The Best Sauce

by P.G. Wodehouse

Sir P. G. Wodehouse (1881-1975), English playwright and author created the fictional characters Bertie Wooster and Reginald Jeeves, starring in such works as The Inimitable Jeeves (1923), Carry On Jeeves (1925), Right Ho Jeeves (1934), Thank You, Jeeves (1934), Ring For Jeeves (1953), How Right You Are Jeeves (1960), and My Man Jeeves (1919); Jeeves--my man, you know--is 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 "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.--Ch. 1 Wooster is the amiable and naive man-of-leisure, while Jeeves as quintessential British gentleman, older and wiser, is friend and valet to him. Their tales usually involve Wooster getting into some sort of "scrape" with a woman, an Aunt, or the Law. Jeeves always comes to the rescue in his inimitably modest, no-nonsense style. "He moves from point to point with as little uproar as a jelly fish." (Ch. 3, My Man Jeeves). The duo became popular literary icons, embodying the dry acerbic wit and humour of the English, "Jeeves lugged my purple socks out of the drawer as if he were a vegetarian fishing a caterpillar out of his salad." (The Inimitable Jeeves) and have gone on to inspire numerous adaptations for television, stage, and the screen. Their first appearance was in Wodehouse's short story "Extricating Young Gussie" printed in 1915 in The Saturday Evening Post. Many of Wodehouse's stories were first published in such magazines as Punch, Cosmopolitan, Collier's, The New Yorker, The Strand, and Vanity Fair before being published as collections. Other popular characters of Wodehouse's are Wooster's Aunt Dahlia "My Aunt Dahlia has a carrying voice... If all other sources of income failed, she could make a good living calling the cattle home across the Sands of Dee". (Very Good, Jeeves (1930), his domineering Aunt Agatha "the curse of the Home Counties and a menace to one and all." (Right Ho, Jeeves), dandy Rupert Psmith, and the absent-minded Lord Emsworth of Wodehouse's "Blandings Castle" series. While Wodehouse is a master of parody and prose, he also worked as theatre critic, and collaborated on a number of musical comedies and their lyrics including Cole Porter's Anything Goes (1934). Pelham "Plum" Grenville Wodehouse was born on 15 October 1881 in Guildford, Surrey, England, the third of four sons born to Eleanor and Henry Ernest Wodehouse (1845-1929), who at the time of his birth was working as a judge in Hong Kong. After living there with his parents for a time, young Plum was back in England to attend boarding school. In 1894 he entered Dulwich College, graduating in 1900.

Genres: Short Stories, Humor

38 pages, Paperback

Published November 8, 2015

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).

Reviews

[K. Anna Kraft · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have arranged my thoughts into a haiku:

"Better than stalking!
To win the girl, just wait and--
Help cover her ass."

[superawesomekt · Rating 5 out of 5]

"There are parsnips for dinner to-night," said Eve, softly.

"I shall get to like them. They are an acquired taste, I expect. Perhaps I am, too. Perhaps I am the human parsnip, and you will have to learn to love me."

Increasing my rating because my brother read this aloud and we were crying laughing.