Until Our Little Lungs Turn Blue

J.D. Salinger and Zach Bryan’s Bro Code

I was up late last night thinking about two men with whom I have complicated relationships. In a strange reversal, I was tossing and turning, regretting my afternoon coffee, while Adam slept soundly. It’s usually his face illuminated by The New York Times crossword puzzle at 3:42 a.m., as I reach for his wrist and remind him that the light is bad for his brain. The two men keeping me awake last night were J.D. Salinger and Zach Bryan.

I first read Salinger in the summer before college. Instantly, I was captivated by Franny and Zooey, Lieutenant Z and Esmé, the suicidal man from “A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” and the child he met on the shore. I was drawn to Salinger himself, who looked like the kind of man I wanted to date: poetic, brooding, and emotionally unavailable. I even saved a magazine article about him as a spiritual figure, pressing it between the yellowing plastic pages of a keepsake book. The article was titled “A Tribute to Swami Salinger” by Philip Goldberg. A friend of mine also loved Salinger and made me read Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters. We discussed it over Jameson and gingers, imagining lives in New York rather than at our liberal arts college in the mountains of Santa Barbara.

To this day, Salinger colors much of my literary and personal imagination, likely because his characters embark on the kind of inner seeking, privileged listlessness, and wandering that I too have experienced. But I’ve noticed a pattern in his work. Many of his male characters–some veterans, all alienated–turn to young girls for help. The most obvious example is Holden and his little sister, Phoebe. But there’s also Lieutenant Z and Esmé in “For Esmé, with Love and Squalor.” Most stunningly, there is Seymour in “A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” who kisses the feet of the prepubescent Sybil. In each case, the men remain unhelped, though the girls’ innocence reminds them of what is good in the world. Some of the men kill themselves or land very close to it.

Salinger himself had a documented interest in younger women. At 53, he lived with 18-year-old Joyce Maynard, causing her to give up her scholarship at Yale. She wasn’t the only one, according to her biography. Despite this troubling simplification of young women as harbingers of purity and youth for complex male characters, I can’t bring myself to cancel Salinger.

I feel similarly about Zach Bryan, the popular Americana musician. Salinger and Bryan have more in common than one might think. Both served in the military, both struggled with infidelity, and both seem to believe that women—especially young, good women—are an antidote to the woes of depressed men.

I am just a sickness and you seem to be the cure / How much can a Southern girl honestly endure? —“Austin”

I’m a self-destructive landslide if you want to be the hill. —“Spotless”

Even with my baby sittin’ next to me / I’m a self-sabotagin’ suicide machine. —“Bass Boat”

You can tell me that you love me till your little lungs turn blue / But I’m always alone when I fall asleep. —“Condemned”

Seemingly, both Salinger and Bryan consider themselves men who need saving. Young women are their cure, or so they think until life inevitably proves otherwise. There is a tone of self-awareness in their work, a kind of protective posture toward the women, as if they’re saying, “You don’t want to get mixed up with the likes of me.” But ultimately, that’s exactly what they want. And they get it because the women in their stories and songs want to save them.

Esmé approaches Lieutenant Z and says, “I purely came over because I thought you looked extremely lonely. You have an extremely sensitive face.” These girls stay with their broken men through addiction, infidelity, and depression.

There’s plenty of boys that want you, babe / But for me you will crawl and scratch and fight. —“Don’t Give Up On Me”

I’m fascinated by this dynamic: a wrecked, emotionally vulnerable man who turns into a puddle with a woman (or girl) who is “unlike other women.”

Girls today will drink all day / To fall in love with any boy they see / You’re a sight of utmost beauty / Utmost strength and utmost loyalty. —“Don’t Give Up On Me”

The problem is that these women have to be angelic, and in return, they get a very unangelic man. These men may stay addicted, leave despite their professed love, or, in the worst case, kill themselves. The women expend so much effort, striving to keep “all their faculties intact,” as Salinger puts it, so that their men might, by some miracle, overcome their darkness.

Here’s the hard part: I love the songs, I love the books, and I love the stories. More than that, I love the men. I have a stack of Salinger’s books set apart on my bookshelf, and Zach Bryan was my most-played artist of 2024. Am I still trying to save them? Is this essay just another example of my little lungs turning blue?

You might think by my obsessions that I was (or am) an angelic gal who likes to swoop in and change the lives of melancholy men. But it’s quite the opposite. Through much of my dating adolescence, I postured myself as needing saving, but not necessarily wanting it, my version of “you best not get mixed up with the likes of me,” though I was more likely to keep my face very stone cold at a party. A friend once claimed I had the face of a girl who already had a boyfriend somewhere else (I did not). This is, of course, a kind of flirtation–and at times, a successful one. Maybe I can’t quite give up Salinger and Bryan because I see too much of myself in them. We might need saving, but even the most beautiful kind of savior won’t be able to do the trick. There’s a looming doom about us.

Better not get mixed up. Even if you are beautiful and pure, unlike all the rest, your goodness stands no chance against our badness. It’s all very silly in the most generous view and narcissistic in the worst.