The part of the sentence "to survive himself" is grammatically correct and can be used in written English.
One possible example where you can use this phrase is: "The young man was determined to survive himself and overcome the challenges that life had thrown at him." In this example, "survive himself" means to overcome one's own personal struggles and adversities.
Wilder went on to survive cancer himself, after he was diagnosed with non-Hodgkins lymphoma in 1999.
We would see a man who, in order to survive, distanced himself from all in his proximity.
In order to survive, he puts himself in the deep freeze, waiting for rescuers who are probably not going to arrive.
FOREIGN POLICY: ERITREA, SOMALIA, AND SUDAN 10. (S) Getachew described Eritrean President Isaias Afwerki as "no martyr," who sought to survive and establish himself as the predominate leader in the Horn of Africa.
That he was able to survive and dig himself out … I really wish he'd been able to save her too.
In short, to survive, he must turn himself into a walking Brian Eno concert.
But it's in digging out the black humour in the petty criminal's scrap to survive that Slattery distinguishes himself.
Both have had to adapt to survive: Sooty has reinvented himself many times in the face of sex and drugs scandals, and big money deals; while the NHS has been through countless reorganisations and crises.
Truman Capote put so much of himself into Holly Golightly – his memories of growing up dirt poor, and of his mother having to charm (and sleep with) men for money, his experience of never quite belonging in glamorous high society, and, most of all, the way he had to reinvent himself to survive.
And it is also, you can't help feeling, a bit of wisdom that has enabled Murakami himself to survive and, maybe, deepen as a writer over the two and a half decades of taking things in that this odd, bracing sampler represents.
