A few? The manuscript ran to more than five hundred pages. And it covered only six years, from the period just before they met through the month before the end. Nathan Wolf, Morton’s agent, had already shown it to Morton’s longtime editor at Magellan, Howard wrote, and she was hardly alone in feeling that nothing this gritty, intimate, and unexpected had been written by a leading American man of letters in decades—if ever. The story of Morton Sarnoff’s return to the whirl of life, after more than a decade in rural retreat: it was going to be a sensation that would rekindle interest in Morton’s earlier work, change the way the last novel was read, and translate into a lot of hard cold cash besides.

Costanza was not entirely surprised to learn from Howard that Morton had left the rights to these diaries to him—another clever gesture on Morton’s part, since he knew that his brother needed money, and a good deal of it, to free himself from his unhappy marriage. She was surprised, and also hurt, to discover that what she felt about them didn’t matter, to Morton or any of the others: the diaries were clearly being sent to her as a courtesy, so that she could make peace (or not) with whatever she found in them before they were published.

Howard didn’t put it like that, of course. He said, instead, that he was so excited to be able to share this wonderful news with her. He hoped she would let him know what she thought, he couldn’t wait to hear from her, and so on. Boilerplate through which she could detect his gloating: finally, for once, he was in charge.

She had not known that Morton kept a diary; she hadn’t even suspected. She thought that what he was writing in those large hardbound ledger books were notes and ideas, sketches for his next (he sometimes wryly referred to it as his last) novel. That was what he had told her when she asked, and she had believed him.

Morton had not lied exactly. Just as he had answered her that day, the first pages contained miscellaneous unrelated scenes, sketches for possible characters, citations from books he was reading. Every so often he inserted notes from his doctors’ appointments: “Grubman says it’s the Coumadin that makes me bruise so easily.” From Pam, his physical therapist: “Suck in my abdomen when I get up out of bed in the morning, it will help with the back. Always sleep with a bed pillow under the knees. Stretch, stretch, stretch.”

Twenty-some pages in, a different kind of sentence erupted. “All these notes and fragments only confirm my emptiness,” he said, apparently out of nowhere. “I’m writing here to avoid writing”—and he was off.