was only a notion at the time. But here an entry in a school newspaper is a serious statement from a young man who will make ideas his life’s work.
His mother, however, still hoped that her only child would follow her late husband’s path. As LeWitt put it in a 1974 oral history interview at the Smithsonian:
In a way I was rebellious, because my family was middle-class, and my mother really wanted me to become a doctor, and one thing I didn’t want to do was to chop open people and look inside of them…. I didn’t think that that was any good. I didn’t want to be in business; it was a boring kind of a life, it seemed. [Being an artist] was a way of asserting my independence…. It was something I could do. I wasn’t precocious at all.42
There was nothing for him in New Britain except his mother’s love, which he treasured, and the affection of a handful of relatives. The city itself held no opportunity in his view, because of its archconservative tastes in art and the laborious summer jobs he needed to take that had him sweeping streets and clearing manhole covers. Jaffe thought that there was some kind of family conspiracy: although the LeWitts and even the Appells had a variety of enterprises, Sol was never invited to work at any of them.
Aunt Luba might have been able to use him in the grocery store, but she continued to struggle, particularly after becoming the defendant in a lawsuit. A customer complained that she had bitten into a piece of bread made by the Schneider and Pomerantz Baking Company and was injured by a tack. She won her lawsuit against Luba, who was not able to recover the money from the supplier until much later.43
Aunt Luba adored Solly, as did Bella and Nellie, who helped fill in what was missing in his family. Even so, the teenager never warmed to New Britain, though he was respectful in his public comments, and apparently resentment to the city mounted.
In the first major interview that the adult LeWitt granted (in 1974 to Paul Cummings for the Smithsonian Institution), he specified his frustrations:
I reached the point in high school where I had to go away to school, and by that time I had gotten to the point where it wasn’t so much that I wanted to be an artist, it was just that I couldn’t stand the life of the town, of this society. I just couldn’t. It was more of an act of rebellion I think than a positive act of wanting to be an artist…. If I were living in these days, I would go into some sort of political activity, or say, in the ’60s, I certainly would be in some political activity. Although I was interested in politics or political activity, there just wasn’t any real road that I could see. Being an artist is something that was in a way rebellious, in a way individualistic, and, in a way, it was an act of rebellion against … the bourgeois kind of society I was brought up in.44
Thirty-three years earlier, he had expressed this view in a very different way. Before he left for Syracuse, he wrote a poem, called “Ode to My Home Town,” on the same typewriter that his father had used for his short stories:
New Britain, oh New Britain,
You moth-eaten town,
Your dirty old buildings,
Should all be torn down.
Your winters are cold
Your summers are hot,
The air is so foul
With mildew and rot.
The land of bad colds
Of sore throats and the flu,
Of sick aching headaches
And pneumonia, too.
You’re a blot on the landscape
The nation’s eyesore,
Your people dull-witted
And God what a bore!
The home of dumb cops
And bumpy thoroughfares,
With your stinky old busses
And ten cent fares.
You live among filth
And you don’t mind the smoke
You thrive on the filth
And to you it’s a joke.
Your beautiful starlings
Fly through the trees,
And the smell from the shops
Is what you call breeze.
You make us pay double
For all you can sell,
But after the war
You can all go to hell!
And when you reach Hades
And Satan greets you,
You’ll feel right at home—
He’s from here too.
The worst of it all,
You think you are swell,
You think you are perfect
And that gripes like hell.
You’re dead and you’re rotten;
You think you’re alive.
You think you’re a place.
Instead, you’re a dive.
You’re not worth this paper,
You’re not worth this ink,
You can take it from me,
NEW BRITAIN YOU STINK!45
Whether LeWitt ever showed this “ode” to his adopted town to anyone is not known. And although it certainly reflects his attitude at the time, it wouldn’t be his last word on the place—far from it. He would one day be ranked among the Hardware City’s greatest benefactors.
THREE
THE BOY FROM SYRACUSE
When sixteen-year-old Solly LeWitt arrived on the campus of Syracuse University for the first time in the summer of 1945, escorted by his loving older cousins Nellie and Bella LeWitt, he became one of the youngest students in the oldest fine arts educational institution in the country.
At that point, he knew little about the university except that one of his uncles had attended it, and that it was far enough from New Britain (about 275 miles) to suit him. He also knew that the Syracuse art department was strong, with a highly regarded faculty.
His first impressions, to be sure, were positive. In later years, LeWitt said that he thought the city was handsome
