Alan Turing: The Enigma (19 page)

Alan did not in fact go to see Russia for himself. But even if he had, he would have found himself ill-disposed to become an enthusiast for the Soviet system. Nor did he become a ‘political’ person in the Cambridge of the 1930s. He was not sufficiently interested in ‘mere power’. Buried in the
Communist Manifesto
was the declaration that the ultimate aim was to make society ‘an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.’ But in the 1930s, to be a communist meant identifying with the Soviet regime, which was a very different matter. Those at Cambridge who perceived themselves as members of a responsible British prefect class might well identify with the Russian rulers as with a sort of better British India, collectivising and rationalising the peasants for their own good. For products of the English public school, apt to despise trade, it was but a small step to reject capitalism, and place faith in greater state control. In many ways the Red was a mirror image of the White. Alan Turing, however, was not interested in organising anyone, and did not wish to be organised by anyone else. He had escaped from one totalitarian system, and had no yearning for another.

Marxism claimed to be scientific, and it spoke to the modern need for a rationale of historical change that could be justified by science. As the Red Queen told Alice, ‘You may call it “nonsense” if you like, but
I’ve
heard nonsense, compared with which that would be as sensible as a dictionary.’ But Alan was not interested in the problems of history, while the marxist
attempts to explain the exact sciences in terms of ‘prevailing modes of production’ were very remote from his ideas and experience. The Soviet Union judged relativity and quantum mechanics by political criteria, while the English theorist Lancelot Hogben sustained an economic explanation of the development of mathematics only by restricting attention to its most elementary applications. Beauty and truth, which motivated Alan Turing as they had always inspired mathematicians and scientists, were lacking. The Cambridge communists took upon themselves something of the character of a fundamentalist sect, with the air of being saved, and the element of ‘conversion’ met in Alan Turing the same scepticism as he had already turned upon Christian beliefs. With his fellow sceptic Kenneth Harrison he would mock the communist line.

On economic questions, indeed, Alan came to think highly of Arthur Pigou, the King’s economist who had played a slightly earlier part than Keynes in patching up nineteenth century liberal capitalism. Pigou held that more equal distribution of income was likely to increase economic welfare, and was an early advocate of the welfare state. Broadly similar in their outlook, both Pigou and Keynes were calling for increased state spending during the 1930s. Alan also began to read the
New Statesman
, and could broadly be identified with the middle-class progressive opinion to which it was addressed, concerned both for individual liberty and for a more rationally organised social system. There was much talk about the benefits of scientific planning (so that Aldous Huxley’s 1932 satire
Brave New World
could treat it as the intellectuals’ already dated orthodoxy), and Alan went to talks on progressive ventures such as the Leeds Housing Scheme
^*
. But he would not have seen
himself
as one of the scientific organisers and planners.

In fact his idea of society was that of an aggregate of individuals, much closer to the views of democratic individualism held by J.S. Mill than that of socialists. And to keep his individual self intact, self-contained, self-sufficient, uncontaminated by compromise or hypocrisy,
†
was his ideal. It was an ideal far more concerned with the moral than with the economic or political; and closer to the traditional values of King’s than to the developing currents of the 1930s.

Like many people (E.M. Forster among them) he found a special pleasure in discovering Samuel Butler’s
Erewhon
. Here was a Victorian writer who had doubted the moral axioms, playing with them in Looking-Glass fashion by attaching the taboos on sex to the eating of meat, describing Anglican religion in terms of transactions in ornamental money,
and exchanging the associations of ‘sin’ with those of ‘sickness’. Alan also much admired Butler’s successor Bernard Shaw, enjoying his light play with serious ideas. For the well-read sophisticate of the 1930s, Butler and Shaw were already out-worn classics, but for one from Sherborne School they still held a liberating magic. Shaw had taken up what Ibsen
^*
called ‘the revolution of the Spirit’, and wanted to show true individuals on the stage, those who lived not by ‘customary morals’ but by inner conviction. But Shaw also asked hard questions about what kind of society could contain such true individuals: questions highly pertinent to a young Alan Turing.
Back to Methuselah
, which Alan thought ‘a very good play’ in May 1933, was an attempt at what Shaw called ‘politics
sub specie aeternitatis’
. With its science-fiction view of Fabian ideas, treating with contempt the sordid realities of Asquith and Lloyd George, it suited Alan’s idealist frame of mind.

