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"Alan Turing: The Enigma" by Andrew Hodges
Everyone who's heard of Alan Turing knows that he came about as close as anybody ever has to single-handedly saving the world (at the tender age of 29), through his work at Bletchley, and they also know that he committed suicide at the age of 42 (younger than me!) after his conviction for "gross indecency" (= homosexuality) and subsequent hormone treatment ("chemical castration" as it was then dysphemistically referred to). That so many people know about his life, and death, is largely due to Andrew Hodges' biography, which is an absolute marvel of the genre.
Researched with extraordinary thoroughness – at a time when the only other secondary literature in existence was Turing's mother's hagiography of him, that very carefully didn't look under the carpet of his private life, and was written by someone with about as much understanding of maths as I have - Hodges talked to everybody – friends, colleagues, acquaintances, relatives, Turing's ex-fiancée, his next-door-neighbour, various lovers. He even tracked down the Arnold Murray, the young man Turing picked up in Manchester, whose friend subsequently burgled Turing's house, leading to the police investigation and the whole sorry story of the trial, and the disgrace, and the "chemical castration", and the suicide. He started his research in 1978 when Turing's death was still in living memory, and history could be told by people who had actually seen it happen.
Where there are gaps, therefore – and towards the end there are very large gaps indeed -you have confidence that it's not the biographer's sloppy research that is responsible, but the British government habit of secrecy, that means even the least significant documents are declared confidential and remain inaccessible for generations.
You also have confidence that, unlike most of his readers, the biographer actually understands the Turing's work (Hodges is a Research Fellow in Maths at Wolfson College, Oxford). He is also, with a rather touching obviousness, in love with his subject. You can tell that his dearest wish is that Turing should have met the right man, someone who was both his intellectual equal and accepting of his homosexuality, and settled down to a long and happy relationship. In his preface, he mentions with great affection "my friend the painter David Hutter, who as described on page 535, sparked off my quest. He died in 1990, closely followed by his partner, the musician James Atkins – who had become, fifty seven years before, the lover of Alan Turing."
In keeping with his rather romantic view, he sees all of Turing's brief sexual liaisons as emotionally unsatisfactory, and as a good biographer, he does not speculate about activities for which he has no evidence. That means that only when he knows Turing made a pass at someone, and was either accepted or rejected, does it get a mention. This can leave the reader with the impression that Turing was a hermit, who only got lucky five or six times in his life. In practice, though, I don't think this was the case. Although one gets the impression from Hodges that Turing's sexual experiences at Sherbourne were confined to an (unconsummated) love for Christopher Morcombe, Turing's subsequently expressed disbelief that any boy could go through public school without becoming well-versed in homosexual activity rather suggests he actually got plenty (besides, the man who complained that Bletchley was "a sexual desert" presumably had a point of comparison). By the end of the book, even Hodges is forced to admit that Turing "was not by nature the most conjugal person, and his exploratory urge was better suited to the possibilities of the cruising grounds." I rather think, therefore, that even though Turing led a lonely and difficult life, he at least had a lot more sex than Hodges believes.
The book also answers a question that has puzzled me ever since I read Simon Singh's The Code Book. Why, given that thanks to the work at Bletchley, this was a war in which "one side read consistently the main military and naval intelligence of the other", did it take the Axis powers so long to lose? Turing's bombes were in operation by 1942, but the war would drag on for another three years. The answer, at least in part, is that while the Bletchley cryptanalysts were doing a first class job, the rest of British intelligence wasn't. Cryptology, in contrast to cryptanalyst was still bedevilled by the kind of class-bound thinking that had hampered Bletchley in the early days, and the Germans were reading a substantial quantity of our own intelligence. As Hodges puts it "The cryptographic and operational authorities were working to standards which to Hut 8 eyes would seem criminally negligent…The cryptanalysts tended to assume that their production [deciphered messages] were being fed into a system that knew what it was doing, and it was a shock when they were told of the convoy cipher fiasco [in which 22 vessels were sunk by U-boats, which knew exactly where they were]).
