Both of them had come a long way since that week in Trinity in December 1929. Alan had been the first to be elected a Fellow (thanks to King’s looking generously at his dissertation subject). But Maurice had just now been elected a Fellow of Trinity, which was that bit more impressive. And everyone could see that it was he who was the rising star. Their interests had developed in a complementary way, for Maurice had taken up quantum electrodynamics, while keeping up an interest in pure mathematics. But both alike were interested in fundamental problems. They had quite often met at Cambridge lectures, sometimes exchanging notes over tea; it had transpired that the Pryces also lived at Guildford, and Maurice had once been invited to tea at 8 Ennismore Avenue, where Mrs Turing had welcomed him as one of the deserving poor from the grammar school. Alan had visited and admired the laboratory that Maurice had fixed up in the Pryce garage.
At Princeton, Maurice had been supervised in his first year by Pauli, the Austrian quantum physicist, but this year was loosely under the wing of von Neumann. And Maurice knew everyone; everyone knew him. He would be seen at the von Neumanns’ luxuriant parties, spectacles ‘like eighteenth-century operas’, although there were less of these this year, because the von Neumann marriage was in difficulties. And if any of the English graduate students came to know John von Neumann, to find him sociable, exuberant, and a pretended playboy with an encyclopaedic knowledge, then it was Maurice Pryce – and certainly not Alan Turing. But at the other end of the scale, it was also Maurice who knew how to engage the reclusive Hardy in conversation. He could get on with everyone, and indeed it was he who made Alan himself feel welcome in the New World.
King’s had sheltered Alan from the more pushy aspects of academic life, which in America were more noticeable. He fitted no better into the American Dream, of winning through the competition, than into the conservative British idea of life, of playing a programmed part in the system.
But King’s also sheltered him from hard realities in another way. At Cambridge he could joke about it. When Victor visited in May 1936 there had been a small scandal, a certain old Shirburnian being caught with ‘a lady’ in his room and sent down. Alan commented wryly that it was not a sin of which he was guilty. Alan was not a moaner, and tried always to show a sense of humour, but there was nothing particularly funny about the problem that he faced in coming out into the world.
In Back to Methuselah, Bernard Shaw imagined super-intelligent beings of 31,920 A.D. growing out of the concerns of art, science and sex (‘these childish games – this dancing and singing and mating’) and turning away to think about mathematics. (‘They are fascinating, just fascinating. I want to get away from our eternal dancing and music, and just sit down by myself and think about numbers.’) This was all very well for Shaw, for whom mathematics could symbolise intellectual enquiry beyond his reach. But Alan had to think about mathematics at twenty-four, when he had by no means tired of the ‘childish games’. He did not divide his mind into rigidly separate compartments, once saying that he derived a sexual pleasure from mathematics. Likewise with his new friend Venable Martin, he went to H. P. Robertson’s lectures on relativity in the new year of 1937, and also went canoeing, perhaps in the stream that fed Carnegie Lake. At one point he9 ‘indirectly indicated’ an ‘interest in having a homosexual relation’, but his friend made it clear that he was not interested. Alan never broached the matter again and it did not affect their relationship in other ways.
The New Jersey poet would have understood. But Alan did not see the America of Walt Whitman, only the land of sexual prohibition. The country of Daddy and Mama had adopted homosexuality as a deeply Un-American activity, especially since the twentieth-century clean-up had got under way. At Princeton there was no one talking about a ‘pretty normal bisexual male’. Alan was lucky to be rebuffed by so tolerant a person as Venable Martin.
He faced the difficulty that confronted any homosexual person who had successfully resolved the internal psychological conflicts attendant on waking up in a Looking-Glass world. The individual mind was not the whole story; there was also a social reality which was not at all the mirror image of heterosexual institutions. The late 1930s offered him no help in coping with it. Except for those with eyes to see through the stylised heterosexuality of Fred Astaire and Busby Berkeley, the times favoured ever more rigid models of ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’. There was, all the time, quite another America of cruising blocks and steam baths and late-night bars, but to an Alan Turing this might as well have been on another planet. He was not ready to make the social adaptation that his sexuality, at least outside Cambridge, demanded.