One subject, however, did
not
feature in Bernard Shaw’s plays, and only very rarely in the
New Statesman
.
¹⁹
In 1933 its drama critic reviewed
The Green Bay Tree
, which was about ‘a boy … adopted for immoral purposes by a wealthy degenerate,’ and said it was ‘well worth seeing for anyone who finds a pervert a less boring subject for the drama than a man with a diseased liver.’ In this respect, King’s College was unique. Here it was possible to doubt an axiom which Shaw left unquestioned and Butler skated over nervously.

It was only possible because no one breached the line that separated the official from the unofficial worlds. The consequences of being found out were the same in King’s as anywhere else, and the same double life was imposed by the outside world. It was a ghetto of sexual dissent, with the advantages and disadvantages of ghetto life. The internal freedom to express heretical thoughts and feelings was certainly of benefit to Alan. He was, for instance, helped by the fact that Kenneth Harrison derived from his father, himself a graduate of King’s, a liberal understanding of other people’s homosexual feelings. But the world of Keynes and Forster, the parties and comings and goings of Bloomsbury people, lay far above Alan’s head. There was a glossiness about King’s, whose greatest strength lay in the arts, and drama in particular, in which he had no share. He would have been too easily deterred and frightened by the more theatrical elements in expressing his homosexuality. If at Sherborne his sexuality was described in terms of ‘filth’ and ‘scandal’, he now also had to come to terms with that other kind of labelling that the world found so important: that of
the pansy
, an affront and traitor to masculine supremacy. He did not find a place in this compartment; nor did the King’s aesthete set, flourishing in its protected corner, reach out to a shy mathematician. As in so many ways, Alan was the prisoner of his own self-sufficiency. King’s could only protect him while he worked out the problems for himself.

It was the same with
regard to religious belief, for while agnosticism was all but
de rigueur
in King’s, he was not the person to follow a trend, only to be stimulated and liberated by the freedom to ask hitherto forbidden questions. In developing his intellectual life, he did not form the social connections that a less shy person could have made. Unlike most of his close acquaintances, he was a member neither of the ‘Ten Club’ nor of the Massinger Society – two King’s undergraduate societies of which the first read plays and the other discussed far into the night, over mugs of cocoa, papers on culture and moral philosophy. He was too awkward, even uncouth, to fit into these comfortable gatherings. Nor was he elected to the exclusive university society, the Apostles, which drew much of its membership from King’s and Trinity. In many ways, he was too ordinary for King’s.

In this respect he had something in common with one of his new friends, James Atkins, who was the third mathematical scholar of Alan’s year. James and Alan got on well together, in an amiable manner that lacked any deep conversations about Christopher or science, and it was James whom Alan asked to come with him for a few days walking in the Lake District.

They were away from 21 to 30 June, so that Alan did achieve his objective of being away from home on 23 June, his ‘coming of age’. In fact they were walking that day from the youth hostel at Mardale over High Street to Patterdale. The weather was unusually hot and sunny, leading Alan at one point to sunbathe naked, and perhaps encouraging him in the gentle sexual approach that he made a few days later, as they rested on the hillside. This almost accidental but electric moment was perhaps less important to Alan than to James, who had been particularly repressed at his public school and was catching up years of self-knowledge, mentally and physically. There was no repetition during the holiday, while he thought it over. In the following two weeks, he found himself roused to feelings of affection and desire for Alan, and expected to see him when he returned to Cambridge on 12 July for the long vacation term. This was not so much to study mathematics as to take part in concerts during the International Congress of Musical Research, for James found in music the absoluteness that Alan found in pure mathematics.

