I'm not exactly a Hemingway expert, but I do see him as a tragic figure. At some point I read the Carlos Baker autobiography, which was fascinating, but also showed details of his life that probably explain a lot. Like his mother having made him wear a dress a a child, his father's suicide, and his mental and physical decline later in his life. And lots of other stuff that I've forgotten the specifics of.
'Course, you have to probably enjoy Hemignway's writing at some level, as I do, to want to go to the trouble of reading an autobiography. I may agree that his writing was flawed, and probably even flawed in the ways you guys describe, but I still see it as great. It reaches me. OTOH, I'm not sure I'd like the guy if I met him.
fishing ping
Yes, he had a rough life. One more piece of bad luck you don't mention is that he gave his wife the manuscript of a bunch of early short stories he wrote in Paris, and she lost the manuscript on the train. It was the only copy.
There's some speculation that he may have had homosexual inclinations, which would explain why he wanted to appear so macho. I don't know whether to credit it, because that kind of speculation runs rampant all over the academy.
I've read Carlos Baker. Also Ilse Lind, who is an old friend of mine. I once asked her how she could stand teaching Hemingway to students, year in and year out, and she just sort of smiled and shrugged. In her late years she even taught that late novel, I think it was called "The Garden of Eden" or some such, that wasn't published until long after his death, because even his publishers couldn't stand it. Finally, greed got the better of them and it went into print.
I think you can tell when he was hitting the sauce pretty hard while writing. In my mind though, his flaws are like the scratches and gouges that can be found on a old rifle's stock. They aren't pretty, but they add character.