Alan Turing: The Enigma: The Book That Inspired the Film The Imitation Game

by Andrew Hodges

  When Don Bayley had met him at Bletchley station, he noticed Alan was carrying a Norwegian grammar. Alan explained that he had just had a holiday in Norway, and that the language interested him. Although at this point his knowledge was rudimentary, he made sufficient progress with Norwegian and Danish to read Hans Christian Andersen stories to his mother a year later. It did not occur to Don that the Norwegian holiday might have had a particular motive, even though Alan explained that now he would have to go abroad for pleasure. He had written to Don about the charge and the trial, as to his other friends, and on the visit spoke with his usual light-hearted bravado of the outcome. He also referred to a letter he had written to a titled lady politician, calling for a change in the law. This was no pleading, as Oscar Wilde had done, that it was no crime but sickness. He had drawn attention to the homosexuality of the politician’s son. All he had received in reply was a brusque disclaimer from her secretary.

  In October 1952, both Don Bayley and Robin went up to Wilmslow for a weekend, a re-creation of Hanslope. Don was there first and they waited together for Robin on the station, Alan showing Don the diffraction pattern that appeared when looking at the station lights through his handkerchief. On the summer visit Alan had taken his usual pleasure in being looked after for a weekend within the more conventional domesticity of the Bayley household, and Don was struck by the contrasting spartan, untidy arrangements of the Prof’s home. Alan pointed to a stack of filing trays overflowing with letters from all over the world about logic, but said that he was not bothering to appear at the university now, and worked at home. He explained that he had an assistant who had taken over the organisation of the computer. Don advised him to watch out, or his assistant would take over. ‘Pooh!’, said Alan, as if to say ‘see if I care!’.

  But if his computer days were over, this did not mean the end of his underlying interest in the human mind. October 1952 also saw Polanyi and the philosophy department at Manchester score something of a coup over the psychology department, by having the Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget to give a course of lectures,26 which Alan attended. They concerned the child’s learning of logical ideas, and connected symbolic logic with actual psychological observations. So perhaps for the first time, Alan found himself listening to arguments about learning and teaching that did not just come from his own experience, and which were touched by modern theories of education that no one at Sherborne would have known to exist. At about the same time he breached his self-sufficiency in another way. He began seeing a Jungian psychoanalyst, Franz Greenbaum.

  There was an element of resistance in his attitude towards this step, because of the implication that there was something wrong with him, and in particular, that his homosexuality was something that should be changed. The 1950s were, indeed, witnessing a powerful come-back of psychoanalysis, and increasingly vocal claims to the effect that its techniques could eradicate homosexual desire. But Greenbaum did not take such a view; homosexuality was not ‘a problem’ to him. He accepted Alan as a ‘natural homosexual’, and as a Jungian, he did not consider human activities in terms of displaced or unconscious sexuality. Rather, as a German refugee of 1939 with a Jewish father and Catholic mother, it was the psychology of religion that interested him most. As with Jung himself, there was no devaluation of the intellect in Greenbaum’s approach, and he was proud to know Alan as the inventor of the computer and as one who was working on the nature of life. His emphasis, as with Jung, was on the integration of ‘thinking’ and ‘feeling’. To apply intelligence to himself; to look at his own system from outside like Gödel, and break his own code – these were natural extensions of Alan’s long-growing interest in psychology. A turning-point was indicated on 23 November 1952, when he wrote to Robin in connection with his now completed PhD thesis, and added:27

  Have decided to have another, and rather more co-operative go at the psychiatrist. If he can put me in a more resigned frame of mind it would be something.

  Thereafter Franz Greenbaum had Alan write down all his dreams, and he filled three notebooks with them.* The relationship soon became more that of friendship than that of doctor and patient. But the professional status gave Alan the excuse to devote time and energy to all those things that he had pushed aside so long from the serious male business of ‘thinking’. As with the war, he made the most of the situation in which he found himself.