The final third of the book gets rather tedious, partly because all of the really interesting stuff is hidden away in classified files, and partly because the non-classified research Turing was doing, did not, as we know with hindsight, lead anywhere. It's hard to maintain interest in the mechanical problems of building a computer when your readers know in advance that it will turn out to be a Neanderthal on the tree of AI evolution. Fortunately, there is a very good play by Hugh Whitemore, Breaking the Code, which is based on Hodges' book, but condenses its 527 densely typed pages into nine short scenes. It was subsequently turned into a film, starring Derek Jacobi. Here's an excerpt.
In this snippet, Turing's boss at Bletchley quotes Wittgenstein at him, to the effect that when all the problems of science have been solved, the problems of life will still remain. Turing's own life exemplifies that paradox precisely. It raises unanswerable moral problems – problems that are, I suspect, in principle unanswerable, of what to do with people who are constitutionally incapable of fitting in with society's demands. In Turing's case, the conflict between the needs of the individual and the needs of society – and the right of society to interfere in the arena of human sexuality – is thrown into sharp relief by the extraordinary service that he performed for the state. Without Turing's bombes at Bletchley, Germany might well have won the war; and yet, as a human being, with human sexual drives, he could not be tolerated. It's a conflict between society and the individual, but also between the brain (clean, usable) and the body (messy, impulsive, prone to socially unacceptable desires). Hugh Whitemore presents Turing's fascination with thinking machines as a symbol of his desire to escape from his body into a simpler world, where physical desires play no role (although in fact, when you look at Turing's writings, he seems to have envisaged machines that had emotions much like human beings, that could also interact physically with their environment).
It's easy to think now, looking back on those grim times, that it would be different now. Our society is, as a whole, so much more open and tolerant of what was then called "deviance" and now is merely a "lifestyle choice." But I don't think the problem of Turing is so easily solved (any more than the problem of Othello would be solved by the availability of quickie divorces).
Turing was a victim of prejudice, no doubt about it. The treatment of homosexuals by the society of his time was horrific. But reading between the lines of Hodges's text raises doubts about whether Turing's fate would have been any happier if he had lived in our own era. We may be more accepting of homosexuality, but we draw a firm line between the (acceptable) practice of homosexuality and the (utterly unacceptable) practice of paedophilia. Turing, at the very least, comes close to crossing that line. Hodges cites a conversation he had with Robin Gandy, one of Turing's lovers (told to him, I presume, by Gandy himself, since he's listed as one of the sources) on the issue of whether one should persist in forcing one's attention on a boy of less than fifteen years if he declines them. Hodges says rather coyly that Gandy had strong feelings on this issue because he had himself been put off sex for a long time by an "over-enthusiastic" suitor. Those are not the terms we would use today in talking about a child whose attempt to resist sexual advances by an older man was overridden. And it's noteworthy that it wasn't even at issue whether it was okay to approach sexually a child of under fifteen, merely that one should respect his wishes if he was reluctant to respond. Another uncomfortable moment in the book occurs when Turing proposes to adopt a young Jewish refugee. His father at this point wrote him a letter saying "Is this wise? People will get the wrong idea." I rather suspect that what he meant was "people will get exactly the right idea," and sure enough, Turing did go on a camping holiday with the boy and did make what Hodges calls "a gentle approach." Apparently, he was rebuffed and let the matter lie, but the whole episode looks uncomfortably like what we would now call "grooming" (and remember this was a child who had been separated from his parents under deeply traumatic circumstances). It was in the context of justifying making a pass at the boy, that Turing came up with the remark to the effect that no boy at a public school could possibly be inexperienced when it came to homosexuality.
His description of the Sherbourne schoolboys he went back to lecture to in 1953 as "luscious" is also rather discomfiting, although it might be dismissed as the kind of camp talk one gay man would use to another without actually meaning anything predatory by it. Then again, it might not. Whitemore, who does fantastic job of zooming in on the key motifs of Turing's life, draws attention to the fact that Arnold Murray was only 19, while Turing himself was 39 (and in modern America, that kind of generation-bridging is commonly seen as reprehensible by people who are entirely accepting of homosexuality).
Ultimately, then, I think the problem that Turing represents – between the "useful" characteristics an individual possesses, those aspects of the self that society can make use of, and their "undesirable" characteristics, those that pose a threat to social values and order– would be unsolvable even today. One of Turing's mathematical jokes was that he didn't want to be "remembered for unsolveable problems" (a pun on the content of his famous paper "On Computable Numbers", that introduced the Turing machine to the world). In this, as in so many things, he saw a great deal further than anyone else.
