Official...Alan Turing pardoned

"Royal pardon for codebreaker Alan Turing"

December 24th, 2013

BBC NEWS

Computer pioneer and codebreaker Alan Turing has been given a posthumous royal pardon.

It addresses his 1952 conviction for homosexuality for which he was punished by being chemically castrated.

The conviction meant he lost his security clearance and had to stop the code-cracking work that had proved vital to the Allies in World War Two.

The pardon was granted under the Royal Prerogative of Mercy after a request by Justice Minister Chris Grayling.
'Appalling' treatment

"Dr Alan Turing was an exceptional man with a brilliant mind," said Mr Grayling.

He said the research Turing carried out during the war at Bletchley Park undoubtedly shortened the conflict and saved thousands of lives.

Turing's work helped accelerate Allied efforts to read German Naval messages enciphered with the Enigma machine. He also contributed some more fundamental work on codebreaking that was only released to public scrutiny in April 2012.

"His later life was overshadowed by his conviction for homosexual activity, a sentence we would now consider unjust and discriminatory and which has now been repealed," said Mr Grayling.

"Turing deserves to be remembered and recognised for his fantastic contribution to the war effort and his legacy to science. A pardon from the Queen is a fitting tribute to an exceptional man."

The pardon comes into effect on 24 December.

Turing died in June 1954 from cyanide poisoning and an inquest decided that he had committed suicide. However, biographers, friends and other students of his life dispute the finding and suggest his death was an accident.

Many people have campaigned for years to win a pardon for Turing.

Dr Sue Black, a computer scientist, was one of the key figures in the campaign.

She told the BBC that she hoped all the men convicted under the anti-homosexuality law would now be pardoned.

"This is one small step on the way to making some real positive change happen to all the people that were convicted," she said.

"It's a disgrace that so many people were treated so disrespectfully."

Some have criticised the action for not going far enough and, 59 years after Turing's death, little more than a token gesture.

"I just think it's ridiculous, frankly," British home computing pioneer Sir Clive Sinclair told the BBC.

"He's been dead these many years so what's the point? It's a silly nonsense.

"He was such a fine, great man, and what was done was appalling of course. It makes no sense to me, because what's done is done."

'It's very wrong'
 
Lord Sharkey, a Liberal Democrat peer who wrote a private member's bill calling for a royal pardon in July 2012, said the decision was "wonderful news".

"This has demonstrated wisdom and compassion," he said. "It has recognised a very great British hero and made some amends for the cruelty and injustice with which Turing was treated."

Vint Cerf, the computer scientist known as one of the founding fathers of the internet, also welcomed the development.

"The royal pardon for Alan Turing rights a long-standing wrong and properly honours a man whose imagination and intellect made him legendary in our field," he told the BBC.

Technology entrepreneur Mike Lynch added: "Society didn't understand Alan Turing or his ideas on many levels but that was a reflection on us, not on him - and it has taken us 60 years to catch up."

Human rights campaigner Peter Tatchell said: "I pay tribute to the government for ensuring Alan Turing has a royal pardon at last but I do think it's very wrong that other men convicted of exactly the same offence are not even being given an apology, let alone a royal pardon.

"We're talking about at least 50,000 other men who were convicted of the same offence, of so-called gross indecency, which is simply a sexual act between men with consent."
Mr Tatchell said he would like to see Turing's death fully investigated.

"While I have no evidence that he was murdered, I do think we need to explore the possibility that he may have been killed by the security services. He was regarded as a high security risk," he said.

'Not entirely comfortable'
 
Glyn Hughes, the sculptor of the Alan Turing Memorial in Manchester, said it was "very gratifying" that he had finally been pardoned.

"When we set out to try and make him famous - get him recognised - it was really difficult to collect money," he said.

"None of the big computer companies would stump up a penny for a memorial. They perhaps would now - we've come a very long way."

But he said he was "not entirely comfortable" that Turing had been pardoned while thousands of other gay men had not.

"The problem is, of course, if there was a general pardon for men who had been prosecuted for homosexuality, many of them are still alive and they could get compensation."

In December 2011, an e-petition was created on the Direct Gov site that asked for Turing to be pardoned. It received more than 34,000 signatures but its request was denied by the then justice secretary, Lord McNally, who said Turing was "properly convicted" for what was at the time a criminal offence.

Prior to that in August 2009, a petition was started to request a pardon. It won an official apology from the prime minister at the time, Gordon Brown, who said the way Turing was persecuted over his homosexuality was "appalling".

"Enigma codebreaker Alan Turing receives royal pardon"

Mathematician lost his job and was given experimental 'chemical castration' after being convicted for homosexual activity in 1952

by

Caroline Davies   

December 23rd, 2013

The Guardian   

Alan Turing, the second world war codebreaker who took his own life after undergoing chemical castration following a conviction for homosexual activity, has been granted a posthumous royal pardon 59 years after his death.

The brilliant mathematician, who played a major role in breaking the Enigma code – which arguably shortened the war by at least two years – has been granted a pardon under the Royal Prerogative of Mercy by the Queen, following a request from the justice secretary, Chris Grayling.

Turing was considered to be the father of modern computer science and was most famous for his work in helping to create the "bombe" that cracked messages enciphered with the German Enigma machines. He was convicted of gross indecency in 1952 after admitting a sexual relationship with a man.

He was given experimental chemical castration as a "treatment". His criminal record resulted in the loss of his security clearance and meant he was no longer able to work for Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), where he had been employed following service at Bletchley Park during the war. He died of cyanide poisoning in 1954, aged 41.

Announcing the pardon, Grayling said: "Dr Alan Turing was an exceptional man with a brilliant mind. His brilliance was put into practice at Bletchley Park during the second world war, where he was pivotal to breaking the Enigma code, helping to end the war and save thousands of lives.

"His later life was overshadowed by his conviction for homosexual activity, a sentence we would now consider unjust and discriminatory and which has now been repealed.

