У меня была запись о том, что в русском переводе биографии Тьюринга, написанной Ходжесом, начало последней (восьмой) главы короче на 19 страниц. Я отсканировала этот отрывок, чтобы можно было сравнить начало восьмой главы в переводе и в оригинале:
"It had not taken the police long to detect Alan Turing's crime. It was almost inevitable once he had made the original report of the burglary, for the police had been able to identify Harry's fingerprints. He was already in custody on another charge in Manchester, and before long made a statement which referred to Arnold telling him of having 'business' at Alan's home. The further information Alan had volunteered on the Sunday merely gave the police their opportunity to act with confidence.
читать дальшеAlan took them upstairs to where he was working with his desk calculator. The detectives, Mr Wills and Mr Rimmer, found themselves in an unfamiliar environment, the room littered with pieces of paper covered with mathematical symbols. They told Alan that they 'knew all about it', leaving him unclear whether they were talking about the burglary or of something else. He later told Robin that he had to admire their interrogation technique. They asked him to repeat the description he had given them on the Sunday moning and Alan said, 'He's about twenty-five years of age, five foot ten inches, with black hair.' Imitation was not Alan Turing's strong point— perhaps an intelligent machine would have done better. This feeble attempt sank like a stone. Mr Wills said, 'We have reason to believe your description is false. Why are you lying?'
This was the moment for 'I don't know what came over me', or the other phrases employed by more politically-minded persons, but once the detectives had shown their hand, Alan blurted out everything that they wanted to hear, in particular admitting that he had concealed the identity of the informant because he 'had an affair with him'. Mr Wills asked 'Would you care to tell us what kind of an affair you have had with him?', and this policemanlike question elicited from Alan a memorable phrase, detailing in semi-official language three of the activities that had taken place. 'A very honourable man', the detectives thought him as they cautioned him in the usual way, and they were the more impressed when he volunteered a statement of five handritten pages. Relieved of the usual necessity to translate human life into police language, they were most appreciative of what was 'a lovely statement'. written in 'a flowing style, almost like prose', although 'beyond them in some of its phraseology'. They were particularly struck by his absence of shame. 'He was a real convert. ... he really believed he was doing the right thing.'
Alan had commented to the detectives that he thought a Royal Commission was sitting 'to legalise it'. There he was wrong. And almost certainly he underestimated the seriousness of what in his statement became 'the offence'. Harry had been justified in assuming that Alan was fair game for robbery. As a sex criminal, he had forfeited the protection of the law. Alan's statement illustrated the difficulty he faced in grasping this fundamental fact. It was mostly concerned with the undecidable problem of Arnold's veracity, and details of 'the offence', though freely and even defiantly supplied, appeared as incidental to what he perceived as the story. It might be called unrealistic of him to expect a relationship rooted in such inequality to develop as an 'affair' between free individuals; he took no account of the fact that words and actions could mean different things to people in different social circumstances. Yet if this showed a lack of realism, a liberal intellectual dream world, it was an unreality also consciously sought and appreciated by Arnold, who had found himself challenged and moved by being treated as a friend of the elite. And the greater unreality lay in Alan's attitude to the law, which was not interested in his mental dilemmas. but was very much concerned with his bodily activities. He found it almost too absurd for belief, but the fact remained that it was this, 'the offence', that the police were investigating with persistent, conscientious, thoroughness.
The detectives did not, however, extend their questioning to his whole past life. In this respect they only took his fingerprints and photograph, to be checked against Scotland Yard records for previous offences. As supporting evidence of the crimes they also took what correspondence he had relating to Arnold. Aftewards, Alan was aware that if he had said Harry was lying, the police might have been unable to make any case against him. As it was, they were able to complete their duties with ease. On Saturday morning Mr Wills arrested Arnold in the Manchester printing shop (a job he immediately lost), took him to Wilmslow police station and showed him Alan's statement. Mr Wills was soon able to write out a statement for Arnold to sign, spelling out 'offences' in copious detail. This in turn Alan agreed on Monday 11 February to be 'materially correct'. The police had solved a crime which attracted up to two years of imprisonment.
The crime was, in fact, that of 'Gross Indecency contrary to Section 11 of the Criminal Law Amendment Act 1885'. It was defined purely in terms of parts of the male body, and applied absolutely, irrespective of such factors as age, financial advantage, and whether the activity was in a public or a private place. Alan's statement left no room for doubt that he was guilty, and he was wrong in imagining that what he had done might soon be 'legalised'. He was right, however, in thinking that changes were taking place in the official perception of homosexuality. Above all, the silence was being broken.
Indeed the turn of the 1940s had seen a renewal in Britain of the process which had led to that 1885 Act, to the trials of Oscar Wilde, and to the books of Havelock Ellis and Edward Carpenter in the 1890s. The point about the law was that it had replaced the vague theological 'crime against nature', or the 'crime not to be mentioned among Christians', by a definite rule. When Oscar Wilde spoke of 'the love that dares not speak its name', he identified a crucial aspect of what was happening — the speaking up, the 'flaunting', the explicitness.
In the next fifty years, incursions into British public consciousness by such books as The Loom of Youth and The Cloven Pine had been exceedingly circumspect and allusive in nature. But in the 1940s a new wave of explicitness swept across the Atlantic to break upon the more austere and tight-lipped culture of the island race.
*More precisely, it was predominantly the subject of male homosexuality that was coming into greater public prominence, just as the 1885 Act defined 'gross indecency' as a male crime. In the parallel period after World War I, much had been made of a supposed 'Black Book' compiled by the German secret service, containing names of thousands of 'sexual perverts', both men and women. This v as one reason ivhy in 1921 the Commons had votcd to extend the 1885 Act to women. But the Lords rejected the proposal — believing that even to mention the crime would have the effect of giving women ideas. The fact that men received a conscious attention not accorded to women was, therefore, an aspect of male privilege— although perhaps Alan Turing would not have seen it in quite this way.
Since 1938, for instance, the zoologist Alfred Kinsey had been documenting the unofficial reality of human sex, and in 1948 he revealed a breach of the 'fixed moral codes' so massive that, like the evidence confronting Donitz, its implications were too profound to be entertained.
While for a time such revelations could, in Britain, be dismissed as American extravagance and vulgarity, the 'head in the sand' attitude was already doomed. In many ways what was happening was a delayed effect of the war — or rather, like so many wartime developments, the expression of ideas which had begun in the 'mechanization, rationalization, modernization' of the late 1930s. While in military affairs the old regime had been forced to adopt modern methods for the sake of survival in 1942, the parallel developments in social policy took longer to filter through. The opening of a public debate about male hoinosexuality in Britain in 1952 was the conflict of the small back room, in another sphere.
In 1952, as in 1942, the times were out of joint. The rulers of Great Britain were still apt to regard the behaviour of its population as that of a public schooL In 1952 the pocket money and the tuck shop were under better management than before, and there was less open complaining from the Modern side. But the return of the old Headmaster in October 1951 had suggested invidious comparisons with former triumphs. In 1951 Britain had lost control over Iran and Egypt, countries so successfully held against German encroachment not ten years before. As during the crisis of imperialism in the 1890s, military loss of control could be identified with sexual loss of control. In the traditional view, homosexuality was an act, or practice, into which any man might be led — and such lapses into 'slackness' were to be prevented not only in the armed forces, but in the national life which raised and moulded them.
Such a view, however, could already be identified with that of an older generation, and one which had been pushed aside since 1940. For nearly a hundred years there had existed a quite different kind of official description, which concentrated not upon the act, but the state of mind. Considerable efforts had been made to elucidate a 'homosexual type', or a 'homosexual personality', rather as the nineteenth century psychologists had also devoted energy to defining criininal, or mentally deficient, or other 'degenerate types'. The word 'homosexual' was itself a nineteenth century medical neologism. Freud was often credited with making this mode of description available to people. Indeed, Alan and Robin would sometimes puzzle over the question of how people had been able to think about sexual desire before Freud's day.
In his 1950 Mind article, Alan had referred to the 'skin of an onion' analogy as helpful:
In considering the functions of the mind or the brain we find certain operations which we can explain in purely mechanical terms. This we say does not correspond to the real mind: it is a sort of skin which we must strip off if we are to find the real mind. But then in what remains we find a further skin to be stripped off, and so on. Proceeding in this way do we ever come to the 'real' mind, or do we eventually come to the skin which has nothing in it?
His own view, of course, was that the mind was like an onion, and not like an apple, there being no central, irreducible, undetermined core. In a different way, nineteenth and twentieth century science had been peeling the onion of the mind, and had dented the concept of responsibility with 'mental illness', shell-shock, neurosis, breakdowns and so forth. Where was the line to be drawn? The conservative fear was that every kind of behaviour would be excused by appeal to some irresistible, uncontrollable force majeure. Like Polanyi and Jefferson, they sought a non plus ultra to the pretensions of mental determinism, a barrier against the flood of threats to traditional values unleashed by the Second World War. They found one in homosexuality: the new men's talk of 'conditions' and 'complexes' was not to be allowed to excuse a deadly social evil, corrupting and weakening everything in its path.
At the same time, yet a third kind of description was gradually coming into focus, that of homosexual men as socially defined. From this point of view, the emphasis was to be placed not upon thoughts and feelings, nor on sexual acts, but on the particular patterns of acquaintanceship, money, and occupations associated with homosexuality. The sociologist 'Gordon Westwood', whose book Society and the Homosexual opened the British debate in 1952, described male homosexuality in all of these ways, one after the other. Reaching a wider audience, the Sunday Pictorial's series of reports on 'Evil Men' also broke what it called 'the conspiracy of silence on the subject' the same year, and likewise treated it from a modem psychological and social perspective, rather than in terms of the law. 'Most people', the newspaper explained, 'know there are such things — "Pansies" — mincing effeminate, young men who call themselves queers.' But these obvious 'freaks and rarities', it continued, represented but the tip of the iceberg. The problem was far greater than most people realised, and the time had come to tackle it.
One of the difficulties pervading these discussions was that no single description was adequate to the matter in hand, although there was an obvious virtue to each of them. There were certainly many homosexual acts — in schools, for example — which had little to do with deep-seated desires, nor with a social 'minority'. In contrast, the diffuse, romantic ambience of The Cloven Pine fell into no category recognised by the English criminal law. While there were others, like Arnold, who did not know what they wanted, but who were very familiar with the social patterns, with their advantages and disadvantages, of what a Methodist minister, quoted in the Sunday Pictorial, called 'the worst city for homosexuality that I have been in'.
The backroom boys of medicine and the social sciences were bringing these unwelcome contradictions to the surface. The law was under attack for its purely physical level of description. Gordon Westwood held, in contrast, that 'The overriding consideration in dealing with homosexual offenders should be that it is a form of mental illness.' But life was more complicated than that, the enforcement of the law was related less to the prevalence of the 'acts' than to the structure of British society.
For this reason the attempt to form a more scientific description ran up against British doublethink. The psychologist Dr Clifford Allen told the Sunday Pictorial that 'In the past battles may have been won on the playing fields of our public schools, but numerous lives have been broken in the dormitories'. The unofficial reality could be entirely different from any particular official line, and in private, the most conservative personages might regard both the law and current psychological theories as nonsensical. But amidst the great complexity, one simplifying feature stood out. As in the 'nation in miniature' of the public school, it was contact between those of different social rank that was most likely to be discovered and punished. Alan Turing's crime epitomised the action upon which the operation of the law was in practice focussed. So was its discovery, by a related petty crime, a classic case of successful detection. In another way again, the arrest was a textbook case, for the age range of thirty to forty was the one most frequently represented in the prosecutions of the period. It was also true that as what Westwood called an 'outsider', unfamiliar with the social milieu, he was natural prey for attempted blackmail.
In the development of his sexual life Alan Turing was in many ways typical for a gay man of his time. He had enjoyed the benefit of a very unusual, very privileged ambience at King's, but in the outside world, the same factors came into play as Kinsey had noted while interpreting the statistics:
There is considerable conflict among younger males over participation in such socially taboo activity, and there is evidence that a much higher percentage of younger males is attracted and aroused than ever engages in overt homosexual activities to the point of orgasm. Gradually, over a period of years, many males who are aroused by homosexual situations became more frank in their acceptance and more direct in their pursuit of complete relations, although some of them are still much restrained by fear of blackmail.
