James Pethel
1997
Max Beerbohm turns his exquisite eye on James Pethel, a man whose extraordinary luck has made him legendary among the tables of Europe. We meet Pethel in a Dieppe baccarat room, where he sits unruffled amid gamblers screaming for fortune, his calm almost obscene in its composure. The narrator becomes obsessed with understanding this wealthy adventurer: his barmaid wife who seems forever unimpressed, his appetite for risk that borders on the spiritual, his daughter's complicated love for a father who lives on the edge of a heart attack. What unfolds is not quite a biography but something more subtle - a portrait of a man who has made luck his philosophy, and the quiet devastation that philosophy eventually brings. Beerbohm writes with the precision of a caricaturist who knows that the truest sketches capture not faces but souls. This is a small gem about the seductiveness of watching someone else dance with mortality.