"Dr Turing deserves to be remembered and recognised for his fantastic contribution to the war effort and his legacy to science. A pardon from the Queen is a fitting tribute to an exceptional man."
David Cameron described Turing as a "remarkable man". The prime minister added: "His actions saved countless lives. He also left a remarkable national legacy through his substantial scientific achievements, often being referred to as the father of modern computing."
 
There had been a long campaign to clear Turing's name, including a private member's bill. In 2009, an "unequivocal apology" was issued by then prime minister Gordon Brown. An e-petition calling for a pardon received 37,404 signatures when it was closed in November last year. The request was declined by the then justice minister Lord McNally on the grounds that Turing was properly convicted of what at the time was a criminal offence.

A pardon is normally granted only when the person is innocent of the offence and where a request has been made by someone with a vested interest, such as a family member. On this occasion, a pardon has been issued without either requirement being met.

There was mixed reaction to the announcement. Iain Standen, chief executive of the Bletchley Park Trust, said Turing was "a visionary mathematician and genius whose work contributed enormously both to the outcome of the war and the computer age".

He added: "The pardon gives further recognition for his outstanding contribution not only to second world war codebreaking but also the development of computing."

Dr Andrew Hodges, tutorial fellow in mathematics at Wadham College, Oxford, and author of the acclaimed biography Alan Turing: The Enigma, said: "Alan Turing suffered appalling treatment 60 years ago and there has been a very well intended and deeply felt campaign to remedy it in some way. Unfortunately, I cannot feel that such a 'pardon' embodies any good legal principle. If anything, it suggests that a sufficiently valuable individual should be above the law which applies to everyone else.

"It's far more important that in the 30 years since I brought the story to public attention, LGBT rights movements have succeeded with a complete change in the law – for all. So, for me, this symbolic action adds nothing.

"A more substantial action would be the release of files on Turing's secret work for GCHQ in the cold war. Loss of security clearance, state distrust and surveillance may have been crucial factors in the two years leading up to his death in 1954."
Writer David Leavitt, professor of English at Florida University and author of The Man Who Knew Too Much: Alan Turing and the Invention of the Computer (2006), said it was "great news". The conviction had had "a profound and devastating" effect on Turing, Leavitt said, as the mathematician felt he was being "followed and hounded" by the police "because he was considered a security risk".

"There was this paranoid idea in 1950s England of the homosexual traitor, that he would be seduced by a Russian agent and go over to the other side," Leavitt said. "It was such a misjudgment of Alan Turing because he was so honest, and was so patriotic."

With the situation in Russia regarding LGBT rights, and the recent decision by the supreme court in India to reinstate the criminalisation of homosexuality, "for this to come from the Queen, is going to send a really important message, especially to the Commonwealth", Leavitt added.Prof S Barry Cooper, professor of mathematical logic at the University of Leeds and chair of the Turing Centenary Advisory Committee, said: "There was a slight worry that the private member's bill had got slightly bogged down. So this is fantastic. And a sign of the growing reputation of Alan Turing, a growing sense of what he did for this country and what so many other people at Bletchley Park did."
 
Liberal Democrat peer Lord Sharkey, who introduced the private member's bill in the House of Lords, said: "This has demonstrated wisdom and compassion. It has recognised a very great British hero and made some amends for the cruelty and injustice with which Turing was treated.

"It's a wonderful thing, but we are not quite finished yet. I will continue to campaign for all those convicted as Turing was, simply for being gay, to have their convictions disregarded. That will be a proper and fitting and final end to the Turing story."
Gay rights campaigner Peter Tatchell said the royal pardon was long overdue, but also due to "another 50,000-plus men who were also convicted of consenting, victimless homosexual relationships during the 20th century".

Though an inquest recorded a verdict of suicide, Turing's mother and others maintained his death was accidental.

Turing made highly significant contributions to the emerging field of artificial intelligence and computing. After the war, he worked at many institutions, including the University of Manchester, where he worked on the Manchester Mark 1, one of the first recognisable modern computers.
 

"Alan Turing's Body"

There's no command-Z for this great man's suffering.

by

Robinson Meyer

December 26th, 2013

The Atlantic

On Christmas Eve, Queen Elizabeth II pardoned the computer scientist Alan Mathison Turing.

Nearly all of the modern world is constructed on Turing’s accomplishments. He helped crack Germany’s “Enigma” code in World War II, contributed two important proofs to mathematics, and established foundational concepts in computer science and artificial intelligence. Without him, the Allies might not have won the war, and you might not have a machine which can display this article.

Turing also had consensual sexual relations with other men, and, for them, was convicted for “gross indecency” under an 1885 criminal law. The queen pardoned him for these on Tuesday.

The pardon is written in a high royal celebratory register, which doesn’t match the somber tone which the events seem to deserve.  I was surprised when, in the text of the pardon, I found something that almost constituted recursion, a building block of programming.

First, the formal document declares it intentions: “to pardon and remit unto [Turing] the sentence imposed upon him.”

Then, it turns the document into the pardon itself, and makes the pardon a reality: “And for so doing[,] this shall be a sufficient Warrant.”

The pardon executes, as a program would, and Alan Turing is forgiven.

***

Renaissance English royal law insists, mystically and metaphysically, that the king has two bodies.

Its theorists did so explicitly: “For the King has in him two Bodies, [namely] a Body natural, and a Body politic,” writes the jurist Edmund Plowden in 1571.

The king’s first body, the natural one, remains a “Body mortal, subject to all Infirmities that come by Nature or Accident.” The body politic, meanwhile, is everlasting, “consisting of Policy and Government, and constituted for the Direction of the People.” It is immutable, “utterly void of Infancy, and old Age.”

The body politic, most importantly, “cannot be seen or handled”; it’s invisible, passed down from reign to reign. The logic of the two bodies illuminates the cheer—“The King is dead; long live the King!”—and it led Elizabeth I to proclaim in her ascension speech, “I am but one body naturally considered, though by [God’s] permission a body politic to govern.”