Kinsey found among his 'active' population a general increase in fequency of sexual experience up to an age of thirty-five, thereafter continuing at that level until the age of fifty, corroborating the common sense expectation that the 'social taboo' could inhibit sexual development for perhaps twenty years. In this respect Alan Turing was just launching out. It was only in his thirties that he had begun to find his way outside King's. He had been involved in two extended relationships, but he was not by nature the most conjugal person, and his exploratory urge was better suited to the possibilities of the cruising-grounds, once he had overcome his shyness. It was not that he was very successful, nor perhaps did he escape a profound sense of compromise and of the loss of youthful ideals — 'Beggars can't be choosers,' he wrote in his self-analytical short story — but he could take pride in breaking out of the framework of his upbringing, working out something for himself, and in managing without special privileges. He had gained experience, and as a very young forty, would want to pursue its opportunities before he was much older. It was this process which had been arrested.
Another feature of the operation of the law was that this sinking of men's souls was all the time on the increase. Between 1931 and 1951 there had been a five-fold increase in prosecutions, a steady rise through depression, blitz and rocket bombs alike. In 1933 it was indeed as J.S. Mill had said about heresy: that public opinion was more crushing than the direct application of the law. By 1952 the position had changed. This was consistent with the great extension of the role of the state in every direction, taking over functions formerly left to individuals, families, voluntary socie6es and so forth. It might be argued that the state was taking a larger role in policing sexual behaviour, precisely because the inhibitory effect of public opinion was decreasing.
In more conservative circles, it was taken that the law only gave the final stamp of authority to the ostracism of society. King George V was supposed to have said, 'I thought men like that shot themselves.' Alan Turing, however, cared nothing for the opinion of society, and therefore was ahead of his time in laying bare the role of the state. For most gay men, the question of ivho kneiv would be of colossal significance, and life would be rigidly divided into two compartments, one for those who knew, and one for those who did not. Blackmail depended as much upon this fact as upon the legal penalties. The question was important to Alan too, but in a rather different way: it was because he did not wish to be accepted or respected as the person he was not. He was likely to drop a remark about an attractive young man, or something of the kind, on a third or fourth meeting with a generally &iendly colleague. To be close to him, it was essential to accept him as a homosexual: it was one of the stringent conditions he imposed.
Exposure, therefore, held no intrinsic terror for him. But a criminal trial would involve not merely exposure as a homosexual, but all the concrete details. It would be one thing to be a martyr for an abstract cause, and quite another to have the sequence of events with Arnold rendered into an unflattering public form. It would expose him not only as a sexual outlaw, which at least carried with it a certain pride, but as a fool. In this respect his insouciance was amazing. But it was his all-or-nothing mentality at work. He had presumbly decided long before that such things were part of the 'large remnant of the random behaviour of infancy', and that it was absurd to be ashamed of anything harmlessly enjoyed, whether it be parlour games or bedroom pleasures. It meant that he had to take a stand not for an ideal, not for anything particularly rewarding or successful, but for that which was simply true. But he did not flinch. The detectives continued to be astonished when they visited him in connection with the case. He would take out his violin and play to them the Irish tune Cockles and Mussels, accompanied with glasses of wine.
After three weeks on 27 February, Alan and Amold both appeared in the Wilmslow magistrates' court for the committal proceedings. The CID officer, Mr Wills, described the circuinstances of the arrests, and read out the statements in full. There was another prosecution witness: Alan's bank manager, whose ledgers corroborated the detail of the £7 cheque. There was no cross-examination. Alan's solicitor 'reserved his defence', and obtained his release on £50 bail. Arnold, however, was held in custody pending the trial proper, to be held at the forthcoming Quarter Sessions. The local newspaper' reported the court appearance and the gist of the story. They printed both men's full addresses, in the usual way, and a photograph of Alan.
The case was not taken up in the Manchester papers, but there was certainly a possibility of the forthcoming trial being reported widely. In any case, Alan had to look after his individual relationships, so that people he cared about should not learn of what had happened from the newspapers or some other unfortunate way. In particular there was his family to consider. Alan wrote to his brother John — with a letter, for once, not a postcard or a telegram. It started off 'I suppose you know I am a homosexual.' John knew no such thing. He had always thought of his brother as 'misogynist', inasmuch as he avoided flirtatious chit-chat when on his occasional visits to Guildford. But Alan bore no resemblance to John's picture of 'pansies', and this possibility had never occurred to him. John stuffed the letter into his pocket and read it later in his oflice.
The letter explained some of the circumstances, and also that he was going to plead 'not guilty' and be properly defended. John immediately dropped everything and went to Manchester, where he consulted a senior partner in a leading firm of solicitors. He in turn saw Alan's solicitor, and they persuaded Alan to change his plea to 'guilty'. He w,as, in fact, caught between two untruths. To deny what he had done would be to tell a lie, and to convey a false sense that he considered it something that ought to be denied. Yet to be portrayed in public with words such as 'guilty', 'self-confessed'. 'admit' was also to compound an untruth. There was no way to keep himself pure. In practical terms his statement to the police had rendered 'defence' impossible, and he had little to lose by pleading 'guilty'. More pertinent. from John's point of view, was the idea that a 'guilty' plea would render the trial both quick and quiet. He thought Alan had been a 'silly ass' to go to the police about the burglary, and that everything he had done showed his naivete about the world outside the intellectual elite.
Behind this lay the question of how to tell their mother. This was the very thing for which 'men like that shot themselves', and Alan told Robin that it was the worst part of the whole business. He had the gall to ask John to do it, which reasonably enough John refused. Accordingly it became Alan's duty to make a journey to Guildford to tell her the facts of his life. Mrs Turing was not entirely clear about the significance of what had happened. but she was sufficiently conscious of the subject for there to be a distressing argument, somewhat at cross purposes. She then placed the matter firmly at the back of her mind. But for whatever mixture of reasons, the salient fact was that she did not let it cause an estrangement. In Alan's schooldays she had sided with the authorities, seeing him as the problem for them, not school as a problem for him; this time she tacitly took his side.
Alan wrote to his brother complaining that he had shown no sympathy with the position in which homosexuals found themselves, which was true enough. He also accused him of caring for nothing but his own reputation in the City, which was not. It was more that both alike shared their father's character, and spoke their different minds. John Turing made no secret of the fact that he considered his brother's behaviour disgusting and disreputable, an extreme example of 'a modus vivendi in which the feelings of others counted for so little.' He was particularly offended by the letter of complaint, because he had intervened in order to protect Alan from himself.
* Once John Turimg had asked his father what he hated most. 'Humbug', he replied without a moment's hesitation.
Perhaps nearly as difficult was the duty of telling Max Newman, so long a father figure. But if so, it did not show in Alan's behaviour. He simply announced that he had been arrested, and the reason for it, while they were sitting at lunch in the refectory. He did this in a particularly loud voice, making it clear that he rather wanted it to be heard by all and sundry. Max Newman was astonished, but his reaction was one of support. Alan asked him to appear as a character witness at the trial, a request he also made of Hugh Alexander, currently working for GCHQ. They both agreed. So in this respect Cambridge liberalism was prepared to stand up and be counted on his behalf — no small matter when a known homosexual was a social leper, conferring stigma by association.
It was easier to tell those who were already familiar with his homosexuality. To Fred Clayton Alan wrote:
The burglary business was actually infinitely worse than an ordinary burglary. I had got a boy friend, who ... put his friends on to my house. One of these has been picked up by the police and has informed against us. When you come to Liverpool perhaps you will stop off to see me in jail.
Then there was Neville, Alan telephoned and then made a journey down to Reading to see him. Neville thought Alan had been incredibly naive to call in the police in the first place. He was, of course, indirectly threatened himself, being fortunate that the police had not pursued their enquiries further, searching through letters and so forth. One ship in the convoy having gone down, the others had to look out very sharply. Kot himself coming from the governing classes, he felt it as a simple outrage that someone who had done something very important in the war could be treated in this way. The visit was painful. Neville's mother heard what had happened and applied sufficient emotional pressure to stop her son from seeing Alan again.
There were others too who had to know. Alan wrote to Joan Clarke (herself, as it happened, now engaged to be married), explaining that he had not told her that he 'did occasionally practise', and that he had been found out. 'They're not as savage as they used to be,' he added, thinking back perhaps to the trials of Oscar Wilde. He also wrote to Bob, now away in Bangkok, where his letter, with its tone of 'never apologise, never explain', caused shock and sadness.
At the university it was yet another case of Alan proving a great embarrassment. They dealt with it as 'typical Turing'. There were members of staff who avoided him, but then they had avoided him anyway. Most people coped with it by carefully not referring to the case. A more free and easy atmosphere prevailed in the computing laboratory than elsewhere, although one or two of the staff were shocked. Tony Brooker's attitude suited Alan best: he had no idea such laws existed, and was simply interested to hear from Alan about what happened. In some ways the case made Alan appear a more human figure. When he called in Cicely Popplewell and asked 'Are you shockable?' explaining that he might be going to prison, it was the first time he had treated her as a person. There was no question of helping or extending sympathy to him — his personality ruled it out. Individual people were onlookers on events that might as well have been happening in Russia. Alan probably found an element of pleasure in confronting the more 'stuffy' elements of Manchester, and gave the impression, which the less sensitive seriously believed, that he did not care a jot about the case. As at school, he bore his afflictions cheerfully.
There was joking in the laboratory about how he would manage for money if he lost his job. In this respect, Max Newman spoke strongly on his behalf, and so did Blackett. Indeed Blackett went to see the Vice-Chancellor, Sir John Stopford, Professor of Experimental Neurology and a distinguished Mancunian, armed with a quotation from the Kinsey report to sustain his case. He said that Alan's work should be safeguarded 'at all costs'. The Vice-Chancellor was less receptive to Kinsey's statistics than the Admiralty had been to Blackett'sconvoy calculations ten years before. 'I will listen to any argument with care and sympathy,' said Stopford, 'but if anyone seeks to document it they must bring me authorities I can myself respect.' But Alan's position was spared, although presumably only after the most thorough of carpetings, for Stopford was no friend of 'slackness'.. Max Newman's statement was crucially important; indeed he found himself surprised by the autonomy he enjoyed as head of department. He said he wished Alan Turing to remain, and this sufficed.
There was also his connection with King's to consider, but here an odd coincidence came into play. His fellowship was due to expire on 13 March 1952, so although he had been arrested a Fellow, he would no longer be one at his trial. Alan consulted with Philip Hall regarding his position, and he in turn talked with Professor Adcock. They advised him not to resign, and in fact the fellowship simply ended at its appointed time, after a total of nine years spread over the past seventeen. He had no reason to feel cut off from King's because he had been found out; Cambridge could remain a point of security and support for him. There was another point of support in the reaction of his good neighbours the Webbs. Although upset by what had transpired, the Webbs still made him welcome in their home.
Despite so much time being taken up by these events, he did not stop work. He would have been ashamed to have let them stop him, just as hc had insisted on keeping up some work on logic throughout the war. The very day after the arrest, he was in London for a meeting of the Ratio Club, talking about his theory of morphogenesis. John Pringle took up the idea as a basis for his discussion of the origin of life in the primordial chemical soup, in a lecture later in 1952. Then again, on 29 February, the day that the local newspaper was reporting the first hearing, he was defending his work against the criticisms of the Belgian chemist Ilya Prigogine, then on a visit to the Manchester chemistry department. On the same day Alan also completed his revisions to the morphogenesis paper, and on 15 March he submitted for publication his work on the calculation of the zeta function, even though the practical attempt at doing it on the prototype Manchester computer had been so unsatisfactory. It might be that he wished to get it out of the way in case he was going to prison.
On 21 March, Alan went to Henley-on-Thames for the weekend, to attend a large Nuffield Foundation conference on biological research. He transpired, the Webbs still made him welcome in their home.
Despite so much time being taken up by these events, he did not stop work. He would have been ashamed to have let them stop him, just as hc had insisted on keeping up some work on logic throughout the war. The very day after the arrest, he was in London for a meeting of the Ratio Club, talking about his theory of morphogenesis. John Pringle took up the idea as a basis for his discussion of the origin of life in the primordial chemical soup, in a lecture later in 1952. Then again, on 29 February, the day that the local newspaper was reporting the first hearing, he was defending his work against the criticisms of the Belgian chemist Ilya Prigogine, then on a visit to the Manchester chemistry department. On the same day Alan also completed his revisions to the morphogenesis paper, and on 15 March he submitted for publication his work on the calculation of the zeta function, even though the practical attempt at doing it on the prototype Manchester computer had been so unsatisfactory. It might be that he wished to get it out of the way in case he was going to prison.
