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On goes the dainty violence, nonetheless, for reasons that are somewhat understandable and forgivable, somewhat not. Writers tend to live in dank, airless cells of self-recrimination. Nothing is ever as good as it should be, and sometimes it is plain awful. Realizing what they have done, they hate themselves, frequently showing excellent judgment, and commit murder instead of suicide.
Who knows what terrible solitary stewing drove Hemingway to say of Wyndham Lewis that "his eyes had the look of an unsuccessful rapist."
A writer alone is almost as frightening a sight as a writer among others, especially at a book party. Paranoia fills the bloodstream. He grows certain that everyone is plotting against him, whereas no one is thinking about him at all. Unable to decide which is more humiliating, he goes for his verbal .45.
But I'm afraid the true reason is that a great many writers lack noble virtue. Their mode of warfare is the sneak attack; their shots are cowardly and cheap. A few years ago, a writer of movie scripts sucker-punched a journalist while he was sitting at a New York City restaurant and knocked him to the floor. People were shocked that he hadn't stabbed him in the back.
In fact, one reason writers become writers in the first place is to enable them to look more decent and honorable in print than they ever could in person. It's a bad lot on the whole--petty, nasty, bilious, suffused with envy and riddled with fear. Myself excluded, of course. And that fathead, Shakespeare.