Now the queen, the second named Elizabeth, has granted a rare royal pardon, the fourth during her reign. Usually only granted to those found innocent by investigation, Turing’s was extended at the request of the justice minister, Chris Grayling. Her “natural body” did not even lend its signature to the declaration: It is signed by Grayling.

When Turing was convicted for gross indecency, the British government forced him to choose between chemical castration and imprisonment; he chose castration, which meant taking estrogen pills. The pills made him impotent and grow breasts. They also depressed him.

Turing was used to eating an apple before bed. On June 7, 1954, he ate one that had purportedly been injected with cyanide, and he died. The local coroner’s office ruled his death a suicide; now, at least one expert doubts that ruling. Turing was 41.

The queen’s pardon follows a years-long attempts to excuse Turing through other legal means. In 2009, Britain’s prime minister, Gordon Brown, apologized to him.

“I am very proud to say: we’re sorry,” Brown wrote in the Telegraph. “You deserved so much better.”

Last year, on Turing’s centenary, members of parliament introduced legislation to formally pardon him. It did not pass: Parliamentarians decided they could not pardon someone for a crime that person had knowingly committed, even if the government no longer considered the offending act criminal. As Brown wrote in 2009, Turing “was dealt with under the law of the time, and we can't put the clock back.” (After the pardon’s failure, 10,000 people promptly petitioned for Turing to be added to the £10 note.)

Now, Queen Elizabeth II has done what elected officials did not.

The “royal prerogative of mercy,” the formal title for a King or Queen’s pardon, is one of the central affordances of English royalty. Its language is old and pleonastic, comfortable in its somber power.

That makes it all the more stomach-turning to read. “Now Know Ye,” it reads, “that We, in consideration of circumstances humbly represented unto Us, are Graciously pleased to extend Our Grace and Mercy unto the said Alan Mathison Turing and to grant him Our Free Pardon posthumously in respect of the said convictions.”

Perhaps this is standard language, but being “pleased to extend Our Grace and Mercy” feels inadequate in any register. Turing should be forgiven for nothing; he did nothing we’d consider criminal. If any entity requires pardoning, it’s the government. And yet the same government, in the body of its messenger, is pleased to excuse itself.

The pardon continues, becoming more and more magically legal. There is that recursion again: “And to pardon and remit unto him the sentence imposed upon him as aforesaid; And for so doing this shall be a sufficient Warrant.” The document only has to say the pardon exists, and it becomes real.

***

Addressing the question “Can machines think?”, Turing proposed a game. He called it “the Imitation Game,” and it goes like this: A human judge corresponds in writing with two unseen parties. One of the parties is human; the other is a machine. If the hidden human successfully convinces the judge of her humanity, the human wins. If the judge can’t tell which of the two is human, the machine wins.

If a machine can convince a human that it, too, is human, it has passed the famous “Turing test.”

The game turns on deception: The ability to act like a human, to perform humanity, supplants functioning like one. As Ian Bogost wrote last year on this website, the same concept drives Turing’s other great contribution to computer science—the universal computing machine. (Which is sometimes called the “Turing machine.”) Bogost writes:

    In the form Turing proposed, this machine is a device that manipulates symbols on a strip of tape. Through simple instructions like move forward, erase, write, and read, such a machine can enact any algorithm—and indeed, the design of modern CPUs is based directly on this principle.

 
    Unlike other sorts of machines, the purpose of a Turing machine is not to carry out any specific task like grinding grain or stamping iron, but to simulate any other machine by carrying out its logic through programmed instructions. A computer, it turns out, is just a particular kind of machine that works by pretending to be another machine.

Code—whether the ciphers of an enemy or the programmatic commands of software—pretends. It pretends to generate random noise, perhaps, or it pretends to be a calculator. And since code pretends, it is pretend, and it can bring fantastic ideas to life, ideas like an accounting ledger that can also do math, ideas like a book that includes its own card catalog or an instantaneous way of sending mail.

Ideas like the queen’s second body.

“Code is law,” Harvard professor Lawrence Lessig observed before the turn of the century. Code is law and code is pretend and since it’s pretend we can take code back, we can command-Z or delete the instruction and write something better.

We can’t do the same for Turing’s pain. The instructions by which Turing suffered, executed by a body politic which he served, inflicted themselves on his human body and altered it. We can append to history but never emend it; we can’t take back Turing’s misery.

But there’s an upside to these pretending machines. In the strict domains of law and code, there is nothing but emulation. Pretend and pretend to something, and very soon you might ask what, exactly, you are pretending to be.

We can’t change Turing’s experience with a pardon. But his legacy mandates that we emulate, create, and codify humane and humble bodies politic, whether with law or with software, to steward and respect bodies natural.

According to Buzzfeed’s Jim Waterson, 75,000 men were convicted under the same law as Turing, some 26,000 of whom are still alive. (The law was repealed in 1967.) We might start by pardoning, or apologizing to, all those other men.

In his poem for the nativity, For the Time Being, W.H. Auden describes “the natural world where / The occupation of space is the real and final act.” Turing’s suffering belongs to that world. But in these two domains where to say something makes it so, where, for so doing, language can be a sufficient warrant, we can still dream of new things to emulate—dreams that might be more expansive and yet more humble.


Forgiveness for Alan Turing by Stephen Hawking and others

Alan Turing pardoned

Oscar Wilde, British fiction, "The Picture of Dorian Gray"

Oscar Wilde discovered that going against the grain of British fiction is painful. And so, The Picture of Dorian Gray was called nasty, nauseous, and prurient to “outlawed noblemen and perverted telegraph-boys”.

