Alan Turing: The Enigma (106 page)

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

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

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

On the beach in Corfu, with the dark mountains of Albania on the horizon, he could study both the seaweed and the boys. Stalin was dead, and a watery sunshine was emerging over a new Europe. Even the cold shabbiness of British culture was not immune to change, and after more than ten years of ration books, a quite new mood, one that no one had planned for, was coming with the growth of the Fifties. Television, its development arrested in 1939, made its first mass impact with the coronation. In a far more complex and more affluent Britain, the boundaries of official and unofficial ideas would become less clear. An outsider, an intellectual beatnik like Alan Turing, might find more room to breathe.

Besides the general relaxation of manners, the diversification of life was most acute in questions of sex. As in the 1890s, the greater official consciousness of sexuality was matched by a greater outspokenness on the part of individuals – and most notably in America, where the process had begun earlier than in Britain. One particular example of this, the American novel
Finistère
³⁵
which had appeared in 1951, was much admired by Alan.

It described the relationship between a fifteen-year-old boy and his teacher, and like
The Cloven Pine
tried to see life through teenage eyes. It was, however, a relationship very different from the vague nuances of Fred Clayton’s
cri de coeur
. In the old days Alan had often teased Fred, shocking him with rather over-simplified assertions about the prevalence of homosexual activity, and this was a book which caught up
with the serious thread that had underlain that delight in gossip – a wish to defy the ‘social stigma’ and discuss sex in the same way as one might discuss anything else. Meanwhile
Finistère
also did full justice to the reality of the ‘social taboo’, and its plot followed a complex pattern of private and public disclosures. These the novelist made lead to a conclusion of hopeless doom, as though homosexual life were something inherently self-contradictory and fatal: ‘the strip of sand, the distinct footprints leading in one single trail into the black water.’

In its tragic end, its suicide at a symbolic ‘end of the earth’ – as also with its linking of the boy’s longing for a man friend with the failure of his parents’ marriage –
Finistère
took its place amidst the older genre of writing about homosexuality. It brought a post-war explicitness into an already dated form. By 1953 the point had been well made that gay men could muddle through like anyone else; thus the new English novel
The Heart in Exile
³⁶
wended its way through the fading drama-ettes of upper middle class taboos, and the more modern obsession with psychological explanations, and rejected both for an ordinary, commonplace ending, tempered by the observation that ‘the battle must continue.’ Angus Wilson’s 1952
Hemlock and After
, with its bleak, black comedy of class and manners, was also close to the matter-of-fact modernity about sex that Alan liked to display. This was another book that he and Robin discussed – more evidence that officialdom and clinical management were not the only legacies of the Second World War. Yet Alan Turing could not share in this anarchic spirit as he might have wished. Less free than he appeared, he too was on the shore of life. A year later, on the evening of 7 June 1954, he killed himself.

Alan Turing’s death came as a shock to those who knew him. It fell into no clear sequence of events. Nothing was explicit – there was no warning, no note of explanation. It seemed an isolated act of self-annihilation. That he was an unhappy, tense, person; that he was consulting a psychiatrist and had suffered a blow that would have felled many people – all this was clear. But the trial was two years in the past, the hormone treatment had ended a year before, and he seemed to have risen above it all. There was no simple connection in the minds of those who had seen him in the previous two years. On the contrary, his reaction had been so different from the wilting, disgraced, fearful, hopeless figure expected by fiction and drama, that those who had seen it could hardly believe that he was dead. He was simply ‘not
the type’ for suicide. But those who resisted a stereotyped association of the trial in 1952 with the death in 1954 perhaps forgot that suicide did not have to be interpreted in terms of weakness or shame. As Alan had quoted Oscar Wilde in 1941, it could be the brave man that did it with a sword.

The inquest, on 10 June, established that it was suicide. The evidence was perfunctory, not for any irregular reason, but because it was so transparently clear a case. He had been found lying neatly in his bed by Mrs C— when she came in at five o’clock on Tuesday 8 June. (She would normally have been in on the Monday, but it was the Whitsun bank holiday, and she had had a day off.) There was froth round his mouth, and the pathologist who did the post-mortem that evening easily identified the cause of death as cyanide poisoning, and put the time of death as on the Monday night. In the house was a jar of potassium cyanide, and also a jam jar of a cyanide solution. By the side of his bed was half an apple, out of which several bites had been taken. They did not analyse the apple, and so it was never properly established that, as seemed perfectly obvious, the apple had been dipped in the cyanide.

John Turing attended the inquest, having met Franz Greenbaum and Max Newman in the meantime. (Mrs Turing was away on holiday in Italy at the time, flying back when the news reached her.) John had already decided that it would be a mistake to contest a verdict of suicide, a policy from which the presence of a row of newspaper reporters did nothing to dissuade him. The evidence given
³⁷
was limited to the discovery of the death, the cause of death, Alan’s good health and his freedom from financial trouble. Nothing was mentioned that hinted at sex, the trial, blackmail or anything of the kind. The coroner said ‘I am forced to the conclusion that this was a deliberate act. In a man of his type, one never knows what his mental processes are going to do next,’ and the verdict was that of suicide ‘while the balance of his mind was disturbed.’ In the event, the national press made remarkably little of it, and nothing was said regarding the 1952 trial.