On 21 March, Alan went to Henley-on-Thames for the weekend, to attend a large Nuffield Foundation conference on biological research. He found many points of contact with the discussions, which were influenced by the rise of cybernetics and in which the importance of the morphogenetic problem was much stressed. Donald Michie was there. He had corresponded a little with Alan about the morphogenetic ideas, having himself moved on from physiology to genetics. Alan asked him to come for a walk, and revealed that beneath the sang froid he showed to the more conventional world, he was in a very nervous state. He mentioned the previous appearance in the magistrates court, and the forthcoming trial, which was now only a week away. Donald said that no serious person would take a court judgment in the matter to be of importance, and that Alan would have to go through with it knowing that. But Alan might well have reflected that it was not only the law that made him an outcast, but all the official British culture, that of its administration, its newspapers, schools, churches, social life and entertainment — and that very largely its intellectuals would add their public weight against him too, whatever Donald Michie generously said.
Attitudes were one thing. Practical prospects were another. There was the nauseating business of having authorities ransack his emotional life and pronounce upon it, and there was the actual punishment that lay in store. The circumstances of his crime, with their elements of age and class difference, were against him. Even to the kindly disposed, this might seem a case of the 'elderly degenerate' of The Green Bay Tree, rather than the romantic wantonness of the greenwood tree.
His intransigent attitude was also a challenge to the authority of the law. But on the other hand, only 174 of the 746 men prosecuted in 1951 for the crime of 'gross indecency' had been imprisoned, and then mostly for less than six months. He would have been in a more dangerous position had the charge been that of 'buggery', for the law distinguished carefully between different kinds of sexual activity. He was also a 'first offender', which diminished the chances of imprisonment. But beyond this, the times were changing, and a more modern attitude was coming to prevail. The backroom boys were beginning to affect not only descriptions, but prescriptions.
Writing a new Foreword to Brave New World in 1946, Aldous Huxley suggested that 'The release of atomic energy marks a great revolution in human history, but not (unless we blow ourselves to bits and so put an end to history) the final and most searching revolution.' Despite the fact that he believed atomic power' would usher in 'highly centralised totalitarian governments', continuing the trend which the Second World War had accelerated, he stuck to his guns of 1932. 'This really revolutionarv revolution is to be achieved, not in the external world, but in the souls and flesh of human beings,' he had claimed, and the signs were there in the existing research in 'biology, physiology, and psychology'.
Alan Turing was no stranger to these subjects; his intellectual development had circled round to face the question of Natural Wonders: 'By what process of becoming did I myself finally appear in this world?' The significance of his mathematical work, indeed, rested upon the fact that specific substances, the 'growth hormones' referred to in his paper, had been chemically isolated by experimental biochemists. Amidst the patient accumulation of facts, the discoveries of the sexual hormones since 1889 had engendered a particular interest. Such interest, both lay and scientific, was not confined to the role of the hormones in physiological grov th. It was widely asserted that the 'chemical messages', at which F..T. Brewster had marvelled in 1912, determined the psychology as well as the physiology of the individual.
If, to the more old-fashioned person, the problem of homosexuality remained one of 'filth' and indiscipline, of which as little was to be said as possible, the modern psychological view was dominated by the categories of 'masculine' and 'feminine', with a belief that gay men and lesbian women had been endowed by nature with some unusual mixture of these allimportant characteristics. One attraction of this view was that it left intact an assumption of universal heterosexuality, since these apparent exceptions could be defined away as cases v here a woman was 'really' a man, or vice versa. Some found in this theory a scientific justification of homosexuality, according to the logic of the age, others found the hope of solving the hitherto unsolvable problem that it posed.
The discovery of the hormones suggested that the eternal verities of 'masculine' and 'feminine' might, indeed, be embodied in a simple chemical form. It was appropriate to a decade in which these great truths were so sedulously cultivated by Hollywood that the first major American experiments to test this theory were made at Los Angeles in 1940. The endocrinologists estimated the quantity of male hormones, or androgens, and of female hormones, or oestrogens, in the urine of seventeen homosexual men who had been 'taken into custody'. They did the same for thirty-one 'normal males'. Their results showed that even for a single individual this ratio could vary from time to time by a factor of up to thirteen. However, a judicious averaging of the ratios suggested that gay men had an androgen-oestrogen ratio of only sixty per cent of the others.
The data were intimately bound up with instructions. Dr Glass, describing this result, explained that 'Obviously, if a biologic etiology were established, this would lead to investigation of therapeutic possibilities from a much wider perspective than now exists,' which in English meant that if they could find a chemical to turn homosexuals into heterosexuals, then they could use it. So in 1944 Glass experimented with the injection into some eleven gay men of male hormones 'kindly supplied' by pharmaceutical companies. 'Four subjects accepted organotherapy by compulsion' — a court order in one case, and parental authority in the case of three boys.
*Thus an exposition of this idea appeared in the 1931 American novel Strange Brother,
one of the few accessible pre-war exceptions to the general silence: 'You see the generative
gland is made up, not only of the gland of reproduction, but of a gland which manufactures
the chemicals that cause a man to be masculine in temperament, and a woman feminine.'
'Both these chemicals are found in every human embryo. But if normal development does
not take place, the feminine chemical may predominate in a male, or the masculine in a
female. And we then get a man attracted by men, or a woman attracted by women.'
'This, at least, is the most plausible theory that modern science has to offer. And our
experiments on rats and guinea pigs bear out the theory.... We've proved that, aside from
the function of reproduction, sex differences are chemical.'
* Some of the results did not fit in, because the 'normals' sometimes had low ratios, and
the gay men high ratios. But this was ingeniously explained: 'Those few normal subjects
may be latent homosexuals, whereas the homosexuals with the high ratios may not be of the
true constitutional type.'
*In similar vein: 'The growing importance of the sociological aspects of the subject makes
urgent the continued investigation of the problem from a broad psychosomatic perspective.'
Alas, the experiment was not a success, in Dr Glass's opinion. 'Only three of the subjects reported benefit from this therapy. Five reported an intensification of the homosexual drive.' This to the scientists was 'a worsening of the condition'. It did not help in 'the clinical management of the male homosexual.'
Back at the drawing board of endocrinology, the failure of the experiment suggested a diametrically opposite approach. If the male hormone increased sexual 'drive', then perhaps the female hormone would decrease it — for heterosexual and homosexual men alike. 'I'his bright idea had already been tried' by another American pioneer, C. W. Dunn, in 1940. He had reported that 'At the end of the treatment there was a complete absence of libido.'
One attraction of this technique was that it was so much more effective than physical castration. Surgery of this kind had held a traditional part in the American Way, especially since the eugenic clean-up of the late nineteenth century. In 1950 there were eleven states which allowed for compulsory castration, with fifty thousand cases on record. But there was also scientific evidence that castration did not successfully inhibit sexual activity, and in this respect the chemical approach was more promising.
This was the lesson drawn by the first British paper on the subject, which appeared in the pages of the Lancet just a few days after Jefferson invoked the supremely human 'charm of sex' in his Lister Oration. It appeared under the authoritative name of F.L. Golla, director of the progressive Burden Neurological Institute at Bristol, where Grey VValter had built his cybernetic tortoises. Neither compulsory nor voluntary castration was allowed in Britain. On the other hand, as he wrote, 'The Criminal Justice Act, 1948, had emphasised the duty of the community to provide treatment for the habitual sexual offender.' Hor mone dosage resolved this contradiction, being both legal, and more effective. By 1949 Golla had experimented on thirteen men, and found that with sufficiently large doses 'libido could be abolished within a month.' He concluded:
In view of the non-mutilating nature of this treatment and the ease with which
it can be administered to a consenting patient we believe that it should be adopted
whenever possible in male cases of abnormal and uncontrollable sexual urge.
He had opened the visionary prospect of providing chemical castration for
all homosexual men. In 1952, the Sunday Pictorial commented that
What is needed is a new establishment for them like Broadmoor. It should be a clinic rather than a prison, and these men should be sent there and kept there until they are cured. Doctors and psychiatrists would welcome the idea. There is still a great deal to be learned about the delicately balanced endocrine glands which determine whether or not a man could take to these unpleasant activities.
* Thus Golla and Grey Kalter were the two scientific colleagues thanked by %. Ross
Ashby for reading the draft of his 1952 cybernetic book Design for a Brain.
L. R. Broster, the Charing Cross Hospital specialist who has done pioneer work in this field, writes that surgical treatment has made great strides recently but 'is still in the groping stage of trial and error'.
The possibilities had, in fact, widened into a more ambitious sphere of human management. Another paper' described how the male hormone had been administered to a fourteen-year-old truant:
For many years he had shrunk from personal contacts, been sensitive, shy and latterly more solitary. Recently he had become morbidly preoccupied with thoughts on abstruse topics beyond his years, chiefly psychology and religion... In the ward he read a lot, wrote many letters, helped with domestic jobs, showed interest in philosophy, but mixed little with others.
But after a course of the drug
his religious and other preoccupations disappeared. The drug was stopped and he was discharged, much improved. Six months later he was reported to have a job at a printers, but still apt to speculate on religion, and to be readily teased by other youngsters.
Perhaps the fourteen-year-old Alan 'Turing would have benefited more from such scientific treatment than from the rough-and-ready team games. On the other hand, it was the female hormone which according to this authority had been most useful in controlling occasional outbreaks of homosexual behaviour in the 12 to 16 age groups.
More effective than cold baths, or Nowell Smith's eloquence, it was the oestrogen which had been useful in 'enabling one of the provisions of the Criminal Justice Act, 1948, to be carried out.' It was the beginning of a new era, in which chemical solutions could be found for the problems of social control.
These advances did not escape the notice of other scientists. In 1952 Sir Charles Darv in, who always took a long-term view, published a book called The Next Million Years. Biology, rather than physics, he held to offer 'the most exciting possibilities', one being that
there might be a drug, which, without other harmful effects, removed the urgency of sexual desire, and so reproduced in humanity the status of workers in a beehive.
Other chapters in the progress of mankind had given rise to alternative methods of treatment, but these had generally disappointed the experts. Gordon Kestwood summed up the experience of analytical psychoanalysts as that of finding homosexuality to present the most problems, of all the cases that they met. Lobotomy had been tried but, as Westwood wrote,
this did not seem to be any more 'successful'. Nor was the administration of a drug to induce epileptic fits, another medical advance of the 1940s. The application of behaviourism to the problem, by administering electric shocks or nauseating drugs in asraciation with sexually attractive stimuli, was a technique still undergoing trial in Cnwhoslovakia and not yet introduced to British psychiatry. For the time being, the less scientific pain buttons offered by prison, loss of employment, social ostracism and blackmail were expected to control behaviour, and when these failed, the new men offered 'organotherapy', or chemical castration. Such were the resources of modern science that were offered to Alan Turing. He perceived them as the lesser evil, and on that basis went to trial. It was a trial between the old and the new.
The queened pawn faced the White Queen. The case of Regina v. Turing and Murray was heard on 31 March 1952, at the Quarter Sessions held at the Cheshire town of Knutsford. The judge was Mr J. Fraser Harrison. Alan was represented by Mr.G. Lind-Smith, and Arnold by Mr Em.yn Hooson. Both were prosecuted by Mr Robin David. The charges now amounted to twelve in number. With the Looking-Glass symmetry of symmetrical crimes, they began:
Alan Mathison Turing
1. On the 17th day of December, 1951, at Wilmslow, being a male person,
committed an act of gross indecency with Arnold Murray, a male person.
2. On the 17th day of December, 1951, at Wilmslow, being a male person was
party to the commission of an act of gross indecency with Arnold Murray, a male
person.
and so forth, for each of the other two nights, and then Arnold was charged in exactly the same way so that the last accusation was that he:
12. On the 2nd day of February, 1952, at Kilmslow, being a male person, was
party to the commission of an act of gross indecency with Alan Mathison Turing,
a male person.
They both pleaded 'guilty' to all the charges, although Alan was guilty of something for which he showed no guilt. The prosecuting counsel, in outlining the case, laid stress upon his unrepentant remarks.
There only lay his 'character' to set against this adrnitted lawbreaking. Normally, 'good character' would be a disguised statement of class status, but in these circumstances his status told against him. The theme of the better public schools had been the balance of privilege and duty, and as one of the prefect class he was supposed to set an example, not to break the rules himself. Alan Turing, however, was little interested either in the privileges or the duties of his class. He never tried to pull rank on the detectives, who saw him as an 'ordinary fellow', with his occasional visits to the local pub. Conversely, his crime was seen at least by an older generation as a betrayal of his class. Arnold likewise was made to feel by his family that his real crime had been that of dragging down a gentleman.