"Deceptive Picture"

How Oscar Wilde painted over “Dorian Gray.”

by

Alex Ross

August 8th, 2011

The New Yorker

Oscar Wilde was not a man who lived in fear, but early reviews of “The Picture of Dorian Gray” must have given him pause. The story, telling of a man who never ages while his portrait turns decrepit, appeared in the July, 1890, issue of Lippincott’s, a Philadelphia magazine with English distribution. The Daily Chronicle of London called the tale “unclean,” “poisonous,” and “heavy with the mephitic odours of moral and spiritual putrefaction.” The St. James Gazette deemed it “nasty” and “nauseous,” and suggested that the Treasury or the Vigilance Society might wish to prosecute the author. Most ominous was a short notice in the Scots Observer stating that although “Dorian Gray” was a work of literary quality, it dealt in “matters only fitted for the Criminal Investigation Department or a hearing in camera” and would be of interest mainly to “outlawed noblemen and perverted telegraph-boys”—an allusion to the recent Cleveland Street scandal, which had exposed the workings of a male brothel in London. Within five years, Wilde found himself convicted of “committing acts of gross indecency with certain male persons.”

The furor was unsurprising: no work of mainstream English-language fiction had come so close to spelling out homosexual desire. The opening pages leave little doubt that Basil Hallward, the painter of Dorian’s portrait, is in love with his subject. Once Dorian discovers his godlike powers, he carries out various heinous acts, including murder; but to the Victorian sensibility his most unspeakable deed would have been his corruption of a series of young men. (Basil tells Dorian, “There was that wretched boy in the Guards who committed suicide. You were his great friend. There was Sir Henry Ashton, who had to leave England, with a tarnished name. You and he were inseparable.”) At the Wilde trials of 1895, the opposing attorneys read aloud from “Dorian Gray,” calling it a “sodomitical book.” Wilde went to prison not because he loved young men but because he flaunted that love, and “Dorian Gray” became the chief exhibit of his shamelessness.

Wilde died in 1900, in a run-down Paris hotel, at the age of forty-six. Almost overnight, a legend was born: Wilde the homosexual martyr, Wilde the moral rebel. A nascent gay-rights movement embraced him as a hero of defiance. When, in 1967, Craig Rodwell opened a gay-and-lesbian bookstore in New York, he named it the Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookshop, and after the Stonewall riots of 1969 Rodwell used the bookstore’s mailing list to help organize the first gay-pride parade. As recently as the late eighties, you could still find bookish young people coming to terms with their sexuality by way of reading Wilde. (You could at least find me.) Whether or not Wilde saw himself as part of a cause, he did not lack courage. The multiple versions of “Dorian Gray”—the earliest surviving manuscript, which is at the Morgan Library; the typescript sent to Lippincott’s, which Harvard University Press has just made available in an “uncensored” edition; the published Lippincott’s text; and the expanded book publication of 1891—show Wilde deciding, sentence by sentence, just how far he would go.

The Wilde Bookshop closed in 2009, a casualty not only of the decline of the bookselling business but also of the partial triumph of Rodwell’s mission. In many major cities, at least, gays and lesbians no longer seem to need a safe place in the form of a store. And they no longer seem to need the tragicomic Oscar; the young gays of today can revel in the wit and wisdom of Neil Patrick Harris. All of which leaves Wilde in an interesting limbo. What will he mean in a perhaps not too distant time when homosexuality has ceased to be a conversation stopper?

“To the world I seem, by intention on my part, a dilettante and dandy merely—it is not wise to show one’s heart to the world,” Wilde once wrote. We should not assume that his heart was revealed to us when he became a gay icon, or when he was canonized in wider bohemian circles as the patron saint of “Be yourself.” (The phrase appears in the 1891 essay “The Soul of Man Under Socialism.”) Wilde’s aestheticism, his fanatical cult of beauty, was the deepest and most lasting of his passions, and it is now the most radical thing about him. Perhaps only the threat of persecution prevented Wilde from freely expressing his sexuality in his writing; yet he also may have been caught in the modern struggle to inhabit an identity without becoming defined by it. The ghastly ending of “Dorian Gray”—Dorian stabbing his portrait in a frenzy—shows a man losing a battle with his public image.

The two most recent major biographies of Wilde are Thomas Wright’s “Built of Books: How Reading Defined the Life of Oscar Wilde,” which appeared in 2008, and Neil McKenna’s “The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde: An Intimate Biography,” which came out in 2005. They present almost comically contradictory portraits. Wright’s Wilde is an intellectual dreamer who rarely steps outside the literary realm. We are told that his parents—the eye-and-ear surgeon William Wilde and the poet Jane Francesca Wilde, who wrote under the name Speranza—accumulated mountains of books at their home, in Dublin, and that young Oscar habitually read in bed, his mind ravished by Irish folktales, ancient-Greek texts, Romantic poems, and gothic novels. Wright even suggests that Wilde discovered his sexuality in the pages of Plato. “Was it a case of literary nurture over biological nature?” Wright asks, as if Wilde might have found boys unattractive had the philosopher not put the idea in his head. In this telling, Wilde’s ultimate humiliation came not on the day of his arrest, on April 5, 1895, but a few weeks later, when his library was auctioned off.

McKenna’s Wilde, by contrast, is a largely sexual being who reads in order to find a language for his desire and writes in order to speak that desire aloud. He is hailed as “a martyr in an epic struggle for the freedom of men to love men.” McKenna rejects the idea, set forth in previous biographies, that Wilde had no gay life until his early thirties, when he met Robert Ross, a precociously self-aware Canadian teen-ager, in Oxford. In fact, certain of Wilde’s youthful poems drip with homoeroticism—“And he looked on me with desire / And I know that his name was Love”—and his early friendship with the painter Frank Miles, among others, had a sexual tinge. Yet McKenna reads too much into meagre evidence. He is a writer of the “almost certainly” school, and he withholds material that belies his thesis. (He does not mention that Miles was notoriously attracted to very young girls.) Later chapters rely on the dubious memoirs of Edmund Trelawny Backhouse, a forger and a fantasist, who claimed carnal knowledge not only of the principals in the Wilde case but also of Paul Verlaine and the Dowager Empress of China. McKenna, by fixating on Wilde’s sexual life, arrives at an oddly unflattering portrait. Preying on young literary fans, paying off rent boys, picking up lads as young as fifteen—Wilde is stripped of his charm.