He could reasonably have felt that there was no acceptable adaptation; that this particular mind-body problem had no solution. For the time being his shyness kept him from confronting the harshness of this social reality, and he continued to try to cope at an individual level, making gentle approaches to some of those he met through his work. It was not a great success.
Alan did spend some time in New York at Thanksgiving, but this was because duty called him to accept the invitation of a right-wing cleric who was a friend of Father Underhill,* Mrs Turing’s favourite priest. (‘He is a kind of American Anglo-Catholic. I liked him but found him a bit diehard. He didn’t seem to have much use for President Roosevelt.’) Alan spent his time ‘pottering about Manhattan getting used to their traffic and subways (underground)’ and went to the Planetarium. More relevant to Alan’s emotional state, perhaps, was the holiday at Christmas when Maurice Pryce took him on a skiing trip in New Hampshire for two weeks:
He suggested going on the 16th and on the 18th we left. A man called Wannier attached himself to the party at the last moment. Probably just as well; I always quarrel if I go on holiday with one companion. It was charming of Maurice to ask me to join him. He has been very kind to me whilst I have been here. We spent the first few days at a cottage where we were the only guests. Afterwards we moved to a place where there were several Commonwealth Fellows and others of various nationalities. Why we moved I don’t know, but I imagine Maurice wanted more company.
Perhaps Alan wanted Maurice more to himself, for his friend was something of a grown-up Christopher Morcom. They drove back through Boston, where the car broke down, and on their return,
Maurice and Francis Price arranged a party with a Treasure Hunt last Sunday. There were 13 clues of various kinds, cryptograms, anagrams, and others completely obscure to me. It was all very ingenious, but I am not much use at them.
One clue was ‘Role of wily Franciscan’, which wittily attracted the party into the bathroom that Francis Price and Shaun Wylie shared, to locate the next clue in the toilet paper. Shaun Wylie himself was amazingly good at anagrams. The treasure hunt bemused the more earnest Americans with its ‘undergraduate humour’, and ‘typical English whimsy’. There were charades and play-readings, in which Alan joined. At lunchtimes they would play chess and Go and another game called Psychology. Tennis began as the snow melted, and the hockey was energetically continued. ‘Virago Delenda Est’, wrote Francis Price on the notice board as they set off for an away match, and some bolder spirit crossed out the first ‘a’. On the playing-fields of Princeton, from which in May 1937 they watched the flames of the Hindenburg illuminate the horizon, the new men rehearsed an Anglo-American alliance.
Alan enjoyed all this, but his social life was a charade. Like any homosexual man, he was living an imitation game, not in the sense of conscious play-acting, but by being accepted as a person that he was not. The others thought they knew him well, as in conventional terms they did; but they did not perceive the difficulty that faced him as an individualist jarring with the reality of the world. He had to find himself as a homosexual in a society doing its best to crush homosexuality out of existence; and less acute, though equally persistent as a problem in his life, he had to fit into an academic system that did not suit his particular line of thought. In both cases, his autonomous self-hood had to be compromised and infringed. These
were not problems that could be solved by reason alone, for they arose by virtue of his physical embodiment in the social world. Indeed, there were no solutions, only muddles and accidents.
At the beginning of February 1937 the offprints of Computable Numbers arrived and some he sent out to personal friends. One went to Eperson (who had now left Sherborne for the more suitable Church of England), and one to James Atkins, who had now taken up a career as a schoolmaster, and was teaching mathematics at Walsall Grammar School. James also had a letter10 from Alan which described, in a rather detached way, that he had been feeling depressed and mentioned that he had even thought of a scheme for ending his life. It involved an apple and electrical wiring.