  In the analysis of his dreams he was surprised to find that many concerned, or could be interpreted as relating to, his mother in hostile terms. In real life, his relationship with her had continued to grow warmer. The fact that she had taken the news of the trial as she had counted for a great deal. So in her seventieth year, Mrs Turing found herself becoming one of Alan’s few friends. By now she knew that he would never cease to be the ‘intellectual crank’ she had been afraid of, and he knew that she would always concern herself with matters like fish-knives as though still arranging for dinner parties at Coonoor. A gentle bickering, with ‘Really, Alan!’ answered by ‘Mother, don’t be so ridiculous,’ characterised the occasional visits. But by this time he had perhaps come to appreciate some of her problems and frustrations, while she, in turn, had come a long way from being the muffled Dublin girl at Cheltenham Ladies College, and had perhaps come to realise that Alan’s vivacity offered her a taste of the more artistic life that she had been denied. After looking so long for the higher and better in churches and institutions, ranks and titles, she found something of it in her son. For forty years she had been cross with him for doing everything the wrong way, but she found the capacity for change. Alan, too, became less totally dismissive of her preoccupations.

  There was plenty of scope for unburying a forty-year-old resentment of a mother so unlike the sensuous, seductive figure of Freudian theory. Perhaps Alan also confronted the figure of his father, whose strength had somehow cancelled itself out, and who had not shown the marathon-runner’s quality of his son. Perhaps too there was a hidden disappointment that his father had never even tried to penetrate his concerns in the way that his mother, however irritatingly, attempted. If Alan’s friends heard him disparage his mother, they usually heard nothing of his father. But sorting out such complexities of inner feeling was one thing; coping with his situation in the real world of 1952 was quite another, and in this respect psychoanalysis was bound by the same limitation as his imitation game – it was the world of dreaming, not of doing. A private ‘free association’ of ideas was allowed, but free association with male persons – that was the very thing that was forbidden. Franz Greenbaum could not supply the greenwood. Consistency and completeness of mind was not enough; something had to be done.

  He had written to a politician about the state of the law, and there was little else that an individual could do – except in refusing to keep quiet. The problem did not lie at an individual level, where the only ‘solution’ was that of being ‘resigned’. He was not charged as one who had harmed another person, but as an enemy of social order. Alan Turing, however, had no interest in ordering other people, while he retained an almost untouched innocence of ‘why not?’ in respect of sex.* It was not an issue that could be resolved by rational argument, and not a problem that Dr Greenbaum could solve.

  The examination of Robin’s PhD thesis, on the logical foundations of physics, had to be postponed since Stephen Toulmin, the philosopher of science, had decided he could not undertake it after all. Early in 1953, Alan wrote to Robin:

  They have at last found someone to referee your thesis, viz. Braithwaite. I think it would be best if we had the oral at Cambridge and am writing to Braithwaite to suggest this…. Have had another go at the Unity of Science essay.

  This was a prize essay that Robin was submitting to the Unity of Science journal, concerned with the same subject.

  I think the duplicate types might be quite important. Don’t they answer the question about ‘What is Time’? I was amused about ‘inpenetrability’ at first. I thought it was a reference to ‘Through the Looking Glass’
, where Humpty Dumpty says ‘lnpenetrability. That’s what I say.’ But on looking up the reference thought probably not.

  This letter was rendered, not very effectively, as part of the computer printout.* Alan had proposed having the oral in March, but this did not suit Robin, who had arranged to go skiing in Austria. Alan wrote:

  Sorry it really isn’t possible to make your oral any earlier. Braithwaite won’t have read it before the very end of March…. If you really are going skiing no doubt it could be delayed till April or May though I may have forgotten about it by then mostly.

  Your last letter arrived in the middle of a crisis about ‘Den Norske Gutt’, so I have not been able to give my attention yet to the really vital part about theory of perception….

