the prince arrives too late
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.
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.
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.”
Like any good biographer, Hodges attempts
to retrace his subject’s steps, to speak to all of those who had seen him in
that 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; certainly 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!
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