My letters are often sold not as literature but as the material relics of a modern saint, wrote George Bernard Shaw to a friend. "Often, some impecunious journalist asks me to refuse [his requests for material] on an insulting postcard, so that he can dispose of it to a collector for the price of a meal." That particular letter brought the price of a pretty good meal--$250--at an auction of G.B.S. letters and memorabilia at Manhattan's Parke-Bernet Galleries. A total of $41,900 was paid for the 165 lots--including $4,250 for a packet of 19 love letters from young Shaw to his "undeservedly beloved," a nurse named Alice Lockett. "I am," he wrote, "opinionated, vain, weak, ignorant, lazy and so forth." He gave her a sample in his final letter: "Lovemaking grows tedious to me--the emotion has evaporated from it. This is your fault."

"None is Fun" is the slogan of NON--the new National Organization for Non-Parents. Co-hosts at the launching in Washington were Baseball Iconoclast Jim Bouton (who has had two children and a vasectomy) and Theater Iconoclast John Simon (divorced non-father). Non-Mother's Day and Non-Father's Day will be celebrated on the appropriate days, as will anything that promotes a "child-free life-style." To that end, Bouton announced the first NON awards: to David and Julie Eisenhower and Congresswoman Shirley and Conrad Chisholm as Child-Free Couples of 1972, and to Ralph Nader and Gloria Steinem as Single Man and Single Woman of the Year. "Wonder what kind of a kid they'd produce," mused Bouton.

"Irreconcilable differences" is the term in California divorce law that covers a multitude of marital problems, and pretty, Dutch-born Mieke Tunney, 35, has used it to sue for dissolution of her 13-year marriage to California's Democratic Senator John V. Tunney, 37. In addition to alimony, child support and half the community property, she is asking for custody of their three children. Tunney, claiming surprise, hurried back from California to see Mieke in Washington. Washington, equally surprised, prepared to get along without one of its most glamorous couples.

The great Willie Mays--a running, throwing, hitting folk hero in his own time--was back in New York City, and everyone was glad. The San Francisco Giants were glad because their failing gates would no longer have to bear the burden of Willie's $165,000 salary (not to mention what they got in exchange: about $100,000 and a pitcher from the New York Mets). The Mets were glad because Mays, even at 41, is still a powerful player as well as an enormous drawing card in the city where he began his career 21 years, 646 home runs and 2,857 big-league games ago. Willie, who has been trying to get a long-term contract to guarantee his future, was delighted. "It's a wonderful feeling," he said. "When you come back to New York, it's like coming back to paradise."

In Women's Wear Daily a few days ago, Teddy Kennedy's wife Joan bristled "at the suggestion that a political marriage is difficult to manage." Said she: "It's not a big deal at all. Politics is not a problem. It's his job. And a political wife can share it more than a woman married to a businessman who works a 9-to-5 job." But in a Good Housekeeping series on the wives of potential presidential candidates, Joan speaks freely of her continuing involvement in psychotherapy in response to the emotional strains and pressures she is living with, indicating, perhaps, that politics can be a problem after all.

One thing is perfectly clear: somebody sent Vice President Spiro Agnew a bedspread. Agnew thought it came from the Democratic Governor of Maine, Kenneth M. Curtis, and he refused to accept it because, he said, Curtis had encouraged an antiwar group that had pelted him with food last April. Not so, said Governor Curtis: "I have never sent Mr. Agnew any gifts of any kind, nor do I intend doing so." Insisted an Agnew spokesman: "We definitely received a bedspread from the Governor, and it's being returned today." Riposted Curtis: "It's amazing that in the middle of a national crisis, the Vice President would have time to even think about returning a bedspread to someone who never sent it in the first place." Eventually a retired Lewiston policeman, A.J. (Tony) Petropulos, 89, said that he, for one, had given Mr. Agnew a bedspread and was surprised not to have received an acknowledgment. Mr. Agnew can rest easy under Mr. Petropulos' coverlet--he is a loyal Republican.

"Mother's life seems just as fantastic to me as it must to everyone else," said Elizabeth Taylor's son, Michael Wilding, 19. "I really don't want any part of it. I just don't dig all those diamonds and things. I haven't seen my mother for several months, but she's always welcome here if she wants to come, of course." "Here" is a farmhouse on twelve acres in Wales, where Michael, having abandoned the $78,000 mansion that his mother gave him, now lives in a commune with Wife Beth, Baby Leyla, six friends, an old goat and a mongrel dog named Wally.

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