I was born in Oak Park, Illinois, on July 21, 1899. A tidy suburb west of Chicago where the lawns were cut square and the houses stood proud. I was the second of six children, which meant I learned early to make my own space or disappear. My mother wanted a girl. She dressed me in lace and curls until I was old enough to fight back. What I did not yet understand was how much I would spend my life proving what I was—not what she had first imagined. Looking back, that tension was useful. The boy who learned to hunt and fish against a house of refinement was already practicing the craft: find the true thing, strip away the rest.

The Army doctor wrote me off at the Kansas City eye chart. Too blind, too young, too much wrong with me. I walked out and signed with the Red Cross instead. An ambulance on the Piave River beat a trench in France if it got me there. July 8, 1918. Fossalta di Piave. I was handing out chocolate and postcards to the troops when the trench mortar came in. I felt my legs go before I heard it. Two hundred twenty-seven fragments, they counted later. I carried a man out anyway, my own guts held in with a kneecap. They gave me the Italian Silver Medal for Valor. I would trade it for working knees. You learn what you are made of when the body fails and the will does not. I was nineteen. I had thought courage was something you declared. It is something you do while bleeding.

September I married Hadley in Horton Bay. November we sailed third-class, everything we owned in two steamer trunks. I am twenty-two, she is thirty, and we have nothing but the Star's cable rates and each other. The Quarter smells of roasting chestnuts and wet wool. I write standing at a kitchen table in the rue du Cardinal Lemoire. The water closet is down the stairs. The stove eats coal we cannot afford. Hadley plays piano at a salon down the street for francs that disappear into bread and wine. I am learning to see what is there and write it flat and true. No lace. No explaining. The sentence must carry the weight alone. Had I known how much would be lost, I might have held some things closer. But a man does not know that when he is busy becoming.

Hadley is in tears at the hotel in Geneva. A porter at Gare de Lyon took her small suitcase while she bought a bottle of Evian. She meant to surprise me, carry every story I had written to Lausanne where I am covering the peace conference. The suitcase held the carbons too. All of it. Three years' work. I tell her it is nothing. I tell her we will make more. I do not tell her I sat in the lavatory of this hotel and could not breathe. I do not tell her I counted the pages in my head—novels, stories, the one about the boy fishing that I knew was good. I am twenty-three and I have nothing to show for it. But I learn something standing in that lavatory. You can lose the words and still be the man who wrote them. Or you can let the loss finish you. I choose to sit down tomorrow and begin again, with the one true sentence I still own.

September. The book is out. Scribner's has it in the shops now. I am thirty years old and have written a novel about a man who deserts from the Italian army, falls in love with a nurse, and loses her and the child both. I took ten years to live it and nine months to write it. The reviews call it a love story. They are wrong. It is a book about how the world breaks people who believe in it. I cut the last chapter seventeen times. The true ending was always the rain. Hadley reads it without speaking. Then she says: You have finally written what happened to you at Fossalta. I tell her no. I tell her it is invention. We both know I am lying.

Madrid. February. The shells come over the Casa de Campo at eleven each morning, regular as a mail train. I write in the Hotel Florida with a pencil stub, standing because the chair makes me sleep. The telephone works only when it pleases. I have seen a man die on the Gran Vía, stepping out for cigarettes. The Republicans say they will hold. I do not know if they will hold. But I know I must see it, must not look away. This is not the war I knew in Italy. This is something new and worse, and the men fighting it believe in something. That belief is the story. I am thirty-seven and still learning what a war costs.