The Man Who Knew Too Much: Alan Turing and the Invention of the Computer (Great Discoveries)

by David Leavitt

  All told, Turing gave a lackluster performance. Yet if on the BBC he failed to invest his argument for machine intelligence with the passion that had animated his papers on the topic, it was only in part because he was tired of being put on the defensive. Earlier, he had left off his cryptanalysis work to undertake the Delilah speech encipherment machine. Then he had abandoned Delilah to build the ACE at Teddington—a project from which he had in turn drifted away as the theory of artificial intelligence consumed his imagination. Finally, in the early fifties, he was moving away from machines altogether. As Mrs. Turing noted in her memoir, since his childhood her son had been fascinated by biology. At Cambridge he had discussed the similarities between machine circuitry and the brain with Peter Matthews; indeed, all his papers on computer intelligence mention the prospect of building a machine on the model of the brain. Now he took up this intriguing notion from the other side.

  The question that preoccupied him was basic: could mathematical models be constructed for the processes of biological growth, or morphogenesis, as it was more technically termed? Previously Turing had focused on exploring whether mechanical systems could be designed that mirrored the process of human thought. Now he wanted to know whether mathematical theory might provide a basis for investigating physiology. Armed with differential equations, he was marching into Jefferson’s territory—and with the same boldness that marked Jefferson’s unwelcome invasion of the Manchester laboratory with its “late lavatorial” tiles. Not that Turing was inclined to play to the gallery, as Jefferson did; instead, he made sure that his approach was rigorously, even bewilderingly mathematical.*

  As a boy, Turing had been drawn to watching the daisies grow. Now he wanted to figure out exactly what he had seen. Although the work had nothing to do with computer design, in many ways it represented a more fitting culmination to his intellectual career than even building the ACE would have. For in the end Turing was more a child of Hardy than of von Neumann, which meant that understanding the world mattered more to him than changing it.

  Disquisiting on the BBC, he had insisted that he was “not interested in the fact that the brain has the consistency of cold porridge. We don’t want to say ‘This machine’s quite hard, so it isn’t a brain, and so it can’t think.’” Still, hard machines had obsessed him for years, as he had taken up the cause of the man-made with an avidity to match Oscar Wilde’s. And now, suddenly, here he was writing about “natural” processes. More to the point, he was living, for the first time, something like the “natural” life that Forster’s Maurice disdained: owning a house, going to work each day, even employing a housekeeper, Mrs. Clayton, with whom, his mother wrote,

  he shared many jokes, for he delighted to regale her with tales against himself. There was, for instance, the occasion when, his watch being under repair, he carried a little clock in his pocket. Suddenly in the crowded train to Manchester the alarm went off and everyone in the compartment jumped. On his runs he often forgot to take his door-key, so one was kept hidden near the spout of the garage gutter. One day he knocked it over the spout and it just slipped away into the ground, a fact which he reported to Mrs. Clayton with much relish.

  In other words, he was still Turing—just Turing with a fixed address, and friends. These included his neighbors, Mr. and Mrs. Roy Webb (he was also fond of their very young son, Rob); Max Newman and his wife, the novelist Lyn Newman; Robin Gandy; and, perhaps most importantly, Norman Routledge, also of King’s, who was gay and in whom Turing could therefore confide about matters he was disinclined to bring up with the others. For his erotic life, if not flourishing exactly, seemed at least to have become a less depressing business than it had been previously. Although his move to Manchester had put something of a damper on his relationship with Neville Johnson, he traveled often to Europe—on one occasion to Norway and on several to France. The Napoleonic Code—which did not criminalize sex between men—meant that while “abroad,” Englishmen could enjoy a much needed respite from the aura of worry and guilt that still attached itself to homosexual sex in Britain. The Continent gave Turing the chance to enjoy erotic dalliances without fear of repercussions, and in seeking this freedom, even just for a few days at a time, he was typical of his generation.