The OBE was duly given a mention, and Hugh Alexander bore witness that Alan was 'a national asset'. Max Newman was asked whether he would receive such a man in his home, and replied that he had already done so, Alan being a personal friend of himself and his wife. He described Alan as 'particularly honest and truthful'. 'He is completely absorbed in his work,' he continued, 'and is one of the most profound and original mathematical minds of his generation.' Lind-Smith pleaded that he should not go to prison:
He is entirely absorbed in his work, and it would be a loss if a man of his ability— which is no ordinary ability — were not able to carry on with it. The public would lose the benefit of the research work he is doing. There is treatment which could be given him. I ask you to think that the public interest would not be well served if this man is taken away from the very important work he is doing.
Mr Hooson, however, defended Arnold as the innocent led astray by Alan's wiles:
Murray is not a university Reader, he is a photo-printer. It was he who was approached by the other man. He has not such tendencies as Turing, and if he had not met Turing he would not have indulged in that practice.
Max Newman and Hugh Alexander were amazed that Alan should go to the stake for Arnold, but Alexander was impressed by his 'moral courage' and Newman by his 'strong line'. He answered back at the judge's remarks, and he did not recant, at an occasion whose very essence was the obtaining of a confession. Hilbert had written of Galileo that in his recantation 'he was not an idiot. Only an idiot could believe that scientific truth needs martyrdom — that may be necessary in religion, but scientific results prove themselves in time.' But this was not a trial of scientific truth.
The verdict quivered between the old and the new dispensations, and came down for the new. Bletchley Park scored a victory beyond its terrn. The state washed its hands, and handed Alan to the judgment of science. He was placed on probation, with the condition that he 'submit for treatment by a duly qualified medical practitioner at Manchester Royal Inhrmary.'
The Wilmslow newspaper headline was:
UNIVERSITY READER PUT ON PROBATION
To have Organo- Therapic Treatment
* The fact that he retained his OBE was itself an interesting detail of the case. The '4'ar
Office would demand the return of medals from anyone p.'ilty under the 1885 Act. The
Foreign Office presumably, took a different view.
Alan wrote to Philip Hall two weeks later:
(postmarked 17 April 1952)
... I am both bound over for a year and obliged to take this organo-therapy for the same period. It is supposed to reduce sexual urge whilst it goes on, but one is supposed to return to normal when it is over. I hope they're right. The psychiatrists seemed to think it useless to try and do any psychotherapy.
The day of the trial was by no means disagreeable. Whilst in custody with the other criminals I had a very agreeable sense of irresponsibility, rather like being back at school. The warders rather like prefects. I was also quite glad to see my accomplice again, though I didn t trust him an inch.
Perhaps it was surprising that he chose the scientific alternative to prison. He was annoyed at having been circumcised and at any editorial meddling with his writings — small interferences compared with this piece of doctoring. Neither did he care much for crea ure comforts, and a year in prison, even an Eng1ish one, would not have been rnuch more uncomfortable than Sherborne. On the other hand, to take that option would have impeded his work and very likely would have forefeited his Manchester position and the computer. He had the choice between his body and feelin~~ on the one hand, and his inte11ectual life on the other. It was a remarkable decision problem. He chose 'thinking' and sacrificed 'feeling'.
There was no concept of a right to sexual expression in the Britain of 1952. People made jokes about bromides put in the servicemen's tea. Samuel Butler might well have laughed in his grave at the prophet of the intelligent machine being punished for being sick and treated for committing a crime. But no one at the time perceived an irony in Alan Turing being on the receiving end of science. As for Jefferson, ranging himself with the humanists, or Polanyi, foe of the state's pretensions to order human life, and adherent of the Congress for Cultural Freedom — this was a private and distasteful medical matter, and did not gain the attention of the liberal intelligentsia of Manchester, discoursing on the folly and iniquity of treating minds like machines.
Harry the burglar was sent to a Borstal the same day, in another trial. Arnold, however, was conditionally discharged. He left the court in a daze, hardly knowing to what he had confessed, and then found himself pointed out in the street by his neighbours. After a few weeks he escaped back to London, found a job in the Lyons Corner House in the Strand, and rapidly made his way into anarchic Fitzrovia. Here in the coffee-bar world, meeting such people as Colin Wilson, he was accepted as an individual and learned to play the guitar.
For Alan, there were rather different consequences of the trial, because of the drug treatment. He was rendered impotent, although scientific opinion was that the impotence was not permanent and potency would return when the medication was stopped. It had other physical effects, for
To obtain the necessary effect mentally, it was necessary to maintain a moderate but not excessive degree of gynaecomastic response.
Translating from the Greek, this meant that there could be no 'reduction in libido' without the production of breasts. Again, according to the same authority,
There is at least a possibility that oestrogen may have a direct pharmacological effect on the central nervous system. Zuckerman (1952) has demonstrated, through his experiments on rats, that learning can be influenced by sex hormones, and that oestrogen can act as a cerebral depressant in these rodents. While it has yet to be shown that a similar influence is exerted in humans, there are sorne indications clinically that performance may be impaired, though more investigation is needed before any conclusion is reached.
So perhaps 'thinking' and 'feeling' could not be so neatly separated after all.
There were some more minor consequences. The News of the World covered the case with a short article in its northern editions, headed ACCUSED HAD POWERFUL BRAIN. He remained under the auspices of the district probation officer. David Champernowne came to Manchester to do some workt on the computer, and being invited to dinner at Hollymeade, found the probation officer another guest. Alan told a story about how the retired bishop of Liverpool had heard of the case and asked to see him- he had gone along, rather surprisingly for one who had written in 1936 that he would not tolerate bishops interfering in his private life. But nothing was private now. He had thought the bishop well-meaning but hopelessly old-fashioned. A further consequence, which for another person might have been major but which for Alan had little significance, was that, with a criminal record of moral turpitude,' he was henceforth automatica!ly barred from the United States.
*At the Nuffield Foundation conference that Alan attended, P. B. Medawar had proposed a programme of experiments on male animals, injecting oestrogen in order to reveal the neuro-physiological mechanism through the consequent alteration in behaviour patterns. Rarely can a Fellow of the Royal Society have had the honour of sitting at the wrong end of such an experiment.
* The work he was doing was on the application of sequential analysis to economics. Although he knew that Alan was interested in Bayesian statistics, he had no idea that Alan had independently invented sequential analysis in Hut 8.
* In a reform typical of the period, 1952 saw a change in American immigration policy from a legal definition of homosexuality (the breaking of a law), to a medical definition. The Immigration and Nationality Act of that year specified that 'Aliens afflicted with psychopathic personality... shall be excludable from admission into the L'nited States.' In 1967 the Supreme Court confirmed that 'the legislative history of the Act indicates beyond a shadow of doubt that the Congress intended the phrase "psychopathic personality" to include homosexuals.' Strictly steafting, therefore, Alan Turing entered the prohibited category in 1952 irrespective of the trial; in practice, of course, the point was that he had been found out.
Describing the events of the trial as with amused detachment, Alan tried to continue as though nothing had happened — as though he had been caught doing a naughty experiment in the dormitory and had suffered the confiscation of his chemistry set. 'I'his was, indeed, more or less what had happened and on one level he could treat it like the humiliations of schooldays. Yet it had obliged him to become more conscious of the conduct of his life and more conscious of his environment. The short story that he scribbled out was one symptom of this increased self-awareness. One person who found him much more interesting and indeed congenial, nov that he was not a remote mathematician with a one-track mind about machines, was Lyn Newman. With his reality revealed, Alan dropped his disconcerting evasiveness, and Lyn Newman found that 'once he had looked directly and earnestly at his companion, in the confidence of friendly talk,' his eyes, 'blue to the brightness and richness of stained glass', could 'never again be missed. Such candour and comprehension looked from them, something so civilised that one hardly dared to breathe. It was at this time that she
pushed first Anna Karenina and then War and Peace into his hands. I knew that he read Jane Austen and 'I rollope as sedatives, but he was totally uninterested in poetry and not particularly sensitive to literature or any of the arts, and therefore not at all an easy person to supply with reading matter. War and Peace proved to be in a very special way the masterpeice for him and he wrote to me expressing in moving terms his appreciation of Tolstoy's understanding and insight. Alan had recognized himself and his own problems in LVar and Peace and Tolstoy had gained a new reader of a moral stature and complexity and an originality of spirit equal to his own.
For indeed, he was there in War and Peace, as Pierre wandering into the midst of the battle — and then? What did it mean! What was it for'. And he was there in Tolstoy, whose puzzle was not over this or that fact, but what history was. Could an individual cause an event, hold power, or exercise will, as in the story book kind of history? 'The subject of history,' he wrote, 'is not the will of man as such but our presentation of it.' It was, in other words, the level of description. The degree of 'will' would depend upon the kind of description, and 'what is known to us we call the laws of necessity; what is unknown we call free will. Free will is for history only an expression connoting what we do not know about the laws of human life.' In particular, the laws of the connection, as he put it, between the mind and the world, were yet unknown, and therefore called free. These were Turing questions, in another form. In the January radio discussion he had said, 'Thinking is those mental processes we don't understand.'
Yet, wrote Tolstoy, however nonsensical the idea of free will, 'without this conception of freedom not only would he be unable to understand life but he would be unable to live for a single moment. Life would be intolerable because all man's aspirations, all the interest that life holds for him, are so many aspirations and strivings after greater freedom.... To imagine a man wholly destitute of freedom is the same thing as to imagine a man destitute of life.'
For Alan Turing there remained one freedom, not perhaps one that Tolstoy would have had in mind. It was that of exiled pleasure. The head master having taken action to prevent associations within the house, he had to fall back upon the possibilities offered by the boys in the other houses. For Alan would not let the system defeat him. On May Day 1952 there was a meeting of the Ratio Club at Cambridge, which he attended, and it was probably then that he saw Norman Routledge at King's. Alan explained about the trial and the hormone treatment ('I'm growing breasts!') and Norman told him that he had heard that in Norway (of all places) there were dances 'for men only'.
In the summer of 1952 Alan went for a holiday in Norway, one which turned out to be a disappointment regarding the rumoured dances."
(Alan Turing: The Enigma by Andrew Hodges, Princeton University Press, 2012, pp. 456-476.)
"It had not taken the police long to detect Alan Turing's crime. It was almost inevitable once he had made the original report of the burglary, for the police had been able to identify Harry's fingerprints. He was already in custody on another charge in Manchester, and before long made a statement which referred to Arnold telling him of having 'business' at Alan's home. The further information Alan had volunteered on the Sunday merely gave the police their opportunity to act with confidence.
читать дальшеAlan took them upstairs to where he was working with his desk calculator. The detectives, Mr Wills and Mr Rimmer, found themselves in an unfamiliar environment, the room littered with pieces of paper covered with mathematical symbols. They told Alan that they 'knew all about it', leaving him unclear whether they were talking about the burglary or of something else. He later told Robin that he had to admire their interrogation technique. They asked him to repeat the description he had given them on the Sunday moning and Alan said, 'He's about twenty-five years of age, five foot ten inches, with black hair.' Imitation was not Alan Turing's strong point— perhaps an intelligent machine would have done better. This feeble attempt sank like a stone. Mr Wills said, 'We have reason to believe your description is false. Why are you lying?'
This was the moment for 'I don't know what came over me', or the other phrases employed by more politically-minded persons, but once the detectives had shown their hand, Alan blurted out everything that they wanted to hear, in particular admitting that he had concealed the identity of the informant because he 'had an affair with him'. Mr Wills asked 'Would you care to tell us what kind of an affair you have had with him?', and this policemanlike question elicited from Alan a memorable phrase, detailing in semi-official language three of the activities that had taken place. 'A very honourable man', the detectives thought him as they cautioned him in the usual way, and they were the more impressed when he volunteered a statement of five handritten pages. Relieved of the usual necessity to translate human life into police language, they were most appreciative of what was 'a lovely statement'. written in 'a flowing style, almost like prose', although 'beyond them in some of its phraseology'. They were particularly struck by his absence of shame. 'He was a real convert. ... he really believed he was doing the right thing.'
Alan had commented to the detectives that he thought a Royal Commission was sitting 'to legalise it'. There he was wrong. And almost certainly he underestimated the seriousness of what in his statement became 'the offence'. Harry had been justified in assuming that Alan was fair game for robbery. As a sex criminal, he had forfeited the protection of the law. Alan's statement illustrated the difficulty he faced in grasping this fundamental fact. It was mostly concerned with the undecidable problem of Arnold's veracity, and details of 'the offence', though freely and even defiantly supplied, appeared as incidental to what he perceived as the story. It might be called unrealistic of him to expect a relationship rooted in such inequality to develop as an 'affair' between free individuals; he took no account of the fact that words and actions could mean different things to people in different social circumstances. Yet if this showed a lack of realism, a liberal intellectual dream world, it was an unreality also consciously sought and appreciated by Arnold, who had found himself challenged and moved by being treated as a friend of the elite. And the greater unreality lay in Alan's attitude to the law, which was not interested in his mental dilemmas. but was very much concerned with his bodily activities. He found it almost too absurd for belief, but the fact remained that it was this, 'the offence', that the police were investigating with persistent, conscientious, thoroughness.