James did not know that the same day Alan had gone to the Clock House to remember Christopher. At Easter, he had stayed there again, taken communion at his shrine, and had written:

20/4/33

My dear Mrs Morcom,

I was so pleased to be at the Clockhouse for Easter. I always like to think of it specially in connection with Chris. It reminds us that Chris is in some way alive
now
. One is perhaps too inclined to think only of him alive at some future time when we shall meet him again; but it is really so much more helpful to think of him as just separated from us for the present.

His July visit coincided with the dedication of the memorial window on 13 July, which would have been Christopher’s twenty-second birthday. The local children had the day off school, and laid flowers beneath the stained-glass window. A family friend preached on ‘Kindness’ in Christopher’s memory. They all sang Christopher’s favourite hymn:

Gracious Spirit, Holy Ghost
Taught by Thee we covet most
Of thy gifts at Pentecost
Holy heavenly Love

In a marquee at the Clock House, a conjuror amused the children over their buns and lemonade; Rupert demonstrated Christopher’s experiment with the iodates and sulphites, and his uncle explained it to them. They blew bubbles and sent up balloons.

Alan returned to Cambridge two or three weeks after this bittersweet ceremony, and so it was not long before James indicated that he would like to continue the sexual contact that Alan had sparked off. But there was always a sense that Alan never again showed the initiative which the summer sun had elicited, and there was a complexity which James could never penetrate. The associations of Christopher, which Alan did not share with James, might have been part of the reason. The visit would have refreshed the memory of pure, intense romantic love, of a kind which did not exist within his relationship with James. Instead, they were satisfied with an easy-going sexual friendship in which there was no pretence of being in love. But at least Alan knew that he was not alone.

Sometimes he seemed ruffled. At the Founder’s Feast in December 1933, there was an incident when an undergraduate from James’s old
school said to Alan in an obnoxious manner, ‘Don’t look at me like that, I’m not a homosexual.’ Alan, upset by this attack, said to James, ‘If you want to go to bed, it’ll be one-sided.’ But this was the exceptional moment in a relationship which continued – to a lessening degree – for several years.

No one else knew of this, although in more general terms, as the Feast incident illustrated, Alan was not particularly secretive about his sexuality. There was another undergraduate for whom Alan (as he told James) had longings, and their names were linked by scurrilous clues like ‘See under 2 down’ for a crossword puzzle in an abortive King’s rag magazine. In the autumn of 1933 Alan also made another friend, with whom the main link was discussion of sex. This was Fred Clayton, who was a very different character. While both Alan and James were reserved, but got on with it without making a fuss, with Fred it was the reverse. His father was headmaster of a small village school near Liverpool, and he had not been through the public school training. A rather small, rather young classics scholar, he had been cox of the boat in which Alan rowed, but their acquaintanceship developed as Fred became aware of Alan as someone
whose sexuality seemed to be made no secret, either by himself or by others.

Fred was very interested in an exchange of views and emotional experiences, feeling himself very puzzled by sex, and confronted by ex-public schoolboys much more conscious of homosexual attraction. He had taken advantage of the King’s freedom of discussion, and had been told by a Fellow that he ‘seemed a pretty normal bisexual male’. But it was not as simple as that, and nothing was ever simple for Fred Clayton.

Alan told his friend about how much he resented having been circumcised, and also of his earliest memories of playing with the gardener’s boy (presumably at the Wards’ house), which he thought had perhaps decided his sexual pattern. Rightly or wrongly, he gave Fred, and others too, the impression that public schools could be relied upon for sexual experiences – although more important perhaps was that schooldays continued to loom large in his consciousness of sexuality. Fred read Havelock Ellis and Freud, and also made discoveries in the classics which he would convey to his mathematical friend, not noted otherwise for an interest in Latin and Greek.