Catching Up with Thurber

[Following are the final two paragraphs from James Thurber’s “Sex Ex Machina” which first appeared in The New Yorker, March 13, 1937.]

I should like to end with the case history of a friend of mine in Ohio named Harvey Lake. When he was only nineteen, the steering bar of an old electric runabout broke of in his hand, causing the machine to carry him through a fence and into the grounds of the Columbus School for Girls. He developed a fear of automobiles, trains, and every other kind of vehicle that was not pulled by a horse. Now, the psychologists would call this a complex and represent the fear as abnormal, but I see it as a purely reasonable apprehension. If Harvey Lake had, because he was catapulted into the grounds of the Columbus School for Girls, developed a fear of girls, I would call that a complex, but I don’t call his normal fear of machines a complex. Harvey Lake never in his life got into a plane (he died in a fall from a porch), but I do not regard that as neurotic, either, but only sensible.

I have, to be sure, encountered men with complexes. There was, for example, Marvin Belt. He had a complex about airplanes that was quite interesting. He was not afraid of machinery, or of high places, or of crashes. He was simply afraid that the pilot of any plane he got into might lose his mind. “I imagine myself high over Montana,” he once said to me, “in a huge, perfectly safe trimotored plane. Several of the passengers are dozing, others are reading, but I am keeping my eyes glued on the door to the cockpit. Suddenly the pilot steps out of it, a wild light in his eyes, and in a falsetto like that of a little girl he says to me, ‘Conductor, will you please let me off at One-Hundred-and-Twenty-fifth Street?’” “But,” I said to Belt, “even if the pilot does go crazy, there is still the co-pilot.” “No, there isn’t.” said Belt. “The pilot has hit the co-pilot over the head with something and killed him.” Yes, the psychoanalysts can have Marvin Belt. But they can’t have Harvey Lake, or Mr. C, or Mr. S, or Mr. F, or, while I have my strength, me.