To read Wright and McKenna in succession is like seeing a picture alter before one’s eyes: a bookish fellow becomes a sex addict. There is, however, no real contradiction; countless literary lives have veered from monkish labor to mindless pleasure. Wilde himself first felt this split when he was studying at Oxford, in the eighteen-seventies. In the poem “Hélas!,” published in 1881, he wistfully imagines a life of “austere control,” in which he “might have trod / The sunlit heights, and from life’s dissonance / Struck one clear chord to reach the ears of God.” But he tastes “the honey of romance” and loses his footing. Sixteen years later, Wilde traced the same downward arc in “De Profundis,” the annihilating book-length letter that he wrote in prison to Alfred Douglas, his former lover: “Tired of being on the heights I deliberately went to the depths in the search for new sensations.” He never found the middle ground between those extremes, although he glimpsed it. “All excess, as well as all renunciation, brings its own punishment,” he said, summing up “Dorian Gray.”

Such epigrams were the foundation of Wilde’s fame, and remain so. He is often seen as the godfather of celebrity culture, in that from the outset he was noted chiefly for being Oscar Wilde. Even in his Oxford days, his witticisms were making their way beyond the university walls. (His first hit: “I find it harder and harder every day to live up to my blue china.”) On settling in London, in 1879, he assumed the gaudy neo-Renaissance poses that inspired dozens of Punch cartoons and two characters in Gilbert and Sullivan’s “Patience.” He maintained exquisite attitudes during his American lecture tour of 1882, enduring jeers from college students and enjoying the unexpected admiration of Colorado miners. Back in England, he caused further chatter with a turn toward domesticity, marrying Constance Lloyd and producing two sons. Only when he published “The Happy Prince and Other Tales,” in 1888, did his literary output catch up to his fame. With that publication, the most intense phase of Wilde’s career began. His wit acquired a sharper edge: celebrity became a vehicle for subversion.

The fairy tales are well stocked with delightful paradoxes, yet they are encircled by strangeness and sadness. “The Star-Child” ends with the sentence “And he who came after him ruled evilly.” They are tales of impossible love: a fisherman’s for a mermaid, a statue’s for a swallow. Victorian parents who read the stories to their children may have stumbled over the friskier moments, as when the title character of “The Young King” presses his lips to a statue of Antinous, Hadrian’s male slave. Wilde reveals the human complexity and suffering behind the luxurious surfaces that he summoned so easily in rolling Irish prose. The Young King is dismayed to discover that his subjects have toiled severely—and even died—in order to manufacture his golden raiments, yet when he tries to assume a humbler guise the kingdom revolts against him.

Wilde was never an open radical in the manner of George Bernard Shaw, but the imperious essays he published between 1889 and 1891—“The Truth of Masks,” “Pen, Pencil, and Poison,” “The Decay of Lying,” “The Critic as Artist,” and “The Soul of Man Under Socialism”—dug tunnels under the moral foundations of Victorian England. Artists are cast as outlaws (“There is no essential incongruity between crime and culture”), purveyors of dangerous ideas (the better to resist “that splendid system that elevates [men] to the dignity of machines”), tellers of gorgeous lies that supplant dull truths, and habitual antinomians, rejecting “the shallow shibboleths of any sect or school.” In “The Soul of Man,” Wilde imagines a revolution that will sweep aside all middle-class Philistinism. Technological advances, he predicts, will liberate even the working classes, granting them lives of aesthetic reverie. The vague economic logic of the argument is a pretext for Wilde to vent his rage on an audience that treated him as an amusing sideshow:

The public make use of the classics of a country as a means of checking the progress of Art. They degrade the classics into authorities. They use them as bludgeons for preventing the free expression of Beauty in new forms. They are always asking a writer why he does not write like somebody else, or a painter why he does not paint like somebody else, quite oblivious of the fact that if either of them did anything of the kind he would cease to be an artist. A fresh mode of Beauty is absolutely distasteful to them, and whenever it appears they get so angry and bewildered that they always use two stupid expressions—one is that the work of art is grossly unintelligible; the other, that the work of art is grossly immoral. What they mean by these words seems to me to be this. When they say a work is grossly unintelligible, they mean that the artist has said or made a beautiful thing that is new; when they describe a work as grossly immoral, they mean that the artist has said or made a beautiful thing that is true.

This fulmination anticipates the rhetoric of modernism. Yeats and Joyce, in particular, felt a strong connection to their Irish forerunner. Yeats, who believed that Wilde would have made a great soldier or politician, praised him for launching “an extravagant Celtic crusade against Anglo-Saxon stupidity.” Joyce evidently drew on the trials of 1895 in creating the hallucinogenic persecution of Leopold Bloom in the “Circe” chapter of “Ulysses.”

The gay strain in Wilde’s work is part of a larger war on convention. In the 1889 story “The Portrait of Mr. W. H.,” a pseudo-scholarly, metafictional investigation of Shakespeare’s sonnets to a boy, Wilde slyly suggests that the pillar of British literature was something other than an ordinary family man. In the 1891 play “Salomé,” Wilde expands a Biblical anecdote into a sumptuous panorama of decadence. Anarchists of the fin de siècle, especially in Germany, considered Wilde one of their own: Gustav Landauer hailed Wilde as the English Nietzsche. Thomas Mann expanded on the analogy, observing that various lines of Wilde might have come from Nietzsche (“There is no reality in things apart from their experiences”) and that various lines of Nietzsche might have come from Wilde (“We are basically inclined to maintain that the falsest judgments are the most indispensable to us”). Nietzsche and Wilde were, in Mann’s view, “rebels in the name of beauty.”