Perhaps this was a case of depression after the triumph; the writing of Computable Numbers would have been like a love affair, now over but for mopping-up operations. Now he had the problem of continuing. Had he killed off the spirit? Was his work a ‘dead end’? He had done something, but what was it for? It was all very well for Bernard Shaw’s Ancients to live on truth alone, but it was asking a great deal of him. Indeed, it was not his ideal. ‘As regards the question of why we have bodies at all, why we do not or cannot live free as spirits and communicate as such, we probably could do so but there would be nothing whatever to do. The body provides something for the spirit to look after and use.’ But what was his body to do, without the loss of innocence, or the compromise of truth?
The months from January to April 1937 were absorbed in writing up a paper on the lambda-calculus, and two on group theory.11 Of these, the logic paper represented a small development of Kleene’s ideas. The first group theory paper was work related to that of Reinhold Baer, the German algebraist now attached to the IAS, which had mostly been done in 1935. But the second was a new departure, which arose through contact with von Neumann. It was a problem suggested by the emigré Polish mathematician S. Ulam, that of asking whether continuous groups could be approximated by finite groups, rather like approximating a sphere by polyhedra. Von Neumann had passed the problem on to Alan, who successfully dealt with it by April, when it was submitted. This was fast work, although as he had shown that continuous groups could not in general be approximated in this way, it was a rather negative result. Nor, he wrote, was he ‘taking these things so seriously as the logic.’
Meanwhile the possibility had arisen of staying at Princeton for a second year. Alan wrote home on 22 February:
I went to the Eisenharts regular Sunday tea yesterday and they took me in relays to try and persuade me to stay another year. Mrs. Eisenhart mostly put forward social or semi-moral semi-sociological reasons why it would be a good thing to have a second year. The Dean weighed in with hints that the Procter Fellowship was mine for the asking (this is worth $2000 p.a.) I said I thought King’s would probably prefer that I return, but gave some vague promise that I would sound them on the matter. The people I know here will all be leaving, and I don’t much care about the idea of spending a long summer in this country. I should like to know if you have any opinions on the subject. I think it is most likely I shall come back to England.
Dean Eisenhart was an old-fashioned figure, who in his lectures would apologise for using the modern abstract group, but very kind. He and his wife made noble efforts to entertain the students at their tea-parties. Whatever his parents thought, Philip Hall had sent Alan the notice of vacancies for Cambridge lectureships, and this Alan would much have preferred if he could gain one. A lectureship would in effect mean a permanent home at Cambridge, which was the only possible resolution of his problems in life, as well as being due recognition of his achievements. Alan wrote back to him on 4 April:
I am putting in for it, but offering fairly heavy odds against getting it.
He also wrote to his mother, who was just setting off on a pilgrimage to Palestine:
Maurice and I are both putting in for it, though I don’t suppose either of us will get it: I think it is a good thing to start putting in for these things early, so as to get one’s existence recognised. It’s a thing I am rather liable to neglect. Maurice is much more conscious of what are the right things to do to help his career. He makes great social efforts with the mathematical big-wigs.
As he forecast, he failed to gain a Cambridge appointment. Ingham wrote from King’s, encouraging him to stay for another year, and this made up his mind. He wrote on 19 May:
I have just made up my mind to spend another year here, but I shall be going back to England for most of the summer in accordance with previous programme. Thank you very much for your offer of help with this: I shall not need it, for if I have this Procter as the Dean suggests I shall be a rich man, and otherwise I shall go back to Cambridge. Another year here on the same terms would be rather an extravagance …
My boat sails June 23. I might possibly do a little travelling here before the boat goes, as there will be very little doing here during the next month and it’s not a fearfully good time of year for work. More likely I shall not as I don’t usually travel for the sake of travelling.
I am sorry Maurice won’t be here next year. He has been very good company.
I am glad the Royal Family are resisting the Cabinet in their attempt to keep Edward VIII’s marriage quiet.
Since he was staying another year, he decided he should take a PhD degree, as Maurice had done. For his thesis, Church had suggested a topic that had come up in his lecture course, relating to the implications of Gödel’s theorem. Alan had written in March that he was ‘working out some new ideas in logic. Not so good as the computable numbers, but quite hopeful.’ These ideas would see him through.
