And yet the stuff he's the most well-known for is anything but concise or to the point. He often rephrased the exact same concept in the same paragraph (or even the same sentence) several different ways and was loved for it.
I assume you're talking about stuff like
A Farewell to Arms and the like? Hemingway was attempting to convey emotions without actually
describing emotions in the traditional sense. Instead he hoped to get readers to feel the same emotions that his characters would, by vividly describing what his character was seeing through that character's own eyes--it was about using a juxtaposition of different phrases, all of which conjured specific imagery--and then through
experiencing that imagery, the reader would
feel the emotion themselves, rather than being told what the character was feeling. It was a brilliant and experimental use of unconventional wording and nonstandard syntax. It was absolutely NOT about redundant phrasing or wordiness, as you imply. Hemingway was much better than that.
