ERNIE'S THE MAN

Somewhere amid the domestic detritus, among the old albums and cardboard boxes full of loose photographs, are three holiday pictures of me standing in three Spanish bullrings, namely, Seville, Ronda and Cordoba. No bulls, you understand. No-one else in the ring, not even any spectators. Just me, looking more than a little ill-at-ease. The reasons are fairly complicated.
An early 1960s holiday in Spain coincided with the Seville Easter Feria, when visits to the local bullring were more or less obligatory, and I am fairly certain that a big name of the day - if not Ordonez, then Dominguin - was one of the main attractions. Anyway, and despite the fact that I had no specific interest in bullfighting, I was blown away by the spectacle - the blazing sun, the noise, the music, the blinding yellow sand, and the unfolding drama of man and black fighting bull.
Talking about it afterwards, I was told: 'You ought to read Ernest Hemingway.' So I did, eventually purchasing a copy of Death in the Afternoon, his rambling but entertaining peon on bullfighting first published in 1932. But it also did something else. I so enjoyed Hemingway's writing style that I also, in time, worked my way through his other, better known and more recent fiction titles, all of which still remain on my shelves -  A Farewell to Arms, Green Hills of Africa, For Whom the Bell Tolls, A Moveable Feast, The Old Man and the Sea, Across the River and Into the Trees, and so on.
They remain among my favourites, books I return to time and time again. Why? I don't know, but there is something about his style - regularly imitated and even smugly parodied these days - terse, pared down to essentials, unfussy, uncluttered, which triggered my interest. Perhaps it was his and my newspaper connections. Perhaps I thought he wrote in precisely the way that editors seemed to like, being economical with space and sparse with words. Or perhaps I just wished I could write like him.
It seemed to me he could say more in fewer words than anyone else, no matter what he was like in his private life, or how much he drank. Thus I could even forgive him for having become involved with Martha (The Faces of War) Gellhorn who, heaven forbid, might even have been a better writer and war correspondent than he was.
Yet Hemingway somehow managed to project the colour and feel of a place better than any other writer I had read. Cuba, Spain, Italy, America, Africa, Florida, Paris. He was Spain and Italy; he was the African game hunter; he was the brawling Cuban fishing and drinking man, and the louche Parisian drinker and socialite between the two world wars. Indeed, somewhere in all this was the man you wanted him to be. 
Later in life when I was trying to write novels, I found that his work was also something of an antedote. If I hit a bad patch at the keyboard, ran out of ideas, got fed up or bored or ran against a brick wall, I simply stopped typing and started reading - A Moveable Feast, or Fiesta, perhaps - and afterwards found that I could start writing again. If I had a blockage, Hemingway freed it.
I am also fascinated by his journalistic work. Hemingway By-Line (Penguin Books, 1970) contains over 70 of his articles written for newspapers or magazines, dating from 1920 through to 1956, and the scope is remarkable. But it is his novels which hold sway on my bookshelves. In any battle for my 'favourite author' title, Ernest Miller Hemingway would still win - with HE Bates, perhaps, coming a very close second.