‘Pryce’s Buoy’: Alan Turing’s autofictional short story

Abstract This article presents the first extended engagement with Alan Turing’s unpublished and untitled short story, commonly referred to as ‘Pryce’s Buoy’. Six pages of the story survive in handwritten manuscript form in the King’s College Archive at the University of Cambridge; the Appendix presents a new, complete transcription of the story. Noting that Turing’s extensive epistolary archive might itself be considered a form of life writing, the article examines Turing’s story as a form of autofiction. It considers the story’s autobiographical source and what is added through its fictional devices, especially its use of shifting focalization and the third person. It then addresses Turing’s, and the story’s, relationship to twentieth-century homosexual literature and social realism, in particular the significant influence of Angus Wilson’s Hemlock and After (1952). Finally, it contextualizes the story as part of Turing’s self-exploration following his arrest and conviction for ‘gross indecency’, arguing that it is an extension in writing of the sense-making function of his lifelong reading of literature, including of his friend Fred Clayton’s autofiction The Cloven Pine (1942). The article concludes by pointing to other storytelling fragments in Turing’s archive, and reflecting on the autofictional as always, like the short story itself, incomplete.