In early 1892, Wilde enjoyed a huge theatrical success with “Lady Windermere’s Fan,” and until he went to prison he confined himself to social comedy. The subversive agenda remained: Richard Le Gallienne plausibly proposed that Wilde “made dying Victorianism laugh at itself, and it may be said to have died of the laughter.” But the increasing virtuosity of Wilde’s dramatic technique masked a weakening of his creative impulse; the plays were written amid long periods of inactivity and relied intermittently on old lines. “The Importance of Being Earnest,” brilliant as it is, threatens to become a greatest-hits compilation. Wilde later blamed the dissipations of Alfred Douglas for the slowing of his productivity after 1892; their affair began that year, after Wilde paid off a blackmailer on Douglas’s behalf.

After reading the newer books on Wilde, I returned to Richard Ellmann’s 1988 biography, which, despite some errors and eccentricities, still commands the field. Ellmann performs the supreme service of taking Wilde seriously, as a writer first and a personality second. He catches Wilde’s lawless moralism, his outcast-preacher tone. “His creative works almost always end in unmasking,” Ellmann writes. “The hand that adjusts the green carnation suddenly shakes an admonitory finger.” Ellmann explains better than any other chronicler why, in 1895, Wilde chose to face his accusers instead of fleeing to the Continent. It was not an act of martyrdom, or of arrogance or self-delusion, but, rather, an exercise in intellectual consistency. Ellmann writes, “He submitted to the society he had criticized, and so earned the right to criticize it further.”

Dorian Gray emerged from the same dinner that insured the immortality of Sherlock Holmes. Wilde and Arthur Conan Doyle dined together in London in August, 1889, as guests of Joseph Marshall Stoddart, the editor of Lippincott’s. Doyle, like so many others, came away dazzled by Wilde. “He towered above us all, and yet had the art of seeming to be interested in all that we could say,” Doyle recalled. Later that year, Doyle sent Lippincott’s his second Holmes tale, “The Sign of Four,” assigning a few Wildean traits to the great detective. (You can imagine Wilde saying, “I abhor the dull routine of existence. I crave for mental exaltation.”) Wilde, for his part, may have picked up some tricks from Holmes’s creator: parts of “Dorian Gray” are as gruesome as a police procedural.

Last spring, I spent a few hours looking at the autograph manuscript of “Dorian Gray,” at the Morgan Library. When Dorian attempts to destroy his portrait, the manuscript has him “ripping the thing right up”; Wilde then adds the phrase “from top to bottom.” Nicholas Frankel, the editor of the new Harvard edition of “Dorian Gray,” notes that the eviscerating gesture evokes Jack the Ripper, whose crimes had filled the papers two years earlier.

The original magazine story, at fifty thousand words, has all the familiar elements of the book version, which is the one most people know. Lord Henry, a Mephistophelian aesthete who seems to be Wilde’s mouthpiece, visits the studio of his friend Basil Hallward and becomes fascinated by a picture displayed there. Basil confesses his attraction to its subject. When Dorian enters, Lord Henry intellectually seduces him with a philosophy of hedonism. (“The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it.”) Dorian, saddened by the idea that he must grow old while his portrait stays the same, wishes the opposite were true. An elfin magic takes hold. Dorian falls for a gifted young actress named Sibyl Vane and then casts her aside when he determines that the joy of love has rendered her art banal. She kills herself. The face in the picture acquires a cruel look. As Dorian wallows in debauchery, Basil pries into his secret life and wonders about the state of his soul. Dorian, who has hidden the picture in his attic, shows Basil the now hideous face, and kills him. Thoughts of repentance cross Dorian’s mind, but he decides that he must wipe out the only remaining record of his crimes: the portrait. When he stabs it, he falls dead, his face misshapen beyond recognition. In the same instant, the picture’s beauty is restored.

In the Morgan manuscript, Wilde’s hand flows confidently, as if taking dictation, but the appearance of fluency may be deceptive: the autograph is probably a copy of an earlier draft that has disappeared. Although Wilde is celebrated as the greatest natural talker of modern times, he edited his prose meticulously. The opening paragraphs, describing Basil’s studio, are a masterpiece of precise evocation, and Wilde’s handwritten changes sharpen the imagery yet more. In a passage that compares the “dim roar of London” to the “bourdon note of an organ,” Wilde inserts the word “distant” before “organ,” adding a twinge of far-off religious dread.

At the same time, Wilde’s revisions to the opening dialogue between Basil and Lord Henry betray a rising anxiety, an urge to lower the emotional temperature. Exclamations over Dorian’s beauty give way to more reserved remarks about his “good looks” and “personality.” “Passion” becomes “feeling,” “pain” becomes “perplexity.” Wilde’s pen stops Basil from mentioning the time Dorian brushed against his cheek and from announcing that “the world becomes young to me when I hold his hand.” And when Basil explains why he is withholding the painting from London gallery-goers he is prevented from saying that “where there is really love, they would see something evil, and where there is spiritual passion they would suggest something vile.” Tellingly, Wilde removes intimations of a prior attachment between Basil and Lord Henry. He deletes a description of Basil “taking hold of [Lord Henry’s] hand.” One passage is so heavily scratched out as to be almost illegible, but in it Lord Henry seems to berate Basil for having become Dorian’s “slave,” and then blurts out, “I hate Dorian Gray.” In the end, Wilde cancels any hint of jealousy and gives Lord Henry the mask of an amused aesthete: “Basil, this is quite wonderful! I must see Dorian Gray.”

Even before Wilde sent his manuscript to the typist, then, he was hesitating over its homoerotic content, and especially over the pages devoted to Basil’s desire. The focus on Basil is not surprising, given that Wilde later declared, “Basil Hallward is what I think I am: Lord Henry what the world thinks me: Dorian what I would like to be—in other ages, perhaps.”

