"A writer’s job is to tell the truth," said Hemingway in 1942. No other writer of our time had so fiercely asserted, so pugnaciously defended or so consistently exemplified the writer’s obligation to speak truly His standard of truth-telling remained, moreover, so high and so rigorous that he was ordinarily unwilling to admit secondary evidence, whether literary evidence or evidence picked up from other sources than his own experience. "I only know what I have seen," was a statement which came often to his lips and pen. What he had personally done, or what he knew unforgettably by having gone through one version of it, was what he was interested in telling about. This is not to say that he refused to invent freely. But he always made it a sacrosanct point to invent in terms of what he actually knew from having been there.
The primary intent of his writing, from first to last, was to seize and project for the reader what he often called "the way it .was." This is a characteristically simple phrase for a concept of extraordinary complexity, and Hemingway’s conception of its meaning subtly changed several times in the course of his career--always in the direction of greater complexity. At the core of the concept, however, one can invariably discern the operation of three aesthetic instruments; the sense of place the sense of fact and the sense of scene.
The first of these, obviously a strong passion with Hemingway is the sense of place. "Unless you have geography, background," he once told George Anteil, "You have nothing." You have, that is to say, a dramatic vacuum. Few writers have been more place-conscious. Few have s carefully charted out she geographical ground work of their novels while managing to keep background so conspicuously unobtrusive. Few, accordingly, have been able to record more economically and graphically the way it is when you walk through the streets of Paris in search of breakfast at corner café… Or when, at around six o’ clock of a Spanish dawn, you watch the bulls running from the corrals at the Puerta Rochapea through the streets of Pamplona towards the bullring.
"When I woke it was the sound of the rocket exploding that announced the release of the bulls from the corrals at the edge of town. Down below the narrow street was empty. All the balconies were crowded with people. Suddenly a crowd came down the street. They were all running, packed close together. They passed along and up street toward the bullring and behind them came more men running faster, and then some stragglers who ere really running. Behind them was a little bare space, and then the bulls, galloping, tossing their heads up and down. It all went out of sight around the corner. One man fell, rolled to the gutter, and lay quiet. But the bulls went right on and did not notice him. They were all running together."
This landscape is as morning-fresh as a design in India ink on clean white paper. First is the bare white street, seem from above, quiet and empty. Then one sees the first packed clot of runners. Behind these are the thinner ranks of those who move faster because they are closer to bulls. Then the almost comic stragglers, who are "really running." Brilliantly behind these shines the "little bare space," a desperate margin for error. Then the clot of running bulls-closing the design, except of course for the man in the gutter making himself, like the designer’s initials, as inconspicuous as possible.
From the author’s comments and the example of the bulls (Paragraph 4), what was the most likely reason for which Hemingway took care to include details of place