Researched with extraordinary thoroughness – at a time when the only other secondary literature in existence was Turing's mother's hagiography of him, that very carefully didn't look under the carpet of his private life, and was written by someone with about as much understanding of maths as I have - Hodges talked to everybody – friends, colleagues, acquaintances, relatives, Turing's ex-fiancée, his next-door-neighbour, various lovers. He even tracked down the Arnold Murray, the young man Turing picked up in Manchester, whose friend subsequently burgled Turing's house, leading to the police investigation and the whole sorry story of the trial, and the disgrace, and the "chemical castration", and the suicide. He started his research in 1978 when Turing's death was still in living memory, and history could be told by people who had actually seen it happen.
Where there are gaps, therefore – and towards the end there are very large gaps indeed -you have confidence that it's not the biographer's sloppy research that is responsible, but the British government habit of secrecy, that means even the least significant documents are declared confidential and remain inaccessible for generations.
You also have confidence that, unlike most of his readers, the biographer actually understands the Turing's work (Hodges is a Research Fellow in Maths at Wolfson College, Oxford). He is also, with a rather touching obviousness, in love with his subject. You can tell that his dearest wish is that Turing should have met the right man, someone who was both his intellectual equal and accepting of his homosexuality, and settled down to a long and happy relationship. In his preface, he mentions with great affection "my friend the painter David Hutter, who as described on page 535, sparked off my quest. He died in 1990, closely followed by his partner, the musician James Atkins – who had become, fifty seven years before, the lover of Alan Turing."
In keeping with his rather romantic view, he sees all of Turing's brief sexual liaisons as emotionally unsatisfactory, and as a good biographer, he does not speculate about activities for which he has no evidence. That means that only when he knows Turing made a pass at someone, and was either accepted or rejected, does it get a mention. This can leave the reader with the impression that Turing was a hermit, who only got lucky five or six times in his life. In practice, though, I don't think this was the case. Although one gets the impression from Hodges that Turing's sexual experiences at Sherbourne were confined to an (unconsummated) love for Christopher Morcombe, Turing's subsequently expressed disbelief that any boy could go through public school without becoming well-versed in homosexual activity rather suggests he actually got plenty (besides, the man who complained that Bletchley was "a sexual desert" presumably had a point of comparison). By the end of the book, even Hodges is forced to admit that Turing "was not by nature the most conjugal person, and his exploratory urge was better suited to the possibilities of the cruising grounds." I rather think, therefore, that even though Turing led a lonely and difficult life, he at least had a lot more sex than Hodges believes.
The book also answers a question that has puzzled me ever since I read Simon Singh's The Code Book. Why, given that thanks to the work at Bletchley, this was a war in which "one side read consistently the main military and naval intelligence of the other", did it take the Axis powers so long to lose? Turing's bombes were in operation by 1942, but the war would drag on for another three years. The answer, at least in part, is that while the Bletchley cryptanalysts were doing a first class job, the rest of British intelligence wasn't. Cryptology, in contrast to cryptanalyst was still bedevilled by the kind of class-bound thinking that had hampered Bletchley in the early days, and the Germans were reading a substantial quantity of our own intelligence. As Hodges puts it "The cryptographic and operational authorities were working to standards which to Hut 8 eyes would seem criminally negligent…The cryptanalysts tended to assume that their production [deciphered messages] were being fed into a system that knew what it was doing, and it was a shock when they were told of the convoy cipher fiasco [in which 22 vessels were sunk by U-boats, which knew exactly where they were]).
The final third of the book gets rather tedious, partly because all of the really interesting stuff is hidden away in classified files, and partly because the non-classified research Turing was doing, did not, as we know with hindsight, lead anywhere. It's hard to maintain interest in the mechanical problems of building a computer when your readers know in advance that it will turn out to be a Neanderthal on the tree of AI evolution. Fortunately, there is a very good play by Hugh Whitemore, Breaking the Code, which is based on Hodges' book, but condenses its 527 densely typed pages into nine short scenes. It was subsequently turned into a film, starring Derek Jacobi. Here's an excerpt.