When the typescript arrived in the Philadelphia offices of Lippincott’s, it was Joseph Marshall Stoddart’s turn to have second thoughts. His changes are noted in the new Harvard edition. Stoddart was no prude, and moved in unconventional circles; when Wilde came to America, Stoddart introduced him to Walt Whitman. But the editor knew his public’s limits. He, or an associate, cut another of Basil’s confessional remarks about the portrait—“There was love in every line, and in every touch there was passion”—and several descriptions of Dorian’s nighttime wanderings, including a sentence that might depict the ancient ritual of cruising: “A man with curious eyes had suddenly peered into his face, and then dogged him with stealthy footsteps, passing and repassing him many times.” In good American style, Stoddart had no problem with the violence.

“Dorian Gray” failed to scandalize America. England was, of course, another matter. Although Wilde was already planning to expand the story into a novel, he certainly reacted to the insinuations in the press. More references to physical contact between the male characters were dropped. Just as significant as the expurgations are the additions: six chapters, totalling some twenty-eight thousand words. They supply further episodes of society comedy, fresh adventures for Dorian in the opium dens, a fuller sketch of the unlucky Sibyl Vane, and a baroque subplot involving James Vane, Sibyl’s brother, who seeks to avenge her. The new material gives “Dorian Gray” a novelistic heft, even a political edge. The chapter about the Vanes, for example, sets Dorian’s velvety life style in stark relief. Yet these excursions in high and low society feel a bit like staged distractions. There are too many tidy formulations—“It was his beauty that had ruined him, his beauty and the youth that he had prayed for”—positioned to reassure the middle classes.

The version that Wilde submitted to Lippincott’s is the better fiction. It has the swift and uncanny rhythm of a modern fairy tale—and “Dorian” is the greatest of Wilde’s fairy tales. Wilde made clear from the outset that he wished to show not only the thrills and pleasures of a ruthlessly aesthetic life but also its limits and dangers. The hideousness of Dorian’s demise is as integral to the work’s conception as any bloodcurdling twist in Poe, and looking at the final pages of the manuscript you can almost see Wilde’s lips curling cruelly as he wrote. Beneath the brutal final paragraph, he signs his name in slashing strokes, as if wielding a knife. Ellmann sums it up thus: “Drift beautifully on the surface, and you will die unbeautifully in the depths.” Wilde steps outside his practiced persona to cast a cold eye on the sensation-seeking life style popularly ascribed to him.

The most problematic aspect of Wilde’s revision is the novel’s Preface, with its famous cavalcade of epigrams: “To reveal art and conceal the artist is art’s aim”; “There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book”; “All art is quite useless.” These lines, together with new quips for Lord Henry (“Art has no influence upon action. . . . It is superbly sterile”), are related to letters that Wilde wrote to critics and readers after the Lippincott’s publication. They amount to a formalist defense, positing the story as an autonomous object in which diverse readers perceive diverse ideas. But art does reveal the artist, and it does influence action, however unpredictably. In Wilde’s narrative, books are described as “poisonous” agents that enter the bloodstream: an unnamed French book that Lord Henry gives to Dorian discloses new vistas of vice. In the typescript, we learn that the book is “Le Secret de Raoul,” by Catulle Sarrazin—probably a fictional stand-in for Huysmans’s 1884 novel, “Against the Grain,” which describes a gay encounter more explicitly than Wilde ever dared to do. (Wilde read it on his honeymoon.) Above all, there is Basil’s painting, which destroys both its creator and subject. When Mallarmé read the story, he singled out for approval the line “It was the portrait that had done everything.” Art is not innocent, Wilde implies. Violence can be done in its name. Indeed, the twentieth century brought forth many Dorian Grays: fiendishly pure spirits so wrapped up in aesthetics that they become heedless of humanity. Wilde’s anatomy of the confusion between art and life remains pertinent with each new uproar over lurid films, songs, or video games.

Even in the final book version, Wilde refuses to moralize, to tell the artist what to do or the reader what to think. Each individual must devise his own ethical code. When Wilde wrote that all excess as well as all renunciation brings its punishment, he evidently had in mind the contrast between Basil, who can conceive of his love for Dorian only in abstract terms, and Dorian, who is so intent on embracing the physical that he loses his mind. Both men meet bad ends. Lord Henry, by contrast, emerges unscathed, his talk naughtier than his walk. Indeed, Basil accuses him of being secretly virtuous: “You never say a moral thing, and you never do a wrong thing.” Lord Henry espouses a peculiarly contemporary kind of moderation, indulging his brain but not his body, employing Dorian as a proxy hedonist. (Today, Lord Henry might spend a lot of time on the Internet.) There is something sad about him, for, unlike Basil and Dorian, he fails to commit himself. His life is vicarious.

What begins as an alluring fable ends as a full-on modernist nightmare. Only one character experiences anything like spontaneous joy, and that is Sibyl Vane, when she decides to abandon the artistic life and devote herself to Dorian. “I am sick of shadows,” she tells him. “You are more to me than all art can ever be.” Tragically, Sibyl does not realize that Dorian has exchanged his soul for that of the painting; like the others, she is trapped by the image’s spell.

The eerie thing about Wilde’s life is that he, too, could not escape the infernal logic of the “Picture.” His own book exhibited “poisonous” properties. Alfred Douglas read it at Oxford and, by his own testimony, reread it thirteen times. He became determined to meet the author. He was Wilde’s fantasy come to life—Dorian stepping from the canvas. But he had an ugly soul; as Wilde recognized in “De Profundis,” hate excited him more than love. Wilde, Basil to the end, adored the young man all the same.

