"Unless you have geography, background," Ernest Hemingway once told George Antheil, "you have nothing." (WA). Geography is the relationships between parts, connections between people and land-- found in the kind of liveable physical background that Jake Barnes of The Sun Also Rises reads in Turgenev. Description so vivid that it enables one to "be there" is crucial to Hemingway, whose characters look outside to satisfy internal needs for substance and grounding. It is necessary for them to be sustained by perception that combines science and art to constitute the kind of natural history that Hemingway practiced. An external approach meets needs for grounding with solutions that bring even deeper complications, however. These problems, when they are resolved, are done so with realizations that enable characters to have peace with the way the world is, no matter how difficult. These realizations take place in reflective memory, the kind created in the act of writing itself.
Although characters are drawn to places via landscape, once they are close, they are no longer landscapes in the sense of being composed views. Close to the component parts, one no longer has the protection of distance; one is then liable to be hurt, wounded--and from these wounds one must recover. Recovery comes when perspective is regained-- moving out to perspective, one can see how one has grown. One is often exhausted, broken, but one is always wiser, better off in terms of knowledge for having plunged into the external world.
In his works, Hemingway creates a sense of reality that disposes of emotional fuzziness and develops a manner of perceiving that is fortified by both the objectivity of science and the selectivity of art. These combined activities reflect a profound need for external reference in works that are, after all, finally about internal matters: struggles of conscience and purpose and the meaning of memories. Connections between points of external reference provide the perspective of meaningful distance required by landscape. In order to be accurate, to avoid sentimentalism, Hemingway chose to make his sentences histories of actual perceptions and thoughts, an accomplishment recognized by biographer Carlos Baker, who concluded that "few writers have been more place-conscious. Few have so carefully charted out the geographical groundwork of their novels while managing to keep background so conspicuously unobtrusive" (WA 49).
As Hemingway suggested in A Moveable Feast, he wrote about what he knew, and what he knew about human nature was framed in the context of a search for actual information and detail in external nature. That is what it means to say that Ernest Hemingway was a natural historian.
His practice of natural history was in the mode of the amateur, for relaxation and enjoyment, as on a vacation, one finds rest. This easy-goingness was given to his characters, when they went outside into terrains in relaxed ways, not to know, but only to be, to find a filling for an interior need, to escape from the city of meaning, and to engage with nature as though she were a woman, and by loving, to be in relation to, and to depend on for what is good, to look at her details for all that is needed.