Djelloul Marbrook

There are gifts we cherish, gifts we loathe, gifts we tolerate, and gifts that make us wince, and then there is, for some of us, that one gift that comes to mind a thousand times in a thousand places. For me that one gift was given to me in the late 1960s by a colleague at The Winston-Salem Journal & Sentinel.

It was a paperback edition of Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer. It was already browning with age and had been leafed through many times. To preserve it, the owner had lovingly enclosed it in distressed denim, leaving the edges overlong and frayed.

Ken Duffer, the young reporter who gave it to me, was far more literary than most reporters. Most reporters and editors on a newspaper have hallway and water fountain conversations about news, especially the news that hasn’t been written and may never be. But Ken and I talked about fiction and poetry, perhaps because I was the Sunday editor and in charge of book reviews, perhaps merely because we were kindred souls.

I knew his inner life was difficult. He knew I knew, but we didn’t discuss it, or we discussed it through the cypher of literature. I don’t know if he sensed that my own life, never on firm ground, was coming apart, but we lost touch because I suffered a life-threatening meltdown that took many years to come through in one piece. I hope Ken didn’t suffer a similar fate.

Over the years I would take his gift down from a shelf and contemplate it as a symbol of human decency and compassion far more profound than anything I ever found in church or school. Ken loved Percy’s (inset) work and I came to love it through Ken’s gift, but it was the painstaking restoration of the frail book and the act of giving it away, that loving gesture, that moved me, still moves me.

No escutcheon speaks as well of human beings as a worn book patched together in buckram and glue.

—DM