  Not that he limited his explorations to Europe. In Manchester, too, he enjoyed the occasional adventure or affair. One of these began in January 1952, around the same time that the BBC broadcast his debate with Jefferson, when he picked up a nineteen-year-old boy named Arnold Murray outside the Regal Cinema. Like many working-class youths at the time, Arnold was both underfed and more or less penniless; nor was it unheard of for a boy in his position to earn a little extra cash by going behind the arches at the railroad station with an older man. And yet both of them seem to have wanted something more than this. Accordingly Turing took Arnold out to lunch, then invited him to come to his house that weekend. Arnold accepted the invitation, but never showed up. They met again in Manchester the following Monday, at which point Turing proposed that this time Arnold come home with him immediately. Arnold agreed. He visited Turing a second time later that month, for dinner and (apparently) to spend the night. Afterward Turing sent him a penknife.

  There was some confusion about money. Not wanting to be treated as a prostitute, Arnold rebuffed Turing’s efforts to give him cash. Then Turing discovered money missing from his wallet. Arnold denied having had anything to do with it, but asked for a loan of three pounds to pay off a debt. A few days later he requested a further seven pounds—again, to pay off a debt. They had a brief wrangle when Turing asked to whom the money was owed, but in the end he wrote Arnold a check.

  Several days afterward Turing’s house was broken into. The thief—or thieves—made off with about fifty pounds worth of his belongings: clothes, some fish knives, a razor, and a compass, among other things. He called the police, and two officers fingerprinted the house. Then—suspicious that Arnold might have been involved—Turing consulted his neighbor’s solicitor, who advised him to write Arnold a letter reviving the matter of the money missing from his wallet, reminding him that he owed Turing money, and suggesting that it would be best if they did not see each other again. In response to the letter, Arnold showed up at his house in a rage, threatening to “do his worst.” The scene was akin to the one that takes place between Maurice and Alec at the British Museum, with the poor gamekeeper telling the bourgeois stockbroker, “Mr. Hall—you reckernize it wouldn’t very well suit you if certain things came out, I suppose.” In response, Maurice lashes out: “By God, if you’d spilt on me . . . , I’d have broken you. It might have cost me hundreds, but I’ve got them, and the police always back my sort against yours.” If, however, Turing took it for granted that the police would back his kind against Arnold’s, he was dreadfully mistaken.

  In Maurice the blackmail threat is a prelude to reconciliation: Alec backs off, and the lovers retreat to a hotel. Something similar happened outside of Manchester. First Arnold, having rescinded his threat, came clean, admitting that he had boasted of his affair with Turing to a youth called Harry, who had in turn proposed robbing Turing’s house. Arnold had refused to have anything to do with the plan, he said; even so, it was possible that Harry, on his own, had decided to go through with it. The confession led, as in Maurice, to a melting of differences, tenderness, and sex. Arnold promised that he would try to retrieve the stolen goods—and indeed, a few days later, he reported back to Turing that he had already had some success in tracking them down. But by then it was too late. For the police had returned—not to report to Turing on the progress of their investigation, but to tell him that they “knew all about” his affair with Arnold. They had put two and two together, and now, instead of arresting the thief, they arrested his victim. The charge was gross indecency with another male: the same crime of which Oscar Wilde had been convicted, and for which he had been sent down, more than fifty years before.

  2.

  The little that was left of Alan Turing’s life afte
r his arrest was a slow, sad descent into grief and madness. Tried on morals charges, he was “sentenced”—in lieu of prison—to undergo a course of estrogen treatments intended to “cure” him of his homosexuality. The estrogen injections had the effect of chemical castration. Worse, there were humiliating side effects. The lean runner got fat. He grew breasts. Through it all he continued to work, soldiering on with the resilience he had had to learn at Bletchley. When, for instance, Norman Routledge wrote to him in February inquiring about jobs in intelligence, he replied, “I don’t think I really do know about jobs, except the one I had during the war, and that certainly did not involve any travelling. I think they do take on conscripts. . . . However I am not at present in a state in which I am able to concentrate well, the reasons explained in next paragraph.”