  The nature of this ‘crisis’ was partly revealed by another letter, dated 11 March 1953:

  My dear Robin,

  I am going to try and stop your journey to Austria by informing the immigration authorities of the following facts:

  (i) That although you have the permission of your mother the counter-signature of the mayor of Leicester is a forgery executed by one of Strauss’s patients.†

  (ii) That the skiing expedition is a blind and that you are really being exported to satisfy the lusts of La Contessa Addis Abbabisci‡ (the pope’s mistress-in-chief) who fell in love with you when you visited the opera in Naples.

  (iii) That you are a heretic with allegiances to the church of Princeton and the hall of Kings.

  Any of these grounds should be adequate I think. If in spite of all they let you in, I hope you have a good holiday. I’ll leave it to Braithwaite now to start arranging another date for oral. I may visit Cambridge towards end of March anyway.

  The Kjell crisis has now evaporated. It was very active for about a week. It started by my getting a p.c. from him saying he was on his way to visit me. At one stage police over the N. of England were out searching for him, especially in Wilmslow, Manchester, Newcastle etc. I will tell you all one day. He is now back in Bergen without my even seeing him! For sheer incident it almost rivals the Arnold story.

  Alan spoke of this ‘crisis’ in the computer laboratory, to Norman Routledge, and to Nick Furbank, with whom he stayed briefly at the end of March, while attending a conference on computers29 at the NPL. But he never ‘told all’, dismissing the story as another absurd police folly,* involving his own house being under watch. It did not occur to those whom he told that there was a different kind of explanation for what had happened. His letter to Robin said no more, and passed on to other concerns:

  I’ve got a shocking tendency at present to fritter my time away in anything but what I ought to be doing. I thought I’d found the reason for all this, but that hasn’t made things much better. One thing I’ve done is to rig the room next [to the] bathroom up as electrical lab. Am not doing very well over your vision model.

  In this ‘laboratory’ he was able to do ‘desert island’ experiments of an electrolytic kind, using current from the electricity mains supply. He would use coke as electrodes, saying that using carbon sticks from old batteries was a form of cheating, and weed juice as a source of oxygen. He liked to see how many chemicals he could produce, starting from common substances like salt – much as he would have done at Dinard if his mother had allowed it. The room he used was in fact a small space left in the middle of the house when the bathroom had been carved out of a larger room. He called it ‘the nightmare room’ – playing on Mrs Turing’s fears of an accident.

  Alan’s letter also explained that he

  Went down to Sherborne to lecture to some boys on computers. Really quite a treat, in many ways. They were so luscious, and so well mannered, with a little dash of pertness, and. Sherborne itself quite unspoilt.

  His schooldays might well have seemed simple and safe, in comparison with the world in which he now waited for the next tum of the screw. This visit had been on 9 March, and in his talk to the science society,30

  Mr Turing made a very clear analogy between a stupid clerk, with his mechanical calculating device, paper to write his workings on, and his instructions, and the electronic brain which combined all these in one. All that was necessary was to put the instructions into a tape machine and the mass of wires, valves, resistors, condensors, and chokes did the rest, the answer appearing on another tape …

  The existence of this society, the Alchemists, since 1943, was a concession to the modern world, but otherwise Sherborne was indeed ‘unspoilt’; neither war nor end of empire had much modified the training of administrators for the 1980s and 1990s. There were, however, more and more cracks appearing in Alan’s stiff upper lip, and although deploring his tendency to ‘fritter his time away’, he was not finding it quite so important to keep his nose permanently to the grindstone. Typically, he had made a game out of the difficult process of breaking the ice, so that when among friends, notably Robin and his friend Christopher Bennett, they would share what Alan chose to call ‘sagas’ or ‘saga-ettes’.

