ABSTRACT
Bill Mizner used to come to our house to play poker with Charlie Van Loan and my father. I would sit upstairs trying to read, but mostly listening to them laugh and talk, and wishing that I was grown up and able to be down there with them. Looking back, it seems to me that writing men had more fun among themselves in those days. Jealousy wasn’t so cheap, and everybody didn’t hate everybody else. There was an element of fraternity missing now among a lot of sour-souled scribes embittered because they didn’t grow up to be Balzac. Maybe it was because the gentlemen of that older vintage enjoyed life first, like Bill Mizner, and wrote about it afterward.