  And what restraint, to write such a casual answer to Routledge’s query before spilling the bad news!

  I’ve now got myself into the kind of trouble that I have always considered to be quite a possibility for me, though I have usually [illegible] it at about 10:1 against. I shall shortly be pleading guilty to a charge of sexual offences with a young man. The story of how it all came to be found out is a long and fascinating one, which I shall have to make into a short story one day, but have not time to tell you now. No doubt I shall emerge from it all a different man, but quite who I’ve not found out.

  The letter concludes,

  Glad you enjoyed broadcast. J. certainly was rather disappointing though. I’m rather afraid that the following syllogism may be used by some in the future:

  Turing believes machines think

  Turing lies with men

  Therefore machines do not think

  It is signed, “yours in distress, Alan.”

  Now there was no question of his ever again working on government cryptanalysis projects, even though Hugh Alexander had recently approached him about doing just that. He was too much of a security risk. Since the 1951 defection of Guy Burgess, the myth of the homosexual traitor had been gaining momentum, both in the popular press and in the halls of government. Nor had Forster helped matters by writing in his essay “What I Believe” that if pressed to choose between betraying his country and betraying his friend, he hoped he would have the courage to betray his country. If the police now trailed Turing, and even tried to keep him from leaving the country, it was not just to torment him; it was also out of fear that he might decide to betray his country, by delivering the secret information to which he was privy to an enemy agent posing as a friend. It did not matter to them that Turing was genuinely apolitical. He hardly existed for them, and having emasculated him chemically, they now emasculated him morally, by robbing him not just of his freedom to wander but of his freedom to feel. Indeed, it may have been because he felt so emasculated that in a second letter to Norman Routledge—this one from a year later—he chose to employ a self-consciously effeminate tone mostly absent from his earlier correspondence:

  I have a delightful story to tell you of my adventurous life when next we meet. I’ve had another round with the gendarmes, and it’s positively round II to Turing. Half the police of N. England (by one report) were out searching for a supposed boy friend of mine. . . . Perfect virtue and chastity had governed all our proceedings. But the poor sweeties never knew this. A very light kiss beneath a foreign flag, under the influence of drink, was all that had ever occurred. . . . [T]he innocent boy has had rather a raw deal I think. I’ll tell you all when we meet in March at Teddington. Being on probation my shining virtue was terrific, and had to be. If I had so much as parked my bicycle on the wrong side of the road there might have been 12 years for me. Of course the police are going to be a bit more nosy, so virtue must continue to shine.

  Turing concludes by telling his friend that he might “try to get a job in France.” He also confides that he has begun psychoanalysis. The letter is signed, “kisses, Alan.”

  The psychoanalyst was Dr. Frank M. Greenbaum. Perhaps under his influence, Turing wrote—or at least began to write—the short story he had mentioned to Norman Routledge. Here he cast himself as Alec Pryce (the use of the physicist Maurice Pryce’s last name might have been coincidental), a scientist who resembles him in every way except that instead of computer design, his area of expertise is “interplanetary travel.” Just as Turing is the father of the Turing machine, Alec is the architect of something called Pryce’s buoy—presumably a sort of satellite or spacecraft:

  Alec always felt a glow of pride when this phrase was used. The rather obvious double-entendre rather pleased him too. He always liked to parade his homosexuality, and in suitable company Alec would pretend that the word was spelt without the “u.” It was quite some time now since he had “had” anyone, in fact it was not since he had met that soldier in Paris last summer. Now that his paper was finished he might justifiably consider that he had earned another gay man, and he knew where he might find one who might be suitable.

  Like Turing, Alec has a habit of going on “rather wildly to newspapermen or on the Third Programme.” Like Turing, he was also rather untidy, dressing in “an old sportscoat and rather unpressed worsted trousers.” One hears the voice of Dr. Greenbaum in the background of the analysis of his sartorial tendencies that comes next:

  He didn’t care to wear a suit, preferred the “undergraduate’s uniform,” which suited his mental age, and encouraged him to believe he was still an attractive youth. This arrested development also showed itself in his work. All men who were not regarded as prospective sexual partners were fellow scholastics to whom Alec had to be actively showing off his intellectual powers.