As for the Procter Fellowship, it did indeed fall into his lap. It was for the Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge University to nominate the Fellow, so there were letters of recommendation sent to him. One of these was from the Wizard himself, who wrote:12
1 June 1937
Sir,
Mr A. M. Turing has informed me that he is applying for a Proctor [sic] Visiting Fellowship to Princeton University from Cambridge for the academic year 1937–1938. I should like to support his application and to inform you that I know Mr Turing very well from previous years: during the last term of 1935, when I was a visiting professor in Cambridge, and during 1936–1937, which year Mr Turing has spent in Princeton, I had opportunity to observe his scientific work. He has done good work in branches of mathematics in which I am interested, namely: theory of almost periodic functions, and theory of continuous groups.
I think that he is a most deserving candidate for the Proctor Fellowship, and I should be very glad if you should find it possible to award one to him.
I am, Respectfully, John von Neumann
Von Neumann would have been asked to write the letter, because his name carried such weight. But why did he make no mention of Computable Numbers, a far more substantial piece of work than the papers to which he referred? Had Alan failed to make him aware of it, even after the paper had been printed, and reprints sent round? If Alan had an entrée with von Neumann, the first thing he should have done was to exploit it to help bring Computable Numbers to attention. It would be typical of what was perceived as his lack of worldly sense, if he had been too shy to push his work upon the ‘mathematical big-wig’.
Against Alan’s prediction, and perhaps to his mild chagrin, the redoubtable Maurice Pryce had been appointed to a Cambridge lectureship, as had Ray Lyttleton, the current Procter Fellow. And Alan did after all spend some time in travel, for Maurice Pryce sold him his car, a 1931 V8 Ford, which had taken him all over the continent on the tour that as a Commonwealth Fellow he had been obliged to make in summer 1936. Maurice taught him to drive, which was not an easy task, for Alan was ham-handed and not good with machines. Once he nearly reversed into the Carnegie Lake and drowned them both. Then on about 10 June they took off together for a Turing family visit, which no doubt Mrs Turing had long been urging upon Alan. It was to a cousin on her mother’s side who had emigrated from Ireland. Jack Crawford, now n
early seventy, was the retired Rector of Wakefield, Rhode Island.
The visit was not quite the expected grim chore of conventional politeness, for Alan approved of Jack Crawford, who in his youth had studied at the then Royal College of Science in Dublin:
I enjoyed the time I spent at Cousin Jack’s. He is an energetic old bird. He has a little observatory with a telescope that he made for himself. He told me all about the grinding of mirrors …. I think he comes into competition with Aunt Sybil for the Relations Merit Diploma. Cousin Mary is a little bit of a thing you could pick up and put in your pocket. She is very hospitable and rather timid: she worships Cousin Jack.
They were ordinary people, who made Alan feel more at home than did the grand Princeton figures. In their old-fashioned country way, they put Alan and Maurice in the same double bed.
The compartments of lfe were fractured. Maurice was amazed – he had not had the slightest suspicion. Alan apologised and withdrew at once. Then he blazed out, not with a trace of shame, but with anger, with a story of how his parents had been away in India so long, and of his years in boarding schools. It had all been said before, in The Loom of Youth:
Then Jeffries’ wild anger, the anger that had made him so brilliant an athlete, burst out: ‘Unfair? Yes, that’s the right word; it is unfair. Who made me what I am but Fernhurst? … And now Fernhurst, that has made me what I am, turns round and says, “You are not fit to be a member of this great school!” and I have to go….’
The deeply embarrassing moment brought to light a vein of self-pity that he otherwise never showed, as well as an analysis which he must have known to be facile. It would not do. It was time to look forward, not backward – but to what? How was he to continue? Maurice accepted the explanation, and they never spoke of it again. Alan boarded the Queen Mary on his twenty-fifth birthday, and on 28 June disembarked at Southampton. He missed the Fourth of July softball match at the Graduate College, between the British Empire and the Revolting Colonies.
Alan Turing: The Enigma: The Book That Inspired the Film The Imitation Game Page 23