The detectives did not, however, extend their questioning to his whole past life. In this respect they only took his fingerprints and photograph, to be checked against Scotland Yard records for previous offences. As supporting evidence of the crimes they also took what correspondence he had relating to Arnold. Aftewards, Alan was aware that if he had said Harry was lying, the police might have been unable to make any case against him. As it was, they were able to complete their duties with ease. On Saturday morning Mr Wills arrested Arnold in the Manchester printing shop (a job he immediately lost), took him to Wilmslow police station and showed him Alan's statement. Mr Wills was soon able to write out a statement for Arnold to sign, spelling out 'offences' in copious detail. This in turn Alan agreed on Monday 11 February to be 'materially correct'. The police had solved a crime which attracted up to two years of imprisonment.
The crime was, in fact, that of 'Gross Indecency contrary to Section 11 of the Criminal Law Amendment Act 1885'. It was defined purely in terms of parts of the male body, and applied absolutely, irrespective of such factors as age, financial advantage, and whether the activity was in a public or a private place. Alan's statement left no room for doubt that he was guilty, and he was wrong in imagining that what he had done might soon be 'legalised'. He was right, however, in thinking that changes were taking place in the official perception of homosexuality. Above all, the silence was being broken.
Indeed the turn of the 1940s had seen a renewal in Britain of the process which had led to that 1885 Act, to the trials of Oscar Wilde, and to the books of Havelock Ellis and Edward Carpenter in the 1890s. The point about the law was that it had replaced the vague theological 'crime against nature', or the 'crime not to be mentioned among Christians', by a definite rule. When Oscar Wilde spoke of 'the love that dares not speak its name', he identified a crucial aspect of what was happening — the speaking up, the 'flaunting', the explicitness.
In the next fifty years, incursions into British public consciousness by such books as The Loom of Youth and The Cloven Pine had been exceedingly circumspect and allusive in nature. But in the 1940s a new wave of explicitness swept across the Atlantic to break upon the more austere and tight-lipped culture of the island race.
*More precisely, it was predominantly the subject of male homosexuality that was coming into greater public prominence, just as the 1885 Act defined 'gross indecency' as a male crime. In the parallel period after World War I, much had been made of a supposed 'Black Book' compiled by the German secret service, containing names of thousands of 'sexual perverts', both men and women. This v as one reason ivhy in 1921 the Commons had votcd to extend the 1885 Act to women. But the Lords rejected the proposal — believing that even to mention the crime would have the effect of giving women ideas. The fact that men received a conscious attention not accorded to women was, therefore, an aspect of male privilege— although perhaps Alan Turing would not have seen it in quite this way.
Since 1938, for instance, the zoologist Alfred Kinsey had been documenting the unofficial reality of human sex, and in 1948 he revealed a breach of the 'fixed moral codes' so massive that, like the evidence confronting Donitz, its implications were too profound to be entertained.
While for a time such revelations could, in Britain, be dismissed as American extravagance and vulgarity, the 'head in the sand' attitude was already doomed. In many ways what was happening was a delayed effect of the war — or rather, like so many wartime developments, the expression of ideas which had begun in the 'mechanization, rationalization, modernization' of the late 1930s. While in military affairs the old regime had been forced to adopt modern methods for the sake of survival in 1942, the parallel developments in social policy took longer to filter through. The opening of a public debate about male hoinosexuality in Britain in 1952 was the conflict of the small back room, in another sphere.
In 1952, as in 1942, the times were out of joint. The rulers of Great Britain were still apt to regard the behaviour of its population as that of a public schooL In 1952 the pocket money and the tuck shop were under better management than before, and there was less open complaining from the Modern side. But the return of the old Headmaster in October 1951 had suggested invidious comparisons with former triumphs. In 1951 Britain had lost control over Iran and Egypt, countries so successfully held against German encroachment not ten years before. As during the crisis of imperialism in the 1890s, military loss of control could be identified with sexual loss of control. In the traditional view, homosexuality was an act, or practice, into which any man might be led — and such lapses into 'slackness' were to be prevented not only in the armed forces, but in the national life which raised and moulded them.
Such a view, however, could already be identified with that of an older generation, and one which had been pushed aside since 1940. For nearly a hundred years there had existed a quite different kind of official description, which concentrated not upon the act, but the state of mind. Considerable efforts had been made to elucidate a 'homosexual type', or a 'homosexual personality', rather as the nineteenth century psychologists had also devoted energy to defining criininal, or mentally deficient, or other 'degenerate types'. The word 'homosexual' was itself a nineteenth century medical neologism. Freud was often credited with making this mode of description available to people. Indeed, Alan and Robin would sometimes puzzle over the question of how people had been able to think about sexual desire before Freud's day.
In his 1950 Mind article, Alan had referred to the 'skin of an onion' analogy as helpful:
In considering the functions of the mind or the brain we find certain operations which we can explain in purely mechanical terms. This we say does not correspond to the real mind: it is a sort of skin which we must strip off if we are to find the real mind. But then in what remains we find a further skin to be stripped off, and so on. Proceeding in this way do we ever come to the 'real' mind, or do we eventually come to the skin which has nothing in it?
His own view, of course, was that the mind was like an onion, and not like an apple, there being no central, irreducible, undetermined core. In a different way, nineteenth and twentieth century science had been peeling the onion of the mind, and had dented the concept of responsibility with 'mental illness', shell-shock, neurosis, breakdowns and so forth. Where was the line to be drawn? The conservative fear was that every kind of behaviour would be excused by appeal to some irresistible, uncontrollable force majeure. Like Polanyi and Jefferson, they sought a non plus ultra to the pretensions of mental determinism, a barrier against the flood of threats to traditional values unleashed by the Second World War. They found one in homosexuality: the new men's talk of 'conditions' and 'complexes' was not to be allowed to excuse a deadly social evil, corrupting and weakening everything in its path.
At the same time, yet a third kind of description was gradually coming into focus, that of homosexual men as socially defined. From this point of view, the emphasis was to be placed not upon thoughts and feelings, nor on sexual acts, but on the particular patterns of acquaintanceship, money, and occupations associated with homosexuality. The sociologist 'Gordon Westwood', whose book Society and the Homosexual opened the British debate in 1952, described male homosexuality in all of these ways, one after the other. Reaching a wider audience, the Sunday Pictorial's series of reports on 'Evil Men' also broke what it called 'the conspiracy of silence on the subject' the same year, and likewise treated it from a modem psychological and social perspective, rather than in terms of the law. 'Most people', the newspaper explained, 'know there are such things — "Pansies" — mincing effeminate, young men who call themselves queers.' But these obvious 'freaks and rarities', it continued, represented but the tip of the iceberg. The problem was far greater than most people realised, and the time had come to tackle it.
One of the difficulties pervading these discussions was that no single description was adequate to the matter in hand, although there was an obvious virtue to each of them. There were certainly many homosexual acts — in schools, for example — which had little to do with deep-seated desires, nor with a social 'minority'. In contrast, the diffuse, romantic ambience of The Cloven Pine fell into no category recognised by the English criminal law. While there were others, like Arnold, who did not know what they wanted, but who were very familiar with the social patterns, with their advantages and disadvantages, of what a Methodist minister, quoted in the Sunday Pictorial, called 'the worst city for homosexuality that I have been in'.
The backroom boys of medicine and the social sciences were bringing these unwelcome contradictions to the surface. The law was under attack for its purely physical level of description. Gordon Westwood held, in contrast, that 'The overriding consideration in dealing with homosexual offenders should be that it is a form of mental illness.' But life was more complicated than that, the enforcement of the law was related less to the prevalence of the 'acts' than to the structure of British society.
For this reason the attempt to form a more scientific description ran up against British doublethink. The psychologist Dr Clifford Allen told the Sunday Pictorial that 'In the past battles may have been won on the playing fields of our public schools, but numerous lives have been broken in the dormitories'. The unofficial reality could be entirely different from any particular official line, and in private, the most conservative personages might regard both the law and current psychological theories as nonsensical. But amidst the great complexity, one simplifying feature stood out. As in the 'nation in miniature' of the public school, it was contact between those of different social rank that was most likely to be discovered and punished. Alan Turing's crime epitomised the action upon which the operation of the law was in practice focussed. So was its discovery, by a related petty crime, a classic case of successful detection. In another way again, the arrest was a textbook case, for the age range of thirty to forty was the one most frequently represented in the prosecutions of the period. It was also true that as what Westwood called an 'outsider', unfamiliar with the social milieu, he was natural prey for attempted blackmail.
In the development of his sexual life Alan Turing was in many ways typical for a gay man of his time. He had enjoyed the benefit of a very unusual, very privileged ambience at King's, but in the outside world, the same factors came into play as Kinsey had noted while interpreting the statistics:
There is considerable conflict among younger males over participation in such socially taboo activity, and there is evidence that a much higher percentage of younger males is attracted and aroused than ever engages in overt homosexual activities to the point of orgasm. Gradually, over a period of years, many males who are aroused by homosexual situations became more frank in their acceptance and more direct in their pursuit of complete relations, although some of them are still much restrained by fear of blackmail.
Kinsey found among his 'active' population a general increase in fequency of sexual experience up to an age of thirty-five, thereafter continuing at that level until the age of fifty, corroborating the common sense expectation that the 'social taboo' could inhibit sexual development for perhaps twenty years. In this respect Alan Turing was just launching out. It was only in his thirties that he had begun to find his way outside King's. He had been involved in two extended relationships, but he was not by nature the most conjugal person, and his exploratory urge was better suited to the possibilities of the cruising-grounds, once he had overcome his shyness. It was not that he was very successful, nor perhaps did he escape a profound sense of compromise and of the loss of youthful ideals — 'Beggars can't be choosers,' he wrote in his self-analytical short story — but he could take pride in breaking out of the framework of his upbringing, working out something for himself, and in managing without special privileges. He had gained experience, and as a very young forty, would want to pursue its opportunities before he was much older. It was this process which had been arrested.
Another feature of the operation of the law was that this sinking of men's souls was all the time on the increase. Between 1931 and 1951 there had been a five-fold increase in prosecutions, a steady rise through depression, blitz and rocket bombs alike. In 1933 it was indeed as J.S. Mill had said about heresy: that public opinion was more crushing than the direct application of the law. By 1952 the position had changed. This was consistent with the great extension of the role of the state in every direction, taking over functions formerly left to individuals, families, voluntary socie6es and so forth. It might be argued that the state was taking a larger role in policing sexual behaviour, precisely because the inhibitory effect of public opinion was decreasing.
In more conservative circles, it was taken that the law only gave the final stamp of authority to the ostracism of society. King George V was supposed to have said, 'I thought men like that shot themselves.' Alan Turing, however, cared nothing for the opinion of society, and therefore was ahead of his time in laying bare the role of the state. For most gay men, the question of ivho kneiv would be of colossal significance, and life would be rigidly divided into two compartments, one for those who knew, and one for those who did not. Blackmail depended as much upon this fact as upon the legal penalties. The question was important to Alan too, but in a rather different way: it was because he did not wish to be accepted or respected as the person he was not. He was likely to drop a remark about an attractive young man, or something of the kind, on a third or fourth meeting with a generally &iendly colleague. To be close to him, it was essential to accept him as a homosexual: it was one of the stringent conditions he imposed.
Exposure, therefore, held no intrinsic terror for him. But a criminal trial would involve not merely exposure as a homosexual, but all the concrete details. It would be one thing to be a martyr for an abstract cause, and quite another to have the sequence of events with Arnold rendered into an unflattering public form. It would expose him not only as a sexual outlaw, which at least carried with it a certain pride, but as a fool. In this respect his insouciance was amazing. But it was his all-or-nothing mentality at work. He had presumbly decided long before that such things were part of the 'large remnant of the random behaviour of infancy', and that it was absurd to be ashamed of anything harmlessly enjoyed, whether it be parlour games or bedroom pleasures. It meant that he had to take a stand not for an ideal, not for anything particularly rewarding or successful, but for that which was simply true. But he did not flinch. The detectives continued to be astonished when they visited him in connection with the case. He would take out his violin and play to them the Irish tune Cockles and Mussels, accompanied with glasses of wine.
