My Man Jeeves – P. G. Wodehouse – you knowis really a most extraordinary chap. So capable. Honestly, I shouldn’t know what to do without him. On broader lines he’s like those chappies who sit peering sadly over the marble battlements at the Pennsylvania Station in the place marked ‘Inquiries.’ You know the Johnnies I mean. You go up to them and say: ‘When’s the next train for Melonsquashville, Tennessee?’ and they reply, without stopping to think, ‘Two-forty-three, track ten, change at San Francisco.’ And they’re right every time. Well, Jeeves gives you just the same impression of omniscience.As an instance of what I mean, I remember meeting Monty Byng in Bond Street one morning, looking the last word in a grey check suit, and I felt I should never be happy till I had one like it. I dug the address of the tailors out of him, and had them working on the thing inside the hour.’Jeeves, ‘ I said that evening. ‘I’m getting a check suit like that one of Mr. Byng’s.”Injudicious, sir, ‘ he said firmly. ‘It will not become you.”What absolute rot! It’s the soundest thing I’ve struck for years.”Unsuitable for you, sir.’Well, the long and the short of it was that the confounded thing came home, and I put it on, and when I caught sight of myself in the glass I nearly swooned. Jeeves was perfectly right. I looked a cross between a music-hall comedian and a cheap bookie. Yet Monty had looked fine in absolutely the same stuff. These things are just Life’s mysteries, and that’s all there is to it.- Taken from ‘My Man Jeeves’ written by P. G. Wodehouse
About the author
Sir Pelham Grenville Wodehouse, KBE, was a comic writer who enjoyed enormous popular success during a career of more than seventy years and continues to be widely read over 40 years after his death. Despite the political and social upheavals that occurred during his life, much of which was spent in France and the United States, Wodehouse’s main canvas remained that of prewar English upper-class society, reflecting his birth, education, and youthful writing career.An acknowledged master of English prose, Wodehouse has been admired both by contemporaries such as Hilaire Belloc, Evelyn Waugh and Rudyard Kipling and by more recent writers such as Douglas Adams, Salman Rushdie and Terry Pratchett. Sean O’Casey famously called him ‘English literature’s performing flea’, a description that Wodehouse used as the title of a collection of his letters to a friend, Bill Townend.Best known today for the Jeeves and Blandings Castle novels and short stories, Wodehouse was also a talented playwright and lyricist who was part author and writer of fifteen plays and of 250 lyrics for some thirty musical comedies. He worked with Cole Porter on the musical Anything Goes (1934) and frequently collaborated with Jerome Kern and Guy Bolton. He wrote the lyrics for the hit song Bill in Kern’s Show Boat (1927), wrote the lyrics for the Gershwin/Romberg musical Rosalie (1928), and collaborated with Rudolf Friml on a musical version of The Three Musketeers (1928).
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