On February 18, 1895, the Marquess of Queensberry, Douglas’s hate-engorged father, inscribed a visiting card with the words “For Oscar Wilde, posing Somdomite,” and left it at Wilde’s club. Urged on by Douglas, Wilde made the mistake of suing the Marquess for libel—a decision catastrophic not only for his career but also for his sense of dignity, since, as he later wrote, he was forced to present himself as a “champion of respectability in conduct, of puritanism in life, and of morality in art.”

At the libel trial, Queensberry’s chief attorney, Edward Carson, needed to demonstrate that the words on the card were justified. So he set about establishing that Wilde had already advertised his proclivities in print. “Dorian Gray” became Carson’s main resource, and he elected to treat it as Wilde’s life story—an ironic move, because in its pages Basil complains that “men treat art as if it were meant to be a form of autobiography.” The barrister pounced on a passage that had appeared in the Lippincott’s version and was later cut: “It is quite true that I have worshipped you with far more romance of feeling than a man usually gives to a friend. . . . I quite admit that I adored you madly, extravagantly, absurdly.” The following interrogation ensued:


CARSON: Have you ever extravagantly adored?
WILDE: Do you mean financially or emotionally?
CARSON: Financially? Do you think we are talking here of finances?
WILDE: I don’t know what you are talking about.
CARSON: Don’t you?
WILDE: You must ask me a plain question.
CARSON: I hope I will make myself very plain before I am done.

Wilde was obviously perturbed by the exchange. It was like talking to an eight-year-old who couldn’t tell the difference between an actor and his role. He defended himself ably, but Carson was softening him up for the blow. Private detectives hired by Queensberry had rounded up rent boys and starstruck youths who had served Wilde’s needs, and there were no clever answers to the next round of questions: “Did you become intimate with a young man named Conway? . . . He sold newspapers on the pier at Worthing? . . . Did you put your hands inside his trousers? . . . Did you give him sums from time to time amounting to fifteen pounds?” The roll call of Wilde’s associates hauntingly echoes the list of young men whom Dorian is said to have ruined.

During the two dismal criminal trials that followed, Wilde had one magnificent moment, and it, too, involved “Dorian Gray.” While being questioned on the subject of Alfred Douglas’s poem about “the Love that dare not speak its name,” Wilde was suddenly moved to defend that love instead of denying it. With emotion, he announced that such love was “as pure as it was perfect,” that it “pervades great works of art like those of Shakespeare and Michelangelo.” According to one transcript, he said, “It is beautiful, it is fine, it is the noblest form of affection.” He was quoting almost directly from “Dorian Gray”: “The love that [Basil] bore him . . . had nothing in it that was not noble and intellectual. It was not that mere physical admiration of beauty that is born of the senses and that dies when the senses tire. It was such love as Michael Angelo had known, and Montaigne, and Winckelmann, and Shakespeare himself.”

Wilde’s speech aroused hisses in the courtroom and also a brave burst of applause. At least one member of the jury voted against a guilty verdict, forcing a retrial. A political panic erupted: the men around Lord Rosebery, the Prime Minister, feared that if Wilde were not convicted they would be accused of sheltering a degenerate. (Rosebery had a personal motive; it was rumored that he had been the lover of the older brother of Alfred Douglas, Francis, who had died in 1894, probably a suicide.) A second prosecution began, with the Solicitor General in charge, and it was successful. Justice Wills, the presiding judge, bombastically described the case as “the worst . . . I have ever tried.”

Over time, though, the shaming of Wilde generated as much sympathy as disgust, particularly among those who were disenchanted by the strutting poses of the British Empire. “When the verdict was announced the harlots in the street outside danced upon the pavement,” Yeats wrote. And in the gay underworld Wilde’s defiance cracked open the door of hope. Havelock Ellis, in the 1906 edition of his book “Sexual Inversion,” noted that the Wilde trials “generally contributed to give definiteness and self-consciousness to the manifestations of homosexuality,” and quoted a correspondent saying that Wilde’s sufferings made him feel “ready to strike a blow, when the time comes, for what we deem to be right, honorable, and clean.”

Wilde foresaw his posthumous triumph. “I have no doubt we shall win, but the road is long, and red with monstrous martyrdoms,” he wrote to the early gay-rights campaigner George Ives. Even so, the clean-cut categories of contemporary sexuality might have puzzled him. He was attracted to women as well as to men, if not nearly as strongly, and the collapse of his marriage may have had as much to do with temperamental differences as with sexual ones. (You could see him as one more self-entitled Victorian male exercising his right to extramarital recreation.) Furthermore, he might have resisted the tendency toward normalization in gay circles—the drive of an oppositional culture to abolish itself. When he spoke of winning the battle, he probably did not have in mind gaining the right to join the military and marry in church. “The world spins only forward,” Prior Walter says at the end of Tony Kushner’s “Angels in America,” a “gay fantasia” that opened in 1991, a century after the publication of “Dorian Gray.” Prior goes on to say, “We will be citizens. The time has come.” Seeing the Signature Theatre production of Kushner’s masterpiece last spring, I thought of how much had changed in twenty years, never mind a hundred. When I was in college, AIDS cast a pall of fear over gay life, and I struggled to summon the courage to tell my closest friends who I was. I couldn’t have imagined that gay marriage would become legal in half a dozen states, or that I would be married myself.

The transformation is almost dreamlike. Yet I doubt that Wilde would recognize in our world the utopia that he dreamed aloud in “The Soul of Man Under Socialism.” A man who steeped himself in the literature of the ancient Greeks, who modelled his being on the writing of Balzac and Stendhal and Pater, who read Dante every day in prison, might have seen a new kind of hell in the global triumph of American-style pop culture. Medicine prolongs life and slows aging, but personal satisfaction is as elusive a commodity as it was for Dorian Gray. Prejudice wanes, ignorance grows, the world spins forward and backward. Few of us would wish for the return of Wilde’s London, with its opulent surfaces and savage heart. But Wilde might have been content to stay there, savoring his joys and sorrows. No one lives happily ever after.

The Picture of Dorian Gray [Project Gutenberg EBook]