After three weeks on 27 February, Alan and Amold both appeared in the Wilmslow magistrates' court for the committal proceedings. The CID officer, Mr Wills, described the circuinstances of the arrests, and read out the statements in full. There was another prosecution witness: Alan's bank manager, whose ledgers corroborated the detail of the £7 cheque. There was no cross-examination. Alan's solicitor 'reserved his defence', and obtained his release on £50 bail. Arnold, however, was held in custody pending the trial proper, to be held at the forthcoming Quarter Sessions. The local newspaper' reported the court appearance and the gist of the story. They printed both men's full addresses, in the usual way, and a photograph of Alan.
The case was not taken up in the Manchester papers, but there was certainly a possibility of the forthcoming trial being reported widely. In any case, Alan had to look after his individual relationships, so that people he cared about should not learn of what had happened from the newspapers or some other unfortunate way. In particular there was his family to consider. Alan wrote to his brother John — with a letter, for once, not a postcard or a telegram. It started off 'I suppose you know I am a homosexual.' John knew no such thing. He had always thought of his brother as 'misogynist', inasmuch as he avoided flirtatious chit-chat when on his occasional visits to Guildford. But Alan bore no resemblance to John's picture of 'pansies', and this possibility had never occurred to him. John stuffed the letter into his pocket and read it later in his oflice.
The letter explained some of the circumstances, and also that he was going to plead 'not guilty' and be properly defended. John immediately dropped everything and went to Manchester, where he consulted a senior partner in a leading firm of solicitors. He in turn saw Alan's solicitor, and they persuaded Alan to change his plea to 'guilty'. He w,as, in fact, caught between two untruths. To deny what he had done would be to tell a lie, and to convey a false sense that he considered it something that ought to be denied. Yet to be portrayed in public with words such as 'guilty', 'self-confessed'. 'admit' was also to compound an untruth. There was no way to keep himself pure. In practical terms his statement to the police had rendered 'defence' impossible, and he had little to lose by pleading 'guilty'. More pertinent. from John's point of view, was the idea that a 'guilty' plea would render the trial both quick and quiet. He thought Alan had been a 'silly ass' to go to the police about the burglary, and that everything he had done showed his naivete about the world outside the intellectual elite.
Behind this lay the question of how to tell their mother. This was the very thing for which 'men like that shot themselves', and Alan told Robin that it was the worst part of the whole business. He had the gall to ask John to do it, which reasonably enough John refused. Accordingly it became Alan's duty to make a journey to Guildford to tell her the facts of his life. Mrs Turing was not entirely clear about the significance of what had happened. but she was sufficiently conscious of the subject for there to be a distressing argument, somewhat at cross purposes. She then placed the matter firmly at the back of her mind. But for whatever mixture of reasons, the salient fact was that she did not let it cause an estrangement. In Alan's schooldays she had sided with the authorities, seeing him as the problem for them, not school as a problem for him; this time she tacitly took his side.
Alan wrote to his brother complaining that he had shown no sympathy with the position in which homosexuals found themselves, which was true enough. He also accused him of caring for nothing but his own reputation in the City, which was not. It was more that both alike shared their father's character, and spoke their different minds. John Turing made no secret of the fact that he considered his brother's behaviour disgusting and disreputable, an extreme example of 'a modus vivendi in which the feelings of others counted for so little.' He was particularly offended by the letter of complaint, because he had intervened in order to protect Alan from himself.
* Once John Turimg had asked his father what he hated most. 'Humbug', he replied without a moment's hesitation.
Perhaps nearly as difficult was the duty of telling Max Newman, so long a father figure. But if so, it did not show in Alan's behaviour. He simply announced that he had been arrested, and the reason for it, while they were sitting at lunch in the refectory. He did this in a particularly loud voice, making it clear that he rather wanted it to be heard by all and sundry. Max Newman was astonished, but his reaction was one of support. Alan asked him to appear as a character witness at the trial, a request he also made of Hugh Alexander, currently working for GCHQ. They both agreed. So in this respect Cambridge liberalism was prepared to stand up and be counted on his behalf — no small matter when a known homosexual was a social leper, conferring stigma by association.
It was easier to tell those who were already familiar with his homosexuality. To Fred Clayton Alan wrote:
The burglary business was actually infinitely worse than an ordinary burglary. I had got a boy friend, who ... put his friends on to my house. One of these has been picked up by the police and has informed against us. When you come to Liverpool perhaps you will stop off to see me in jail.
Then there was Neville, Alan telephoned and then made a journey down to Reading to see him. Neville thought Alan had been incredibly naive to call in the police in the first place. He was, of course, indirectly threatened himself, being fortunate that the police had not pursued their enquiries further, searching through letters and so forth. One ship in the convoy having gone down, the others had to look out very sharply. Kot himself coming from the governing classes, he felt it as a simple outrage that someone who had done something very important in the war could be treated in this way. The visit was painful. Neville's mother heard what had happened and applied sufficient emotional pressure to stop her son from seeing Alan again.
There were others too who had to know. Alan wrote to Joan Clarke (herself, as it happened, now engaged to be married), explaining that he had not told her that he 'did occasionally practise', and that he had been found out. 'They're not as savage as they used to be,' he added, thinking back perhaps to the trials of Oscar Wilde. He also wrote to Bob, now away in Bangkok, where his letter, with its tone of 'never apologise, never explain', caused shock and sadness.
At the university it was yet another case of Alan proving a great embarrassment. They dealt with it as 'typical Turing'. There were members of staff who avoided him, but then they had avoided him anyway. Most people coped with it by carefully not referring to the case. A more free and easy atmosphere prevailed in the computing laboratory than elsewhere, although one or two of the staff were shocked. Tony Brooker's attitude suited Alan best: he had no idea such laws existed, and was simply interested to hear from Alan about what happened. In some ways the case made Alan appear a more human figure. When he called in Cicely Popplewell and asked 'Are you shockable?' explaining that he might be going to prison, it was the first time he had treated her as a person. There was no question of helping or extending sympathy to him — his personality ruled it out. Individual people were onlookers on events that might as well have been happening in Russia. Alan probably found an element of pleasure in confronting the more 'stuffy' elements of Manchester, and gave the impression, which the less sensitive seriously believed, that he did not care a jot about the case. As at school, he bore his afflictions cheerfully.
There was joking in the laboratory about how he would manage for money if he lost his job. In this respect, Max Newman spoke strongly on his behalf, and so did Blackett. Indeed Blackett went to see the Vice-Chancellor, Sir John Stopford, Professor of Experimental Neurology and a distinguished Mancunian, armed with a quotation from the Kinsey report to sustain his case. He said that Alan's work should be safeguarded 'at all costs'. The Vice-Chancellor was less receptive to Kinsey's statistics than the Admiralty had been to Blackett'sconvoy calculations ten years before. 'I will listen to any argument with care and sympathy,' said Stopford, 'but if anyone seeks to document it they must bring me authorities I can myself respect.' But Alan's position was spared, although presumably only after the most thorough of carpetings, for Stopford was no friend of 'slackness'.. Max Newman's statement was crucially important; indeed he found himself surprised by the autonomy he enjoyed as head of department. He said he wished Alan Turing to remain, and this sufficed.
There was also his connection with King's to consider, but here an odd coincidence came into play. His fellowship was due to expire on 13 March 1952, so although he had been arrested a Fellow, he would no longer be one at his trial. Alan consulted with Philip Hall regarding his position, and he in turn talked with Professor Adcock. They advised him not to resign, and in fact the fellowship simply ended at its appointed time, after a total of nine years spread over the past seventeen. He had no reason to feel cut off from King's because he had been found out; Cambridge could remain a point of security and support for him. There was another point of support in the reaction of his good neighbours the Webbs. Although upset by what had transpired, the Webbs still made him welcome in their home.
Despite so much time being taken up by these events, he did not stop work. He would have been ashamed to have let them stop him, just as hc had insisted on keeping up some work on logic throughout the war. The very day after the arrest, he was in London for a meeting of the Ratio Club, talking about his theory of morphogenesis. John Pringle took up the idea as a basis for his discussion of the origin of life in the primordial chemical soup, in a lecture later in 1952. Then again, on 29 February, the day that the local newspaper was reporting the first hearing, he was defending his work against the criticisms of the Belgian chemist Ilya Prigogine, then on a visit to the Manchester chemistry department. On the same day Alan also completed his revisions to the morphogenesis paper, and on 15 March he submitted for publication his work on the calculation of the zeta function, even though the practical attempt at doing it on the prototype Manchester computer had been so unsatisfactory. It might be that he wished to get it out of the way in case he was going to prison.
On 21 March, Alan went to Henley-on-Thames for the weekend, to attend a large Nuffield Foundation conference on biological research. He transpired, the Webbs still made him welcome in their home.
Despite so much time being taken up by these events, he did not stop work. He would have been ashamed to have let them stop him, just as hc had insisted on keeping up some work on logic throughout the war. The very day after the arrest, he was in London for a meeting of the Ratio Club, talking about his theory of morphogenesis. John Pringle took up the idea as a basis for his discussion of the origin of life in the primordial chemical soup, in a lecture later in 1952. Then again, on 29 February, the day that the local newspaper was reporting the first hearing, he was defending his work against the criticisms of the Belgian chemist Ilya Prigogine, then on a visit to the Manchester chemistry department. On the same day Alan also completed his revisions to the morphogenesis paper, and on 15 March he submitted for publication his work on the calculation of the zeta function, even though the practical attempt at doing it on the prototype Manchester computer had been so unsatisfactory. It might be that he wished to get it out of the way in case he was going to prison.
On 21 March, Alan went to Henley-on-Thames for the weekend, to attend a large Nuffield Foundation conference on biological research. He found many points of contact with the discussions, which were influenced by the rise of cybernetics and in which the importance of the morphogenetic problem was much stressed. Donald Michie was there. He had corresponded a little with Alan about the morphogenetic ideas, having himself moved on from physiology to genetics. Alan asked him to come for a walk, and revealed that beneath the sang froid he showed to the more conventional world, he was in a very nervous state. He mentioned the previous appearance in the magistrates court, and the forthcoming trial, which was now only a week away. Donald said that no serious person would take a court judgment in the matter to be of importance, and that Alan would have to go through with it knowing that. But Alan might well have reflected that it was not only the law that made him an outcast, but all the official British culture, that of its administration, its newspapers, schools, churches, social life and entertainment — and that very largely its intellectuals would add their public weight against him too, whatever Donald Michie generously said.
Attitudes were one thing. Practical prospects were another. There was the nauseating business of having authorities ransack his emotional life and pronounce upon it, and there was the actual punishment that lay in store. The circumstances of his crime, with their elements of age and class difference, were against him. Even to the kindly disposed, this might seem a case of the 'elderly degenerate' of The Green Bay Tree, rather than the romantic wantonness of the greenwood tree.
His intransigent attitude was also a challenge to the authority of the law. But on the other hand, only 174 of the 746 men prosecuted in 1951 for the crime of 'gross indecency' had been imprisoned, and then mostly for less than six months. He would have been in a more dangerous position had the charge been that of 'buggery', for the law distinguished carefully between different kinds of sexual activity. He was also a 'first offender', which diminished the chances of imprisonment. But beyond this, the times were changing, and a more modern attitude was coming to prevail. The backroom boys were beginning to affect not only descriptions, but prescriptions.
Writing a new Foreword to Brave New World in 1946, Aldous Huxley suggested that 'The release of atomic energy marks a great revolution in human history, but not (unless we blow ourselves to bits and so put an end to history) the final and most searching revolution.' Despite the fact that he believed atomic power' would usher in 'highly centralised totalitarian governments', continuing the trend which the Second World War had accelerated, he stuck to his guns of 1932. 'This really revolutionarv revolution is to be achieved, not in the external world, but in the souls and flesh of human beings,' he had claimed, and the signs were there in the existing research in 'biology, physiology, and psychology'.
Alan Turing was no stranger to these subjects; his intellectual development had circled round to face the question of Natural Wonders: 'By what process of becoming did I myself finally appear in this world?' The significance of his mathematical work, indeed, rested upon the fact that specific substances, the 'growth hormones' referred to in his paper, had been chemically isolated by experimental biochemists. Amidst the patient accumulation of facts, the discoveries of the sexual hormones since 1889 had engendered a particular interest. Such interest, both lay and scientific, was not confined to the role of the hormones in physiological grov th. It was widely asserted that the 'chemical messages', at which F..T. Brewster had marvelled in 1912, determined the psychology as well as the physiology of the individual.