  As the story begins, Alec is Christmas shopping. He is also, presumably, looking out for the “gay man” he feels he has “earned”—and at this point the story’s point of view changes rather suddenly to that of “Ron Miller,” the stand-in for Arnold. Ron, we learn, “had been out of work for two months, and he’d got no cash. He ought to have had 10s or so for that little job he had helped Ernie over. All he had had to do was to hold the night watchman in conversation for a few minutes whilst the others got on with it. But still it wasn’t safe.” Ron is also “very hungry and rather cold in the December weather.” And, apparently, he is not unwilling to consider bartering sex for cash:

  If he let someone take him under the arches for ten minutes he might get four bob. The men didn’t seem to him so keen for it as they were a year ago before the [Ron’s?] accident. Of course it wasn’t the same as having a girl, nothing like it, but if the chap wasn’t too old it wasn’t unpleasant. Ernie had said how his chaps would make love to him just as if he were a girl, and say such things! But these were toffs. Ernie with his pansy [illegible] and his pretty-pretty doll’s face could get them as easy as [illegible]. Should think he liked it quite a lot too, the sorry little swine. Heard [illegible] boast he couldn’t do anything with a girl when she paid him!

  Presumably, then, Ron sees himself as being in a different class from Ernie, that “sorry little swine”—just as Arnold saw himself as being in a different class from such friends as, perhaps, the “little swine” Harry. Nonetheless, he is on the lookout and notices that Alec is watching him:

  That chap who was walking round the place had given him quite a look. . . . Here he was coming round again. This time Ron stared back, and Alec followed in his walk and hurried on round the plot again. No doubt now of what he wanted. Didn’t seem to have the nerve though. Better give him a little encouragement if he came past again. He was coming too. Ron caught Alec’s eye and gave him a half-hearted smile. It was enough though. Alec approached the park seat; Ron made room for him and he sat down. Didn’t seem to be very well dressed. What an overcoat! Why wasn’t he saying anything? Could he be mistaken? No, he was having a furtive look. . . . [I]f he wasn’t careful nothing would come of it.

  Ron now asks whether Alec has a cigarette. And, as it happens, Alec does—though this requires some explanation:

  He didn’t smoke, because he hadn’t quite enou
gh control if he did, and anyway it didn’t really agree with him. But he knew that if he “clicked” he would need some cigarettes.

  “Doing anything this afternoon?” Alec asked suddenly. It was a standard opening. A bit brusque certainly, but he hadn’t thought up anything better: anyway the brusqueness tended to prevent misunderstandings. This chap would do well enough. Not a real beauty, but had a certain appeal. Beggars couldn’t be choosers. He was shaking his head. “Come and have some lunch with me.”

  Beggars can’t be choosers. What is so sad about this moment is the forcefulness with which the need for Forsterian connection obliterates standards, class, memory (of the idealized Morcom), even self-esteem. And not only for Alec—also (though to a lesser extent) for Ron:

  “Don’t mind if I do,” said Ron. He didn’t go for lah-di-dah ways of talking. It’d come to the same anyway. Bed’s bed whatever way you get into it. Alec thought otherwise, and was silent for a couple of minutes as they made their way towards Grenkoff’s [?]. He’d got to go through with the lunch at least now. Ron was quite clear about this too. He was sure of the meal. He wasn’t sure whether he’d do anything. Perhaps he’d be able to get something without.

  In the restaurant, however, Ron is too dazzled by having “the door opened for you by a commissionaire, and to go through first like a girl,” to take much notice of Alec. Instead, his attention is “concentrated entirely on the restaurant and its trappings.” And this makes Alec happy: “Usually when he went to a restaurant he felt self-conscious, either for being alone, or for not doing the right thing. Ron wouldn’t . . .”