TORO! TORO! TORO!

By WilliamHjortsberg '62. New York: Simon andSchuster, 1974. 160 pp. $5.95.

The cause is obscure. It may be the sluggishness of granite-clogged brains or the hill-windiness of our prose styles; it may be the isolation of Hanover from any noticeable culture (in the 'sos many 'of us thought that Boston represented civilization!); it may be that we shrink from competing with Herb West; it may be distraction, the siren songs of drink and sex. Or it may be another cause entirely. ¿Quien sabe? (As linguist William Hjortsberg might ask.) In any case, Dartmouth has never been known for its wits. The fact is obvious enough to anyone familiar with Hanover. Uninitiates should consult any issue of, say, the JackO'Lantern. They will find such thigh-slappers as a silhouetted small dog confiding to a large one that "my trouble is mounting," or asking, "what's your angle?" ... and they will sigh and search no farther.

Well, adolescent humor has never set well with grownups. But what about the grownups? For years, Hanover's best-known resident humorist enjoyed putting into the hands of female visitors an object that he would then identify as a walrus penis. Our own best grownup humorist was Thorne Smith '14, a delightful man but hardly subtle or wide-ranging. Dartmouth humorists seem never to leave the campus, in fact. "My trouble is mounting": puns, sex, Disney animals, and impending impotence

Dartmouth's legacy to the world of wit. Toro! Toro! Torol (after the dull movie Tora! Toral Tora!) is full of people with punny names: Paco Machismo, Don Pepe Bacalao y Pinas, el Conde de San Conejo ... The plot involves a mechanical bull, a rhinoceros, schemers, and young people who talk about sex while Sr. Hjortsberg talks about them. (Especially the women's breasts; his prose can't take its hands off them.) Sometimes the youngsters actually do things, things every bit as credible as those adventures that happen, always to someone else, in White Town. Among the sidesplitting characters are an apprentice matador who practices on live sheep, a woman who hunts and kills other women, a girl who prostitutes herself to buy bullfighting shoes, a bull who impales a screaming woman "right through the bag of oranges resting in her lap," and another girl who yearns to make it with a bull. (You know how girls are, in Dartmouth fiction.) In short, it's a cock and bull story, and as good as anything the Jack-o ever printed.

A University of Connecticut Professor ofEnglish, Mr. O'Hara, a specialist on modern fiction, American and foreign, is a frequent contributor to magazines and newspapers.