If, to the more old-fashioned person, the problem of homosexuality remained one of 'filth' and indiscipline, of which as little was to be said as possible, the modern psychological view was dominated by the categories of 'masculine' and 'feminine', with a belief that gay men and lesbian women had been endowed by nature with some unusual mixture of these allimportant characteristics. One attraction of this view was that it left intact an assumption of universal heterosexuality, since these apparent exceptions could be defined away as cases v here a woman was 'really' a man, or vice versa. Some found in this theory a scientific justification of homosexuality, according to the logic of the age, others found the hope of solving the hitherto unsolvable problem that it posed.
The discovery of the hormones suggested that the eternal verities of 'masculine' and 'feminine' might, indeed, be embodied in a simple chemical form. It was appropriate to a decade in which these great truths were so sedulously cultivated by Hollywood that the first major American experiments to test this theory were made at Los Angeles in 1940. The endocrinologists estimated the quantity of male hormones, or androgens, and of female hormones, or oestrogens, in the urine of seventeen homosexual men who had been 'taken into custody'. They did the same for thirty-one 'normal males'. Their results showed that even for a single individual this ratio could vary from time to time by a factor of up to thirteen. However, a judicious averaging of the ratios suggested that gay men had an androgen-oestrogen ratio of only sixty per cent of the others.
The data were intimately bound up with instructions. Dr Glass, describing this result, explained that 'Obviously, if a biologic etiology were established, this would lead to investigation of therapeutic possibilities from a much wider perspective than now exists,' which in English meant that if they could find a chemical to turn homosexuals into heterosexuals, then they could use it. So in 1944 Glass experimented with the injection into some eleven gay men of male hormones 'kindly supplied' by pharmaceutical companies. 'Four subjects accepted organotherapy by compulsion' — a court order in one case, and parental authority in the case of three boys.
*Thus an exposition of this idea appeared in the 1931 American novel Strange Brother,
one of the few accessible pre-war exceptions to the general silence: 'You see the generative
gland is made up, not only of the gland of reproduction, but of a gland which manufactures
the chemicals that cause a man to be masculine in temperament, and a woman feminine.'
'Both these chemicals are found in every human embryo. But if normal development does
not take place, the feminine chemical may predominate in a male, or the masculine in a
female. And we then get a man attracted by men, or a woman attracted by women.'
'This, at least, is the most plausible theory that modern science has to offer. And our
experiments on rats and guinea pigs bear out the theory.... We've proved that, aside from
the function of reproduction, sex differences are chemical.'
* Some of the results did not fit in, because the 'normals' sometimes had low ratios, and
the gay men high ratios. But this was ingeniously explained: 'Those few normal subjects
may be latent homosexuals, whereas the homosexuals with the high ratios may not be of the
true constitutional type.'
*In similar vein: 'The growing importance of the sociological aspects of the subject makes
urgent the continued investigation of the problem from a broad psychosomatic perspective.'
Alas, the experiment was not a success, in Dr Glass's opinion. 'Only three of the subjects reported benefit from this therapy. Five reported an intensification of the homosexual drive.' This to the scientists was 'a worsening of the condition'. It did not help in 'the clinical management of the male homosexual.'
Back at the drawing board of endocrinology, the failure of the experiment suggested a diametrically opposite approach. If the male hormone increased sexual 'drive', then perhaps the female hormone would decrease it — for heterosexual and homosexual men alike. 'I'his bright idea had already been tried' by another American pioneer, C. W. Dunn, in 1940. He had reported that 'At the end of the treatment there was a complete absence of libido.'
One attraction of this technique was that it was so much more effective than physical castration. Surgery of this kind had held a traditional part in the American Way, especially since the eugenic clean-up of the late nineteenth century. In 1950 there were eleven states which allowed for compulsory castration, with fifty thousand cases on record. But there was also scientific evidence that castration did not successfully inhibit sexual activity, and in this respect the chemical approach was more promising.
This was the lesson drawn by the first British paper on the subject, which appeared in the pages of the Lancet just a few days after Jefferson invoked the supremely human 'charm of sex' in his Lister Oration. It appeared under the authoritative name of F.L. Golla, director of the progressive Burden Neurological Institute at Bristol, where Grey VValter had built his cybernetic tortoises. Neither compulsory nor voluntary castration was allowed in Britain. On the other hand, as he wrote, 'The Criminal Justice Act, 1948, had emphasised the duty of the community to provide treatment for the habitual sexual offender.' Hor mone dosage resolved this contradiction, being both legal, and more effective. By 1949 Golla had experimented on thirteen men, and found that with sufficiently large doses 'libido could be abolished within a month.' He concluded:
In view of the non-mutilating nature of this treatment and the ease with which
it can be administered to a consenting patient we believe that it should be adopted
whenever possible in male cases of abnormal and uncontrollable sexual urge.
He had opened the visionary prospect of providing chemical castration for
all homosexual men. In 1952, the Sunday Pictorial commented that
What is needed is a new establishment for them like Broadmoor. It should be a clinic rather than a prison, and these men should be sent there and kept there until they are cured. Doctors and psychiatrists would welcome the idea. There is still a great deal to be learned about the delicately balanced endocrine glands which determine whether or not a man could take to these unpleasant activities.
* Thus Golla and Grey Kalter were the two scientific colleagues thanked by %. Ross
Ashby for reading the draft of his 1952 cybernetic book Design for a Brain.
L. R. Broster, the Charing Cross Hospital specialist who has done pioneer work in this field, writes that surgical treatment has made great strides recently but 'is still in the groping stage of trial and error'.
The possibilities had, in fact, widened into a more ambitious sphere of human management. Another paper' described how the male hormone had been administered to a fourteen-year-old truant:
For many years he had shrunk from personal contacts, been sensitive, shy and latterly more solitary. Recently he had become morbidly preoccupied with thoughts on abstruse topics beyond his years, chiefly psychology and religion... In the ward he read a lot, wrote many letters, helped with domestic jobs, showed interest in philosophy, but mixed little with others.
But after a course of the drug
his religious and other preoccupations disappeared. The drug was stopped and he was discharged, much improved. Six months later he was reported to have a job at a printers, but still apt to speculate on religion, and to be readily teased by other youngsters.
Perhaps the fourteen-year-old Alan 'Turing would have benefited more from such scientific treatment than from the rough-and-ready team games. On the other hand, it was the female hormone which according to this authority had been most useful in controlling occasional outbreaks of homosexual behaviour in the 12 to 16 age groups.
More effective than cold baths, or Nowell Smith's eloquence, it was the oestrogen which had been useful in 'enabling one of the provisions of the Criminal Justice Act, 1948, to be carried out.' It was the beginning of a new era, in which chemical solutions could be found for the problems of social control.
These advances did not escape the notice of other scientists. In 1952 Sir Charles Darv in, who always took a long-term view, published a book called The Next Million Years. Biology, rather than physics, he held to offer 'the most exciting possibilities', one being that
there might be a drug, which, without other harmful effects, removed the urgency of sexual desire, and so reproduced in humanity the status of workers in a beehive.
Other chapters in the progress of mankind had given rise to alternative methods of treatment, but these had generally disappointed the experts. Gordon Kestwood summed up the experience of analytical psychoanalysts as that of finding homosexuality to present the most problems, of all the cases that they met. Lobotomy had been tried but, as Westwood wrote,
this did not seem to be any more 'successful'. Nor was the administration of a drug to induce epileptic fits, another medical advance of the 1940s. The application of behaviourism to the problem, by administering electric shocks or nauseating drugs in asraciation with sexually attractive stimuli, was a technique still undergoing trial in Cnwhoslovakia and not yet introduced to British psychiatry. For the time being, the less scientific pain buttons offered by prison, loss of employment, social ostracism and blackmail were expected to control behaviour, and when these failed, the new men offered 'organotherapy', or chemical castration. Such were the resources of modern science that were offered to Alan Turing. He perceived them as the lesser evil, and on that basis went to trial. It was a trial between the old and the new.
The queened pawn faced the White Queen. The case of Regina v. Turing and Murray was heard on 31 March 1952, at the Quarter Sessions held at the Cheshire town of Knutsford. The judge was Mr J. Fraser Harrison. Alan was represented by Mr.G. Lind-Smith, and Arnold by Mr Em.yn Hooson. Both were prosecuted by Mr Robin David. The charges now amounted to twelve in number. With the Looking-Glass symmetry of symmetrical crimes, they began:
Alan Mathison Turing
1. On the 17th day of December, 1951, at Wilmslow, being a male person,
committed an act of gross indecency with Arnold Murray, a male person.
2. On the 17th day of December, 1951, at Wilmslow, being a male person was
party to the commission of an act of gross indecency with Arnold Murray, a male
person.
and so forth, for each of the other two nights, and then Arnold was charged in exactly the same way so that the last accusation was that he:
12. On the 2nd day of February, 1952, at Kilmslow, being a male person, was
party to the commission of an act of gross indecency with Alan Mathison Turing,
a male person.
They both pleaded 'guilty' to all the charges, although Alan was guilty of something for which he showed no guilt. The prosecuting counsel, in outlining the case, laid stress upon his unrepentant remarks.
There only lay his 'character' to set against this adrnitted lawbreaking. Normally, 'good character' would be a disguised statement of class status, but in these circumstances his status told against him. The theme of the better public schools had been the balance of privilege and duty, and as one of the prefect class he was supposed to set an example, not to break the rules himself. Alan Turing, however, was little interested either in the privileges or the duties of his class. He never tried to pull rank on the detectives, who saw him as an 'ordinary fellow', with his occasional visits to the local pub. Conversely, his crime was seen at least by an older generation as a betrayal of his class. Arnold likewise was made to feel by his family that his real crime had been that of dragging down a gentleman.
The OBE was duly given a mention, and Hugh Alexander bore witness that Alan was 'a national asset'. Max Newman was asked whether he would receive such a man in his home, and replied that he had already done so, Alan being a personal friend of himself and his wife. He described Alan as 'particularly honest and truthful'. 'He is completely absorbed in his work,' he continued, 'and is one of the most profound and original mathematical minds of his generation.' Lind-Smith pleaded that he should not go to prison:
He is entirely absorbed in his work, and it would be a loss if a man of his ability— which is no ordinary ability — were not able to carry on with it. The public would lose the benefit of the research work he is doing. There is treatment which could be given him. I ask you to think that the public interest would not be well served if this man is taken away from the very important work he is doing.
Mr Hooson, however, defended Arnold as the innocent led astray by Alan's wiles:
Murray is not a university Reader, he is a photo-printer. It was he who was approached by the other man. He has not such tendencies as Turing, and if he had not met Turing he would not have indulged in that practice.
Max Newman and Hugh Alexander were amazed that Alan should go to the stake for Arnold, but Alexander was impressed by his 'moral courage' and Newman by his 'strong line'. He answered back at the judge's remarks, and he did not recant, at an occasion whose very essence was the obtaining of a confession. Hilbert had written of Galileo that in his recantation 'he was not an idiot. Only an idiot could believe that scientific truth needs martyrdom — that may be necessary in religion, but scientific results prove themselves in time.' But this was not a trial of scientific truth.
The verdict quivered between the old and the new dispensations, and came down for the new. Bletchley Park scored a victory beyond its terrn. The state washed its hands, and handed Alan to the judgment of science. He was placed on probation, with the condition that he 'submit for treatment by a duly qualified medical practitioner at Manchester Royal Inhrmary.'
The Wilmslow newspaper headline was:
UNIVERSITY READER PUT ON PROBATION
To have Organo- Therapic Treatment
* The fact that he retained his OBE was itself an interesting detail of the case. The '4'ar
Office would demand the return of medals from anyone p.'ilty under the 1885 Act. The
Foreign Office presumably, took a different view.
Alan wrote to Philip Hall two weeks later:
(postmarked 17 April 1952)
... I am both bound over for a year and obliged to take this organo-therapy for the same period. It is supposed to reduce sexual urge whilst it goes on, but one is supposed to return to normal when it is over. I hope they're right. The psychiatrists seemed to think it useless to try and do any psychotherapy.
The day of the trial was by no means disagreeable. Whilst in custody with the other criminals I had a very agreeable sense of irresponsibility, rather like being back at school. The warders rather like prefects. I was also quite glad to see my accomplice again, though I didn t trust him an inch.
Perhaps it was surprising that he chose the scientific alternative to prison. He was annoyed at having been circumcised and at any editorial meddling with his writings — small interferences compared with this piece of doctoring. Neither did he care much for crea ure comforts, and a year in prison, even an Eng1ish one, would not have been rnuch more uncomfortable than Sherborne. On the other hand, to take that option would have impeded his work and very likely would have forefeited his Manchester position and the computer. He had the choice between his body and feelin~~ on the one hand, and his inte11ectual life on the other. It was a remarkable decision problem. He chose 'thinking' and sacrificed 'feeling'.
