ESSAY An English Martyr

ANDREW HOLLERAN ASED ON A TRUE STORY” are It’s no surprise that Benedict Cumberbatch plays Turing as probably the most ominous words a geek; though how much of a geek Turing was is hard to tell in film, but that’s what flashes from the book. He did not dress carefully; but where on the across the screen at the opening of spectrum of eccentricity does a man lie who used a piece of The Imitation Game, the new string or an old tie instead of a belt to hold his pants up? He biopic about the British mathe- looks very handsome in some photos; he was shy, reserved, matician“B Alan Turing. Like Breaking the Code, the play and the with a high-pitched voice and an occasional stammer. He de- film starring Derek Jacobi that came out in 1986 and 1996, re- cided early on whether you were smart enough to be listened to, spectively, The Imitation Game is based on the massive biogra- he would walk out of parties he thought a waste of time, and he phy of Turing by gay activist and Oxford mathematician did not believe in small talk. He was also such a serious runner Andrew Hodges, which was published in 1983 (and was fol- that he would have tried out for the Olympics had he not in- lowed, in 2006, by a much shorter life by David Leavitt). jured his hip. He loved to hike, and to sunbathe nude; he had Although 768 pages long, Hodges’ Alan Turing: The many friends, delivered papers, taught mathematics, went to Enigma is extremely readable. The first chapter alone is a vivid conferences, examined doctoral candidates, and was the main portrait of an English childhood in the early part of the 20th liaison with American scientists at Bell Labs and the U.S. gov- century. Turing’s father was a civil servant in India; Alan and ernment during the War. his older brother were farmed out to couples in England who In short, he was a success, a prominent scientist whose took in children till they went away to boarding school. His peers and superiors kept supporting his work, famous among mother chose Sherborne School in Dorset, being aware that her mathematicians at an early age for his paper on computable son’s brilliance and eccentricity made the choice of the right numbers. He despised pretension of any kind, whether intel- school crucial. At Sherborne, however, he was not merely lectual or social. He seems to have been, on some level, the taunted by his classmates but buried alive under the floorboards eternal English schoolboy, and a creature, Hodges implies, of of his dormitory in a scene even more hor- the coddled, immensely tolerant, and rar- rifying in the movie than in the book. But Alan Turing helped save efied atmosphere created by the higher Turing ended up a great success at school England from the Nazis reaches of British education—the King’s and went on to become a lecturer in mathe- College, Cambridge, of economist John matics at Cambridge—at the same time that only to be prosecuted Maynard Keynes, novelist E. M. Forster, another famous gay mathematician, Ludwig for having sex with and philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein, was teaching there. Then, at another man. Like Wittgenstein, whose course he took the start of World War II, Turing was re- and whose conversation with the Austrian cruited by the British government to crack the code the Nazis philosopher we have a record of, Turing “liked ordinary were using to communicate with the U-boats that were causing things,” Hodges writes. “But he found himself to be an ordinary havoc on British shipping. And this is the heart of the film: the English homosexual atheist mathematician. It would not be efforts of a group of mathematicians, working in a big Victorian easy.” Ironically, the word used by a friend who saw The Imi- mansion north of London called Bletchley Park, to crack the tation Game with me to describe the movie was “ordinary.” It’s Nazis’ Enigma code. what the British do well—a good Masterpiece Theater period The movie cuts back and forth between Turing’s school piece—good script, well acted, intelligent. But even the shots years, when he fell in love with a classmate named Christopher of the Blitz—the beautiful silvery compositions of wet streets, Morcum, and his work at Bletchley Park, and his subsequent glistening rubble, gray sky—look like ones we’ve seen many arrest for gross indecency (i.e., homosexual acts) after the War. times before. Halfway through, I started thinking of Chariots of The movie’s mantra, repeated at key moments, like something Fire and Downton Abbey for some reason. This movie, in fact, from Star Wars, is: “Sometimes it is the people whom no one had an American producer, an American screenwriter, and a imagines anything of who do the things that no one can imag- Scandinavian director; yet the story, setting, and cast are so ine.” When Turing’s M16 handler tells him, “You’re exactly the British that it comes off as a product of the same culture that re- person I hoped you would become,” it’s thrilling: a boy has leased a film about Stephen Hawking at about the same time, grown up, a nerd has learned to be a team player, a nebbish has which makes one think that what differentiates Britons from delivered the goods. Americans is that the former romanticize their artists and in- tellectuals in a way that we do not. (Walt Whitman in Love?I Andrew Holleran’s novels include Dancer from the Dance, The Beauty don’t think so.) of Men, and Grief. But Turing is a significant figure not just in British but in

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