  A ‘saga’ would have to enjoy the dimensions of ‘the Arnold story’, but a saga-ette might have more modest proportions of self-revelation. Alan would tell the saga-ette of a particular Paris adventure. Alan had picked up a young man and insisted on walking back to his hotel instead of taking the Metro. This caused amazement, Alan said, because ‘he thought of Paris like you or I would think of a Riemann surface; he only knew the circles of convergence round every Metro station, and couldn’t analytically continue from one to another!’ In the hotel, the boy had solemnly lifted up the mattress, and inserted his trousers, pour conserver les plis, which this time amazed Alan, who never had a visible crease and wanted to get on with it. Afterwards, the boy had made up some story about exchanging their watches so as to prove their trust for each other, until they met next day, so Alan showed his trust, and lost the watch, but considered it worth the sacrifice. Alan and Robin would also point out this or that pleasant sight in the street, each catering to the taste of the other.* ‘ls that what you call a pretty girl?’ Alan once asked, allowing the suggestion to stand that he thought he ought, at least in principle, to expand his own interests.

  Once Alan had been persuaded that self-exploration and self-revelation were worthwhile goals, he pursued them in his uncompromising way. In the computer laboratory, for instance, a young man whom Alan found particularly attractive once arrived from London to use the computer. ‘Who’s that beautiful young man?’ Alan immediately asked Tony Brooker, who explained. An invitation to dinner for the young PhD rapidly followed, but Alan found himself fobbed off with a thin excuse, of which he took a dim view, about having to visit a sick aunt.

  Franz Greenbaum had a theory that Alan’s attention was drawn to those who in some way either resembled himself, or what he would like to be – a rather commonplace observation, perhaps, and of the psychoanalytical kind where any exception could be taken to prove the rule. But it intrigued Alan, who apparently had never thought out such ideas before. One person who encouraged this development was Lyn Newman, who became another of the small group of human beings whom Alan could trust. There was a playful element in his correspondence31 (some of it in French) with her, but it represented a serious cracking of the male shell. He wrote to Lyn Newman in May that ‘Greenbaum has made great strides in the last few weeks. We seem to be getting somewhere near the root of the trouble now.’†

  By spring 1953 he was also being invited to the Greenbaums’ house from time to time, for Franz Greenbaum, whom the Manchester intellectual establishment did not consider a very respectable figure, was not bound by the strict Freudian view of relations between therapist and client. Alan quite failed to communicate with Mrs Greenbaum, but became fond of playing with their daughter Maria. He made a particular hit by giving her a box of sweets, saying it was a special left-handed tin for her. Once he amazed Mrs Greenbaum by his excitement over a youth in the next-door garden whom she did not think at all attractive, She thought him ‘obsessed by sex’ – but he was obsessed
with truth, at the cost of crudity.

  The probation period ended in April 1953. For the past three months they had put an implant of hormone into his thigh, instead of the dosage of pills. Suspecting, with some annoyance, that the effect would last more than three months, he had it taken out. Then he was free, the more so because his future at Manchester was secure. On 15 May 1953 the University Council formally voted33 to appoint him to a specially created Readership in the Theory of Computing when the five years of the old position ran out on 29 September. This he could reasonably expect to last for ten years, if he wanted it. In this respect, his insouciant ‘Pooh!’ to Don Bayley had been justified: he had a small pay rise, and freedom to work exactly as he chose.

  On 10 May Alan sent a letter to Maria Greenbaum, describing a complete solution to a solitaire puzzle, and ending:

  I hope you all have a very nice holiday in Italian Switzerland. I shall not be very far away at Club Mediterranée, Ipsos-Corfu, Greece. Yours, Alan Turing.

  He had already – most likely in 1951 – been to a Club Mediterranée on the French coast. In this summer of 1953, probably over the period of the coronation,* Caliban escaped from the island for his brief ration of fun, to Paris for a short while, and then to Corfu. He would return with half a dozen Greek names and addresses,34 although from this point of view his exploration of the eastern Mediterranean proved disappointing. As at school, he made mistakes with the French, but still did better than with the Greek.