There was no concept of a right to sexual expression in the Britain of 1952. People made jokes about bromides put in the servicemen's tea. Samuel Butler might well have laughed in his grave at the prophet of the intelligent machine being punished for being sick and treated for committing a crime. But no one at the time perceived an irony in Alan Turing being on the receiving end of science. As for Jefferson, ranging himself with the humanists, or Polanyi, foe of the state's pretensions to order human life, and adherent of the Congress for Cultural Freedom — this was a private and distasteful medical matter, and did not gain the attention of the liberal intelligentsia of Manchester, discoursing on the folly and iniquity of treating minds like machines.
Harry the burglar was sent to a Borstal the same day, in another trial. Arnold, however, was conditionally discharged. He left the court in a daze, hardly knowing to what he had confessed, and then found himself pointed out in the street by his neighbours. After a few weeks he escaped back to London, found a job in the Lyons Corner House in the Strand, and rapidly made his way into anarchic Fitzrovia. Here in the coffee-bar world, meeting such people as Colin Wilson, he was accepted as an individual and learned to play the guitar.
For Alan, there were rather different consequences of the trial, because of the drug treatment. He was rendered impotent, although scientific opinion was that the impotence was not permanent and potency would return when the medication was stopped. It had other physical effects, for
To obtain the necessary effect mentally, it was necessary to maintain a moderate but not excessive degree of gynaecomastic response.
Translating from the Greek, this meant that there could be no 'reduction in libido' without the production of breasts. Again, according to the same authority,
There is at least a possibility that oestrogen may have a direct pharmacological effect on the central nervous system. Zuckerman (1952) has demonstrated, through his experiments on rats, that learning can be influenced by sex hormones, and that oestrogen can act as a cerebral depressant in these rodents. While it has yet to be shown that a similar influence is exerted in humans, there are sorne indications clinically that performance may be impaired, though more investigation is needed before any conclusion is reached.
So perhaps 'thinking' and 'feeling' could not be so neatly separated after all.
There were some more minor consequences. The News of the World covered the case with a short article in its northern editions, headed ACCUSED HAD POWERFUL BRAIN. He remained under the auspices of the district probation officer. David Champernowne came to Manchester to do some workt on the computer, and being invited to dinner at Hollymeade, found the probation officer another guest. Alan told a story about how the retired bishop of Liverpool had heard of the case and asked to see him- he had gone along, rather surprisingly for one who had written in 1936 that he would not tolerate bishops interfering in his private life. But nothing was private now. He had thought the bishop well-meaning but hopelessly old-fashioned. A further consequence, which for another person might have been major but which for Alan had little significance, was that, with a criminal record of moral turpitude,' he was henceforth automatica!ly barred from the United States.
*At the Nuffield Foundation conference that Alan attended, P. B. Medawar had proposed a programme of experiments on male animals, injecting oestrogen in order to reveal the neuro-physiological mechanism through the consequent alteration in behaviour patterns. Rarely can a Fellow of the Royal Society have had the honour of sitting at the wrong end of such an experiment.
* The work he was doing was on the application of sequential analysis to economics. Although he knew that Alan was interested in Bayesian statistics, he had no idea that Alan had independently invented sequential analysis in Hut 8.
* In a reform typical of the period, 1952 saw a change in American immigration policy from a legal definition of homosexuality (the breaking of a law), to a medical definition. The Immigration and Nationality Act of that year specified that 'Aliens afflicted with psychopathic personality... shall be excludable from admission into the L'nited States.' In 1967 the Supreme Court confirmed that 'the legislative history of the Act indicates beyond a shadow of doubt that the Congress intended the phrase "psychopathic personality" to include homosexuals.' Strictly steafting, therefore, Alan Turing entered the prohibited category in 1952 irrespective of the trial; in practice, of course, the point was that he had been found out.
Describing the events of the trial as with amused detachment, Alan tried to continue as though nothing had happened — as though he had been caught doing a naughty experiment in the dormitory and had suffered the confiscation of his chemistry set. 'I'his was, indeed, more or less what had happened and on one level he could treat it like the humiliations of schooldays. Yet it had obliged him to become more conscious of the conduct of his life and more conscious of his environment. The short story that he scribbled out was one symptom of this increased self-awareness. One person who found him much more interesting and indeed congenial, nov that he was not a remote mathematician with a one-track mind about machines, was Lyn Newman. With his reality revealed, Alan dropped his disconcerting evasiveness, and Lyn Newman found that 'once he had looked directly and earnestly at his companion, in the confidence of friendly talk,' his eyes, 'blue to the brightness and richness of stained glass', could 'never again be missed. Such candour and comprehension looked from them, something so civilised that one hardly dared to breathe. It was at this time that she
pushed first Anna Karenina and then War and Peace into his hands. I knew that he read Jane Austen and 'I rollope as sedatives, but he was totally uninterested in poetry and not particularly sensitive to literature or any of the arts, and therefore not at all an easy person to supply with reading matter. War and Peace proved to be in a very special way the masterpeice for him and he wrote to me expressing in moving terms his appreciation of Tolstoy's understanding and insight. Alan had recognized himself and his own problems in LVar and Peace and Tolstoy had gained a new reader of a moral stature and complexity and an originality of spirit equal to his own.
For indeed, he was there in War and Peace, as Pierre wandering into the midst of the battle — and then? What did it mean! What was it for'. And he was there in Tolstoy, whose puzzle was not over this or that fact, but what history was. Could an individual cause an event, hold power, or exercise will, as in the story book kind of history? 'The subject of history,' he wrote, 'is not the will of man as such but our presentation of it.' It was, in other words, the level of description. The degree of 'will' would depend upon the kind of description, and 'what is known to us we call the laws of necessity; what is unknown we call free will. Free will is for history only an expression connoting what we do not know about the laws of human life.' In particular, the laws of the connection, as he put it, between the mind and the world, were yet unknown, and therefore called free. These were Turing questions, in another form. In the January radio discussion he had said, 'Thinking is those mental processes we don't understand.'
Yet, wrote Tolstoy, however nonsensical the idea of free will, 'without this conception of freedom not only would he be unable to understand life but he would be unable to live for a single moment. Life would be intolerable because all man's aspirations, all the interest that life holds for him, are so many aspirations and strivings after greater freedom.... To imagine a man wholly destitute of freedom is the same thing as to imagine a man destitute of life.'
For Alan Turing there remained one freedom, not perhaps one that Tolstoy would have had in mind. It was that of exiled pleasure. The head master having taken action to prevent associations within the house, he had to fall back upon the possibilities offered by the boys in the other houses. For Alan would not let the system defeat him. On May Day 1952 there was a meeting of the Ratio Club at Cambridge, which he attended, and it was probably then that he saw Norman Routledge at King's. Alan explained about the trial and the hormone treatment ('I'm growing breasts!') and Norman told him that he had heard that in Norway (of all places) there were dances 'for men only'.
In the summer of 1952 Alan went for a holiday in Norway, one which turned out to be a disappointment regarding the rumoured dances."
(Alan Turing: The Enigma by Andrew Hodges, Princeton University Press, 2012, pp. 456-476.)
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23.04.2015 в 13:55Я чувствую, что тут оборвана какая-то прекрасная фраза )
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23.04.2015 в 14:27-
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23.04.2015 в 14:32-
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23.04.2015 в 14:35т.к. это перепечатка довольно большого отрывка из книги Ходжеса, пропущенного в изданном у нас переводе.
Думаю, можно открыть для всех. Даже большой фрагмент все равно вполне может считаться "превью".
Если бы не он, я бы еще долго не замечала, что произошло.
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23.04.2015 в 14:49-
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23.04.2015 в 21:04"Полиции понадобилось немного времени, чтобы вычислить преступление Алана Тьюринга. Это было неизбежно после того, как он сообщил об ограблении. Полиции удалось найти отпечатки Гарри. Он уже был фигурантом другого дела и сделал заявление, которое отсылало к словам Арнольда о том, что у них с Аланом были «дела» у него дома. Поэтому Тьюринг решил сам во всем сознаться. На допросе присутствовали два детектива Уиллс и Риммер, сам того не ведая, Алан сказал, что специально скрывал личность Арнольда, так как у него с ним была интрижка.
Алан заявил детективам, что Королевская комиссия собирается «легализовать» гомосексуализм. Однако он был не прав. Он даже не понял того, что теперь обвиняемым будет он. Масло в огонь подлило еще и то, как он говорил о своих «пристрастиях», будто он делает правильные вещи.
Детективы не стали интересоваться всей его прошлой жизнью, они лишь сняли его отпечатки пальцев и сфотографировали его, чтобы проверить на наличие судимостей.
В субботу утром Уиллс арестовал Арнольда в Манчестере и в полицейском участке показал ему показания Алана.
Спустя три недели 27 февраля Алан и Арнольд предстали на слушании их дела. Уиллс зачитал обстоятельства ареста и их показания. Перекрестный допрос проводить не стали. Адвокат Алана добился его освобождения под залог, а Арнольд остался под стражей до суда.
Данная ситуации не особо освещалась в прессе, поэтому у Алана была возможность рассказать правду своим друзьям и семье самому.
В итоге Тьюрингу было предъявлено обвинение в непристойном поведении в соответствии с поправкой Лабушера. Ему предложили выбор: сесть в тюрьму или гормональную терапию. Алан выбрал инъекции гормонов, которые должны были подавить его либидо.
Летом 1952 года Алан отправился на каникулы в Норвегию, которые оказались сплошным разочарованием".
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23.04.2015 в 22:53-
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24.04.2015 в 09:45-
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24.04.2015 в 16:27-
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24.04.2015 в 17:35-
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24.04.2015 в 20:30-
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25.04.2015 в 01:12Ходжес пишет, что «о содержании писем можно догадаться по письму Лин Ирвин подруге в 1957 г.: "Милый Алан, помню, как он сказал мне так просто и грустно "Я не могу поверить, что спать с девушкой так же приятно, как с парнем", а я смогла ответить только "Я с тобой полностью согласна — и сама предпочла бы парня"». Но неужели что-то в этом роде могло так сильно шокировать Джона Тьюринга?
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25.04.2015 в 16:43-
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26.04.2015 в 16:36Насчет семьи Тьюринга, у меня вообще сложилось впечатление, что Алана недолюбливали даже за то, что он "не от мира сего". Нет, не огорчайтесь из-за этого, все было не так плохо.) Они на него иногда злились, но все равно по воспоминаниям брата чувствуется, что он его любил. Может быть, из-за пропущенного отрывка сложилось впечатление, что Джон Тьюринг ничем не помог Алану в трудные дни, но все было как раз наоборот. Ходжес пишет, что Алан напрасно обидел брата, сказав, что тот помогает ему, заботясь лишь о своей репутации. А о матери Тьюринга Ходжес пишет, что она в этом деле безоговорочно встала на сторону сына, а не так, как в его школьные годы, когда она принимала сторону учителей, считая, что если они недовольны Аланом, значит, он этого заслуживает.
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26.04.2015 в 19:54Вот именно! В русском переводе про семейные отношения хоть немного написано, когда он учился в школе и колледже. Потом все обрезается. Только кое-где буквально по одному предложению, что Джон женился и Алан стал дядей в таком-то году. Даже не уточнили кто у него племянники или племянницы. И потом написали, что он приезжал к семье на Рождество с подарками. Все! Даже в конце вроде такую важную вещь, как письмо Алана брату, где он признается в своей ориентации убрали. Просто сказали признался и все. И откуда мне было понять из таких скупых сведений, как они к нему относились? Вообще это ужасно, что они так переврали книгу! Тем более народу больше интересно, что он за человек, а не математика.
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26.04.2015 в 20:09-
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26.04.2015 в 20:13-
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26.04.2015 в 20:20-
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26.04.2015 в 20:24Ну а что ей оставалось?) Когда собственное чадо любимое говорит, что он-гей? Родители любят нас не зависмо от возраста. Мы всегда для них маленькие дети. Хоть 5 нам лет, хоть 25. Тем более матери любят сильнее, так как рожают.
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26.04.2015 в 20:30-
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26.04.2015 в 20:36-
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26.04.2015 в 20:59-
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26.04.2015 в 23:48Киплинг о_О?! Я его только как автора детских сказок знаю! "Маугли", "Рики-тики-тави" и.т.д. А где про него почитать можно?
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27.04.2015 в 11:18