© THE NEW YORK TIMES
August 19, 1968

A Slight Case of Candor
By MITCHEL LEVITAS

Last summer, when The New York Times Book Review asked a pride of distinguished novelists which of their works they would most like to reread while lolling among the sand castles, Kurt Vonnegut Jr. replied, disarmingly: ''I can't stand to read what I write. I make my wife do that, then ask her to keep her opinions to herself.'' Diogenes would have shucked his barrel for honesty such as that. Nor was the remark a momentary lapse of candor. In his preface to Welcome to the Monkey House, a collection of 23 stories and one essay, the author of two such zestful novels as God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, and Cat's Cradle again smiles and tells it straight.

''The contents of this book,'' he says with good-natured detachment, ''are samples of work I sold in order to finance the writing of the novels. Here one finds the fruits of Free Enterprise.'' Well, to paraphrase Lamont Cranston, ''the seeds of Free Enterprise bear bitter fruit.''

A Slick (True) Love Story

From Collier's, a conspicuous failure of our capitalist magazine economy, comes the largest harvest of stories (seven) and the earliest. The oldest saw print in the faraway year of 1950. From Playboy, a heart-warming success story of competition in the marketplace, comes the title story, published this year. Between these dead and thriving examples of what turns a freelancer's heart to pulp, readers will also find represented Esquire, the Saturday Evening Post, Cosmopolitan, Venture, Galaxy, and Fantasy and Science Fiction Magazine. Plus, as a bonus, ''In honor of the marriage that worked I include in this collection a sickeningly slick love story from The Ladies Home Journal, God help us. . . . It describes an afternoon I spent with my wife- to-be. Shame, shame, to have lived scenes from a woman's magazine.''

This Vonnegut is obviously a lovable fellow. Moreover, he's right about the story, which is indeed a sickening and slick little nothing about a soldier who goes A.W.O.L. in order--How to say it?--to sweep his girl from the steps of the altar into his strong and loving arms.

When not in love, Vonnegut's stories fall into two general classifications. One uses contemporary settings, smoothly and mechanically plotted down to the obligatory twist near the finale and featuring easily recognizable types: the rich, stuffy benefactor of a prep school who tries to wangle the admission of his nice-but-not-too-bright son; a neighbor obsessed with the exciting idea of home decoration and furnishing; a vicious juvenile delinquent saved by a high school band teacher's therapy (''Love yourself, and make your instrument sing about it.''). A subcategory of this group, if you're still interested, often takes place on Cape Cod--Vonnegut lives in Barnstable--and describes the encounters of simple folk in unlikely circumstances. A shy clerk comes commandingly alive only as an actor in amateur theatricals. A salesman of storm windows and bathtub enclosures tells tales of a few high and mighty who have been his customers.

Mixed Bag of Sci-Fi

Vonnegut's other favorite bag is science fiction, a genre usually marked by a weakness of real characters and the pronouncement of human messages. Here, the message is crisply transmitted and often with humor in stories about a world without war, achieved by a single scientist's powers of concentration; life without fear, won by freeing the spirit from the body; and the realization of instant, synthetic happiness by tuning in on the radio waves of distant stars with a ''euphoriaphone.'' In one of the liveliest sci-fi stories, ''Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow,'' the discovery of an anti-aging potion has pushed the world of 2158 to a population of 12 billion, which largely exists on a diet of processed seaweed and sawdust. In the three-room apartment of a housing development that covers what once was southern Connecticut live the children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren of Harold Schwartz, 172. Gramps, a crochety tyrant who is glued to television, barks, ''Hell, we did that 100 years ago,'' and regularly disinherits family grumblers who are restlessly waiting--vainly, it seems--for him to die and vacate the only private bedroom in the place.

The title story takes up the same theme, overpopulation, but treats it sententiously. World Government is waging a two-front war on the problem by encouraging "ethical" suicide and by making sex joyless; the latter is accomplished with mandatory pills that numb the body from the waist down. Our hero is Billy the Poet, whose special pleasure is deflowering the Junoesque virgins administering the program and who heads a coeducational underground whose members favor birth control, of course, and aim to revive the hearty sex of their ancestors. Among these forefathers, presumably, is Hugh Hefner of Playboy, author of a relentlessly documented ''philosophy'' that rests on pillars of thought similar to Billy's. With this in mind, how uncharacteristically unkind of Vonnegut to have written on another, earlier, occasion: ''. . .the science fiction magazine that pays the most and seems to have the poorest judgment is Playboy.''

© THE NEW YORK TIMES