In the late nineteen-sixties I lived for a year, with my then husband, in the middle of an apple orchard in northern New Mexico, some miles from the glorious Rio Grande Gorge. Our adobe house was equipped with nothing but electricity—no plumbing, no running water—so a fair amount of physical labor was necessary to get through each day. This was fine with me. My husband and I were both in our thirties and, like many of our generation, preoccupied with “finding” ourselves—I by writing something I could think well of, my husband by finishing a dissertation that had long been languishing. But, as I was often gripped by the conviction that any writer ten years my junior was already more accomplished than I’d ever be, I welcomed the time spent hauling water or raking the woodstove.
One day, we paid a visit to the D. H. Lawrence Ranch ten or fifteen miles north of our house. The ranch, long the property of the University of New Mexico, was now run as a writers’ retreat, with a single writer of reputation occupying the privileged position of writer-in-residence. That year, it was Henry Roth, the author of the 1934 masterpiece “Call It Sleep,” a book I held in high regard. When we stepped out of the car, my husband unexpectedly suggested that we look in on Roth.
“Oh, no!” I instantly shot back. “We can’t do that.”
“Why not?”
“We’d be intruding.”
“Nonsense. I’m sure he’d love it.”
It was typical of us in those years that, whatever the suggestion, I almost invariably said no, whereas my outgoing husband just as invariably said yes. I always thought I was simply exercising good critical judgement in opposition to my husband’s indiscriminate eagerness. It never occurred to me that perhaps some anxiety lay at the heart of my dismissiveness. On that afternoon at the Lawrence ranch, however, my husband’s yes prevailed. A tall, friendly-faced woman answered the door—Mrs. Roth, as it turned out—and, in a voice as friendly as her face, told us that the Great Man was asleep, she couldn’t wake him, but who, she wanted to know, were we, and where had we come from? When we told her where we lived, she said that they’d heard of the orchard, and longed to have some of its apples. Come on down and take all you want, my husband said. How about Sunday, Mrs. Roth suggested. Fine, we said, and went on our way.
On Sunday morning, I woke up, yawned and stretched, and said to my husband, “Let’s take a walk at the gorge.”
“We can’t do that,” he said. “The Roths are coming.”
“Oh, don’t be silly,” I said. “They’re not going to come.”
“Sure they will,” he said.
“No,” I insisted, “they won’t. I want to go to the gorge.”
Within the hour, we were in the car. When we returned, late in the afternoon, there was a note on the door. It was, of course, from the Roths. They were sorry not to have found us at home, they’d been looking forward to a visit, and hoped we didn’t mind that they’d picked a bagful of apples. It was almost as though their feelings had been hurt by finding us gone.
My husband stood holding the note in his hand, looking at me as though seeing something in me he’d not seen before. “Why did you do this?” he asked softly.
It would be many decades before I could answer that question.
A woman sits alone in her apartment, perishing for want of company. She has a number of friends with whom she might spend the evening, she need only pick up the phone and call, but she’s seen them all within the past week and cannot imagine that any one of them would want to see her again so soon. She makes no calls.
At a dinner party, a man dominates the conversation, speaking non-stop for nearly ten minutes. He knows that he’s burning his social bridges behind him, but he does not trust that his presence will be recalled, much less well regarded, should he fall silent. He goes on talking even as every eye in the room glazes over.
Another man, independently wealthy, is always borrowing small, niggling amounts of money from friends and acquaintances which he routinely forgets to pay back. No matter how much privilege he enjoys, he can never feel sufficiently taken care of.
I once had a mentor who could only correct, never praise. It was years before I realized how bitter her assessment of her own abilities was.
When one thinks of all the calls not made, the courtesies ignored, the ways others are made to feel small in our presence or we in theirs, the sheer meanness of little everyday confrontations. . . .
Yet it is also true that the influence of negative self-regard over character formation can be remarkably varied. I have a friend of many years—I’ll call her Diane—who suffers mightily from the suspicion that she is not worthy of the world’s affection: she grew up feeling not only unloved but unlovable. Instead of developing into someone driven to act out the injured self in the ways I have been describing, Diane’s instinct since childhood has been to engage affectionately with humanity at large. For her, the pain of feeling unlovable is assuaged by acting as though she lives in a garden of earthly delights where all the other animals are creatures of equal interest and value. Hers is the gift of making all who come her way feel, “You enchanting creature! I could happily go on talking to you for the rest of my life.” What Diane yearns to have others think of her, she bestows on her every interlocutor. In other people’s lives, Diane’s self-abasement is the cause of emotional nourishment.
The solipsism of low self-esteem is one of the wonders of the human psyche. So inexplicable is its grip, so binding its influence, it can feel almost mythic. And why not? Myths are what we invent to accommodate the mysteries of nature: our own if not those of our surroundings. Scientists can explain daylight and darkness, gravity and rainfall, but who, after all, can explain why we are born with a need to think well of ourselves, and why, when we don’t, life becomes an exercise in humiliation?
According to Biblical myth, human beings were at one with all the dumb animals of the earth until we ate of the Tree of Knowledge, whereupon we became a race divided against itself. On the one hand, the gift of consciousness brought the glory of independence; on the other, the punishment of separateness. Now we were proud but lonely. The loneliness proved our undoing. It so perverted our instincts that we became strangers to ourselves—the true meaning of alienation—and thus to all others.
Many cultures have felt tasked with the problem of restoring some semblance of that imagined inner wholeness, in the hope that humanity will be freed of its emotional isolation. In our own time, that of the therapeutic age, we have come to believe that if people could purge themselves of all their hidden fears and anxieties, and learn to occupy their conscious selves, fully and freely, they would find that they were no longer alone; they would have themselves for company. As soon as one had company, one could feel benign toward others. Ah, therein lies the promised land! But the therapeutic age is now more than a century old, and the problem has proved intractable.
I think often, and always with regret, of that long-ago Sunday afternoon in New Mexico when feelings of inadequacy drove me to flee a meeting with a person of accomplishment. It’s not the inadequacy I regret—that I believe to be very nearly existential—it’s the flight. I daydream about how differently someone similarly afflicted might have acted. Take Diane, for instance. Not only would she have been there to welcome the Roths; she would have baked them an apple pie. ♦