Mrs Turing would not accept the verdict. Her argument was that it was an accident. Her evidence was that while Alan lay in his small front bedroom, an electrolytic experiment was bubbling away at the back. It had, in fact, been going for a long time. He did sometimes use cyanide for electrolysis, it being necessary for gold-plating. Recently he had used the gold from his grandfather John Robert Turing’s watch to plate a teaspoon.
³⁸
She argued that he had got cyanide on to his hands by accident, and thence into his mouth. This was, of course, what she had always said might happen. At Christmas 1953, when he made his last Guildford visit, she had repeated her warning (‘
Wash
your hands, Alan, and get your
nails
clean. And don’t put your
fingers
in your mouth!’). He brushed all this off with ‘I’m not going to injure myself, Mother.’ But this very fact meant that he was well aware of her sensitivity to the possibility of an accident. More
willing to bend truth for the sake of kindness with her than with anyone else, he could turn her long complaint at his erratic ways into a scheme to save her feelings. It was a cruel blow for Mrs Turing, and the more so as it came hard on the heels of a greater
rapport
with her son. Suicide was officially a crime, over and above the social stigma, and she was also a great believer in Purgatory. The plan that Alan had mentioned to James Atkins in 1937, which involved both an apple and electrical wiring, might well have played on the same idea – perhaps it was the very plan he used. If so it was a ‘perfect suicide’, in this case calculated to deceive the one person whom he wanted to deceive.

It resembled the mixture of detective story and chemistry set jokes that he enjoyed in the treasure hunts. Once he had devised a clue that depended upon the electrical conductivity of the soft drink Tizer. A last treasure hunt, held at Leicester with Robin in the summer of 1953, found him preparing bottles of red liquid, with clues written in red ink on the back of the label, so that they could only be read after the bottles were emptied. They were labelled the wrong way round: ‘The Libation’ for the smelly one and ‘The Potion’ for the drinkable. Perhaps the idea went back to Christopher Morcom’s teasing ‘deadly stuff’, back to the poisons of
Natural Wonders
. He had found a final chemical solution.

Anyone arguing that it was an accident would have had to admit that it was certainly one of suicidal folly. Alan Turing himself would have been fascinated by the difficulty of drawing a line between accident and suicide, a line defined only by a conception of free will. Interested as he was by the idea of attaching a random element into a computer, a ‘roulette wheel’, to give it the appearance of freedom, there might conceivably have been some Russian roulette aspect to his end. But even if this were so, his body was not one of a man fighting for life against the suffocation induced by cyanide poisoning. It was that of one resigned to death.

Like Snow White, he ate a poisoned apple, dipped in the witches’ brew. But what were the ingredients of the brew? What would a less artificial inquest had made of his last years? It would depend upon the level of description, ‘not the will of man as such but our presentation of it.’ To ask what caused his death is like asking what caused the First World War: a pistol shot, the railway timetables, the armament race, or the logic of nationalism could all be held accountable. At one level the atoms were simply moving according to physical law; at other levels there was mystery; at another, a kind of inevitability.

At the most superficial level, there was nothing to see. His working papers were left in an untidy mess in his room at the university. Gordon Black, who worked with the computer on lens design problems, happened on the Friday evening before his death to see him cycling home as usual.
^*

He had also booked as usual to
use the computer on the Tuesday evening, and the engineers waited up for him, only hearing next day that he was dead. His friendly next door neighbours, the Webbs, had moved to Styal on the Thursday, and he had had them to dinner on the previous Tuesday, merry and chatty. He had been much regretting their move, spoke of visiting them, and said he was glad that the new occupants would be young and with young children. There were purchases, including theatre tickets, in his house when he died; he had written, though not posted, an acceptance of an invitation to a Royal Society function on 24 June. He had been seen out walking on the Sunday morning by a neighbour with whom he was on nodding terms (‘as usual he looked very dishevelled’); he had taken in the
Observer
on the Sunday and the
Manchester Guardian
on the Monday; he had eaten and left the washing up. None of this shed the slightest light upon his death.

To his old undergraduate friends, the last year revealed a troubled mind, but equally, one that was continuing to press on. At Christmas 1953, besides visiting Guildford, he stayed with his friends David Champernowne at Oxford and Fred Clayton at Exeter. He went out for a walk with Champ and certainly did talk in a worried way about the Norwegian boy, Champ forming the impression that he had been imprudent and perhaps a bit reckless. But there was no definite point that came across; Alan rather rambled on and Champ felt a little bored.

At Exeter he also went for a walk with Fred and his wife, who now had four children. One of the boys, Alan agreed, closely resembled his uncle in Dresden. Alan told Fred about the arrest, the trial and the hormone treatment, describing how it had developed the breasts, and making the most of its black absurdity. To Fred it was the confirmation of all his fears, and he told Alan how unsatisfactory such pick-ups must be, wishing he could find a permanent friend from the academic world. (He did not know anything about Neville.) A great believer in family life, Fred felt that Alan envied him the course that he had taken since 1947. Alan found a large mushroom, which to the Claytons’ amazement he said was edible, so they cooked and ate it. Afterwards Alan sent a thank-you note, with more notes on astronomy, and a homemade sundial in a cardboard box. It was hardly a grand farewell. Neither, indeed, did his Guildford visit take on a leavetaking character, and his last note
³⁹
to his mother, written shortly after these visits, ended with some information about a shop he had found in London where ‘some quite remarkably cheap things in glass suitable for wedding presents etc.’ could be bought.

Neither of his two close postwar friends, Robin and Nick Furbank, had any clear idea that an end was approaching. Robin stayed at Wilmslow for the weekend of 31 May, just ten days before Alan died. Their friendship was one of great mutual confidence in emotional matters, but there was no hint of a psychological crisis on this visit. They amused themselves with
Alan’s experiments, trying to make a non-poisonous weedkiller and sink-cleaner from natural ingredients. They talked about type theory and planned to meet again in July.