Books: Christian Triumph

CHRISTMAS STORY (31 pp.) — H. L Mencken—Knopf ($1).

Just in time for the Christmas trade, this tiny book contains perhaps the nearest thing to piety in Mencken’s writings. It is a moral tale, told in the Sage of Baltimore’s redolent and contented prose. The story—originally printed in the New Yorker—attests to the triumph of Christian reflexes over heathen among the bums of Baltimore 45 years ago.

A local freethinker and scoffer at the Gospel, Fred Ammermeyer. decided he would beat the missions at their own game by giving a big Christmas feast and blowout for outcasts. No hymns, no prayers, not a word of preachment would embarrass Ammermeyer’s free festivities, but “a dinner that went on in rhythmic waves,’ all day and all night, until the hungriest and hollowest bum was reduced to breathing with not more than one cylinder of one lung.”

When sufficiently beery, however, Fred’s guests astounded him by doing what they thought was expected of them: breaking into Are You Ready for the Judgment Day, followed by other favorite Salvation Army hymns. When silence fell, a sinner rose and quaveringly confessed. Sorrowing and defeated, the free-thinking host fled into the night.