Venetian Teenager Who Stirred Hemingway's Heart and Art

Ernest Hemingway influenced generations of writers with his terse, understated prose, his stoic code of grace under fire and his commitment to producing a strict number of pages each day. In his private life, he showed no such discipline. Married four times and chronically unfaithful, a prodigious drinker and gourmand whose weight ballooned to 240 pounds, a man of savage mood swings, alternately bellicose and sloppily sentimental, a blowhard and relentless self-promoter who claimed to crave privacy, he passed himself off as an icon of machismo, yet wrote a novel, “The Garden of Eden,” rife with cross-dressing and gender fluidity. It would have taxed Sigmund Freud and all his psychoanalytic acolytes to tease out the implications of Hemingway's rigorous literary standards and his slovenly personal style.