On Self-Respect

Once, in a dry season, I wrote in large letters across two pages of a notebook that
innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself. Although
now, some years later, I marvel that a mind on the outs with itself should have
nonetheless made painstaking record of its every tremor, I recall with embarrassing
clarity the flavor of those particular ashes. It was a matter of misplaced self-respect.

I had not been elected to Phi Beta Kappa. This failure could scarcely have been more
predictable or less ambiguous (I simply did not have the grades), but I was unnerved
by it; I had somehow thought myself a kind of academic Raskolnikov, curiously exempt
from the cause-effect relationships that hampered others. Although the situation must
have had even then the approximate tragic stature of Scott Fitzgerald's failure to become
president of the Princeton Triangle Club, the day that I did not make Phi Beta Kappa
nevertheless marked the end of something, and innocence may well be the word for it.
I lost the conviction that lights would always turn green for me, the pleasant certainty
that those rather passive virtues which had won me approval as a child automatically
guaranteed me not only Phi Beta Kappa keys but happiness, honour, and the love of a
good man (preferably a cross between Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca and one of the
Murchisons in a proxy fight); lost a certain touching faith in the totem power of good
manners, clean hair, and proven competence on the Stanford-Binet scale. To such doubtful
amulets had my self-respect been pinned, and I faced myself that day with the nonplussed
wonder of someone who has come across a vampire and found no garlands of garlic at hand.

Although to be driven back upon oneself is an uneasy affair at best, rather like trying
to cross a border with borrowed credentials, it seems to me now the one condition
necessary to the beginnings of real self-respect. Most of our platitudes notwithstanding,
self-deception remains the most difficult deception. The charms that work on others count
for nothing in that devastatingly well-lit back alley where one keeps assignations with
oneself: no winning smiles will do here, no prettily drawn lists of good intentions. With
the desperate agility of a crooked faro dealer who spots Bat Masterson about to cut
himself into the game, one shuffles flashily but in vain through one's marked cards—the
kindness done for the wrong reason, the apparent triumph which had involved no real
effort, the seemingly heroic act into which one had been shamed. The dismal fact is that
self-respect has nothing to do with the approval of others—who are, after all, deceived
easily enough; has nothing to do with reputation—which, as Rhett Butler told Scarlett
O'Hara, is something that people with courage can do without.

To do without self-respect, on the other hand, is to be an unwilling audience of one to
an interminable home movie that documents one's failings, both real and imagined, with
fresh footage spliced in for each screening. There's the glass you broke in anger, there's
the hurt on X's face; watch now, this next scene, the night Y came back from Houston, see
how you muff this one. To live without self-respect is to lie awake some night, beyond the
reach of warm milk, phenobarbital, and the sleeping hand on the coverlet, counting up the
sins of commission and omission, the trusts betrayed, the promises subtly broken, the gifts
irrevocably wasted through sloth or cowardice or carelessness. However long we postpone it,
we eventually lie down alone in that notoriously uncomfortable bed, the one we make
ourselves. Whether or not we sleep in it depends, of course, on whether or not we respect
ourselves.

To protest that some fairly improbable people, some people who could not possibly respect
themselves, seem to sleep easily enough is to miss the point entirely, as surely as those
people miss it who think that self-respect has necessarily to do with not having safety pins
in one's underwear. There is a common superstition that "self-respect" is a kind of charm
against snakes, something that keeps those who have it locked in some unblighted Eden, out
of strange beds, ambivalent conversations, and trouble in general. It does not at all. It
has nothing to do with the face of things, but concerns instead a separate peace, a private
reconciliation. Although the careless, suicidal Julian English in Appointment in Samarra and
the careless, incurably dishonest Jordan Baker in The Great Gatsby seem equally improbable
candidates for self-respect, Jordan Baker had it, Julian English did not. With that genius
for accommodation more often seen in women than in men, Jordan took her own measure, made
her own peace, avoided threats to that peace: "I hate careless people," she told Nick
Carraway. "It takes two to make an accident."

Like Jordan Baker, people with self-respect have the courage of their mistakes. They know
the price of things. If they choose to commit adultery, they do not then go running, in an
access of bad conscience, to receive absolution from the wronged parties; nor do they
complain unduly of the unfairness, the undeserved embarrassment, of being named corespondent.
If they choose to forego their work—say it is screenwriting—in favor of sitting around the
Algonquin bar, they do not then wonder bitterly why the Hacketts, and not they, did Anne
Frank.

