The Unteachable Molly

TO A YOUNG ACTRESS (192 pp.)--Edited and with an introduction by Peter Tompkins--Clarkson N. Potter, Inc. ($8.50).

In the ancient myth Pygmalion breathes life into his statue Galatea through love. It was typical of Bernard Shaw, one of the last of the great 19th century rationalist optimists, that in his Pygmalion, Professor Henry Higgins teaches Eliza Doolittle into existence. Give Shaw an actress, a breed he regarded as intrinsically brainless, and the sage would begin playing post office, or frequently postcard. Absence definitely made Shaw's heart grow fonder, and for added emotional insurance the women were al ways married, as was he. The two most celebrated of these epistolary romances involved Mrs. Pat Campbell and Ellen Terry, but the headiest, cranially speaking, has only just come to light. Shaw's heroine in this instance was a well-to-do American dilettante named Mrs. Molly Tompkins. He was 65, she 24, when they met in 1921, and for the next 28 years, he bombarded her with advice about everything from acting to child rearing, vowels to vegetarianism. The irony was that, unlike Eliza, Molly was unteachable.

Were or Hwen. Young Molly and her husband Laurence arrived in England as Shavian cultists. Laurence, a would-be architect, wanted to build a theater shrine; Molly, a would-be actress, wanted to play Shaw heroines. Though Shaw was not immune to Molly's shapely figure and "eyes like muscatel grapes," he quickly let her know that his first love was English. He packed her off to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art to drop her "very queer R's" and pick up her elocutionary ABCs. One of his early obiter dictions: "Wot, wich, were, wen. weel, etc. are absolutely incorrect; but the alternatives hwat, hwich, hwere, hwen, and hweel are equally incorrect."

He found her makeup appalling ("Some day I shall take your face and scrub it and show you that it looks much better unbuttered"), and she was always offending the Shavian dietary laws: "I exhort you to remember that you are a human being with a soul and the divine gift of articulate speech, and not a confectioner's shop." Some sample instructions:

P:"Education in the ways of the world is a series of humiliations, like learning to skate. All you can do is to laugh at yourself with the crowd."

P:"Wearing black [is] the only resource of people who cannot dress because they have no color sense."

P:"Have you not yet discovered that the only roads that remain beautiful are those that never led anywhere? For you never come to the end of them."

P:"If you have started being afraid of me, all is over. Lots of people are: that is why they hate me. The fear of God may be the beginning of wisdom; but the fear of Man is the beginning of murder."

Cure for the Learned. The trouble with Molly was that she feared nothing, especially her own limitations, and liked to indulge in the vocational therapy of the rich--changing vocations. She dropped acting for painting, painting for playwriting. G.B.S. steadily urged her to be a disciplined pro, but her game was con, starting sadly enough with herself.

Her most poignant self-deceit was in expecting a closer liaison with Shaw. He incessantly reminded her of the age difference. When G.B.S. was 90 and his wife Charlotte had died, the unteachable Molly proposed to live with him, and Shaw was scandalized: "The degradation to Literature, the insult to Charlotte's memory would be such that I should be justified in shooting you if there were no other way of preventing you from crashing my gates." Yet his last postcard to her a year before his death (she died last summer) is a bit of romantic doggerel ending with an Irish endearment:

The Old Man at his gate

As he was in forty-eight

And still is at ninety-three

Awaiting news of thee

Molly Bawn

The letters show that Molly Bawn bewitched, bothered, and bewildered Shaw, but they do not wholly show why. He resisted her coquetry, but he could not resist her ignorance, the last temptation of the learned. His mind rushed in to fill that mental vacuum. That is why the Eliza Doolittles of this world are always snaring the Professor Higginses.

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