Student Poetry From Abroad

STARTLING in the wrong direction necessitates an immediate right about face or a long journey and a difficult one across sterile fields. Ellis Parker Butler wrote "Pigs Is Pigs", a concession to a tasteless whim, and has continued along that road of supposed humor ever since.

In this latest collection of short stories, presented as "The Behind Legs of the Orse", he is true to this tradition of his. Lacking in the comic sense, without wit, he occasionally approaches humor with, even then, a fixed uncertainty of attack. As a humorist, Mr. Butler is a good director of the Flushing National Bank: as a short story writer, he is an excellent trout fisherman, a good poker player.

Which last two genres suggest his true ability. Mr. Butler is a gentle, observing, whimsical soul who has taken to literature for the same reason people take to playing the base viol. In creating, and he sometimes does, the atmosphere of trot fishing, poker playing, whimsy, he amuses. But the amusement has the solidity and permanence of prune whip. Also one always realizes that prunes are the basic element in the concoction.