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 bitter-sweet 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.
Puzzlement was an entirely reasonable reaction, in the conditions of 1933, when even in King’s there was so little to go on for those outside the most chromium-plated circles. These conversations were whispers in a crushing, deafening silence. It was not the effect of the law, whose prohibition of all male homosexual activity played but a tiny part in the Britain of the 1930s, in direct terms. It was more as J. S. Mill had written20 of heresy:
… the chief mischief of the legal penalties is that they strengthen the social stigma. It is that stigma which is really effective, and so effective is it, that the profession of opinions which are under the ban of society is much less common in England than is, in many other countries, the avowal of those which incur risk of judicial punishment.
Modern psychology had made a twentieth-century difference; the 1920s had given to the avant-garde the name of Freud to conjure with. But his ideas were used in practice to discuss what had ‘gone wrong’ with homosexual people, and such intellectual openings were outweighed by the continual efforts of the official world to render homosexuality invisible – a process in which the academic world played its part along with prosecutions and censorship. As for respectable middle class opinion, it was represented by the Sunday Express in 1928, greeting The Well of Loneliness with the words, ‘I had rather give a healthy boy or a healthy girl a phial of prussic acid than this novel.’ The general rule remained that of unmentionability above all else, leaving even the well-educated homosexual person with nothing more encouraging than the faint signals from the ancient world, the debris of the Wilde trials, and the rare exceptions to the rules supplied by the writings of Havelock Ellis and Edward Carpenter.
In a peculiar environment such as Cambridge, it might be a positive advantage to enjoy homosexual experience, simply in terms of the opportunity for physical release. The deprivation was not one of laws but of the spirit – a denial of identity. Heterosexual love, desire and marriage were hardly free from problems and anguish, but had all the novels and songs ever written to express them. The homosexual equivalents were relegated – if mentioned at all – to the comic, the criminal, the pathological, or the disgusting. To protect the self from these descriptions was hard enough, when they were embedded in the very words, the only words, that language offered. To keep the self a complete and consistent whole, rather than split into a facade of conformity, and a secret inner truth, was a miracle. To be able to develop the self, to increase its inner connections and to communicate with others – that was next to impossible.
Alan was at the one place that could support that development. Here, after all, was the circle round which Forster passed the manuscript of his novel Maurice which conveyed so much about being ‘an unmentionable of the Oscar Wilde sort’. How to complete the work, that was one problem. It had to have its own integrity of feeling, yet be credible as a story of the real world. There was a fundamental contradiction, which was not resolved by having his hero escape into the ‘greenwood’ of a happy ending.
There was another contradiction, in that this attempt at communication remained secret for fifty years.21 But here at least was the place where these contradictions were understood, and although Alan’s self-contained nature placed him on the edge of King’s society, he was protected from the harshness of the outside world.
If Alan enjoyed Back to Methuselah, it would also have been because Shaw dramatised his theory of the Life Force, which raised the same questions as the ‘spirit’. One of Shaw’s characters said ‘Unless this withered thing religion, and this dry thing science, come alive in our hands, alive and intensely interesting, we may just as well go out and dig the garden until it is time to dig our graves.’ This was Alan’s problem in 1933, although he could not accept Shaw’s easy solution. Bernard Shaw had no compunction about rewriting science if it did not agree with his ideas; determinism had to go, if it conflicted with a Life Force. Shaw fixed on Darwin’s theory of evolution, which he discussed as if it were an account of every kind of change, social and psychological change included, and rejected it as a ‘creed’: he wrote22 that:
What damns Darwinian Natural Selection as a creed is that it takes hope out of evolution, and substitutes a paralysing fatalism which is utterly discouraging. As Butler put it, it ‘banishes Mind from the universe.’ The generation that felt nothing but exultant relief when it was delivered from the tyranny of an Almighty Busybody by a soulless Determinism has nearly passed away, leaving a vacuum which Nature abhors.
Science, for Shaw, existed to provide a hopeful ‘creed’, which revealed religion no longer did. There had to be a Life Force, of which the super-intelligent Oracle of A.D. 3000 could say ‘Our physicists deal with it. Our mathematicians express its measurements in algebraic equations.’
But for Alan, science had to be true, rather than comforting. Nor did that mathematician and physicist John von Neumann have anything to say that lent credence to a Life Force. His Mathematische Grundlagen der Quantenmechanik had arrived in October 1932, but perhaps Alan had put off tackling it until the summer, when he also obtained books on quantum mechanics by Schrödinger and Heisenberg. On 16 October 1933 he wrote:
My prize book from Sherborne is turning out very interesting, and not at all difficult reading, although the applied mathematicians seem to find it rather strong.
Von Neumann’s account was very different from Eddington’s. In his formulation, the state of a physical system evolved perfectly deterministically; it was the observation of it that introduced an element of absolute randomness. But if this process of observation were itself observed from outside, it could be regarded as deterministic. There was no way of saying where the indeterminacy was; it was not localised in any particular place. Von Neumann was able to show that this strange logic of observations – quite unlike anything encountered with everyday objects – was consistent in itself, and agreed with known experiments. It left Alan sceptical about the interpr
etation of quantum mechanics, but certainly gave no support to the idea of the mind manipulating wave-functions in the brain.
Alan would not only have found von Neumann’s book ‘very interesting’ because it was tackling a subject of such philosophical importance to himself. It would also have been because of the way in which von Neumann approached his scientific subject as much as possible by logical thought. For science, to Alan Turing, was thinking for himself, and seeing for himself, and not a collection of facts. Science was doubting the axioms. He had the pure mathematician’s approach to the subject, allowing a free rein to thought, and seeing afterwards whether or not it had application to the physical world. He would often argue on these lines with Kenneth Harrison, who took the more traditional scientific view of experiments and theories and verification.
The ‘applied mathematicians’ would have found von Neumann’s study of quantum mechanics to be ‘rather strong’ because it required a considerable knowledge of recent pure-mathematical developments. He had taken the apparently different quantum theories of Schrödinger and Heisenberg, and by expressing their essential ideas in a much more abstract mathematical form, shown their equivalence. It was the logical consistency of the theory, not the experimental results, that von Neumann’s work treated. This suited Alan, who sought that kind of toughness, and it made a beautiful example of how the expansion of pure mathematics for its own sake had borne unexpected fruit in physics.
Alan Turing: The Enigma: The Book That Inspired the Film The Imitation Game Page 15