In this snippet, Turing's boss at Bletchley quotes Wittgenstein at him, to the effect that when all the problems of science have been solved, the problems of life will still remain. Turing's own life exemplifies that paradox precisely. It raises unanswerable moral problems – problems that are, I suspect, in principle unanswerable, of what to do with people who are constitutionally incapable of fitting in with society's demands. In Turing's case, the conflict between the needs of the individual and the needs of society – and the right of society to interfere in the arena of human sexuality – is thrown into sharp relief by the extraordinary service that he performed for the state. Without Turing's bombes at Bletchley, Germany might well have won the war; and yet, as a human being, with human sexual drives, he could not be tolerated. It's a conflict between society and the individual, but also between the brain (clean, usable) and the body (messy, impulsive, prone to socially unacceptable desires). Hugh Whitemore presents Turing's fascination with thinking machines as a symbol of his desire to escape from his body into a simpler world, where physical desires play no role (although in fact, when you look at Turing's writings, he seems to have envisaged machines that had emotions much like human beings, that could also interact physically with their environment).
It's easy to think now, looking back on those grim times, that it would be different now. Our society is, as a whole, so much more open and tolerant of what was then called "deviance" and now is merely a "lifestyle choice." But I don't think the problem of Turing is so easily solved (any more than the problem of Othello would be solved by the availability of quickie divorces).
Turing was a victim of prejudice, no doubt about it. The treatment of homosexuals by the society of his time was horrific. But reading between the lines of Hodges's text raises doubts about whether Turing's fate would have been any happier if he had lived in our own era. We may be more accepting of homosexuality, but we draw a firm line between the (acceptable) practice of homosexuality and the (utterly unacceptable) practice of paedophilia. Turing, at the very least, comes close to crossing that line. Hodges cites a conversation he had with Robin Gandy, one of Turing's lovers (told to him, I presume, by Gandy himself, since he's listed as one of the sources) on the issue of whether one should persist in forcing one's attention on a boy of less than fifteen years if he declines them. Hodges says rather coyly that Gandy had strong feelings on this issue because he had himself been put off sex for a long time by an "over-enthusiastic" suitor. Those are not the terms we would use today in talking about a child whose attempt to resist sexual advances by an older man was overridden. And it's noteworthy that it wasn't even at issue whether it was okay to approach sexually a child of under fifteen, merely that one should respect his wishes if he was reluctant to respond. Another uncomfortable moment in the book occurs when Turing proposes to adopt a young Jewish refugee. His father at this point wrote him a letter saying "Is this wise? People will get the wrong idea." I rather suspect that what he meant was "people will get exactly the right idea," and sure enough, Turing did go on a camping holiday with the boy and did make what Hodges calls "a gentle approach." Apparently, he was rebuffed and let the matter lie, but the whole episode looks uncomfortably like what we would now call "grooming" (and remember this was a child who had been separated from his parents under deeply traumatic circumstances). It was in the context of justifying making a pass at the boy, that Turing came up with the remark to the effect that no boy at a public school could possibly be inexperienced when it came to homosexuality.
His description of the Sherbourne schoolboys he went back to lecture to in 1953 as "luscious" is also rather discomfiting, although it might be dismissed as the kind of camp talk one gay man would use to another without actually meaning anything predatory by it. Then again, it might not. Whitemore, who does fantastic job of zooming in on the key motifs of Turing's life, draws attention to the fact that Arnold Murray was only 19, while Turing himself was 39 (and in modern America, that kind of generation-bridging is commonly seen as reprehensible by people who are entirely accepting of homosexuality).
Ultimately, then, I think the problem that Turing represents – between the "useful" characteristics an individual possesses, those aspects of the self that society can make use of, and their "undesirable" characteristics, those that pose a threat to social values and order– would be unsolvable even today. One of Turing's mathematical jokes was that he didn't want to be "remembered for unsolveable problems" (a pun on the content of his famous paper "On Computable Numbers", that introduced the Turing machine to the world). In this, as in so many things, he saw a great deal further than anyone else.
no subject
no subject
I did rather get the impression from the book that Turing was distinctly Aspie. Even as a kid, his parents could tell he was going to have huge problems fitting in at school.