In brief, people with self-respect exhibit a certain toughness, a kind of moral nerve; they
display what was once called character, a quality which, although approved in the abstract,
sometimes loses ground to other, more instantly negotiable virtues. The measure of its
slipping prestige is that one tends to think of it only in connection with homely children
and with United States senators who have been defeated, preferably in the primary, for
re-election. Nonetheless, character—the willingness to accept responsibility for one's own
life—is the source from which self-respect springs.

Self-respect is something that our grandparents, whether or not they had it, knew all about.
They had instilled in them, young, a certain discipline, the sense that one lives by doing
things one does not particularly want to do, by putting fears and doubts to one side, by
weighing immediate comforts against the possibility of larger, even intangible, comforts.
It seemed to the nineteenth century admirable, but not remarkable, that Chinese Gordon put
on a clean white suit and held Khartoum against the Mahdi; it did not seem unjust that the
way to free land in California involved death and difficulty and dirt. In a diary kept during
the winter of 1846, an emigrating twelve-year-old named Narcissa Cornwall noted coolly:
"Father was busy reading and did not notice that the house was being filled with strange
Indians until Mother spoke about it." Even lacking any clue as to what Mother said, one can
scarcely fail to be impressed by the entire incident: the father reading, the Indians filing
in, the mother choosing the words that would not alarm, the child duly recording the event
and noting further that those particular Indians were not, "fortunately for us," hostile.
Indians were simply part of the donnee.

In one guise or another, Indians always are. Again, it is a question of recognizing that
anything worth having has its price. People who respect themselves are willing to accept
the risk that the Indians will be hostile, that the venture will go bankrupt, that the
liaison may not turn out to be one in which every day is a holiday because you're married
to me. They are willing to invest something of themselves; they may not play at all, but
when they do play, they know the odds.

That kind of self-respect is a discipline, a habit of mind that can never be faked but can
be developed, trained, coaxed forth. It was once suggested to me that, as an antidote to
crying, I put my head in a paper bag. As it happens, there is a sound physiological reason,
something to do with oxygen, for doing exactly that, but the psychological effect alone is
incalculable: it is difficult in the extreme to continue fancying oneself Cathy in Wuthering
Heights with one's head in a Food Fair bag. There is a similar case for all the small
disciplines, unimportant in themselves; imagine maintaining any kind of swoon, commiserative
or carnal, in a cold shower.

But those small disciplines are valuable only insofar as they represent larger ones. To say
that Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton is not to say that Napoleon might have
been saved by a crash program in cricket; to give formal dinners in the rain forest would be
pointless did not the candlelight flickering on the liana call forth deeper, stronger
disciplines, values instilled long before. It is a kind of ritual, helping us to remember
who and what we are. In order to remember it, one must have known it.

To have that sense of one's intrinsic worth which, for better or for worse, constitutes
self-respect, is potentially to have everything: the ability to discriminate, to love and
to remain indifferent. To lack it is to be locked within oneself, paradoxically incapable
of either love or indifference. If we do not respect ourselves, we are on the one hand
forced to despise those who have so few resources as to consort with us, so little
perception as to remain blind to our fatal weaknesses. On the other, we are peculiarly in
thrall to everyone we see, curiously determined to live out—since our self-image is
untenable—their false notions of us.

We flatter ourselves by thinking this compulsion to please others an attractive trait: a
gift for imaginative empathy, evidence of our willingness to give. Of course we will play
Francesca to Paolo, Brett Ashley to Jake, Helen Keller to anyone's Annie Sullivan: no
expectation is too misplaced, no role too ludicrous. At the mercy of those we cannot but
hold in contempt, we play roles doomed to failure before they are begun, each defeat
generating fresh despair at the necessity of divining and meeting the next demand made
upon us.

It is the phenomenon sometimes called alienation from self. In its advanced stages, we no
longer answer the telephone, because someone might want something; that we could say no
without drowning in self-reproach is an idea alien to this game. Every encounter demands
too much, tears the nerves, drains the will, and the spectre of something as small as an
unanswered letter arouses such disproportionate guilt that one's sanity becomes an object
of speculation among one's acquaintances. To assign unanswered letters their proper weight,
to free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves—there lies the
great, the singular power of self-respect. Without it, one eventually discovers the final
turn of the screw: one runs away to find oneself, and finds no one at home.