injected an apple with cyanide before biting into it, dying on the floor near
his bed. Although the apple was never checked to see if indeed it contained the
poison, the medical examiner declared what seemed obvious to everyone—except,
later, to Turning’s mother—that he had taken his own life.
Like any good biographer, Hodges attempts to retrace his subject’s
steps, to speak to all of those who had seen him in the last years of his life,
and to ask, in each case, had there been any suggestion of despair, statement
of intent, or action that might reveal an instability of his so much admired
mind. Anyone’s life, in retrospect, might signify little clues that could be
misinterpreted or, particularly in hindsight, seen as evidence that something
was amiss. Yet there seems to be no concrete evidence about any preparations
for death, and many examples of behavior that might suggest quite the opposite,
that he was planning to embark on new areas of intellectual consideration.
God knows, Turing certainly would have had enough reasons to give
everything up! His brilliant war efforts had not only been forgotten, they had
never been known, kept secret as they were until decades after his death. His
Turing machine and, in particular, his ACE computer, had never been built and
had been shuttled by the government while lesser and cruder versions were
created by Manchester engineers and competing mathematicians who received their
due, while his plans had been forgotten and buried away in files. Although his
brilliant study, Computable Numbers,
while increasingly quoted, it was unknown by many younger figures and seemed
something of a long ago past. His current biological studies, based as they
were on mathematical principles, were often incomprehensible to biologists and
practical scientists, and, like most of his work, were too far ahead of their
time to be truly comprehended. The Americans, despite the fact that British
genius had not only dreamed-up the idea of the computer and the whole field of
cybernetics, now dominated the science.
Yet Hodges, much as Turing might have, boldly moves off into other
possible and even probable causes for his hero’s death, exploring a wide range
of topics, including the class structures, the isolated camaraderie of British
university communities, and, with perhaps a too careful tiptoeing around the
subjects, the grown homophobia of the early 1950s, particularly with regard to
the involvement of the very scientists who had opened the new fields of nuclear
physics and computer science. The conservative phobias of the U.S.—so apparent
in the hearings of Senator Joseph McCarthy, but just as insidiously inflicted
by Congress and military panels—could only see the potential bribes by spies of
intellectually out-of-control men who sexually could not keep themselves in
check, namely the detestable homosexuals. Hodges does not make the parallel,
but it exists between the lines of his arguments; in the early 1950s, the U.S.
and, through
their influence, Britain, almost did
to gays what Hitler had done in Germany, to further criminalize their actions
and isolate them from society. Prisons, hospitals, and relocation were all on
the table, along with chemical treatments, lobotomies, and castration, which
were equally considered as methods to control their behavior. Of particular
interest, and representing one of the most notable “problems,” was that a man
like Turing (although, of course, there was no other man quite like Turing),
who not only knew far too much about how the British had won World War II, but
had access to the black arts of nuclear power, and the held a magical key to
the city in his hands through his imagined Turing machines, was still on the
loose. It its apparent that even Turning did not quite comprehend what his
Alchemist-like shenanigans represented to the new post-war order; the rather
socially ill-at-ease man who shunned nearly all opportunities of power, could
not have truly understood just how much of a problem he represented to the
powers in charge. As Hodges suggests, he was the loosest of the loose cannons,
in a time when spies like Donald Maclean and Guy Burgess seemed to be around
every corner. What was he doing on his overseas trips? What was he telling of
his wartime secret work? And to whom was he speaking? Could any man so
imaginative to question nearly principle of science ever be trusted simply to
keep his mouth shut—and then, he was not just any man, but a pansy, a pervert!
Brick upon brick, Hodges layers a case for what could easily be seen,
and would be today, as an explanation
of why the powers-who-be must have done him in. But then, a man so rational as
Hodges would never be able to buy in to any conspiracy theories. Rather, his
yellow brick road (and the author is fond of The Wizard of Oz,
along with Alice-in-Wonderland and the Snow White stories) takes him
down the path of attempting to explain how those same pressures began to build
up on Turing’s mind, leading Dorothy to bite of the poisoned apple, like Snow
White, before he arrived at his destination. It is in Hodges’ numerous
psychological speculations, however, that he becomes least convincing. Yes,
Turing was undergoing Jungian analysis, and he was reading works of literature
by Tolstoy and others which brought up the dilemmas related to the moral
quandaries that had suddenly begin to rise up before him, impeding upon his own
life. In the end, however, while the truth may, in fact, lie therein, Hodges’
theories sometimes reek of ether. Why wouldn’t the GCHQ or, even more likely,
the CIA want to get rid of this freethinking, “immoral” being? To their way of
thinking, he represented everything they stood against. He was an impetuous
individual daily challenging their rigid intellectual and societal norms, just
as Turing’s own mother had seen him doing all of his life. She could not
believe he might kill himself, that he might, in the end, given in to the
horrific pressures brought upon all perceived outsiders until the whole society
self-imploded a decade later. We, however, have no way to be so smug. Looking
back from what today may appear as the Emerald City, we can merely shed some
tears, regret the awful times—while, hopefully recalling that all times are
equally awful*—and ask, endlessly ask, “why, why?”
Thank heaven, with the help of Hodges, we now know, at least, part of
who this great man, Turing, really was, and can imagine, had the Prince arrived
on time, who Turing might have been living amongst us. Surely the visionary
scientist would have warned that the imitating Wizard was a fake.
*As Hodges sadly points out, in the
U.K., at least when he was writing his book, a man like Turing could still be
arrested for his homosexual activities given the laws about street encounters
and the fact that the legal age of such encounters is 21 (Turing’s young
“pick-up” was 18).
Los Angeles, February 6, 2015
Reprinted from Green Integer Blog (February 2015).
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